I remember growing up and being told that we had
fought the two world wars to protect our freedom and that the difference
between us and Russia during the Cold War was that we had freedom, and they did
not. It turns out that I was duped and that it was all just a lot of lies and
nonsense to make the masses fight.
When I went to Russia, I discovered something rather
different. Ordinary life was in many respects just as free as here. You could
go for a barbecue in the woods with loads of vodka and cigarettes and you could
do just what you pleased. There were limits when you got back to your job or
your university, but if you played the game, they weren’t that onerous.
The real difference was in freedom to say what you
wanted and read what you wanted. You could whisper to your friends in private
without much risk of anything going wrong so long as you were careful. But the
books you could read and the news that was printed in the newspapers or broadcast
on the TV was controlled by the state.
The problem with this is that ordinary people have no
other source of information and after a few generations of selective truth and
lies most people knew no better. I had to teach my teachers Russian history.
There is a museum in Moscow dedicated to the Second
World War that only has exhibits about Soviet victories. The defeats are unmentioned
and largely unknown. The truth about how Soviet soldiers behaved when they raped
and pillaged while conquering Berlin is still unknown in Russia or dismissed as
Western propaganda. When I first mentioned the murder of Polish officers at
Katyn I was met with blank looks from educated people.
When communism ended people found that everything, they
had been told was lies that the god they had worshipped was merely decaying in
tomb outside the Kremlin and that their whole belief system was built on sand.
When you cease to believe in Lenin it isn’t that you
believe nothing, it’s that you believe anything.
This is what followed. In Russia people rediscovered
Orthodoxy but didn’t know who the icons represented, and so weird beliefs began
to take hold. There were cults involving strange men preaching the end of
times, there were imported cults of Hare Krishna, scientology and Mormonism. Finally,
there was the cult of Putin, and we were back where we started with the
falsification of history and ordinary Russians not quite knowing what was true
anymore.
To maintain the falsehood that Russia was still a
major power Putin had to start invading other people’s countries just to
maintain the illusion that he had created.
We in Britain looked on and still look on smugly at
the stupid Russians believing their own governments propaganda, but we are
losing our freedom too and the loss of it has already gone very far very fast.
There are two important freedoms. The freedom to do
what I please so long as it does not harm others and the freedom to speak and
write what I please with very few limits such as not shouting fire when there
is not a fire.
It is not the business of government to protect me
from myself. That is to treat me as a child where my parents were absolute
monarchs because I knew no better, and they could stop me harming myself and
could tell me when to go to bed.
The excuse that government must protect me from
harming myself because it will cost the state money to treat me is to take away
all freedom of action. It could be used to stop me driving a car as I pollute
and might have an accident. It could be used to stop me eating fish and chips as
it makes me obese. Go down that route and it is as if John Stuart Mill’s On
Liberty never was written and soon will be banned.
Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn was sent to the Gulag for making a joke about Stalin that was
overheard and reported. He was unlucky. He was made an example of. The purpose
of the example was to deter others from speaking freely or writing freely. It
worked.
So too here. Labour has punished random people some of
whom said things that were dreadful, but many of whom were merely unlucky. On another day they would have got away with
it. If there had not been any riots and the need to punish someone like poor Admiral
John Byng, then no one would have been jailed.
Dans ce pays-ci, il est
bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres.
My goodness me that was written in the eighteenth century.
Quite candid or indeed Candide. It could have been written right now. Better
not translate it. It might not be safe.
I hate both the rioters and the government for making me
feel this way.
The result of all this random punishment is that no
one quite knows what they are allowed to say or indeed do. Under certain
circumstances, if for instance there is another riot, the government might find
it convenient to punish almost any action or anything that is written. It is in
this way that we all lose freedom. We self-censor and gradually what we took
for granted is lost.
The loss of freedom of speech is not felt immediately.
For the first generation or two people in the Soviet Union knew what the truth
was because they had been able to read reasonably freely before the Revolution.
So too here.
What Labour is trying to do is to limit our freedom to
object. Mainstream opinion commonly held in the 1970s or 1980s let alone the nineteenth
century about a whole range of topics gradually becomes unsayable. Much highly erudite
Victorian scholarship about Islam will very soon be Islamophobic and therefore
illegal to say and soon perhaps even to read. Mainstream Christian views about
marriage and homosexuality that all of our grandfathers held are now taboo and
could get your fired.
It’s only because I could read freely and write freely
and think freely that I could teach the Russians their own history, but already
we are one generation into students believing in critical race theory and that
boys can become girls and that our whole history is one of villainy until a
rush of wind brought us enlightenment and all of the benefits that went with
it.
Labour is much worse than I thought it would be. It’s
one thing to be socialist we can endure that like we did in the 1970s even if
the lights go out, it’s quite another to be authoritarian.
I look back at the time when as a student on a grant I
could go to the pub with my friends whenever I wanted. We could buy chips or a
curry whenever we wanted because it was cheap. We could smoke because it was cheap,
and you could smoke in busses and the cinema and it seems like I am looking
back to a time before the Revolution curtailed all our freedoms.
I am reduced to writing riddles and fairytales and
waiting like Shostakovich on the landing for the NKVD to arrive because he didn’t
want to wake up his family.
There was a time not very long ago when we laughed at
the Americans for banging on about freedom all the time because we took it for
granted.
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone?
They took down Thatcher and put up Lenin a lot
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