As Orwell made clear, the logical next step after silencing dissent is to require assent. Being silent soon becomes not enough. You will eventually be required to state your positive agreement with the official line. And in Mao Tse Tung's China it really happened that way.
And it seems to moving in that direction in Britain too. Even if you say nothing out of line, pity help you if you are suspected of deviant thoughts. As Sean Gabb reports, a drama teacher at a local theatre was quietly doing her job and doing it well. There was certainly no claim that she was preaching politics as part of it. But it was discovered that she was in her after-hours life active in the British National Party -- a party that opposes multiculturalism and wants all illegal immigrants sent back whence they came.
So a local newspaper and a local Member of Parliament are campaigning to have her sacked from her job not because of anything she has done or said while at work but because she is a "Fascist". The fact that the original Fascists were socialists does not bother anybody, of course.
So she will undoubtedly lose her job simply because she does not join in Hosannas to the official British "diversity" religion. Sean Gabb's article includes an email address for the newspaper concerned.
'Republicans hate Mexicans'
Once upon a time false and offensive stereotyping like 'Republicans hate Mexicans' would have been passed over as mere political rhetoric along the lines of 'Capitalists hate the workers' but now that any instance of overgeneralization from conservatives gets furiously condemned, conservatives are beginning to hit back and hold Leftists to the same rules. We saw that yesterday in my post about blacks being watermelon eaters.
If blacks do eat a lot of watermelon and fried chicken, I personally see no harm in mentioning it but I guess that shows what a dodo I am. But super-sensitivity all-round seems to be the rule now and conservatives obviously have every right to demand the same sensitivity of Leftists. And given the constant furious abusive generalizations that Leftists hurl at conservatives and Christians, Leftists sure have got a lot of lessons in sensitivity to learn.
So it's good that Leftists are being held to their own rules. I guess many readers will by now have heard of the case where a defender of illegal Hispanic immigrants gave a speech to a Tucson High School assembly in which she repeatedly said 'Republicans hate Mexicans' -- which is an absurd and insulting generalization and certainly an instance of stereotyping. It overlooks for a start that there are a lot of Republican voters of Mexican origin! And disliking illegal immigration is not remotely the same as disliking Mexicans.
But it looks like the Superintendent of Tucson schools (Pfeuffer) is not so far backing down in his support for the anti-Republican speech:
"In a letter to Paton sent Wednesday, Pfeuffer said Huerta was allowed to continue after the comment about Republicans because she's "a national icon and her words offer an historical perspective that is consistently left out of our history books."
Source
Superintendent Pfeuffer obviously needs to be sent off to sensitivity training. How would he feel if he were a Republican?
But the most interesting thing about the whole affair is that accusations of hate speech are now being seen as what they often are -- as hate-speech themselves. Not all accusations of hate speech are themselves hate-speech but some clearly are. And we have an example of it above.
Hate speech is now regarded as such a terrible offence that accusations of it have to be pretty thoroughly substantiated if they are not themselves to be seen as abusive. One would think that that would put a rather large spoke in the wheel of a lot of Leftists! Or, to use another traditional metaphor, Leftists could well be 'hoist with their own petard' (Blown up by their own bomb).
Canadian Christians Finally have a Win against Hate-Speech Law
Quoting the Bible was judged illegal at two levels of the Canadian judicial system but sanity finally won out at the third level.
"The highest court in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan has reversed a 2002 decision that found a man guilty of inciting hatred by placing newspaper ads citing Biblical verses about homosexuality, the LifeSiteNews service reports. In December 2002, the lower court in Saskatchewan had upheld a decision by the province's Human Rights Commission, which had levied fines against the Saskatoon Star Phoenix and Hugh Owens, a local resident who had placed the ads"
Source
But how disgraceful that quoting the Bible was ever judged illegal by any Canadian court in the first place! There is obviously little respect for either religious freedom or freedom of speech in Canada. And if you look at the details of the verdict above, it is still no warrant for complete freedom of religion.
