As is well known, in the police state of Nazi Germany, the regime used the SS and Gestapo to control the population, but these bodies were backed up by the Blockleiters, who were in charge of listening to gossip, keeping an eye on neighbours, and informing on anything suspicious in a block of flats, or a group of houses.
In the German Democratic Republic the Stasi network of Informal Collaborators covered all sections of the population, providing crucial support to the country's elaborate surveillance system, and made possible the monitoring of groups to which a secret policeman could never have gained more direct access, notably in artistic and church circles, so that the state was informed in particular detail about individuals defined as "enemy-negative persons”.
Parsons, a character in Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, professes to love Big Brother, but he is heard by his daughter to say in his sleep "Down with Big Brother." She turns him in to the Thought Police, and Winston Smith encounters him in the Ministry of Love before he is executed.
Of course such nightmares could never take place in our liberal society, where free speech is regarded as a given, and private conversations, or idle gossip, could never be used against individuals could they? Unfortunately it is becoming increasingly likely.
It is reported that the Law Commission has abandoned proposals to extend hate crime legislation into private homes, laws which could have meant that dinner table conversations could have led to hosts or guests being investigated by police, and possibly sent to prison. We are now told that the commissioners are looking at alternative ways to achieve something similar. If this review is not thrown out, lock, stock and barrel, supposed hate crimes will anyway to be extended to cover gender and age.
These proposals may have been abandoned, but it is a disgrace that they should even have been considered for one moment. Do not forget that these presumed offences can arise just because a person says they have been offended, ignoring the fact they such offence was never intended, or that the words used would not qualify as offensive to anyone except the paranoid.
That this kind of review should be taking place would be a disgrace at any time, but it is almost unbelievable that it should be happening under a Conservative government. Can anyone doubt that, should any of the parties of the left achieve power in the future, such ideas would not resurface?
Everywhere we look the lunacy emanating from the ‘woke’ is disfiguring our country. Teenage pupils at Seaford Head School in East Sussex have forced the removal the names of Winston Churchill, and the author J K Rowling, from their houses, because the latter’s statements about the ‘trans’ community were unacceptable to these snowflakes, while the British hero is accused of having ‘unfairly imprisoned and tortured many, a flat out lie. Clearly the school does not teach history.
The Brighton and Sussex University Hospital NHS Trust is telling its staff to stop using terms such as ‘mother, ‘breast’ or ‘woman’ so that, where one might have said that “the child’s mother is breastfeeding her baby with breastmilk” it would be necessary to say ‘the maternal, or paternal, person is chest feeding the baby with chest milk”. Newspeak lives! That this insanity is greeted with incredulity by any reasonable person means nothing to those being allowed to ride roughshod over the views of ordinary people in the name of a deranged ideology. They must be stopped if this country is to be prevented from falling into a purgatory where rational behaviour, and belief, has been abolished.
In 1953 the novel “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury was published, concerning a future society where books are outlawed, and burnt, in order to suppress dissenting ideas, and the actual book burning by the Nazis is a matter of historical record. We have not yet reached that point, but can anyone doubt that the imbeciles who have been attacking statues will not soon turn their attention to books. One can foresee the works of Churchill being banned in libraries run by left wing councils, or even their publication being prevented on the grounds they they will encourage patriotism, or pride in our country’s history and achievements.
We in the UK are mad to have allowed the politically correct fascists to get as far as they have, and it is time that the overwhelmingly majority of decent citizens turned on these so called activists. They will never be satisfied until every person obeys their diktats without question, and the simplest of pillow talk between married couples becomes subject to examination by the state, with sanctions applied to those who dare to stray from the line dictated by this real life Thought Police.