There are countless more examples of attempts to close down free speech with social media being forced into censorship through the likes of the new German hate-speech legislation (NetzDG). Social media companies can now be fined 50mln Euros for not removing ‘offensive’ material within twenty-four hours. Twitter hands out temporary bans to users who post offensive material which could be anything perceived to be critical of Islam. Infowars, run by the explosive Alex Jones, has recently been given a temporary ban by Twitter. Infowars has nearly half a million followers on Twitter. Unsurprisingly, its numbers of users is now falling. If language is policed systematically, the whole purpose of social media becomes somewhat questionable.
Freedom and ‘free speech’ are the solution to the problem of how to respond to Islamism, but instead it was the first casualty of the migration crisis. To be anti-jihad and a freedom of speech activist is not a banal expression of bigotry. We will not find the right solution if we allow the moralistic censors to legislate against the discussion or delegitimise it. Hate-speech laws, as they are currently drafted and implemented, do not result in social harmony, but instead create a miasma of fear and trepidation, a dangerous cocktail of unaired, suppressed views.
As we have seen, in academic circles it is just assumed that one endorses the ultra-liberal agenda and its propagandistic and omnipresent speech code (the ‘happy talk’ of tolerance, social justice, inclusion and diversity). This speech code, this moral imperative for the masses, is the equivalent of an incipient intellectual totalitarianism and is leading to social apartheid. It is a single, totalising orthodoxy that tolerates no opposition. It does not even pretend to enforce dichotomies. It is so totalising that every conversation ensues in a manner that implies there can be no opposition. It assumes a mass uncompromising adherence by not even bothering to identify the opposition, but by just pretending that it does not exist. In the days of the aftermath of the Brexit vote, staff at Oxford University and at universities all over the UK received patronising e-mails from Vice Chancellors and Heads of Department apologising for the apparent intellectual scar that was Brexit. The e-mails were worded in such a way that the Vice-Chancellors just assumed they were speaking for all of us. After all, it would surely be unthinkable to be an academic and wish to leave the European Union. On the day after the referendum, the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford’s e-mail spoke of ‘how we will all always remember where we were when we heard the news’, as if it were an event on par with the Kennedy assassination in terms of tragic impact. This kind of intellectual patronisation was to be seen again after the 2016 US Presidential Election. E-mails were sent out asking people to attend Chapel services where they would pray for the ‘unsettled world’ that Trump would surely bring about, ‘giving voice to fears and concerns at world developments, and remind ourselves of the common need for love and inclusivity’. For weeks and months afterwards, university sermons would continue to conjure up a ‘fragile world of morally corrupt values’.
University departments felt the curious need to remind us how committed they were to ‘diversity’, implying that Brexiteers were all narrow-minded doctrinaires. The idea that there was a Brexiteer amongst them was not even entertained. Oxford College chaplains would shake their heads in disbelief and label the apparently invisible opposition as ‘the new ISIS living in thatched cottages’. Their partisan sermons and prayers had missed the target, entertained false dichotomies. Living in their liberal cocoons, some of the Bremainers thought the result was impossible. It seems they had been living in a false reality. They thought they had created a world just as they wanted it.
Through groupthink and Newspeak whose purpose just as in Nineteen Eighty-Four is to make certain modes of thought impossible and is thus the literal expression of linguistic determinism, the Left builds an ideological wall, protecting themselves from anybody who holds opposing views. The new Newspeak of the hyper liberal-progressives is used to veil reality. But to those not blinded by the propaganda, it does little more than satirise reality. It blurs the connection between words and concepts, muddling the intrinsic constitution of linguistic signs by recycling sloganistic words.
We self-censor in order not to breach institutional equality and diversity policies, and the repressive speech code operates as a verbal landmine fuelled by paranoia, demonology and social intimidation. An innocuous comment could explode in one’s face because an invisible, virtual party finds it offensive, or pretends to find it offensive, because they know such a response would be beneficial. With increasingly universalised speech codes and mass thinking, communication and dialogue in the West may never be the same again because freedom of speech is becoming synonymous with ‘inoffensive’ speech. This rather indirect, but sometimes violent intimidation must of course be eschewed. Now that more or less everybody in the West is armed with audio and video-enabled Smartphones, every minutiae of potentially ‘inoffensive’ speech can reach through social media — the digital panopticon which turns private experiences into public ones and which nowadays amounts to an electronic copy of the Self made de facto public property — an audience of millions in just seconds.
But, it is difficult to articulate anything without offending somebody in a world where so many are trying to play the victim. Since it is socially unacceptable not to observe the stifling speech code, those ‘liberals’ who spearhead this agenda, these so-called social justice warriors, rise to the top in the public sector. If one side of the discussion is politically correct, the other side is axiomatically incorrect. All that is left are a set of moralised points that cannot be contested without running the risk of being charged with political incorrectness. It also results in an expectation to conform to a culture through language. Thus, within liberal circles, one is expected to use the word ‘partner’ and not husband, wife, boyfriend or girlfriend. To do otherwise, one might run the risk of being accused of being ‘sexist’ (or perhaps more correctly, ‘sexualist’, but not in the botanical sense of the word of course) for assuming the individual is heterosexual. But, ‘partner’ is the default term for homosexual couples (and not heterosexual ones) and this lack of neutrality makes it problematic if a single, heterosexual man is asked about his ‘partner’. In a minoritocracy, it is the discourse of the minority that must take priority.
Its proponents have thus weaponised social pressure, and used it to their advantage to climb the career ladder. By conforming to this methodology, they have shown that they are pioneers of diversity, equality and anti-discrimination. It would seem that they are pursuing authoritarian means to implement an anti-fascist agenda. At the moment, the force of political and social coercion is such that almost everybody is conforming to the agenda.
This is the atmosphere in which academics, politicians and many in the public sector in the West work today. Thinking aloud is therefore checked in the ‘age of unenlightenment’ (Powers, 2015). In accordance with this speech code, criticism of Islam in particular is becoming not only socially unacceptable, but criminalised through hate-speech laws. If one cannot tell the truth for fear of being accused of hate-speech, then we are indeed living in a dangerous Orwellian world. Dangerous because speaking one’s mind risks isolation, and potentially far worse. Those who have spoken up for our freedom and have simply told the truth about jihad (Wilders, Rushdie, Hedegaard and Geller for instance) live under a constant daily death threat from Islamic radicals. Some of them such as Wilders and Geller have been banned entry to the UK. We have closed the door to freedom-fighters who wish to protect our interests if their views do not conform to the State ideology: multiculturalism.
After having spoken out against Islam, Wilders has lived for over ten years under constant police protection, returning to a heavily guarded prison-like basement flat in the Netherlands every evening. This alone surely tells us everything we need to know about the threat facing us. A man who has dedicated his life to preserve freedom and democracy is marked for death. If we chip away at our own liberty in this fashion, we will eventua
lly lose it.
The divinity of speech and freedom is what our culture is predicated on. The highest faculty of the human being is articulated speech. Language is power and influence of the best sort. We must use it to offer a more positive and enriching discourse than the tired blame-game of dead French philosophers.
IV. Losing Those Essential Connections
Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.
— Edward O. Wilson
Vaporised words linger in arid self-interrogation. There is an extended silence, a short sonata of raised eyebrows and then a meaningful grin. Ibbi, an Inuit hunter, sits in my freezing hut, patting his firm bulk full of seal meat. Implausible palindromes are whispered over black coffee, and jokes are shared about his embonpoint. Thin jokes, admittedly. Here we sit hour after hour, pensive and introspective, during the interstices of everyday life. As is so often the case in this remote, bewitching place, our thoughts turn to the urban sprawl-sopped lands beneath us, to those living in choked cities that we call ‘civilised’. For Ibbi, living without industry is an ideal, swerving ‘progress’ and ‘development’ and thus living without fumes and noisy spiel. He would prefer to live in a cosmos with a transcendental dimension. He shakes his head, ‘we, hamani [“down there”], are the prisoners of monotony’. ‘You do not hunt, you do not live in nature’, he says. We have chosen a less holistic reality.
With a deep, earthy voice, he tells me how hamani, there is just this mixed up, globalised world, inuit pa.pa.pa… (‘so many people, so many people’). ‘There is no connection to the place, the land, the spirits that inhabit the land and now the people. You are losing your connections with one another’, he continues. An explosion in the world’s population has crowded out wildlife all over the planet. We are living in denial about the biggest problem of all. Many journalists only dare to talk about the problem of ageing populations, never the unsettling truth that the line for population growth is almost vertical on the chart. With the ice melting, the barrier to the outside world — the frozen buffer —, both metaphorical and physical, is disappearing. A time of privileged isolation is coming to an end, and Ibbi is well aware of this. The world of hamani is coming closer and closer, impinging on the indigenous lifestyle, diet and traditional cosmologies. Isolated from the outside world for so long, mining prospectors, Government officials, scientists and environmentalists are now entering this melting corner of the Arctic.
Ibbi does not dream of any ‘elsewhere’. His Lebenswelt is his nuna, the settled land of connections, a universe of kin, family and traditions — the more obvious presuppositions. This is where he belongs. He has seen and fears the ‘other’, the Mitsein of nihilistic drift and Western, atomistic individualism. A place where surrounded by thick crowds of takornaqtoq (‘strangers’, literally: ‘he who has not been seen before’), he becomes the stranger himself. ‘How can you be happy if surrounded by strangers?’ he asks. It is of course true that we live in a society of strangers, but up until now it has been a society where strangers can meet face-to-face and enjoy the spirit of free cooperation and shared beliefs. That is now under threat, for we live increasingly in the hullabaloo of the circus, the spittled zoo of globalisation. The hubbub, hurry-scurry and helter-skelter of the minutiae of modern life renders our lives topsy-turvy and convoluted, torn apart from the basic modes of existence. Nature is no longer the living cosmos; we have forgotten its inherent meaning. ‘You are living in a disconnected world’, he sighs.
To lose these connections would be the greatest fear for the Polar Eskimo; it would be to live in an ontological vacuum without a soul (tarneq). But for us, we prefer to discard the ambiguities of the spiritual world, and fill the emptiness of the wild places with the stigmata of suburban housing estates. In the spirit of epistemological anti-foundationalism and excessive cultural relativism, we are being told that we do not need these connections of place, family, religion, customs, cultural identity and faith any longer. Globalist liberalism is the ideology that imparts this falsehood, that promotes a way of life that breaks these bonds, connections and ties. It is liberalism that will leave you alone, apparently in a secularist nirvana, but in fact wallowing in a consumerist frenzy of disconnectedness.
Since 1991, liberalism has become the sole, dominant ideology of almost the entire world (North Korea and Iran are obvious exceptions). It is at least the operational system of Western civilisation, colouring even conventional wisdom. When I speak of liberalism, I am concerned with ‘a state of mind which, in certain circumstances, can become universal and infect opponents as well as defenders’ (Eliot, 1939: 16). Liberalism used to concern itself with individual interests and freethinking, but it has morphed into something remorsefully other. Ironically, liberalism that started as anti-totalitarian has become quasi-totalitarian itself as it attempts to control society in accordance with a matrix of ‘ideal principles’, and ‘denies the ontological space in which alone we can operate in a truly human fashion’ (Milbank and Pabst, 2016: 253). The dialectic of liberalism has become a mordant paradox. It began as an anti-colonialist project, but ended up as US imperialism. Although it is notoriously difficult to define, the aspiration of socio-cultural liberalism in the West is to create an atomistic individual without culture, religion, sexuality or identity who lives in a world where commercial value has been turned into the essence of all life. Kalb (2008: 40) sees it as a form of secularised Christianity because both are unassuming and humble, and tell us not to make claims we cannot substantiate. It pretends to embody the dominant ideology of modernity. It has become something of a meta-ideology, a doctrinal tsunami that obliterates alternative thinking.
There is an implicit assumption that liberalism’s intentions are better and more high-minded than conservatism’s, and as such it purports to be as much a moral doctrine as a political doctrine. But liberalism is a destructive ideological hegemony that has become authoritarian, almost messianic in nature. We have allowed the dogma of liberalism to subvert cultural values. Liberal thinking threatens to destroy the shared values that underpin the countries of Western Europe, and in doing so will destroy the post-modern liberalism which they all stand for. It will be this self-defeating.
One of liberalism’s diktats states that it is axiomatic in Western society that minorities are unquestionably persecuted in some way. Our ideologies are framed in the negative; they seek legitimacy by trying to appear to resolve some injustice or other. Implicit in this is of course an anti-elitist element. Liberalism is thus a negative anthropology which holds that man’s social constructs are malevolent and biased. Liberalism prioritises vice over virtue at a time when what is needed is a revitalising esprit de corps. The assumption is that we are self-interested, fearful and greedy. Human virtue is dismissed, and negative freedom defines liberal thought. Liberalism betrays itself as the best option in a world of evil. It rules our plurality and posits itself at the end of history. Ultimately, liberalism represents therefore anthropological and ontological pessimism and yet always tries to position itself as the meta-narrative.
This ideology is in fact self-annihilating, for it is an anti-Western ideology perpetuated by Western intellectuals and journalists. As we have seen, the ideology prevents any kind of negative commentary on another culture and in this sense pretends to represent a form of positivity; it is a kind of blind, extreme cultural relativism: a normative claim which forgoes the possibility of any moral judgement. To deny cultural relativism is no doubt to court the accusation of racism, but cultural relativism has become a form of absolutism of its own. However, it is always ‘culture’ and not race or any other construct that dictates that young girls should have their genitals mutilated, that infidels (i.e. non-Muslims) should be butchered, that it is a sin to listen to music or watch television etc.
The liberal ideology is centred on an ill-defined, putative guilt for Western cultural domination, a notion that has an irreducible position in current political discour
se in the West. A quagmire of moral guilt has impinged on Germany most obviously, but also large parts of Western Europe where ironically none of the guilt can be correctly ascribed. Here, the liberal psyche much prefers guilt to responsibility. Liberals like to cynically calculate how they can appear noble by helping minorities. But, if one compares the indifference that liberals showed to African genocide (Rwanda, 1994, Burundi 1972 and 1993), the Mao-Mao terror of Kenya (1952-1960), the Angolan Revolution (1961), the 300,000 slaughtered by Idi Amin (1971-79) or the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970) where blacks were killing blacks, to colonialism or any conflict which pitches the European against the African or the Arab, it is obvious their main concern is their own guilt, and not conflict per se. In the civil conflicts mentioned (and in many others), infinitely more people were killed and atrocities committed than in African conflicts involving Europeans. Is there ever discussion about the Arab or African slave trade which trafficked more than the Western variant? It was Europe that stopped the slave trade. Let us not forget that Saudi Arabia declared the slave trade illegal in 1962, Mauritania in just 1980 and Niger in 2003. Those who rail unthinkingly against colonialism will not talk about the Chinese land and resources grab right across Africa, or the way poor South American countries such as Ecuador have become mortgaged to China. They will not want you to watch David MacDougall’s award-winning ethnographic film, To Live with Herds (1972), where the Jie of Uganda talk about how they miss the colonial days. They will certainly not want you to hear about ethnic tribal racism in Africa, the racist policies implemented in 1970s Uganda that targeted the Asian population or the ethnic cleansing against white Zimbabwean communities. At the time of writing, South Africa has abandoned the rule of law and allowed blacks to legally seize land from white farmers without financial recompense. Several months after the vote the BBC has still not reported on the story. The mainstream media has ignored it because it does not conform to their cultural nihilistic agenda.
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