Two identical events that took place last week are being discussed in Britain and Germany. They are not directly related, but they followed an identical pattern.
Last Sunday, at 9:40 a.m. in the English county of Essex, two young police officers showed up at the home of Allison Pearson, a well-known British conservative journalist who works mainly for The Daily Telegraph. They informed the landlady that she was suspected of committing a “hate offence which is not a crime.” The reason for this was a report that Pearson was accused of making a tweet a year ago. And police refused to explain which post was meant and did not name the accuser, as he was named as a victim in the case.
And on Tuesday, at 6:00 in a town in the German state of Bavaria, two young police officers turned up at the house of the previously unknown 64-year-old Stefan Niehoff and his 33-year-old daughter, who suffers from Down syndrome. In this case, the police were not very discreet and immediately handed over a paper stating that the pensioner was guilty of tweeting a picture of German Deputy Prime Minister and Green Party leader Robert Habeck.
In this innocuous meme, Habeck was depicted with the logo of the famous perfume company Schwarzkopf, but with a couple of letters replaced, resulting in the inscription Schwachkopf Professional (professional idiot). The police seized Niehoff’s electronic devices and explained that with his joke he was “trying to defame Robert Habeck, which made his job as a member of the German Federal Government more difficult,” which could lead to a charge of nothing less than “sedition” and a long prison sentence.
“Thinkpol” in action
In both countries, these accusations have caused a flurry of emotions. The press is buzzing, social networks are buzzing, and opposition politicians are speaking out angrily. The main complaint: how can the police be distracted from carrying out their direct duties! Virtually everywhere the “Thought Police” (Thinkpol in Newspeak) from George Orwell’s novel 1984 have been recalled. People are outraged: in the conditions of growth of thefts, rapes, robberies, significant forces of law enforcers are thrown to fight “thought crimes.”
These cases immediately revealed the enormity of the problem. The Sun newspaper reported of the situation in Britain: “You may think it will never happen to you. Think again. After all, according to the Alliance for Free Speech, it has already happened to about 250,000 people since 2014.”
And it turns out that British police are investigating under the same articles the incident with a nine-year-old child who called his peer “retarded” and with two schoolgirls who said that their classmate “stinks of fish.” At the same time, a 73-year-old woman was cautioned by police for posting a picture online of a pole with a sticker that read, “Keep men out of women-only areas.”
Immediately, various public figures confessed that they had been broken into in the same way by police investigating “hate crimes.” For example, prominent British feminist Julie Bindel described the police coming to her home following a complaint by a transgender man from the Netherlands. She wrote:
“The officers left looking a bit confused. I got the feeling that they realised the ridiculousness of the mission they had been sent on. I advised them to make better use of their time by investigating rape and domestic violence. The police don’t have enough time to investigate real crimes, but instead they are tasked with harassing people like me for daring to tweet that ‘transgender women are NOT women.”
This is precisely what strikes European everyday people the most – the fact that so many police officers are being thrown in to fight “thought crimes” against the liberal order. For example, in Essex, where the Pearson incident took place, an elite squad of police is deployed to this task. Which raises logical questions about why it took a year to investigate Pearson’s “red-hot” tweet.
“Moral superiority” and double standards
By the way, the authorities never officially informed the journalist what exactly her post caused such a reaction. But almost everyone agreed that it was a criticism of the London police last November, when Pearson mistook Pakistani protesters in Manchester for a pro-Palestinian rally in London. According to the journalist, she deleted that tweet the next day when she realised her mistake. But who cares anymore?
And everyone picked up on a statement by Boris Johnson, who also spoke out on the Pearson case:
“This whole thing is a real gift to Vladimir Putin and his legions of Russian internet trolls. They can use the hype to accuse us of hypocrisy and double standards – and indeed they do. Any such comparison between the UK and Russia is disgusting and false. And yet inch by inch we are losing our moral superiority.”
It seems odd that Johnson claimed “moral superiority.” He could well be accused of double standards about democracy and free speech. For example, he calls the current Ukrainian government democratic, although Kyiv has long ago banned all opposition parties, television broadcasts only “right” news in telethon mode, and dissenters are either killed or thrown into prisons, yet Johnson and his colleagues turn a blind eye to this.
A typical representative of such a stratum is the Bavarian pensioner Niehoff, who hugging his frightened disabled daughter tells the German press:
“It can’t be that everyone keeps their mouth shut! I think we still have a democracy, don’t you?”
We wish we could be so naive and believe in free speech in a free Europe, but the EU has already established and reinforced a brutal liberal dictatorship. Yes, it equates funny memes about liberal politicians with “sedition” and an attempt to defend the rights of the gender majority with a hate crime.
These two recent cases in Bavaria and Essex are just episodes that confirm the general picture that has already emerged in Europe, where aggressive liberal totalitarianism at its worst has triumphed. “Thoughtcrime” against the established order will not be tolerated there.
THE ARTICLE IS THE AUTHOR’S SPECULATION AND DOES NOT CLAIM TO BE TRUE. ALL INFORMATION IS TAKEN FROM OPEN SOURCES. THE AUTHOR DOES NOT IMPOSE ANY SUBJECTIVE CONCLUSIONS.
Sigmund Huber for Head-Post.com
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