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Sir Kier Rodney Starmer may be feeling quite pleased with himself given the recent arrests of perhaps a 1000 people who it is alleged inadvertently stirred up hate online or in some way or another contributed to the public disorder sparked by the savage murder of three little girls and the stabbing of several others at a Taylor Swift themed dance event.
He should however, be worried by this development, some of these new prisoners, locked up for tweets and put in a cell formerly occupied by a murderer, now released early in order to make room for them, will undoubtedly return to a quiet life when it’s their turn to get out, but not all will. How many of these men and women, some of which are pensioners with no employer and nothing to lose will dedicate the rest of their lives to the undoing of this dreadful establishment? How many men and women of good conscience will, upon release, instantly become enemies of the state and its rotten governance headed by Sir Kier Rodney Starmer? How many, aggrieved by the growing perception of unjust sentencing will work tirelessly, night and day to undermine, devalue and destroy all that remains of the Labour Party and the rotten edifices of state that support it, both in the civil service and party political landscape? How many will become dissidents, fighting for the return of the old England, the old Wales, the old Scotland and the old Ireland that they grew up in, the legal traditions of which are baked into their souls. In short, I’m asking, how many will become the UK’s equivalent of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, famous for his work ‘The Gulag Archipelago,’ and his only slightly lesser-known essay ‘Live Not by Lies,’ the online text of which is linked below.
I for one, a free speech absolutist, am all too happy to raise my voice in opposition to the corrupt establishment that parasitically sits in the midst of our institutions.
Corruption is theft
What is corruption but theft, some of these mandarins steal money from the public purse, others steal power. Those who are corrupt are all thieves in one way or another. They deserve our contempt and nothing more. Corruption is theft. The corrupt are thieves.
“In all institutions from which the cold wind of open criticism is excluded, an innocent corruption begins to grow like a mushroom – for example, in senates and learned societies”- Friedrich Nietzsche – Human, All Too Human
I for one, can’t think of anything less British than the spectacle of British people being sent to prison for speaking freely in Britain (albeit online). It’s the type of thing that we expect to happen in France, Germany and so on and that’s because we’re currently living through a battle of ideals, two competing legal philosophies have been duking it out in our politics for at least fifty years, one is that of English Common Law, the other is that of Continental Law. On the continent there’s no such thing as a negative right, all rights are positive, meaning they are gifts of the state, i.e. you can do anything you like unless the government passes a law to ban it, this even applies to free speech which is why it’s illegal to deny the holocaust in Germany.
The positives and negatives of rights
In Britain, it used to be that we had the right to speak freely, to say whatever we’d like without fear or hindrance and this right was considered God given, an absolute right, something that not even government could take away. This a negative right, it’s a right that can’t be interfered with. It’s inherent in both our constitution and our legal tradition, but recent events have strained this understanding to say the least!
Most people have until recently thought that this negative right was still in place, unaware that our law makers and policymakers have succumbed to the continental tradition of positive rights and no longer recognise that a negative right could still be an assumed custom of the land, a living part of our unwritten constitution an ongoing part of our legal tradition, a right that still exists subconsciously in the minds of every native Brit. This in part explains the Brexit referendum. The man in the street is a Common Law citizen but the politicians he votes for are all Continentals, at least in thought and deed.
Common Law rights are Human Rights
The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human rights were an attempt by the victors of World War Two to expand their pre-existing framework of English Common Law Rights that underpinned the legal systems of Britain, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and so on, to all of mankind.
The Chiefest of these rights is the ability to speak freely, without interference or hindrance. Originally an Anglo-Saxon tribal right, it became a divine right to speak liberally and without hindrance or interference when the Christians arrived, because God we’re told, loves truth and also it meant that the preaching of Christianity could not be stopped by the angry pagan hordes. There’s a reason why God commands us to speak truthfully!
Should you go further back in time to ancient Greece, the birthplace of all western civilisation, then you’ll find that free speech was allowed in Athens at a time when it was prohibited in the other city states of the ancient world. It’s for this reason Athens became such and important hub for philosophers everywhere. It’s no accident that our world spanning civilisation, the greatest that the world has ever seen, was born in the one place in history where speech was free.
Don’t lose your tongue
It’s free speech that makes truth valuable, without which it’s impossible to live a good life. Truth leads to science, engineering, medicine, computing and so on, all of which makes the world a better place to live in than the blood soaked lands of our distant ancestors, the Rift Valley folk who existed on the knife edge of survival, hunting, gathering and dying at a young age from diseases that are both easily preventable and treatable in the present. In short free speech led to all of the gains of materialism, that includes all science, all medicine, all technology and all of the material comforts that we’ve come to take for granted! All of these things, birthed in the free flow of words have served humanity well, they’ve made life itself an experience worth having because they’ve separated us from the beasts of the earth. This for me, makes me a free speech absolutist. I passionately believe that there should be no limit to speech. Censorship, is the work of the Devil. Every man is born with a tongue, and as far as I am concerned it’s his birthright to use it as he sees fit! So, I advocate that we should speak freely. I take the view that sunlight really is the best disinfectant because bad ideas die when exposed to the gentle light of truth, withering on the vine, in contrast, good ideas prosper under the same light.
No censorship of words
So, we must demand from our leaders an end to censorship of words, that hate speech legislation be demolished, that social media be treated as speech and not as print, because when someone posts a tweet, or whatever online it’s usually just the expression of an idea, an inner thought or a feeling and not an attempt at essay writing!
Free Speech is for us free speech absolutists, a divine right that cannot be revoked now or in eternity. God demands that we all speak freely, let’s all remember the words of Robert F Kennedy Jr, who recently said in conversation with Bill Maher:
“… liberals had such antipathy towards any kind of censorship. There was no time in history where the people who were censoring free speech were the good guys.”
Truth when freed will stand upon its own two feet. Truth is real, it’s the sum total of all material interactions. It is findable, it exists in the world beyond our skins as a tangible sum of all material interactions.
The Impermanent pixel
Nobody should go to prison for saying what they believe to be true even if it later turns out to be mistaken, nobody should feel that they shouldn’t say the things that they believe to be true because it may send them to jail. Nobody, should be hounded for making a mistake, instead let them correct the record, let them make a public apology that thanks to the magic of technology can easily be put in front of anyone on social media who initially saw the earlier post now deemed to be incorrect. The social media giants now little more than intelligence agencies know exactly who saw the offending post, and crucially, they also know who shared it! A retraction can easily be put in the social media feeds of all of those affected. It can be put front and centre. Damage can be undone, social media is not print, social media is just pixels, and pixels can be changed at any time. There’s no such thing as a permanent pixel! Prison sentences for creating pixels represents the most fundamentally un-British thing that I’ve ever heard of it. Should someone feel aggrieved by pixels, or perhaps they feel maligned, defamed etc, then let them sue, let legal aid always be available for this type of thing, instead of it being made ready to defend the rights of foreign actor’s hostile to the state. The government shouldn’t intervene to ban the free flow of words and ideas. To do so, is to break the social contract that keeps this country from splitting into many competing tribes all of which are only too happy to wage war upon one another. Free speech is the subtle lubricant of the wheels of society that are too often prone to friction.
https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/live-not-by-lies
