Tuesday, March 13, 2018

In defense of free speech: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”, the oppression of ideas and free speech is becoming normalised, from nasty little hater thugs to state discrimination, we are living in a society which has to change



Dear All

One of the things which make the United Kingdom the place it is in the world; is the defence of free speech, but in order to defend it, you have to recognise that in order to protect your right, you have to protect the right of people who you oppose.

Westminster is called the ‘Mother of all Parliaments, a cradle of democracy, but increasingly we are seen the rise of a political doctrine that makes it acceptable to ban people for ‘thought crimes.

In academia, a person can say that child molesters are innocent and not criminals, keep his job and cite academic freedom, and jog on, still spouting this nonsense with no consequences.

In the same educational environment, we seeing people getting “No-platforming”, not allowed to get the same opportunities to put their view points across. Speakers with whom we fundamentally disagree can suggest that force ought to prevail over free speech and no one bats an eye on the left. 

Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, recently announced that it was investigating Professor of Psychology. Rick Mehta had a number of complaints over controversial comments he made in his class.

Was he proposing sex with children, humping dead bodies or promoting incest, no, it seems that his view on the value of multiculturalism along with the existence of gender inequality in the workplace provoke a few reactions.

Multiculturalism is a recognised failure of the left and the trendy liberals, a social engineering experiment gone badly wrong, not just in the UK but right across Europe.

Here is a story which highlights how badly.


Look at what happened to Sarah Champion, Labour MP for Rotherham, who was sacked from the shadow front bench for exercising her right to free speech and telling the truth.

Sacked for telling the truth, what does that say about values and social justice?

Amina Lone, a Muslim councillor from Birmingham, who rightly defended Champion but was then told she cannot stand for re-election, where was equality, fairness and social justice there?

In places like Germany and through-out Europe, we have seen the effect of the migrant crisis. Breitbart is a good source of news to witness a decline of the western values.


Jordan Peterson provokes a similar reaction; his interview with Cathy Newman is a classic piece of what happens when a trendy liberal gets destroyed in an interview.


There is a war on, a war set to continue, not just about free speech but also about political control and how it is used.

Austrian Identitarian leader Martin Sellner was detained and refused entry to Britain, he was handcuffed, held in a detention centre for three days and then along with his journalist girlfriend deported.

Had he committed a crime?

Originally, the Identitarian leader was scheduled to speak at a conference organised by UKIP youth wing Young Independence that got cancelled, so he was going to go to Hyde Park and stand on his soapbox, and follow a tradition of dissent and speak there. If a British person had spoken the same words as Sellner, he wouldn’t have committed any crime, so was his deportation a racist act under the guise of being undesirable.

Brittany Pettibone was refused entry into the UK on the basis that she wanted to attend her boyfriend’s speech and also as a journalist, she had plans to interview former English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson.

Here is a classic example of oppression to follow on from above; Wilfrid Laurier was the site of controversy generated last fall by a graduate student’s decision to show the class she was tutoring. During the class a five-minute clip of Professor Jordan Peterson speaking in the context of a discussion on a local television newsmagazine shown about the use of gender pronouns.  

Lindsay Shepherd was brought into a meeting with the course director and two senior administrators and up-braided for her action, which was likened to the dissemination of Nazi propaganda. The course director decided that it was appropriate to lie that one or more students had complained.

Sadly for the three Social Warriors, we know the intimate details of this supposedly private conversation because Shepherd secretly taped and then subsequently disclosed it causing quite a stir.

An investigation revealed that there had, in fact, been no student complaints whatsoever.

Suppression of free speech is everywhere, our democracy is under threat, social cohesion is under threat and yes, our values are under threat as well, if people in authority think it is acceptable to appoint themselves as guardians of what you are allowed to say, we are heading to a black place.

Finally, George Orwell, the author of the book 1984 famously said:

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

Yours sincerely

George Laird
The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Multiculturalism was a term & ideology constructed by scholars of the writings of Marx! People like Gramsci, Adorno, Marcuse etc while they attended the Frankfurt Institute in the 1930s. Read the original history books(and not the amended stuff churned out these days) & you discover it was a 'divide & rule' idea to disrupt social cohesion in order to bring about a communistic society. This is exactly what we see today as we witness the rise of extreme leftist garbage.

George, i am glad you have highlighted the Telford sex abuse scandal....because it took the BBC nearly 3days to put a SMALL piece about this way, way down the list on its website. Its still not been reported on tv news, yet for the last 2days theres high priority & endless repeated reporting of Carragher spitting on a 14 yr old girl. This to the BBC is deemed more newsworthy than the systematic & sustained rape, torture & abuse over a 40 year period of young girls in Telford. There are NO excuses for this clear & blatent attempt by our public funded broadcaster to stifle news which is clearly in the public interest to know about. Any excuses of not wanting to stir up hatred is complete & utter nonsense. People not knowing does nothing to stop the abuse. The public have a right to know that their children are in danger irrespective of WHO the perpetrators are. All tv news media stifled this, as they have with other similar crimes, but i single out the BBC because they are a public funded organisation whose responsibilities are to inform the public who fund them of matters which are important. They really are a disgrace!!

THE INVISIBLE MAN said...

When the British Empire was winding down after the Second World War, the Malayan Emergency of the 1950s saw a Communist uprising. According to the SAS who served there, the Communists would often use brutality to force the locals on their side (not that the British NEVER did it in the conflict, but that's another story), so the SAS would frequently counter this by winning the locals over with hearts and minds, and convince them into supporting them. This may be one big reason why the Communists were defeated, and Malaya continues with parliamentary democracy rather than Communism or Socialism today.

If PC culture were genuine opposition to genuine bigotries then there'd be less of a problem, but now we've got to the point of cultural policing. Political correctness has gone from Dolores Umbridge to Francis Begbie, and when it silences abuse victims because they're not the "right" sort (sex workers, male abuse victims, working class women, etc) then PC culture has crossed the line into not merely being a bit overbearing, but a danger to people's safety.

Here's the reason for my first paragraph. What the left would need to do now would be a huge charm offensive. It needs to grovel to the society that it has so frequently failed, the voters it has abandoned and their concerns that they've ignored. It needs to show genuine fairness, restraint, compassion, commitment to its "values". For the left to continue its cultural hegemony it's retained post-1960s, it has to win people over because it depends on that to survive. It cannot force them under its jackboot, or it will lose, and at the moment, things are really not looking good for them.

Anonymous said...

Here is one view George that i saved from an arricle i read about the mindset of the people that society is up against. This follows my earlier post about multiculturism...

"The main impulse at work here is not simply Marxism, but megalomania. The far leftist postmodernist sees himself as the embodiment of good and worthy causes. The less everyone else supports those causes, the less human they are, and therefore deserving fewer rights and less entitlement to their own views. Lying to them or about them is of no consequence. Beyond a not-so-far-off point of disagreement, it is acceptable to attack them, rhetorically or bodily. In this context, Marxism is merely an exculpatory device.'

Anonymous said...

Your point is very true, but it seems the far left thats causing the problems are too far gone for that to happen. They are completely out of control & the ones in UK are riding the Corbyn wave thinking theyre within reach of power. Corbyn doing nothing to discourage this insanity speaks volumes to me.
If however youre refering to the 'normal' left, like myself, then we are stuffed aswell because the people who were traditionally left, or liberals are being told to shut up or are being called nazis aswell..just check out social media. Its going to take a normal left wing leader to sort this in my opinion

Anonymous said...

Well a Church Minster can say some men have vaginas and some wimen have penises and a weirdo who lectures in social work can say 12 convicted child abusers are totally innocent.
Isn't that freedom of speech....mines a valium!