Anarcho-Tyranny

This is slightly old news that managed to slip under my radar, but hearing about it right after encountering a description of Britain's increasingly Orwellian method of rationing medical care does make me wonder whether we should start calling the place "Airstrip One".

In any event, it seems that a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl was recently arrested (HT: What Would Charles Martel Do?) for the heinous crime of asking to be transferred during a group activity in the classroom to -- gasp! -- a group of students who -- brace yourselves -- speak English!

The Brussels Journal quotes The Daily Mail:

A teenage schoolgirl was arrested by police for racism after refusing to sit with a group of Asian students because some of them did not speak English. Codie Stott's family claim she was forced to spend three-and-a-half hours in a police cell after she was reported by her teachers. According to Codie, the five -- four boys and a girl -- then began talking in a language she didn't understand, thought to be Urdu, so she went to speak to the teacher.

"I said 'I'm not being funny, but can I change groups because I can't understand them?' But she started shouting and screaming, saying 'It's racist, you're going to get done by the police'." Codie said she went outside to calm down where another teacher found her and, after speaking to her class teacher, put her in isolation for the rest of the day.

A complaint was made to a police officer based full-time at the school, and more than a week after the incident on September 26 she was taken to Swinton police station and placed under arrest. "They told me to take my laces out of my shoes and remove my jewellery, and I had my fingerprints and photograph taken," said Codie. "It was awful."

[...] Robert Whelan, deputy director of the Civitas think-tank, said: [...] "A lot of these arrests don't result in prosecutions -- the aim is to frighten us into self-censorship until we watch everything we say."

Whelan hits the nail on the head, but it's even worse than that. Quite a while back, I noted that "hate crime" legislation in America penalizes individuals for their beliefs to the extent that it assesses additional penalties for actual crimes based upon the motivation for these deeds. This is even worse. In Britain, people can apparently be charged for the "thought crime" itself, without even having to commit a real crime as a pretext for doing time for their beliefs! Yes. The goal is certainly self-censorship, but the groundwork for outright government censorship has already been laid through precedents like this.

The Brussels Journal ends by making the following excellent point.

... The less control the authorities have with Muslims, the more control they want to exercise over non-Muslims. This strange mix of powerful censorship of public debate, yet little control over public law and order, has by some been labeled anarcho-tyranny. The reason why European authorities are becoming increasingly totalitarian in their censorship efforts is to conceal the fact that they are no longer willing or able to uphold even the most basic security of their citizenry. [italics added]

This is almost completely on the mark, although it does miss the original motivation for the censorship: the doctrine of multiculturalism, which holds that all cultures are equally good. To quash criticism of other cultures -- even criticism which exists in the imagination of some minor functionary upon hearing a schoolgirl's request to be able to understand her classmates -- is the real goal of this censorship. That such censorship can also hide the ugly results of implementing this doctrine just happens to serve the purpose of exempting this doctrine from objective evaluation.

Government is the only institution in Western society that can legally wield force -- the delegated retaliatory force of its citizens. For that force to be used to prevent these citizens from stating the obvious about members of other cultures (including when some of them pose an objective threat to their well-being) is to hand our delegated power of self-defense directly over to those who would do us harm. As the term "anarcho-tyranny" implies, this combines the worst of the worlds of anarchy and of tyranny.

Europe is in serious trouble.

-- CAV