Creeping Fascism

Well, that didn’t take long. Last night I wrote:

The next revelation might well be that she’s actually the real public health minister, and Jane Ellison is just one of her stooges.

H/T Taking Liberties, Deborah Arnott has gone one better and become Jane Ellison:

 

Moving on from one health fascist to a whole army of them, Chris Snowdon reports:

The medical establishment’s bid for world domination continued today, with the Royal Society for Public Health (whoever they are) demanding the right to decide which shops are allowed to open and where they should be allowed to position their goods. In the same way as Lord Darzi has a fascist desire to turn public parks into ‘Beacons of Health’, this mob wants to live out their Albert Speer fantasies in our town centres.

We believe that business has a responsibility to ensure that what they offer doesn’t undermine the public’s health

Do you? Is that what you think? Because I think it should be up to us what we buy and we can “undermine” our health if we damn well please.

And we want to ensure that local authorities have the powers they need in order to curtail those business practices which may undermine the public’s health and the great work that many public health teams are doing.

Eurgh. The totalitarian tendencies of the ‘public health’ lobby are on full display in this document. There is no aspect of life that they don’t want dominated by lectures and harassment. For example…

On a healthy high street businesses would create opportunities for health optimisation. This could include signposting customers to health services, high street employees engaging customers in healthy conversations, health promotions in local shops, such as health shopping trolleys and outreach activities in pubs and bars, including smoking cessation or health checks.

“Engaging customers in healthy conversations”? What does that even mean?

This what comes of making “health” (which translates into longevity of life) the only measure of value. So next we are to have people having “healthy” conversations on “healthy” high streets. I think these people are monomaniacs, and deeply sick.

And so to simple fascism, with Brendan O’Neill:

And on it goes. Across Europe, from Britain to Scandinavia, from the former Stalinist bloc to the Mediterranean countries, people are being arrested and convicted and fined and jailed for expressing themselves. Not for violence or theft or criminal damage, but for expression; not for action, but for speech; not for behaviour, but for thought.

And those cases are just some of the better known ones. There are hundreds more incidents from the past few years where people in Europe have been arrested under public-order or hate-speech legislation for the crime of saying shocking or offensive or simply non-mainstream things.

Christian preachers who have argued that gay sex is evil; historians who have called into question the Armenian genocide; young Muslims who have expressed support for certain Islamist groups in the Middle East —such people, and many others, are being arrested in their hundreds in 21st-century Europe.

Some are let off, some are punished. But the clear message sent by all this heavy-handed state intervention into the arena of thought and speech is that there are certain things you cannot say; certain views you cannot hold; certain opinions you must not express.

So if you want to see regimes which still, in the 21st century, punish people for singing songs or which destroy decadent art, you don’t have to look to the Islamic State.

It is happening here, all around us, on this apparently Enlightened continent. Freedom of speech no longer exists in Europe.

O’Neill also mentions Holocaust Denial as one form of forbidden speech. I’m no sort of Holocaust Denier myself, but I must say that I have always regarded this to be a very stupid thing to forbid – because the likely effect will be to make everybody into Holocaust Deniers, as what they’re forbidden to say becomes what they must say.

It doesn’t surprise me in the least that there are Holocaust Deniers. It may quite simply be impossible for some people to reconcile the Holocaust with, say, a belief in an idea of the existence of an advanced European civilisation, or the perfectibility of human nature, or something like that. So they reject the Holocaust in order to preserve their belief system.

And in fact I wish that Holocaust Deniers were right, and that it did never happen. But the reasons they put forward for their denial (when they are allowed to express them) always seem to me to lack substance. For example, one historian (whose name escapes me) said that the reason for his scepticism grew from the fact that there were no written records of the genocide. There were no train schedules, no written orders, etc. I suppose that for historians who rely on such records, the absence of them must be the equivalent of absence of evidence. But for a non-historian like myself, the absence of such evidence is completely unsurprising. It’s a bit like denying that there was any conspiracy to assassinate JFK, because there are no minutes of the meetings of the conspirators, no records of purchase of telescopic rifles, no detailed plans for the positioning and coordination of the assassins. Once again, I’m not surprised there aren’t any. But that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a conspiracy. Nor does it mean that there was one.

But if I’m not a Holocaust Denier, I’m most certainly a Global Warming Denier, and even worse a Smoking-Causes-Lung-Cancer Denier. And at the present rate of creeping fascism, I can expect to have my blog closed down, and myself sent to prison.