| Welcome to Edl The Forum. We hope you enjoy your visit. You're currently viewing our forum as a guest. This means you are limited to certain areas of the board and there are some features you can't use. If you join our community, you'll be able to access member-only sections, and use many member-only features such as customizing your profile, sending personal messages, and voting in polls. Registration is simple, fast, and completely free. Join our community! If you're already a member please log in to your account to access all of our features: |
| Melanie Phillips article; I think, therefore I’m guilty | |
|---|---|
| Tweet Topic Started: Sep 26 2010, 10:28 PM (233 Views) | |
| Wigone | Sep 26 2010, 10:28 PM Post #1 |
Patriot
|
I love Melanie Phillips, I don't always agree with her but mostly I do. She is straight talking no nonsense. This article has just been sent by someone I know. September 18, 2010 I think, therefore I’m guilty Spectator, 17 September 2010 Everyone can agree that today’s Britain — which we’re always being told has become so much more liberal — is the very model of a forward-looking, tolerant society in which freedom of expression is paramount. Correct? If only. In fact, the intellectual trend in Britain is a remorseless slide towards a dark age of intolerance, reverting to a reason-suppressing, heresy-hunting culture in which certain opinions are being turned into thought crimes. Astoundingly, people are being arrested by the police — even if the case against them eventually falls — because of what they have said. They are not inciting violence or any criminal activity. They are merely expressing a point of view. Yet for that they may find the police feeling their collars. It is difficult to say when, exactly, the priorities of the British police shifted from the prevention of criminal offences towards criminalising people for causing offence. The police have become the thin blue line against the Wrong Opinion. Instead of protecting society against oppression, British police officers have become the agents of oppression. Freedom of religious expression, for example, is a bedrock principle of an open society. Yet if Christians express their religious opposition to homosexuality, they are treated like criminals. Dale McAlpine, a Christian preacher in Cumbria, was carted off by the police, locked in a cell for seven hours and charged with using abusive or insulting words or behaviour after telling a passer-by that he believed homosexuality was a crime against God. Harry Hammond, an evangelist, was convicted of a public order offence and fined for holding a placard saying ‘Stop Homosexuality, Stop Lesbianism, Jesus is Lord’ at a street demonstration in Bournemouth — even though he was attacked by members of the public who poured soil and water over him. Pensioners have even found the police on their doorstep accusing them of ‘hate crime’ for objecting to the local council about a gay pride march or merely asking if they could distribute Christian leaflets alongside the gay rights literature. Such Christians are far from alone in finding that certain opinions are now forbidden. Across public life — in academic, legal, governmental, scientific and media circles and beyond — an atmosphere is being engendered which is inimical to independent thought. And this is often amplified to incendiary levels through the electronic lynch-mob of the internet. Writers who bust the boundaries of permitted thinking may become the target of frenzied denunciation by a global army of haters whipping up a campaign for the dissident to be boycotted, banned or sacked. After Jan Moir suggested in the Daily Mail that the death of the gay Boyzone singer Stephen Gately was linked to a louche lifestyle, she was subjected to a fireball of vilification on the internet, Twitter and Facebook. The Crown Prosecution Service then said ‘the Metropolitan Police passed the article’ to them ‘to determine whether or not any crime had been committed’, but Moir would not be prosecuted. Prosecuted! For making what at most was a tasteless remark? What on earth has Britain come to when the CPS entertains this as a serious possibility? Moir’s particular thought crime was unwittingly to desecrate the hallowed shrine of victim culture.Certain groups of ‘victimised’ people — lone mothers, ethnic minorities, Muslims, gays — enjoy a kind of Protected Species status, in that they must never be offended; nor can any fault ever be laid at their door. To offend or criticise them is to be guilty of hate crime. But since hatred is a subjective notion, this has opened the way for an oppressive culture of coercion, double standards and injustice. Offending such groups has become a hanging offence — and that includes protesting against this very phenomenon. It took Robin Page, chairman of the Countryside Restoration Trust, some five years to clear his name after he was arrested for remarking at a 2002 rally against the government’s anti-hunting laws: ‘If you are a black vegetarian Muslim asylum-seeking one-legged lesbian lorry driver, I want the same rights as you.’ To enforce the dogma of thought crime, language has been hijacked and turned inside out. Dissent has been relabelled as either hatred or insanity. Those who disagree with current orthodoxies are therefore deemed to be either bad or mad. These modern heretics are demonised as Europhobes, homophobes, xenophobes or Islamophobes. They can therefore safely be purged from all positions of influence and their ideas trashed without any discussion. The taunt of ‘phobia’, or irrational fear, is used along with outright accusations of insanity to place rational dissent beyond the pale. As the former Today programme editor Rod Liddle recently revealed, a BBC apparatchik said to him of Lord Pearson of Rannoch and other Eurosceptics (whose views happen to be shared by half or more of the population): ‘Rod, you do realise that these people are mad?’ Just such a charge was made by totalitarian movements from the medieval Catholic church by way of the Jacobins all the way to Stalin’s secret police. In similar vein, the rational anxieties of millions about mass immigration or militant Islam destroying the culture of the country are held merely to demonstrate that ordinary people are racist bigots or Islamophobes. The great gift bequeathed to us by the 18th-century Enlightenment is the freedom to disagree. This is now in eclipse. The intelligentsia — the supposed custodians of reason and intellectual freedom — has turned itself into an inquisition, complete with an index of prohibited ideas. Nowhere is this more starkly displayed than in the hounding of scientists and others who question man-made global warming theory. Such sceptics are vilified, smeared, denied funding and even — according to the renowned meteorologist and IPCC reviewer Professor Richard Lindzen — intimidated into telling lies to shore up the theory. Assertions wholly inimical to science, such as ‘the argument is over’ or that global warming is the belief of a scientific ‘consensus’ — the claim once used by the medieval church to stifle Galileo — are deployed to ensure the argument is over before it can begin. More viciously still, these dissenters have been dubbed ‘climate change deniers’ to equate their views with Holocaust denial. Not only are they thus likened to Nazi sympathisers, but rejecting man-made global warming theory — for which many of the best brains in climate-related science say there is scant or no evidence — is equated with the genocide of the Jews. Without the freedom to question and argue, science cannot thrive — and without science, reason would be crippled and modernity would grind to a halt. Which is of course the aim of the environmental movement, whose roots lie in a stream of pagan, irrational and proto-fascist thinking which goes back to the counter-Enlightenment. ‘Politically correct’ views all derive from anti-Western, secular ideologies such as anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, utilitarianism, feminism, multiculturalism and environmentalism. These all share the aim of overturning the established order in the West. So any groups who have power within that order can never be offended or hurt because they are themselves offensive and hurtful, while ‘powerless’ groups can never be other than victims. This obsession with power is, of course, a Marxist position; indeed, ‘political correctness’ is a form of cultural Marxism. But how has good old empirical, pragmatic, anti-ideological Britain succumbed to such extremism? Part of the explanation is that, with the collapse of Soviet communism, the left shifted its focus from economics and politics to the cultural arena. Employing Gramsci’s tactic of ‘the long march through the institutions’, it captured the citadels of the culture for a variety of utopian ideas. Class divisions would give way to equality, capitalist despoliation of the earth would be replaced by pre-lapsarian agrarian communes and all hatred, prejudice and irrationality would be excised from the human heart. Like all ideologies, these utopian fantasies wrenched facts and evidence to fit their governing idea. Independent thought thus became impossible — which inevitably resulted in an attack upon freedom, because reason and liberty are inseparable bed-fellows. Because these creeds purported to embody unchallengeable truths, they could permit no dissent. Reason was thus replaced by bullying, intimidation and the suppression of debate. What we are living through is therefore a fresh mutation of the previous despotisms of first the medieval church and then the totalitarian political movements of the 20th century. The West has now fallen victim to a third variation on the theme: cultural totalitarianism, or a dictatorship of virtue. For, in a pattern that goes back to the French Revolution, the left believes that its secular, materialistic, individualistic and utilitarian values represent not a point of view but virtue itself. To oppose such coercive behaviour or uphold factual evidence in the face of ideological distortion is thus to be damned automatically as evil, mad and extreme. But here’s the really striking thing. Progressive intellectuals who scorn ‘the right’ as knuckle-dragging extremists are themselves promoting a range of secular fantasies which uncannily mirror pre-Enlightenment religious fanaticism. Anti-imperialism, anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism, environmentalism, scientism, egalitarianism, anti-racism, libertinism, moral relativism and multiculturalism are all quasi-religious movements — evangelical, dogmatic, millenarian and with enforcement mechanisms to stamp out heresy. Some would call all this tyranny. But to progressives, tyranny occurs only when their utopia is denied. Virtue therefore has to be coerced for the good of the people at the receiving end. Since progressivism is all about creating the perfect society, it is therefore incontestably virtuous; and so — like Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety, like Stalinism, like Islam — it is incapable of doing anything bad. Unlike everyone else, of course, for whom it follows they can do nothing but bad. Accordingly, progressives feel justified in trying to stifle all dissent. Never engaging with the actual argument, they instead use gratuitous abuse to turn their opponents into pariahs (while they themselves, failing to grasp the point about evidence, characterise all reasoned arguments against them as outrageous ‘insults’). So if you are a white Christian man upholding traditional family values and expressing a desire to stop immigration and leave the EU, while being sceptical of man-made global warming and believing that Darwinian evolution does not explain the origin of life on earth, Britain is no longer your country. But don’t worry. Utopia is taking its place. The police are on their way to tell you. |
|
They don't like it up 'em. Don't tell them your name Pike. | |
![]() |
|
| brianoflondon | Sep 26 2010, 10:33 PM Post #2 |
Member
|
Agreed: last paragraph sums up quite a few in the EDL.
|
|
Brian of London has been actively occupying a very small slice of hideously over-occupied Tel Aviv since early 2009. Islam is a giant bungee cord tying it's adherents to the 7th century. They can pull themselves almost to the twenty first century but eventually the cord tightens and flings them back. | |
![]() |
|
| Steve Freedom | Sep 26 2010, 10:41 PM Post #3 |
Patriot
|
very good read took awhile to get through it like but bang on the money |
| “The modern definition of "racist" is "someone who is winning an argument with a liberal” --- Peter Brimelow | |
![]() |
|
| Wigone | Sep 26 2010, 10:44 PM Post #4 |
Patriot
|
Research Common Purpose and New World order. |
|
They don't like it up 'em. Don't tell them your name Pike. | |
![]() |
|
| Deleted User | Sep 26 2010, 10:50 PM Post #5 |
|
Deleted User
|
Just read her book, "Londonistan". Enough said. |
|
|
| Deleted User | Sep 26 2010, 10:58 PM Post #6 |
|
Deleted User
|
She's good.
|
|
|
| scotsguy | Sep 26 2010, 11:07 PM Post #7 |
|
Kafir
|
thank fcuk we got rid of labour and the unions/uaf nuj lot!...wonder will things change under cameron! |
![]() |
|
| Deleted User | Sep 26 2010, 11:12 PM Post #8 |
|
Deleted User
|
Don't hold your breath scotsguy, Cameron et al haven't given any reason to think it will not be more of the same. |
|
|
| Deleted User | Sep 26 2010, 11:13 PM Post #9 |
|
Deleted User
|
Put it this way, it cannot get any worse. Labour as is usual leave power with the country in a worse state than when they took it. How they were voted in 3 times and stayed in office for 13 years baffles me. Are people really that stupid? This co-alition is not ideal and has a lot of work to do, dirty work at that, and at the risk of being slaughtered on this forum I wish them well. What other REALISTIC chance have we got at the moment? Ed Miliband in 5 years time - think about it!!? |
|
|
| Deleted User | Sep 26 2010, 11:16 PM Post #10 |
|
Deleted User
|
No we didn't, we just changed them for BluLabour and the communists known as the LibDumbs. OPWTN. |
|
|
| English Angel | Sep 26 2010, 11:22 PM Post #11 |
|
Kafir
|
there is a little bit of hope in the form of the leaked Quilliam memo to Govt.. Briefly, it says Gordon Brown didnt have a clue, many of his cabinet didnt have a clue, and many senior civil servants and council leaders were also clueless about the threat that engaging with muslims could bring, as it legitimised them to the detriment of other minority/majority groups. It also lays out what the new coalition Govt strategy is. long read, but worth it.. http://www.scribd.com/doc/34834977/Secret-Quilliam-Memo-to-government |
![]() |
|
| Deleted User | Sep 26 2010, 11:33 PM Post #12 |
|
Deleted User
|
Good srticle and well put Ms Phillips. Every point you make is valid, current and to the point, I admire your thoroughness and depth of observations and take solace in the fact you are both willing & able to print your words. If the Gulag looms as a result your publications you will find huge support across the length and breadth of Britain. Thankyou. |
|
|
| Xboxgen | Sep 27 2010, 12:04 AM Post #13 |
Member
|
what I can't understand is the denial of the people in this country. is Melanie Phillips insane? no of course not. but insane is exactly what groups like UAF would have us believe by their blatent denial of the truth. I happen to adere to the same thinking in regards to this statement. ' the rational anxieties of millions about mass immigration or militant Islam destroying the culture of the country are held merely to demonstrate that ordinary people are racist bigots or Islamophobes. ' and this one. Accordingly, progressives feel justified in trying to stifle all dissent. Never engaging with the actual argument, they instead use gratuitous abuse to turn their opponents into pariahs (while they themselves, failing to grasp the point about evidence, characterise all reasoned arguments against them as outrageous ‘insults’). Islams proves itself time and time again while the police enforce against people who stand against this can do no wrong wicked Ideology of hate. |
![]() |
|
| Wigone | Sep 27 2010, 12:09 AM Post #14 |
Patriot
|
I was sent this, it has bent my mind trying to get my head around it. It seems outrageous but plausible bearing in mind what has been happening in our country the past 10 years. http://www.stopcp.com/index.php Edited by Wigone, Sep 27 2010, 12:18 AM.
|
|
They don't like it up 'em. Don't tell them your name Pike. | |
![]() |
|
| Deleted User | Sep 27 2010, 12:14 AM Post #15 |
|
Deleted User
|
Unfortunately Melanie Phillips is Jewish. The poor woman is pilloried no matter what she says by our friends of the muslim faith for that fact alone. |
|
|
| Deleted User | Sep 27 2010, 12:15 AM Post #16 |
|
Deleted User
|
Sometimes I feel like it's akin to convert a reigious zealot into an atheist - they're in solid denial. No matter what you tell them, no matter how much evidence to lay at their feet or how great the threat to their own life(style) they'd rather believe whatever they've been indoctrinated with or whatever they've been tol is the truth. If the government of the day said "Eeverything is alright, just carry on as normal." Mr/Mrs 'average white, middle class person with 2.4 kids in the drive' will just accept this because anything other 'doesn't affect them'. Oh yes it does and in so many ways - they just can't see it. |
|
|
| scotsguy | Sep 27 2010, 12:21 AM Post #17 |
|
Kafir
|
i like melanies writings,though its sad when you have to think about a knock at the door from the old bill,before you post anything on the net that may be deemed offensive by the pc brigade!... the previous uk goverment were a spineless,pc mob,made up of the great unwashed... constantly lying to the people,and pandering to every whim of the pc brigade and muslims. thats not what the british people want,and labour was booted out accordingly!... took 13 years though... i wonder will this govt actually sit down and enlighten the great brit masses,as to why,islam seems to be such a violent culture/religion?...i mean,why not,they would only be telling the truth. i hear govts say islam is a religion of peace!...yet our internet/tv/papers/radio tell us on the whole,a completley different story!,murder,religious hatred,suicide bombings,be-headings!....its time the uk govt told the truth!,better to offend a few,and be honest,than offend the majority by being dis-honest!.... if islam is a religion of peace...why are british soldiers being killed in afghanistan?...i mean,when one thinks of religion,the think of love,peace etc.... |
![]() |
|
| CAPTMAINWARING | Sep 27 2010, 12:38 AM Post #18 |
|
Excellent to see smart threads pop up. I like the article but one thing that kinda stuck out for me was how theres a list of anti-Western ideologied in there but she includes deminism and neglects to mention Islamism. I'm now going to have a long read of that Quilliam foundation memo. I read the letter and am now off to read the report. They better be doing their jobs. Never knew they were a counter-terrorism measure. |
![]() |
|
| Xboxgen | Sep 27 2010, 12:50 AM Post #19 |
Member
|
its just another reason why we need to end dependancies on oil. because we can't trust our greedy polititions. thats the real reason they can't be honest with us or themselves. they are buying time. its all about money. we have the technology to build electric cars. we don't. after the war this country will be totally energy efficient. no more gas guzzlers. electric cars with a 0-60 in 4 seconds range of 300 miles. a whole new industry. bullet trains and high speed internet. and no Muslims whatsoever. thats the future I want to see. a place where we buy british and export our products. no debts to foreign countries. market leaders in new industries. even if we have to have a war to get there. it will be well worth it. |
![]() |
|
| scotsguy | Sep 27 2010, 12:55 AM Post #20 |
|
Kafir
|
it was never about the oil my friend!,it had everything to do with teaching the muslims a lesson after 9/11...what good is afghanistan to the uk?...herion? whilst we did the whole world a big favour by getting rid of saddam!...mess with the west!,and your owned by us... even the arabs didnt like saddam,and paid the west billions for getting rid of him.... |
![]() |
|
| CAPTMAINWARING | Sep 27 2010, 01:03 AM Post #21 |
|
Afghanistan was about kicking these nutters into touch. Problem being the border was Pakistan that shelters them. |
![]() |
|
| Xboxgen | Sep 27 2010, 01:07 AM Post #22 |
Member
|
I think that giving the west a good excuse to take control of the oil had something to do with it. other than the fact they are fanatical about their hatred for all things west. why don't they stop fighting us in these countries? wouldn't we have been gone a long time ago if they stopped fighting us. they don't want our democrasy. they want the sharia. |
![]() |
|
| lan-astaslem | Sep 27 2010, 08:34 AM Post #23 |
|
Patriot
|
If that was the case then Jeddah Medina and Mecca would have been flatten. as most of the money to finance 9/11 came from Saudi Oil does play a very big role, because one of the main objectives of Bin Laden is to take control of Saudi. Another fact is there was a very big chance of war between Saudi and Iraq, now imagine what would happen to oil prices then. If there was no oil in the middle east then we would not being seeing the crap which is going on today, this lastest round of jihad is mainly financed by oil. |
|
“One day, millions of men will leave the Southern Hemisphere to go to the Northern Hemisphere. And they will not go there as friends. Because they will go there to conquer it. And they will conquer it with their sons. The wombs of our women will give us victory.” – Houari (Mohamed) Boumedienne, President of Algeria, 1965 – 1978, in a 1974 speech at the UN
| |
![]() |
|
| tobias malachi | Sep 27 2010, 10:36 AM Post #24 |
Infidel
|
Excellent artical Is the spread of islam in preparation for when the oil wells run dry. Without oil many of these countries have no products to sell to the western world and will therefore become bancrupt and slide into poverty. So is this conquest by stealth in preperation for that time when their ecconomies go down like sinking ships that like rats they will desert to arrive in the new lands that have been taken over and prepared for them. |
![]() |
|
| 1 user reading this topic (1 Guest and 0 Anonymous) | |
| « Previous Topic · EDL Chat · Next Topic » |
| Track Topic · E-mail Topic |
1:26 AM Jul 11
|
Feliz Navidad (Gold) created by Sarah & Delirium of the ZNR







1:26 AM Jul 11