Criminalising the Truth

Telling people what they do not wish to hear is a dangerous business. As George Bernard Shaw put it: ‘If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh otherwise they’ll kill you’. History alas is hardly testament to mankind’s bonhomie, awash as it is with the bodies of those who died for their beliefs; not to mention the poor souls born before the policy of ‘don’t shoot the messenger’ became fashionable.

While modern society’s attitude to the truth is somewhat more benign (death is rarely on the cards these days), our sense of humour has not improved. Honesty is still the ‘revolutionary act’ Orwell spoke of, with censure, cancellation, financial penalties and even jail time awaiting those who fail to sing from the approved hymn sheet.

Opposition to the liberal consensus on progressive issues is a case in point. Anyone who questioned the logic of transgender ideology was cast as a social pariah. Graham Lineham famously had his life destroyed, while in other parts of the Commonwealth parents were jailed for ‘misgendering’ their children. The obvious truth of course is that men in dresses are not women, neither is it advisable to encourage children to mix and match their genitals. The Cass Review has come and gone, yet the apologies are conspicuous by their absence.

Covid was much the same, with anyone ‘questioning the science’ decried as ‘antivaxxers’ and ‘conspiracy theorists’. Globally, governments concurred that penalty was the solution, and those failing to roll their sleeves up were fined, isolated, locked down, denied healthcare, dismissed from work and even threatened with jail time. The truth on vaccine injuries is now beginning to leak out, but again the apologies are muted.

As the list of truths the authorities do not wish the citizenry to notice expands, it makes sense to organise them under one umbrella: ‘hate speech’. You are now, for instance, more likely to be arrested in central London for holding up a sign saying ‘Hamas are terrorists’, than you are for openly calling for genocide as a Hamas terrorist. Nowhere is this hostility to truth more apparent, bizarrely, than when one makes reference to the official figures.

Consider the recent €6,000 fine and criminal record handed down to Alternative für Deutschland politician, Marie-Thérèse Kaiser, for the crime of restating the government’s own figures on the disproportionate number of Afghan refugees who commit rape in Germany. In Britain, keen-eyed members of the public are similarly discouraged.

The Press Complaints Commission considered it ‘racist’ of Rod Liddle to notice that young black men were committing the majority of violent crime in London, even though as Sadiq Khan will tell you any day of the week:

‘Black Londoners are disproportionately represented as victims and offenders for all categories of serious violence. Some 62% of homicide victims and 65% of offenders are Black Londoners.’

Jeremy Corbyn thought it the height of bad taste for Sarah Champion to infer that ‘Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls’, although had he read the government’s own reports into the matter, he might well have concluded Pakistani Muslims were hugely overrepresented in grooming gangs.

It was also clearly impolite of Emmanuel College, Cambridge fellow, Dr Nathan Cofnas to quote Harvard’s own admission figures when speaking about race differences in intelligence, a crime for which he was subsequently dismissed:

‘If Harvard admitted students based on their academic qualifications alone, Harvard would be 43 percent Asian, 38.4 percent white, 0.7 percent black, and 2.4 percent Hispanic’.

Unlike other nations, the British government is terribly squeamish about publishing sensitive data it does not believe to be ‘in the public interest’. The Home Office is not interested in sharing migrant crime data for instance, nor the number of small boats blocked from crossing the Channel. Certain information does slip through the net however, and when the public starts drawing conclusions it is always met with the same combative retort, ‘So what?’ That was former Home Secretary, Sajid Javid’s response to the highlighting of ONS figures that London, Manchester and Birmingham are now all minority white cities. In other words, ‘How dare you notice?’

I’ll tell you ‘So what?’ Sajid, why collect such data in the first place if it has no implications for societal cohesion or government policy? Why criminalise citizens who fail to comply with data collection exercises like the Census, if those exercises are merely academic enquiries? And why is it only certain inconvenient truths that you object to?

Like NPR CEO Katherine Mayer, the authorities appear to have concluded that ‘Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction getting in the way of finding common ground & getting things done’ – i.e., failing to reach the promised multicultural nirvana. One can only hope so. A society based on convenient lies rather than uncomfortable truths, is one in which I’d rather not participate.

Frank Haviland is the author of Banalysis: The Lie Destroying the West, and writes a Substack here.

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