Liberty Lost

You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone

I remember growing up and being told that we had fought two world wars to protect our freedom and that the difference between us and Russia during the Cold War was that we had freedom, and they did not. It turns out that I was duped; it was all just a lot of lies and nonsense to make the masses fight.

When I went to Russia, I discovered something rather different. Ordinary life was in many respects just as free as here. You could go for a barbecue in the woods with loads of vodka and cigarettes, and you could do just what you pleased. There were limits when you got back to your job or your university, but if you played the game, they weren’t that onerous.

The real difference was in the freedom to say what you wanted and read what you wanted. You could whisper to your friends in private without much risk of anything going wrong so long as you were careful, but the books you could read and the news printed in the newspapers or broadcast on the TV was controlled by the State.

The problem with this is that ordinary people have no other source of information, and after a few generations of selective truth and lies, most people knew no better. I had to teach my teachers Russian history.

There is a museum in Moscow dedicated to the Second World War that only has exhibits about Soviet victories. The defeats are unmentioned and largely unknown. The truth about how Soviet soldiers behaved when they raped and pillaged while conquering Berlin is still unknown in Russia, or dismissed as Western propaganda. When I first mentioned the murder of Polish officers at Katyn I was met with blank looks from educated people.

When communism ended, people found that everything they had been told was lies; the God they had worshipped was merely decaying in a tomb outside the Kremlin, and their whole belief system was built on sand.

When you cease to believe in Lenin it isn’t that you believe nothing, it’s that you believe anything.

This is what followed. In Russia people rediscovered Orthodoxy, but didn’t know who the icons represented. Thus, weird beliefs began to take hold. There were cults involving strange men preaching the end of times. There were imported cults of Hare Krishna, Scientology and Mormonism. Finally, there was the cult of Putin, and we were back where we started with the falsification of history and ordinary Russians not quite knowing what was true anymore.

To maintain the falsehood that Russia was still a major power, Putin had to start invading other people’s countries just to maintain the illusion he had created.

We in Britain looked on (and still look on smugly) at the stupid Russians believing their own government’s propaganda, but we are losing our freedom too, and the loss of it has already gone very far very fast.

There are two important freedoms. The freedom to do what I please so long as it does not harm others, and the freedom to speak and write what I please, with very few limits such as not shouting fire in a crowded theatre.

It is not the business of government to protect me from myself – they are not the default loco parentis setting. Certainly, my parents were absolute monarchs because I knew no better, and they could stop me harming myself or tell me when to go to bed.

The excuse that government must protect me from harming myself, because it will cost the State money to treat me, is to take away all freedom of action. It could be used to stop me driving a car, as I pollute and might have an accident. It could be used to stop me eating fish and chips, as it makes me obese. Go down that route and it is as if John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty was never written, and soon might even be banned.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was sent to the Gulag for making a joke about Stalin that was overheard and reported. He was unlucky. He was made an example of. The purpose of the example was to deter others from speaking freely or writing freely. It worked.

So too here, Labour has punished random people – some of whom said things that were dreadful, but many of whom were merely unlucky. On another day they would have ‘gotten away with it’. If there had not been any riots and the concomitant need to punish someone like poor Admiral John Byng, then no one would have been jailed.

Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres.

My goodness me that was written in the eighteenth century. Quite candid or indeed Candide. It could have been written right now. Better not translate it, it might not be safe.

I hate both the rioters and the government for making me feel this way.

The result of all this random punishment, is that no one quite knows what they are allowed to say or indeed do. Under certain circumstances, if for instance there is another riot, the government might find it convenient to punish almost any action or anything that is written. It is in this way that we all lose freedom. We self-censor, and gradually what we took for granted is lost.

The loss of freedom of speech is not felt immediately. For the first generation or two, people in the Soviet Union knew what the truth was because they had been able to read reasonably freely before the Revolution. So too here.

What Labour is trying to do is to limit our freedom to object. Mainstream opinion commonly held in the 1970s or 1980s, let alone the nineteenth century about a whole range of topics, gradually becomes unsayable. Much highly erudite Victorian scholarship about Islam will very soon be Islamophobic and therefore illegal to say – perhaps even to read. Mainstream Christian views about marriage and homosexuality (that all of our grandfathers held) are now taboo, and could get you fired.

It’s only because I could read freely, write freely, and think freely that I was able to teach the Russians their own history. Alas, we are already one generation into students believing in Critical Race Theory, that boys can become girls, and that our whole history is one of villainy, until a rush of wind brought us enlightenment and all of the benefits that went with it.

The Labour Party is much worse than I thought it would be. It’s one thing to be socialist, we can endure that like we did in the 1970s even if the lights go out; it’s quite another to be authoritarian.

I look back at the time when as a student on a grant I could go to the pub with my friends whenever I wanted. We could buy chips or a curry whenever we wanted, because it was cheap. We could smoke because it was cheap, and you could smoke on busses and in the cinema, and it seems like I am looking back to a time before the Revolution curtailed all our freedoms.

I am reduced to writing riddles and fairytales and waiting like Shostakovich on the landing for the NKVD to arrive, because he didn’t want to wake up his family.

There was a time not very long ago when we laughed at the Americans for banging on about freedom all the time, because we took it for granted.

Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone?

They took down Thatcher and put up Lenin a lot!

 

The excellent Effie Deans writes at Lily of St. Leonard’s here. To support her writing, payments are welcomed here.

This piece was first published in Country Squire Magazine, and is reproduced by kind permission.

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