Vietnam, Biafra (in Britain, at least), repression of freedom of speech and various groups of people. Such were the objects of protest. I recall the police action in breaking up the final Free Festival in Windsor Great Park, 1974. Along with my friends, I was lucky: we sensed trouble in the air, and left the festival the day before the 'pigs' moved in. What happened was truly awful. Women, - including those pregnant -, children: nobody was spared the brutality unleashed upon the freak alternative youth on that dark morning just down the road from one of the Queen's prime residences.
In a sense, this action by the forces of law and order was successful: young people stopped protesting in such numbers on the street about wars; there were no more free festivals in Windsor Great Park. At the same time, it did the reputation of 'the Establishment' no good at all. It showed its own vicious colours all too vividly, and its real disrespect for anybody who dissented their programmes. 'Normal' citizens were left feeling uneasy. So another strategy of shutting people up was needed. Eventually someone had a brainwave. And political correctness was born.
'Self-policing' was the stroke of genius which arose in response to this conundrum, of how to shut people up in a socially acceptable fashion. And political correctness was the ideology that emerged as fit for purpose. It's brilliant, really. You don't need police out on the street, when you have the general public doing the job for you. People who would have been on the streets protesting now serve as prime trolls for the Establishment without even realising it. Plenty of folk considering themselves as right-on, fighting the fight against evil, in favour of noble and ephemeral notions like justice and equality. While, in reality, they are doing the dirty work of the dark forces who they profess to despise. Unwitting slaves, really.
Freedom of speech is a big one. The freedom to communicate, or at least express, your feelings, your ideas, your inspirations, no matter how weird and wacky, how unorthodox and unconventional, they may be. Freedom of speech is closely related to freedom of mind: if things cannot be expressed, they are likely to wither away, or be dismissed by the individual as aberrant, unhealthy, pathological, and so on, leading to all manner of personal difficulties. Obvious example: the effects on some truly gay people of outlawing homosexuality in the west in the first part of the 20th century.
This freedom of speech is a most unwelcome freedom in the eyes of 'Establishment'. It creates all kind of problems, as people question, poke, and prod, sometimes even digging up unpleasant truths about the nature and activities of Establishment. With the advent of the internet, the problem has become still more acute, with information and ideas zipping around the globe with ease. It is a situation which clearly needed to be dealt with.
Self-policing through the totalitarian lens of political correctness is a genius solution. Coming from a generation which campaigned ceaselessly for freedom of speech, I find it galling when idiotic students in places of 'learning' (read 'brain correction') protest against anybody lecturing or speaking in public whose ideological or political colours do not match theirs. These students, of course, are proud of how absolutely right-on they are, and how they make sure nobody gets offended by a viewpoint that falls outside the norm. People believing they are making a new and better world, when they are in reality doing the dirty work of the Establishment. This is society policing itself to perfection. Studenst creating a nightmare world. The 'education' of these young people obviously doesn't run to seriously reading 'Animal Farm' and '1984'.
It is the same story with other totems of modern ideology: racism, sexism, anthropogenic climate change, and the rest. The original freedom-affirming meanings of racism and sexism have become warped, to enable shutting up of dissenting voices. Any doubts about the official climate change story are met with Holocaust parallelism, the questioner being dubbed a 'climate change denier'. There. That vicious accusation should shut them up. It is the shadow of the MeToo# movement, as well. I'm all for being able to jump up and down if you have been abused - by anyone -, but their programme comes laden with fear and manipulation, having the effect of closing down, or inhibiting, any kind of passionate or sexual response from the heterosexual male. Damping down feelings, shutting people up, especially heterosexual male people.
And with that I shall, for now, of my own accord, my own free will, shut up - until the next time.
Images: - Free speech, 1960s-style
- The police seize a stage at Windsor. Photo: Steve Austin, from the excellent ukrockfestivals website
- Student protests 2015
