by Joshua Trevino, Daily Sceptic:
A much-remarked and deeply chilling aspect of the British regime’s social repression following the civil disorder and violence of early August is its pursuit of those who merely engaged in speech online. The various mechanisms of the regime have been crowing about the wave of arrests and jailing, including a Home Office posting that “[t]here’s no place in society for armchair thugs”. But there is, of course: you just have to belong to the government or be one of its valued constituencies. If you are, then you can freely post apologetics for menace and violence, for example this Labour MP extending her generous understanding:
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
These people came to this location because it has been spread that racists were coming to attack them. This misinformation was spread entirely to create this content. Don’t spread it MR Tice! https://t.co/l03oTp7fdB
— Jess Phillips (@jessphillips) August 5, 2024
Make sure you click through and watch the video here, for full effect.
Or you can be the Home Office itself, doing its best Westmoreland/McNamara light-at-the-end-of the-tunnel datum — but then there is no British Vietnam experience to ward them off it — with a plain old body-count metric, touted as a sort of success:
These criminals will face the full force of the law ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/HXOHzjCwYT
— Home Office (@ukhomeoffice) August 14, 2024
One of the comments below it notes, “Yet no arrests for the thousands of people who enter the country illegally each year.” But this is the point, and the discrepancy is meant to be noticed: the regime touts its activity specifically to illuminate the difference between that which it tolerates, and that which it represses. The appeals to consistency and accusations of hypocrisy are unmoored from the reality of British governance now. It would be hypocritical and inconsistent if the U.K. regime promised equal justice under law, for example, or punished only commonly discernible lawbreaking. It does neither. If the post-riot prosecutions confined themselves to generally agreed crimes like property destruction, assault, and so on, across all cohorts, then there would be few grounds for complaint and one could argue that it does in fact aspire to equal justice. What is actually happening is a vigorous prosecution of crimethink, mostly under the anodyne term “online offenses,” and unconnected with any demonstrable incitement or violence.
One chilling example comes in the sentencing of Julie Sweeney, a caregiver for her disabled husband, who will now spend fifteen months in jail for a rather sad and morally abhorrent little Facebook post. The judge acknowledged that she was, in effect, a nobody who posted in anger and endangered no one, and he further acknowledged that she was not racist. According to the BBC, “[t]he judge [further] said no one was suggesting that Sweeney would have taken part in any violence.” Yet she will be in jail for fifteen months, and her husband thrown to who knows what mercies, and why? Well, this is why, in the judge’s own words:
You should have looked at the news with horror, like right-minded people.
That’s it. She expressed regime-disallowed opinions, reacted incorrectly to the news, and so off she goes. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but it looks as if this sort of thought policing characterises about one in 10 of the Home Office’s thousand-plus arrests. To re-use a phrase, it is done pour encourager les autres. The absence of a definable standard is a feature, not a bug, of the operation. Julie Sweeney and a few hundred powerless nobodies with bad opinions are thrown against the wall to motivate the rest of the population to first, be silent, and second, to look to the regime for the permitted ambit of sentiment before speaking. It is Soviet stuff, but the Soviet Union does not exist, and the United Kingdom’s regime does.
