You are right, of course. Those ‘rich, dead, white men’ who pioneered the philosophy behind and created the Enlightenment and the democracies that spawned it knew what they were talking about — just because they were white, dead and rich (well, not all of them were rich) doesn’t mean that we should not listen to them, which appears to be the position of the common-or-garden social justice warrior these days and which ironically makes them bigots.

Thomas Paine summed it up pretty well when he said that he did not need any weapon other than free speech because, in an educated and enlightened society, free speech and the ability to wield it is all we require to ensure our freedom. There’s another side to this which is that if you have an enlightened and educated society and you decide to suspend free speech then people who are unable to express their disagreement through speech inevitably resort to the last option — violence. Free speech is a vital and necessary safety valve.

It is a strange phenomenon of the so called progressive left that they have always, since the days of my avatar, sought to silence and stigmatize their opponents. It is depressing that 230 years after they cut off my avatar’s head Mrs Merkle is overheard demanding from the spotty CEO of Facebook, whether he has started deleting ‘racist’ posts from his media platform yet. Racist, a word that is misused badly these days, in this context is ‘anyone who disagrees or objects to Merkle’s open door policy to immigration that she decided to unilaterally implement despite breaking EU laws to the contrary’. I would recommend you read Jamie Palmer’s excellent essay on the subject that can be found here: http://jacobinism.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/stigmatise-shame-and-silence.html

Those of us in middle age look on in horror at the undergraduate’s apparent inability to ‘cope’ with or understand the importance of, unrestricted and completely free speech, no matter how offensive it might be. Our universities are meant to be crucibles of thought and creativity, how is this possible when the foundation that underlies that; free speech; is shut down on the spurious basis of ‘trigger warnings’? It is almost as if they have never read Orwell or studied the newspeak of totalitarian regimes, in particular the Soviet Union. Churchill once said that the next fascists would come from the left and so far he is being proven right. What is it about the current generation of students that appears to make them so fragile that they are unable to cope with topics with which they do not agree, preferring to put their fingers in their ears and say “lalalalalalalala” until some hulking oaf of a ‘safe space officer’ escorts the ‘hater’ out of earshot? Do they not realise that the inevitable progression of their enforcement of silencing will eventually be applied to them? Forgive me if I am wrong, but I put a lot of this current problem at the doors of the way history has been taught in the west for the last 20 years or so. Whilst it is fascinating to learn social history it is apparent that a whole generation have not been taught how and why our enlightened societies came into being or the huge sacrifices made by our ancestors to ensure that they did and survived. Those of us who were brought up by the generation who gave all to fight real fascism did so to ensure that the free speech that underpins our democracy would survive. We can only assume this gap in knowledge exists because of the obvious contempt with which the current generation of students hold our enlightened democratic society. When you are not taught to value what is precious and fragile then you don’t know the dangers of smashing it. To generations who were taught to value our western societies, it is quite extraordinary to see educated, intelligent individuals behaving like infants, incapable of reasoned debate and spouters of newspeak nonsense.

Much of this has to do with the rise of identity politics. In order to be ‘heard’ one must be ‘worthy’ and in order to be ‘worthy’ one must belong or claim to belong to an ‘oppressed’ group who must be positively discriminated to make up for the ‘genetic crimes’ of the ancestors. I suffer from a debilitating and chronic illness that effectively renders me disabled, the other day I was called a ‘hero’ because every day I have to face my disease and the pain that comes with it. There is no cure. The person who called me thus was horrified when I informed them that I was not a hero. My disease afflicts me by chance, in order to live I have to cope with it. How does that equate to a fireman risking his life to pull someone out of a burning bulding? Or a soldier laying down his life for his friends? According to ‘newspeak’ it does equate, but that is plain nonsense.

This identity politics issue we have is wrong on so many levels, it infantalises, it forgives terrible stone-age attitudes towards those of other sexuality, creed or colour, it reduces whole groups of people to what the Victorians would have called ‘noble savages’ (and in doing so is deeply racist), it focuses on identity groups and group behaviour and suborns the status and role of the individual, personal responsibility and independent thought to collective groupthink. It appears to allocate genetic responsibility for crimes of the past — as a white man, I have no right to comment because my great great grandfathers were imperialists! And I am responsible for that….how precisely? Worst of all it is contrary to the most important speech of the late 20th C, that of Martin Luther King. MLK dreampt of a world where it wouldn’t matter what colour or creed someone was — the current ‘civil rights’ activists appear to be wholly opposite to this, enforcing a quasi Nazi racial and sexual profiling to pigeon hole people into groups which are then allocated worthiness. We saw this during the Oscar awards this week, where one winner was keen to ascribe his victory to his LGBT identity (and in doing so appeared to claim he was the first openly gay man to do so — he wasn’t — that was Gielgud.

You want to get freedom of speech back in universities — well the starting point is to discard this cancerous and frankly sinister idea of identity and focus instead on individuals. Judge by merit alone, THAT is the basis of enlightened society, the triumph of the individual (what the dead white men used to call ‘man’). Until that happens we will continue to see the erosion of our enlightened, broadly secular and free society with something considerably nastier and more sinister.

Good luck with your realisation of this but be prepared for the inevitable attack. I have lost count of how many former liberals I know who have been ostracized as ‘far right’ and ‘hateful’ because they pointed out exactly what you have pointed out. Most end up dedicating their activism to the counter counter enlightenment and working with ‘far right’ parties that are condemned as such, without a trace of hypocrisy or irony (which used to be enough to prevent this but sadly no more) by the so -called progressive left. Those ‘far right’ parties being mostly concerned with the repeal of the idiotic and deeply damaging ‘hate speech’ laws brought in by Blair and added to by other governments that has turned our police into a political police force for the first time in our history and also in campaigning for a written UK constitution with a 1st amendment guaranteeing free, unfettered speech.

Drop me a line when you realise that your former allies are in fact, the real fascists when they, inevitably now, turn on you, you nasty hater you!;-)