THE APPROACHING DICTATORSHIP
“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
Edmund Burke
It cannot be merely coincidence that the film detailing a plot to kill Adolf Hitler has so recently been released in our cinemas. Sometimes, art acts as a means of alerting us to dangers, needs, duties, in our present situation, our present society.
In the film “Valkyrie”, the point had been reached amongst some officers in the German army where their revulsion and disgust at the things being done in the name of Germany moved them to attempt assassination. They had been appalled and sickened by the wholesale slaughter of the native population in Poland, in Russia, and by the knowledge that Jews, gypsies, and any other groups the Fuehrer considered undesirable, dangerous or worthless, were being systematically eliminated in the concentration camps. Their action was that of patriots, lovers of their Fatherland, who wanted the Allies to know that there were Germans who hated what Hitler stood for.
Their decision and subsequent assassination attempt were very risky – and they knew that if they failed, they would almost certainly forefeit their lives. They knew that if Hitler triumphed, they and their families would be branded as traitors. Yet such was their horror at what Germany had become under Hitler, they knew they must take this action, both to maintain their own honour and to rescue their country from total destruction. .
Well, they did fail, and most of them paid with their lives. But all these years later, there appears this film, which is both a tribute to the conspirators, and a warning to those who will heed it, that dictatorship has always at some stage to be confronted and resisted, whatever the cost to those who do so.
Here in Britain, we have been living under a growing dictatorship for many years now. For a long time, those of us who expressed concern about the first warning signs of the gradual curtailment and erosion of long-cherished freedoms were laughed at – some of the laughter stemmed from a fatal conviction that “it couldn’t happen here”, some of it arose because initially the comparatively minor incursions made by the government into our personal liberties were felt to be “worth it” for the benefits we would ultimately enjoy.
Long-suffering as always, the public accommodated themselves and adjusted their lives to conform to the new laws, the new restrictions. Many years later, thanks chiefly to the present severe downturn in the economy and the growing numbers of people losing their jobs, their livelihood, many more are beginning to see that what they had always considered a democracy is now much more accurately described as a dictatorship.
The government and so far the public might naturally blame the banks for their profligate lending. Yet it was the government that encouraged the banks to lend, and the public happily took whatever was on offer, paying very little heed to whether or not they could afford to service their loans, either at the time of contracting them, or, still less, if the economy became less buoyant at some future date. After all, hadn’t Gordon Brown grandly announced that the days of boom and bust were over?
2
If our present economic woes help us to see how dramatically our daily lives are now hedged about by orders, laws, rules and restrictions that affect us more and more individually, perhaps they might also enable us to realise that sooner or later, we are going to have to take a stand and demand that the government calls a halt to its unwanted interference in the lives of the general public.
There are ominous parallels between daily life in the Third Reich and our own lives in Britain today. No, we haven’t yet arrived at the midnight knock on the door, and transportation to the work camps, but a number of recent events highlighted in the media indicate that informers are reporting the content of private conversations (as they did in Germany) and that whilst some religious groups may be free to say more or less whatever they please about whomever they please, others are certainly not.
The first case is that of a private conversation between Carol Thatcher and others in what is called The Green Room at the BBC. During the course of the conversation, Carol Thatcher remarked that a particular tennis player reminded her of a golliwog.
That is a personal opinion of the speaker’s, with which I assume those to whom she made the remark were free to agree or disagree at will.
But no – despite the contention that Britain is a society which encourages “free speech”, we discover that speech is only permitted if it conforms to the politically correct standards that have been imposed on us by a comparatively small “elite”.
So some quisling reported Ms Thatcher’s comment, and she has been sacked from the programme on which she had worked until that time.
It doesn’t matter whether you find her opinion amusing, disgusting, or reprehensible – it was merely an opinion. Apparently, now we are censored for our opinions. And not only censored – we are spied upon, our opinions are reported to the Authorities, and we lose our job - The Third Reich.
The second illustration of our loss of individual freedom of speech is that of the Christian nurse who, tending one of her patients, offered to pray for her, if she would like her to do so. The woman patient refused the offer, from the reports of the incident, one gathers she refused quite pleasantly, as it was her prerogative to do.
Mysteriously, the patient mentioned this conversation to another nurse, saying that although she herself had not been offended, there might be someone who would find such an offer offensive.
After that, the Authorities took it up and have now suspended the nurse from duty, pending an “enquiry”. The Third Reich. A Christian nurse must conceal her faith, it seems. It is difficult not to ask the question, what would have been the result had a Jew or a Muslim nurse made a similar offer to a patient? I should have thought that any patient would be pleased to have a nurse who was sufficiently concerned for their welfare that he/she would make such an offer. Even if the patient was an atheist, it isn’t difficult to refuse prayer, and it must have been obvious that in making the suggestion, the nurse was offering to her patient the best she knew.
3
There are, it seems, increasing numbers of people nowadays who are only too willing to rush off to report to the Authorities on others whose remarks, comments, communication are “verboten” according to our Masters.
When I grew up in England in the 1950s, a commonly heard saying was: “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me”. It was invariably quoted when a child returned in tears from a game with friends or from school after critical or unkind words had been exchanged. We were taught that we needed to “toughen up”, and learn to ignore taunts and negative comments – and we did! I am not speaking, of course, about long-term and consistent bullying, but if people are now encouraged to plead “wounded feelings” every time anyone says or does something that “hurts” those feelings, we are evidently set on breeding a nation of wimps.
In those days, too, we had a stock reply for the sort of people who came to us with gossip likely to cause trouble, or bearing tales of others’ behaviour to their disadvantage: “Don’t be a tell-tale!” This effectively discouraged the bearing of tales, since the would-be messenger soon got the message that nobody wanted to listen.
Ask yourselves, as you read this – what kind of a person “informs” on others, when they know that doing so will get the person informed on into potentially serious trouble? What sort of character do they have? Well, they certainly take pleasure in causing trouble to others, and probably also hope for a pat on the back from the Authorities in the course of doing their “duty” – or, to put it another way, “telling their tale”. Not an admirable character, and almost certainly not someone you’d want to be friends with. The government encourages characters like this! Evidently, the government thinks it desirable to encourage a nation of “snitches”.
At some point, and particularly in view of the economic downturn which looks set to last a considerable length of time with consequences that affect us all, we need to start taking a stand against the plethora of new laws that interfere with our daily lives, the spying, reporting, dogmatic application of rules, directing of how parents should bring up their children, the banning of activities like tree-climbing or playing with conkers, the cutting down of trees “in case” a branch falls off and hits a passer-by, the fining of householders who mistakenly allocate an item to the wrong recyling box, or who put their bins out a day early for collection, and the list goes on and on.
As citizens, we have to play our part. If we weren’t so quick to sue a local council for injury, local councils might not be so eager to cut down trees. But one reason why law suits have proliferated of recent years is partly because we all pay more and more tax, and have less and less disposable income as a result. And the reason for that is that the government WASTES so much of the taxes it collects from us, it is continually seeking new ways to extract more money from the citizens. It HAS to – because of the hundreds of billions of pounds it simply wastes on hugely expensive computer systems that never work, on quangos and committees and enquiries and investigations and on and on. We can never, as individual taxpayers, satisfy the bottomless pit of government need for our money.
4
But money enables a measure of independence for the individual. This is why so many people dream of winning the Lottery – it is not always to buy a new car, take a world cruise – sometimes it is simply to know that you can continue your present life-style without anxiety, to know that you can pay your bills without difficulty. It does sometimes look as though, with the vast increase in the numbers employed by the government and the savage tax take from those who find themselves poorer each year as a result, the real aim of government is so to impoverish the majority that we shall have no freedom of action, no independence whatsoever. Then the government will have total control, and we shall all have to do as we’re told, like it or not.
That seems to me a fair description of a dictatorship – the Third Reich.
“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
Edmund Burke
xxxxxxxxxx jn
feb 2009
Posts
