Via Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism blog, I came across this excellent article by Hal G. P. Colebatch, entitled "Thought Police Muscle Up in Britain." It is very disconserting that the country of the mother of parliaments has degenerated after 14 years of Labour rule to this level. Things are not much better here in Canada and under Obama the US is teetering on the edge of following the path of political correctness into tyranny. Colepatch writes:
"BRITAIN appears to be evolving into the first modern soft totalitarian state. As a sometime teacher of political science and international law, I do not use the term totalitarian loosely. There are no concentration camps or gulags but there are thought police with unprecedented powers to dictate ways of thinking and sniff out heresy, and there can be harsh punishments for dissent.
Nikolai Bukharin claimed one of the Bolshevik Revolution's principal tasks was "to alter people's actual psychology". Britain is not Bolshevik, but a campaign to alter people's psychology and create a new Homo britannicus is under way without even a fig leaf of disguise.
The Government is pushing ahead with legislation that will criminalise politically incorrect jokes, with a maximum punishment of up to seven years' prison. The House of Lords tried to insert a free-speech amendment, but Justice Secretary Jack Straw knocked it out. It was Straw who previously called for a redefinition of Englishness and suggested the "global baggage of empire" was linked to soccer violence by "racist and xenophobic white males". He claimed the English "propensity for violence" was used to subjugate Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and that the English as a race were "potentially very aggressive".
In the past 10 years I have collected reports of many instances of draconian punishments, including the arrest and criminal prosecution of children, for thought-crimes and offences against political correctness.
- snip -
There have been innumerable cases in recent months of people in schools, hospitals and other institutions losing their jobs because of various religious scruples, often, as in the East Germany of yore, not shouted fanatically from the rooftops but betrayed in private conversations and reported to authorities. The crime of one nurse was to offer to pray for a patient, who did not complain but merely mentioned the matter to another nurse. A primary school receptionist, Jennie Cain, whose five-year-old daughter was told off for talking about Jesus in class, faces the sack for seeking support from her church. A private email from her to other members of the church asking for prayers fell into the hands of school authorities.
To read the rest, go here.
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Blair isn't the Prime Minister no more...
Really Halden? You sure are up on current affairs, aren't you. But I thought you only were concerned with ecclesiastical affairs and discounted worldly politics as irrelevant. (You might have noted that I called for Brown's resignation/defeat in the next post just above what you read. But Brown is just a footnote to Blairism.) (And I think you meant "any more" - the double negative doesn't work.)
Speak ill of me for not thinking politics are identical with statecraft if you wish, but never speak ill of the double negative. It certainly doesn't not work.
Politics that leaves the state alone to pursue its evangelistic agenda designed to convert Christians to a pagan belief system and lifestyle, and to confirm pagans in their religion, is not politics but surrender by another name and a failure to proclaim the Lordship of Jesus Christ.
Yes, curse those Desert Fathers and Anabaptists for their failure to proclaim the Lordship of Jesus Christ.
I was talking to a friend who admires and studies Yoder a few weeks ago and he told me that he voted for Obama and was excited about Obama's potential. I was disgusted, but it reminded me of the remark Oliver O'Donovan made in "The Desire of the Nations" (criticizing what he considered to be Yoder's volunterism) to the effect that Yoder reduces membership in the Church to the level of membership in a country club. I disagreed with O'Donovan's criticism of Yoder in my book on Yoder because I think it is an insult to his ecclesiology.
I still think O'Donovan was wrong with regard to Yoder. However, I have since come to see that this criticism is legitimately applied to many of his disciples (including many liberal Mennonites), whose living out of the politics of the cross serves to provide support for the liberal state and individualism.
By that last sentence, I meant to say that their supposed living out of the politics of the cross. A genuine living out of said politics involves a confrontation with liberalism.
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