There is nothing to fear abroad, either. In the days of my youth, Americans were frightened by the Domino theory. After the Communist takeover of Vietnam and Cambodia, they would proceed to California, run the writ. It came to naught. The fear of Communism destroyed trillions of dollars of national product across the globe and eventually ruined the great social experiment. The victorious mice judge the slain lion: at the initiative of Poland and the Baltic states, The Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) condemned “horrors and crimes of Communism.” Now the machine plays up the fear of Islam. Islam was provoked and its response was presented as the proof of its depravity.
Last month there were a few important but apparently unconnected developments. The British PM, Tony Blair, made a step towards total control over his population. England introduced a new computer system that collects and stores data of car traffic. Connected to ubiquitous video cameras, it allows the Big Brother to trace your movements from your work to your girlfriend and to your home. It passed without a hitch. Then it tried to pass the Internet Terror Bill, that would have given police the power to shut down websites which “promote terrorism”. The House of Lords blocked it. Last month the Lords threw out plans for a new offence of “glorifying” acts of terrorism. The Government was also defeated when peers voted to redraft ministers’ version of the offence of “intentionally” or “recklessly” disseminating a “terrorist publication”. And the best of all, the indomitable Lords blocked the bill against “religious hatred” which was supposed to close the only loophole for criticising Jews.
After that, the Adversary splashed the Satanic Pictures. The predictable and predicted reaction of the offended Muslims will force the parliaments to accept the new set of ‘anti-hate’ laws. Surely these laws will not protect the feelings of Muslims and Christians, who, after all, encompass only a few billion humans. The Jews, the preferred mascot of the Mammonites, will feel better protected (and more vulnerable), but more important, freedom of speech will receive another blow.
This great freedom was the advantage of the West over the Soviet East, for one of the less savoury features of the Soviet regime was its infamous Article 58 of the Criminal Code “Anti-Soviet propaganda”. In the early Stalin’s days, one has to express sympathy with the enemies of the Republic to be sentenced; in his heyday, a joke would suffice; in Brezhnev’s era it was used to ensure conformity in the society. Even in the very end of the Soviet days, the Damocles’ sword of Article 58 influenced all discussion and eventually allowed Gorbachev to carry out his transformation of Russia without a debate. He eliminated the social achievements of the Soviet era, surrendered Russian industry and oil to a few Jewish crooks, gave the keys of the Russian might to the CIA and broke up the country into feuding successor states. The only positive feature of Gorbachev-Yeltsin transformation was the removal of Article 58. Now it is creeping back.
Some time ago booby-trapped anti-Jewish billboards appeared in Moscow. When a passer-by tried to remove it, the explosive device went off. The government rushed an ‘anti-hate’ bill through the parliament, and lo! No more anti-Jewish billboards came to be. A month ago, there was an extremely fishy incident in a Moscow synagogue, and a new reinforced ‘anti-extremism’ bill was introduced into the Russian parliament.
Thus, under the cover of fighting extremism, terrorism and hatred, the remainder of freedom on our planet shrinks from day to day. Eugene Rostow, “a Kennedy’s Huntington”, predicted in 1960s that the two systems, Communism and Capitalism would eventually converge, and bring forth the best features of both systems. Now the Convergence has actually taken place. Once, the Red East was socially secure, but at the expense of personal freedom, while the West was free at the expense of equality and social guarantees. Now they have converged: the Russians have lost their free schools and health and have received the freedom to sleep under the bridge, while the West now has its own Gulag and its own political dissidents. East and West reinstalled Article 58 under the guise of anti-hate, anti-terrorism, anti-extremism laws.
By Israel Shamir