by Emanuele Mastrangelo and Enrico Petrucci
Welcome back to our usual, grudging, weekly appointment.
Old England's Thinkpol is always on the cutting edge as we are reminded by the Daily Mail which reports on the complaint against a woman lawyer employed by a public body, the Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs, guilty of "belief that only women menstruate".
News that gives us pause for the taking stock of all the new "anti-hate" legislation that is making its way into Western jurisprudence and that is not only a restriction on free speech, the free spech as the U.S. understands the First Amendment. But in fact they represent a direct attack on freedom of thought itself, providing even preventive tools by laying the groundwork for a Thinkpol.
As of April 1, the Hate Crime and Public Order Act, a law passed three years ago and in line with the similar Irish law we have already covered, will come into force in Scotland. There it goes on to expand the facts of the legislation against racial hatred by extending it to "to disability, religion, sexual orientation, age, transgender identity and ‘variations in sex characteristics’".
As in the Irish legislation, there is a mild space for protecting religious freedom. And both legislations translate the concept of combating hate crimes into a form of crimethink: in the case of the Irish legislation, possession of material qualifying as "incitement to hatred" is sufficient. In the Scottish case it is enough to express something that can be qualified as hate speech in private to be reported. In short, it is no longer the classic Twitter post as in the Norwegian lesbian case we have already dealt with. The Spectator writes: hate speech in privato per essere denunciati. Insomma non si tratta più del classico post su Twitter come nel caso delle lesbiche norvegesi di cui ci siamo già occupati. Scrive lo Spectator:
The law doesn’t just apply to social media posts or newspaper articles. It covers anything said anywhere – even in your own home. Children will in theory be able to report their parents. Scots can inform on each other anonymously, through an expanded network of ‘third-party reporting centres’. The list of centres includes a striking number of university campuses, as well as a Glasgow sex shop and a North Berwick mushroom farm.
Disturbing that hate speech can be reported not only through the police but also through centers that are supposed to be outlets run by private individuals or worse by ideologically motivated activists. Critical discussions will still be allowed (but we know SJWs are very sensitive) and for religious topics, but only those, it will be possible to express "antipathy, dislike, ridicule or insult".
Beyond the law itself, it is clear that the definition of hate crime allows ample room for the guidelines that the police will intend to adopt. And while even Nicola Sturgeon has fallen from grace since this law was passed, the current prime minister is indeed the former justice minister of the Sturgeon government, namely Humza Yousaf.
Moreover, even if the hate speech investigation concludes that it is not a hate crime, it will still be kept track as NCHI, non-crime hate incident. Non-crime for the law, an act worthy of dossier for the Ministry of Love. And of course since we are not in the land of Sylvanian Families, where the police only deal with cats on trees, the handling of hate crimes will go to flooding the police. And guess who will get less priority?
An estimated 24,000 crimes a year will no longer be assigned to an officer, meaning we will basically just file the complaint, directly filed. We are talking about petty theft and damage. The Telegraph requested information from the Aberdeen police regarding the handling of crimes: 472, 5 percent, are those directly filed. Police did not provide other details because disclosure of filing criteria could indirectly favor criminals.
But in the world of rainbow unicorns, it is always a tough fight for primacy over the pack. And Canada is keen to keep its place at the forefront with a law, still in the process of being passed, that stands as a true vanguard. It is not technically an anti-hate crimes law, but a law against the dangers of the Internet: it is the Online Harms Act, or Bill 63. Of course it is promoted with the classic "no one thinks of the children!" But it actually falls back on hate speech because it lacks even vague definitions of what constitutes "hate speech," leaving the decision to the Canadian Supreme Court.
Similar to the Irish variant, a suspicion that a hate crime, i.e., online hate speech, may be perpetrated is sufficient for a magistrate to order an arrest. Orwell, hold my beer, as the Spectator again points out. But there's more: the legislation will also be retroactive! To denounce the dangers of this legislation, not only a champion of free speech like psychologist Jordan Peterson (here is the account of when he was a guest of the Machiavelli) but even writer Margaret Atwood, hardly a "right-wing" figure, has discomfited Orwell. Among other details is the elevation from five years to life imprisonment for those online who commit the crime of "promoting genocide." And as the definition of "genocide" from a shared and historicized assessment is becoming a political weapon where quot happens quot sententiae, the shadow of discretion stretches dangerously over the right of criticism of Trudeauland's subjects. As the Spectator points out, "you can be put away for life for a ‘crime’ whose legal existence hangs on the distinction between ‘dislike’ and ‘detest.’"
But if possible there is worse: in the case of conviction the fine will be C$50,000. And the accuser will receive a C$20,000 bounty. Basically a state incentive to whistleblowing.
By now, hate speech is literally becoming the black hole swallowing the rule of law. This is demonstrated by the case of Washington State with Bill 5427, which introduces the extralegal offence of so-called "bias incident." Basically, cases of "hate speech" that cannot be considered (at least for now) crimes and therefore be punishable under criminal or civil law. These can now be brought before the state attorney general whose office will proceed to examine the case. Up to $2,000 in compensation may be awarded to the "victim" of these "bias incidents." "Poor thing, did you feel offended? Here's two thousand dollars extorted from taxpayers to comfort you..."
Noah Was A Conspiracy Theorist Then It Rained...
As a side note, the German Ethics Council, a body with policy-making duties for the Bundestag, has put in black and white in an official document one of the most popular conspiracy humbugs: namely, that it would be possible to restrict individual freedoms in the event of a "climate crisis." Note well, the first part of the document states that the thing should not be done, but then they conclude that desperate times call for desperate measures. If the exercise of individual freedoms interfered "with future generations" (whatever that means), or with the environment, the government could restrict those freedoms and these would be ethically acceptable. A skin-crawling thing in itself, but imagine it combined with legislation such as Canada, Scotland or Ireland.
Have a champagne during Ramadan
Last week we had reported on an overly literal application of the Ramadan fast in a Frankfurt school due to the initiative of some teachers. Old England is keen not to fall behind on this front. City illuminations have also been put up in London as in Frankfurt, but the initiative that has deserved the most commentary is the one at King's Cross station, which displayed a Hadith from the Sunna calling for repentance on its displays.
There immediately came a furious backlash against the station, which immediately made amends, although the BBC is keen to point out how there were also many messages of appreciation on social media.
Britannia rules
Also from England, another report of how wokeshit puts a strain on museums (something that is beginning to happen in Italy too, albeit limited to ethno-anthropological-colonial museums and collections). And after the Cambridge museum's turn explaining how landscape painting is strongly nationalist (see Bulletin #6), it is the turn of the natural history museum, which, in order to be more inclusive, not having rainbow unicorns in storage, invents that the feathered world is more queer and non-binary than we ever imagined. Becoming queer is the poor female pheasant, who changes plumage with age, becoming more like the male.
As if the gender fluidity of feathered animals were not enough, the museum also talks about the LGBT history of dinosaurs. The queerness lies not in the fact that perhaps dinosaur plumage was more common than we think but because of paleontologists, old white male chauvinists, who gave dinosaurs undemocratic and inclusive names (see Bullettin #2) as well as denied the right to dinosaur feathers. Dinosaurs also have an LGBT history because some paleontologists and dinosaur discoverers are gay. We are in the same pattern as Hadrian's Wall being a symbol of LGBT history because Hadrian loved Antinous (see Bulletin 4)
But it is not only public and state institutions that come up with wokeshit. Even the Anglican Church of England is getting in on it thanks to Liverpool Archdeaconess Miranda Threlfall-Homes, who wrote an SJW-worthy sermon on X: "So yes, let’s have anti whiteness, & let’s smash the patriarchy. That’s not anti-white, or anti-men, it’s anti-oppression."
Reached by the Telegraph, after the inevitable controversies, she said:
...perhaps not the best place for a nuanced argument I was contributing to a debate about world views, in which ‘whiteness’ does not refer to skin colour per se, but to a way of viewing the world where being white is seen as ‘normal’ and everything else is considered different or lesser.”
Penitenziagite and check your privileges!
Another news story coming out of England. Not everyone associated it with a wokeshit, but it is still worth mentioning. If Italy, in one of those rare patriotic moments, will have "Italy Called" printed on the collar of the players' shirts, for England there will be a St. George's cross in which the heraldic red will be replaced by three shades of red vertically and horizontally three bands of blue, light blue and purple. Officially it appears to be a sponsors' choice winking at the 1966 training uniforms when England won the World Cup.
The problem is that the combination of blue, purple, pink and light blue can easily be associated with certain "fluid pride" flags: bisexual (blue, pink and purple), non-binary (lavender, black, yellow and white), transgender (pink, light blue, white). In the British press, someone immediately pointed the finger at the woke drift and some players began to cover the symbol. Of woke here actually there would not be that much, but the simple fact that some newspapers try to tell this news without going into the woke controversy makes it all the more woke.
To close this long space devoted to Old England one last wokeshit on the subject of high culture. A University of Roehampton project, funded for £800,000 by the Arts and Humanities Research Council with the aim of "centring marginalised communities in the contemporary performance of early modern plays" has found that Shakespeare was disproportionately successful because of nationalism and toxic masculinity. This is what the Telegraph reports:
masculinity and nationalism were crucial motivating factors in the rise of Shakespeare as the arbiter of literary greatness […] we need to be much, much more suspicious of Shakespeare’s place in contemporary theatre.
Instead of Shakespeare, it will be brought to the stage "Galatea" (1588) by the lesser-known John Lyly. A comedy of mythological setting all about the misunderstandings that arise from two shepherdesses who disguise themselves as men to avoid being sacrificed to the god Neptune. In the finale Venus even speculates that one of the two main characters will be transformed into a man to allow marriage between the two! Big celebration among the SJWs because this - strangely enough! - little-known play will allow "an unparalleled affirmative and intersectional demographic, exploring feminist, queer, transgender and migrant lives."
The purest that purges you
We close with a news story that sounds like it was written by a modern-day Chekov and instead comes from the New York Times. It concerns an internal affair at the nonprofit American Civil Liberties Union. A woman lawyer working for this union/association has been complaining about sexism and an intimidating climate at the human resources department for years. Guess how did it turn out? The lawyer in question was fired because her complaints allegedly contained ... "racist stereotyping." In fact, the woman felt intimidated by her superiors who are, however, African American. And because she is Korean American, in the matrix of oppressions "African American" is "more oppressed" than "Asian American." In the meantime, the matter has ended up before a court -- and we will be following it up for the readers of the Centro Studi Machiavelli.
Happy Easter to everyone.
Redattore del blog del Centro Studi Machiavelli "Belfablog", Emanuele Mastrangelo è stato redattore capo di "Storia in Rete" dal 2006. Cartografo storico-militare, è autore di vari libri (con Enrico Petrucci, Iconoclastia. La pazzia contagiosa dellacancel cultureche sta distruggendo la nostra storia and Wikipedia. L'enciclopedia libera e l'egemonia dell'informazione).
An essayist and popularizer, his publications include "Alessandro Blasetti. The forgotten father of Italian cinema" (Idrovolante, 2023). And with Emanuele Mastrangelo "Wikipedia. The Free Encyclopedia and the Hegemony of Information" (Bietti, 2013) and "Iconoclasm. The contagious insanity of the cancel culture that is destroying our history" (Eclectica, 2020).
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