Liberals burn books too
The truth is that wherever liberals gain power, they retain their grip on power with tactics as tenacious and duplicitous as any other type of elite.
Reading a book on liberalism for review (available here), I was struck by the distance between the ideals of liberalism and reality. The truth is that wherever liberals gain power, they retain their grip on power with tactics as tenacious and duplicitous as any other type of elite. The difference is, they want you to love them for their ideals while they violate those very ideals. They are anxious for you to love them, even as they pull down your history and humiliate your ancestors.
One of the principles of liberalism is free speech. John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty is a handbook for liberals, libertarians and soft-line conservatives everywhere. It has also been invoked by leftists, but only when out of power. An iron rule of free speech is that when you are out of power you demand it as a human right, playing upon the generosity of the elite’s tolerance; when you are in power, you restrict that of your opponents, finding their speech a threat to [insert favoured cause or group here]. This applies to liberals as elites as much as to any group. It is the basis of “hate speech”. Remember this common truism. “When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.”
According to a report last year, in Ontario, Canada in 2019 a school burned books in a “flame purification” ceremony. The selected titles chosen “had outdated content and carried negative stereotypes about First Nations, Métis and Inuit people,” according to the organisation leading the destruction. Thirty books were burned as “an act of reconciliation”. When questioned about this act of destroying knowledge and suppressing freedom of speech – for the dead (that most marginalised and vulnerable of groups) need freedom to be heard too – the response of Canadian politicians was feeble. Just as feeble as the non-defences of missionaries, churches and church schools when activists burned forty-five churches in Canada last summer.
When facing the choice of free speech and community cohesion, liberals always take the second route, as we noted in the mealy-mouthed apologetics of the elite following the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Except you won’t find a chapter in Mill on community cohesion. Mill did not grant any exceptions on the grounds of religious privilege; indeed, the privilege of religious exemptions was something of which he was sceptical. There is no Enlightenment or Liberalist principle of giving certain groups the power to exempt themselves from laws on the grounds of group identity. Multiculturalism and community cohesion are excuses for liberals to (respectively) allocate public funding to favoured groups and extend legal immunity to client groups. Liberals expect reciprocal votes in return for favouring minority groups. There is no principle here, simply pork-barrel politics.
Of course, liberals tend to avoid justifying such outright violent actions. Instead, they condition generations of school children to think of colonists as devils and vicious exploiters spreading a network of Christianity, colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy, buttressed by years of historical apologies and flirtation with reparations. When an incident (or, in the case last year, mere speculation) prompts networks of well-funded and elite-approved activists to commit criminal acts, they speak of oppression and historical inevitability that led to the crimes, rather than the crimes themselves. Thus, they prime criminals to destroy the heritage of their putative opponents, implicitly encourage violence and shield perpetrators from prosecution.
Liberals do not need to burn books when they have librarians to deaccession books for them. You can find tomes of wisdom by our forefathers and the ancients in skips outside city libraries and schools in any Western country. Mass purging of literature is a constant act of speech suppression, committed by those charged with protecting it. Today’s librarians have an intense puritanical distaste for opinions of which they disapprove; many of them see themselves as state-appointed chaplains of progressivism. Our history – insights of the dead, illuminating the past (with all its crimes and tragedies) – is being revised to conform with the expectations of today by a cadre of information technicians trained to think of themselves as ethical activists. They do not regard the dead as worthy of speech. We do not need to mention all the classic texts now deemed too “offensive and outdated” to be reprinted or even sold second hand.
Whenever I hear liberals complain about the harassment and murder of journalists in other countries, it reminds me that liberals – being the squeamish technocrats that they are – find it much more efficient to kill news rather than journalists. They suppress news as ruthlessly as any nationalist dictator, by choking the channels through which inconvenient information might be transmitted. They distort news constantly and exclude dissident journalists and channels from forums, using networks such as Sleeping Giants to mass-report critical commentators. Liberals engage in lawfare, with political organisations such as The Southern Poverty Law Center and The Anti-Defamation League providing favourable consultations and advice on “hate speech”, which permit prosecutions, defunding and banning of unremarkable opinions of opponents.
The liberal ideal of free speech has never been implemented. Perhaps it was always a tactic to advance dissident liberal ideas until liberals achieved hegemony and were able to destroy traditional structures and outlawed inherited knowledge. Perhaps the liberal ideal of free speech was never intended to be implemented.
Remember: liberals burn books too.
