Glass hearts: the danger to our liberal culture, by Sackerson

A young female student is tearing down community posters from a ‘Lennon wall’ and meticulously picking off the shreds that remain. She is Chinese and the messages that offend her are criticisms of her government. Tiananmen Square? That was 40-50 years ago (33, actually), before she was born, she says; why should she care?

She is not doing this in China, but in an Australian university (how tolerant is the host country! Can tolerance survive intolerance?) and she is one of very many Chinese who are enforcers worldwide – online as well as in person - for their nation’s narratives. As ‘Serpentza’ here demonstrates, dare to use social media to reveal inconvenient truths about the CCP and skilled trolls will appear, skewing the argument with accusations of racial prejudice against ‘Asians’; refute them and they become abusive and aggressive.

Why are they doing it? It’s not for pay. ‘Serpentza’ says it is because they have ‘glass hearts’: they have been through an educational system that gives them a myopic political view, and they live in a country that rigorously suppresses dissent. Diversity of opinion gives them real emotional distress, ‘triggers’ them into vandalism and even violence.

Does this seem familiar?

Of course it does; and now the ‘snowflake’ generation we have bred in the UK are getting older; soon enough they will become the troops of our totalitarian new ideologies, or even the leaders. ‘It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be,’ explained O’Brien to Winston Smith in ‘1984.’

Who is going to defend liberalism? It evaporates like morning mist in the hot sunshine of propaganda, as we see in our current war fever. The shimmering heat of emotionalism creates distorting mirages: already Facebook is full of amateur agitprop that betrays not the slightest understanding of what – and who - has split Ukraine in two.

The ignorance is not surprising; mainstream news excludes most dissidents. Only someone of Peter Hitchens’ seniority is allowed to put an alternative perspective, and even in his case, when he castigated the West for its arrogance and folly in continuing to treat Russia as an enemy after the fall of Communism, his piece was pushed back to page 13 in the print edition, and labelled ‘‘A personal viewpoint.’ Maybe we should be grateful that he appears at all; in 2015, when Geordie Greig was editor of the Mail on Sunday, Hitchens’ column was mysteriously absent from the editions (3 and 10 May) immediately before and after the General Election. I would give good money to see the submissions that were spiked, if that is what happened.

The ’legacy media’ mostly do not educate and inform; their main usefulness for us is to show us the current official line. For example, a word used early by Boris in his comments on the Russian incursion is ‘unprovoked’; I suspect this is to pave the way for an attempt to try President Putin at The Hague for ‘waging aggressive war,’ the charge that legitimated the executions of Hitler’s leaders. To accept the argument about lack of provocation, the court would have to ignore such matters as 7 or 8 years of shelling the Donbas, the million-plus mostly Russian-speaking people who have fled that area since 2014, the café-bomb assassination of Donetsk separatist leader Alexander Zakharchenko, and allegations of neo-Nazi ‘targeted killings’ and atrocities from 2014 through to now.

Then there is the wider provocation: the game of ‘What’s the time, Mister Wolf?’ played by NATO as, contrary to assurances given after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the EU progressively accepted country after country into its fold and so into the NATO alliance against, well, an enemy that had ceased to be. Who are the actors behind the scenes? The US State Department? The Pentagon? The CIA? The IMF? Did they know how this would go? Is this dreadful affair a miscalculation, or part of a greater plan?

To see things differently, we are forced to explore the wild lands of the internet.

Oddly, although an influential Conservative commentator has called the Stop The War Coalition ‘fifth columnists’ (a term often used to mean crypto-communists, though originally referring to secret supporters of Spain’s Franco), the Left here seem to be backing the eastern Ukrainians. Professor Dutton (aka The Jolly Heretic) suggests that this orientation is because Russia represents the opposite of wokery.

Craig Murray notes how exaggerating the strength of Putin’s military has boosted shares of armaments companies and helped to justify additional expenditure on ‘MI6, the Defence Intelligence Service, the British armed forces, of their American counterparts, and of all their NATO counterparts.’ 

‘Demirep’ traces the start of the mess back to the EU’s attempt to recruit Ukraine in 2013, and the subsequent overthrow of President Yanukovych when he demurred (please colour me sceptical when people ‘spontaneously rise up’.)

As yet still in mainstream communication Peter Hitchens, the licensed jester of the PTB, has been permitted to remind us of a deeper, longer-standing US foreign policy as delineated by Paul Wolfowitz; long may he continue to twit our political establishment; not that Lear’s Fool managed to dissuade the King from his folly.

Contrariwise, on chewing-gum TV news (Hannity on Fox), South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham is calling for the murder of Putin; we shall see how much it helps world peace should that ever happen.

How easy it is to sway the public! CIA official Frank Wisner boasted how his department could play the mass media and their audience like a ‘mighty Wurlitzer’ on which he could play any propaganda tune. The keyboards and foot pedals are busy again today.

It is not only the Chinese and their culture of censorship that is a threat to Western democracy. In fact the more democratic we are the more danger for us, if we are not provided with truthful, balanced information and taught in schools and universities to be open to contrarian points of view, to be aware that we may be mistaken. We need a Fourth Estate committed to liberalism; and stouter hearts, not glass ones.