Thread by @JoshJPhilipp

Thread:

‘ThoughtCrime’ Is Becoming a Reality

Column here: theepochtimes.com/thoughtcrime-i…

Cases are emerging in several Western countries where people are getting visits from the police to question them on their political views, and some have been arrested. (1)

Cases in the UK and New Zealand often involve people who make comments against mass migration and Islamism, and include a viral video of a NZ man being questioned by police for his alleged online posts about the mosque shooting in Christchurch. (2) facebook.com/10003538906548…

Of course, the real issue isn’t about religious “intolerance.” It’s publicly accepted for people, including public leaders, to openly condemn religions like Christianity. (3)

This is very specifically a political issue, related to state policy on mass migration, which is often heavily from Muslim countries. (4)

Condemning state policies has become synonymous with a double standard on “intolerance,” which is punishable by the state. (5)

And by latching their policies to social issues, political parties have found a way to silence people who are criticizing their policies, by using using the powers of the state for harassment and intimidation. (6)

Even in the United States, similar practices are now in place, only they’re being enforced by large corporations. (7)

Chase Bank is accused of cancelling accounts of people for having “right-wing” views. (8) theepochtimes.com/chase-bank-den…

Twitter and Facebook are accused of censoring conservatives. (9) theepochtimes.com/conservatives-…

Google is accused of firing employees for questioning politically correct company culture. (10) theepochtimes.com/google-employe…

Systems like these were warned about by the British writer, George Orwell, who told of a fictional “Thought Police” in his book “1984.” He envisioned this secret police force tasked with finding thought-criminals, and punishing them for “thoughtcrime.” (11)

These “thoughtcrimes,” as Orwell imagined, referred to illegal thoughts—which included unspoken beliefs or negative thoughts towards the fictional ruling party of English Socialism (Ingsoc). (12)

The ideal good citizen of this system, Orwell said, “is expected to have no private emotions and no respites from enthusiasm. (13)

He is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party.” (14)

Of course, even in the time when Orwell published the book in 1949, examples of regimes like this had been seen under Hitler’s National Socialists, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and Mao’s Chinese Communist Party. (15)

All three regimes had their own forms of “thoughtcrime,” and people risked imprisonment or death for opposing the ruling regimes. (16)

The deeper nature of the socialist idea is in struggle, and much like Orwell’s views of people under his fictional English Socialism regime people are expected to hold a “continuous frenzy of hatred.” (17)

The systems rely on the state identifying a “privileged” group, framed as taking advantage of the “oppressed,” and anyone who says otherwise is deemed guilty of ideological treason for aligning with the “privileged.” (18)

As Orwell imagined, people would go through a series of mental gymnastics to avoid committing “thoughtcrimes.” This included acts such as “DoubleThink,” where Party members could simultaneously hold two contradictory viewpoints. (19)

In today’s world, we’ve seen this in many cases—the leftist policy that criticizing Islamism is “religious intolerance,” but criticizing Christianity is somehow fine, is among the many examples. (20)

Yet, to understand the deeper logic behind this modern “DoubleThink,” we need to understand the root cause of these wild concepts. (21)

Socialists hold that their ideas are Utopian—the ultimate goal of “progress” towards their envisioned state—and so anything that opposes this “progress” is guilty of all the things they seek to destroy. (22)

Under Mao Zedong, for example, people who opposed his 1967 theory of “political correctness” to guard his destruction of Chinese culture during the Cultural Revolution, could be labelled a “counter-revolutionary” and be killed by the regime. (23)

In the United States, the idea that anyone who opposes the socialist goals should be attacked by any means comes from the Marxist Frankfurt School’s theory of “repressive tolerance.” (24)

The idea from Herbert Marcuse’s “A Critique of Pure Tolerance” in 1965 held that only things that support the socialist cause should be tolerated, and anyone who opposes it should be met with intolerance. (25)

With "repressive tolerance," socialists introduced a warped concept of “tolerance” that tolerates only its their views. (26)

The result of these policies, as Orwell imagined, was a state where people censor themselves—not just in public speech, but even in their own minds. ... (27)

... Orwell referred to this as “CrimeStop,” which he described as “the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought.” (28)

He described this self-censorship as a form of “protective stupidity” that supports the totalitarian regime, even at the defiance of logic. (29)

He called this “BlackWhite”. “Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this.” (30)

We see the same thing today: intolerance is bad, unless it’s intolerance of those who oppose socialist policies—then it’s encouraged. (31)

Under socialism, attacks on religion are bad, unless they’re attacks on religions that the regime opposes. Racism is bad, unless it’s attacks on the “oppressive” races. (32)

What we’re witnessing today is the same theory of ThoughtCrime that Orwell envisioned, with a similar Thought Police enforcement branch, and with the same DoubleThink, CrimeStop, and BlackWhite tools to justify it. (33)

/End/