The journalist Petronella Wyatt has claimed that “grown-up debate has become a farce” and speaking the truth is “perilous.”
In an outstanding column in today’s Daily Telegraph: Wyatt writes:
The caravan of the (BBC) licence fee must move on, as something far more indefensible has taken its place.
Where the flame and flambeaux of the Left burn and gutter, the Lineker Affair is an incalculable victory for those whose idea of free speech is that there are two kinds; the right kind and the wrong, and they are the arbiters of both.
One merely has to contrast Lineker’s position with that of poor Fiona Bruce, who has stepped down from her role at domestic abuse charity Refuge because she exhibited caution when Boris Johnson’s father, Stanley, was accused by a panel member of being a wife beater.
Unlike Lineker, she spoke impartially, attempting to place the allegation in some sort of context. But the whole camorra of professional uplifters pressed warp speed and Bruce was detonated.
Call me a sceptic with no faith in my fellow men, but if Stanley Johnson had been the father of a Labour former prime minister, her sense of balance would doubtless have been greeted with Hosannas. Instead, unjustly, she has been put in the dock.
In the past few days, I have been the recipient of death threats. This came about because of a tweet.
In response to Lineker’s remarks about Nazi Germany, I pointed out that the Nazis were not fascists, like Mussolini’s party, but national socialists, and were called the German National Socialist Party.
I was woefully unprepared for the reaction. I not only received highly imaginative abuse, but my tweet was tampered with by the Twitter police.
Quite suddenly, a small box appeared underneath it, “correcting” me and claiming the National Socialists were not “socialists” at all.
I have always guarded my amour propre by assuming my opponents were decent and vaguely attached to the truth. I had not realised that it is now unacceptable to state that evil can be committed by people who are not ‘Right-wing’.
Lineker has illuminated a dark corner in the online public psyche in which all dictators have been reclassified politically by those who shout the loudest for freedom.
Left-wing tyrants, if they existed at all, are now, according to many pundits, amiable sorts who never stooped to burning a book, let alone torture or genocide. I wonder where this leaves Lenin, Stalin, Castro and Ceaușescu?
In this desert of tolerance, grown up debate has become a farce. Our justice system was founded on the premise that laws should protect us all, irrespective of our views or position.
If freedom of thought is not similarly protected, democracy is a self-limiting disease with suicidal tendencies.
A new survey backs this up, literally. Conducted in America, it found that people on the Left are unhappier than those on the Right and more likely to kill themselves.
Meanwhile, we are busily disposing of all our traditions of honour, courage and, above all, honesty. It is either democracy for all, or democracy for none. So much for free speech.
Link to the article in full https://www.telegraph.co.uk/columnists/2023/03/14/become-unacceptable-left-evil-how-did-end/
