| When the terror is the state |  |  |  |
| Written by Sarah Albion |
| March 2012 14:05 |
| A young man was sent to prison yesterday. He has been locked away for eight weeks, not a lifetime in itself, but he now has a criminal record, which will blight his life for years to come. The unforgiving zealots at the university where he had been studying have kicked him out, so his career plans are wrecked so probably his life is too, after all his picture, and his name were published in every national newspaper and on every TV news bulletin in the nation. He was not a hero, but a broken boy who cried as he was led away into state incarceration where he will spend the next two months. But let us not judge his tears, would the strongest of us be able to withstand the bile and venom poured upon him by a morally outraged media and the blood baying Twitter nazis who now dictate how people are to think. And what was his crime? He did not steal, he did not defraud anyone, he did not rape or kill, he did not draw blood, he did not bruise, he did not lay a finger on anyone. His only crime was to say things which we are not supposed to say, and which offended those who passionately seek offence. For that he must be punished, shamed, humiliated and held up weeping before the nation as an example of what will happen to those who, even when drunk, as he was, dare to misspeak. Elsewhere a young mother awaits trial for the transgression of daring to say “You're not British, you're black!” There was a time when what we found most frightening about states such as those beneath the totalitarian fist of Soviet Russia or which were tin pot dictatorships, run by brutal despots, was that people could be locked away because of what they said. We now live under such terror. More chilling still are the shrill cheers of those who support the prosecution. To merely read the approving comments beneath the news report of the young man's trial is to hear echoes from another darker place we once thought had disappeared long ago.
How low has our country sunk that the likes of Olivia, Arshad, Denise and Anthony now tell us how to think. We are told that this is a free country, that is a joke, we are becoming the terrorist state of which others once warned us, and most frightening is the fact that there are many who welcome it. Post Script: It is ironic that one of those who reported the offending speech was black footballer Stan Collymore, who said there must be “zero tolerance for racism”, luckily for Stan it appears that intolerance does not extend to black footballers who beat up their girlfriends or go dogging on Cannock Chase. I guess Stan thinks that doing stuff is not as bad as saying it. |
