I remember watching with horror, when under George W. Bush, the US Congress passed the Patriot Act, a perversely named piece of legislation which tossed many provisions of free speech, free association, the presumption of innocence. one’s right to privacy and other sacred elements of Constitutional law, into the gutter.
At the time, MSM hailed this as a sign of unity, but that’s certainly not the kind of unity I like. I vastly prefer the freedom of a Congressional or Parliamentary system where adversarial debates are held on a wide range of subjects. I like authority to be peacefully challenged, I like establishment narratives to be scrutinised and I like received wisdom to be labelled ‘lies’ when this is the case.
The recent terrorist attack in London, perpetrated by someone with the same ideology as the terrorists that Britain aids in their attempt to overthrow President Assad and turn Syria into a backwards, Gulfi style dictatorship, is something I condemn. I condemn all expressions of terrorism and all actors who seek to violently overthrow states.
I condemn the attack in London for the same reason I condemned the terrorists who overthrew the Libyan government in 2011, to name but one example. If only the western establishment was as totally consistent in their opposition to terrorism as I am.
Terrorist attacks always have a plethora of negative knock-on effects and one of the worst is that ordinary people often become self-appointed ‘free-speech police’, a bit like how the illegal terrorist fascist regime in Kiev banned the entire Russian language shortly after seizing power.
What is freedom if it can only be used to toe an establishment line? Freedom of speech is designed to protect conspiracy theorists calling incidents false flags and indeed historically false flags do exist in all nations and throughout all epochs. Therefore, people should have the freedom to speculate as they personally see fit.
Free speech is designed to aid those pointing out the hypocrisy of those who ‘pray for’ a relatively few number of casualties in some countries but totally ignore the millions who have died in countries like Iraq, as a result of decisions taken by the elite in Washington D.C. and London.
Free speech is there to protect people asking, ‘why wasn’t there more security’. It seems that people have traded liberty for security, but that the exchange hasn’t really gone as expected.
What’s the point of living in a police state that cannot actually police against real crime? At least in what one wants to call more ‘masculine’ police states, people’s exchange of liberty for security actually does provide security against random violence, theft and the proliferation of weapons in the hands of lunatics, scoundrels and other miscreants.
While people who haven’t been to a place of worship for decades, ‘pray for’ this and that, I think perhaps we better ‘pray for’ free speech to survive its assault both from the elite who imagine themselves as the bad guys from 1984, as well as the tin-pot social media dictators telling us what to think, how to think it and when we are allowed to begin questioning the narrative.
Now watch Adam Garrie speak freely about free speech
The post The consistent terror casualty that few mention is our freedom of speech appeared first on The Duran.