Count Dankula, the YouTuber, was today fined £800 for teaching his girlfriend’s pet pug dog to perform a Nazi salute. Dankula, real name Mark Meechan, had thought out the stunt as a joke, to annoy his girlfriend by teaching the dog the least cute thing he could come up with. He was convicted of a hate crime last month and could theoretically have been sent to prison at today’s sentencing. Mercifully, the judge settled on a fine. The ruling comes days after 19-years old Chelsea Russell was also hauled before the UK courts and found guilty of sending a grossly offensive message over Instagram. She had posted lyrics from rapper Snap Dogg’s “I’m Trippin”, which includes several mentions of the N-word.
There are so many things wrong with these grotesque cases. By criminalising words and making it illegal to offend people, “hate crime” laws have warped what used to count as being outside the law, to include acts which are in bad taste. That, in itself, is a disaster – but it actually gets worse: what the recent cases have demonstrated is that the laws will be used to prosecute much more than people who are actively promoting division and conflict. Jokes between friends, if taken the wrong way – even by outsiders; you don’t have to be the butt of the joke yourself – are suddenly liable to end you up in court.
Simply unthinkable just a few years ago, now this reality is something every Briton must countenance as part and parcel of living in an increasingly Orwellian society. Free speech is so obviously a thing of the past in Britain, with legislation being used to make us think and act differently, in deference to a politically correct dogma. In George Orwell’s 1984, Newspeak was the language created by the regime, the aim of which was to narrow the range of thought of the people of Oceania. UK politicians and authoritarian social justice warriors are reading Orwell’s dystopian vision as an instruction manual.
For years, public hysteria (much of it on social media) has been used to destroy the careers and lives of people who fell foul of the PC agenda. But there was a saving grace; a weapon against the mob: deny any moral culpability, don’t accept that the game must be played by their rules. Stick by your words; admit what you said, but not that it was wrong; refuse to be judged by their moral standards – standards which have been invented in the last few years by a small, but powerful group of identity politics crusaders, but which we are to accept as if they were universal. If you stuck to your guns, often the outrage would dissipate, allowing the alleged offender to emerge largely unscathed from the turmoil. This is now much more difficult. With the courts on their side, the social justice warriors have increased their power to silence those who dissent from “allowable opinion”.
Britain is a joke. The most politically correct joke you can imagine. But not a funny one.