They say you can tell a lot about a person by the company they keep. Not just personally, but ideologically. Jacinda Ardern’s political pals and ideological fellow-travellers tell us everything we need to know.
Ardern is great chums with Canada’s smirking, dim-witted authoritarian, Justin Trudeau. Needless to say, both of them have a narcissistic addiction to selfies that is exceeded only by their uncontrollable urge to stamp on the necks of anyone who threatens to show them up. Whether it’s obstreperous Labour backbenchers, peaceful protesters camped on Parliament lawns, or peacefully protesting truckers, the jackboot Bobbsey Twins readily weaponise everything from firehoses to frozen bank accounts to silence dissent.
And all the while, they’ll tell you “it’s for your own good”.
Indeed, one of the most striking things about Ardern’s speech was her claim that if the elites ignore “misinformation”, then “the norms we all value” will be in danger.
Who’s this “we”? And what norms do they all value? One could be forgiven for thinking that prime narcissist Ardern is using the royal “We” — and presuming to tell us all what we should and shouldn’t value. If nanny doesn’t approve, then you can’t have it.
This is the most common cry of the 21st-century authoritarian – that speech can have a destabilising and even life-threatening impact, especially if it concerns big crises like climate change or Covid-19. So “climate deniers” are a threat to the future of the human race and thus may be legitimately silenced. “Lockdown deniers” threaten to encourage the spread of viral infection and thus may be legitimately gagged. The spectre of crisis is cynically used to clamp down on anyone who dissents from the new global consensus. Images of Armageddon are marshalled to justify censorship of troublemakers. “Chaos”, as Ardern calls it – that’s what will unfold if your reckless, dangerous ideas are given free rein.
The worst authoritarians have always been obsessed with order. This was what Tolkien recognised as the root of Sauron’s evil: “He loved order and coordination, and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction”. But free beings are inherently messy and chaotic, so more and more brutal force becomes necessary to impose order.
You will smile along with the Dear Leader or you will be crushed. The beatings will continue until morale improves.
But it’s not just smiley-face nascent fascists with whom Ardern keeps dismal company. Some of her anti-free speech fellow travellers don’t even bother hiding their true nature.
To see how authoritarian the desire to clamp down on “misinformation” can be, just consider some of the other world leaders who likewise used the platform of the UN to call for tougher controls on speech. Muhammadu Buhari, the brutal ruler of Nigeria, focused on his nation’s “many unsavoury experiences with hate speech and divisive disinformation” and joined the calls for a clampdown on the “scourge of disinformation and misinformation”. Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, bemoaned the “disinformation” against his nation. The chattering classes cheering Ardern for standing up to “fake news” are implicitly cheering Buhari and Lavrov, too. They are as one with that woke queen when it comes to chasing “misinformation” from the public sphere.
Orwell imagined the authoritarian future as a boot stamping on a human face forever; Huxley imagined it as a world where slaves loved their chains.
It turned out both were wrong. The totalitarian future wears a huge, toothy grin and comes with a suffocating iron hug.
