Q: Is it true that there is freedom of speech in the United Kingdom, just like in the USA?
A: In principle, yes. In the USA, you can stand in front of the White House in Washington, DC, and yell, “Down with Trump!”, and you will not be punished. Equally, you can also stand in front of the US Embassy in London and yell, “Down with Trump!”, and you will not be punished.
The British Government whether Conservative or Labor has always kept a tight rein on its real or perceived political enemies. As far as its Establishment is concerned, meaningful political discourse be damned! And let it be noted that the various British political parties are for all intents and purposes component parts of the Establishment.
This makes me proud to be Russian, seeing the so-called “civilized world” converge with our country. Or was it always like this?
All hail the filter bubble…
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/tommy-robinson-protests-trump-march-london-violence-met-police-a8446091.html
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/donald-trump-london-march-live-and-tommy-robinson-protest-latest-news-as-thousands-take-to-streets-a3887231.html
Then again, may not be a problem of a filter bubble, but an idiotic attempt at right wing propaganda.
When I was a kid in Britain and someone was upbraided for saying something offensive, the standard response was always, “It’s a free country. I can say what I like.”
That expression died out about thirty years ago.
Want to know what real propaganda looks like? Check out this passage:
Right-wing demonstrations in the West do not “turn violent”. They get attacked by professional left-wing thugs (the “Antifa”) as police opts to stand down.
Well you can say that it was freedom that allowed subversive ideologies like cultural Marxism to take root and flourish right? Maybe the West would have been better served by some combination of state Confucianism and legalism with its inherent conservatism and the official backing of the coercive power of the state like with imperial China.
So what type of content can actually land you in trouble? I’ve only seen few examples. I understand that you can get done even if intention was humorous.
One measure of how things are for average people is whether people get nervous and start looking around the room to see who is listening when you start talking about politics.
In the West there are now certain trigger subjects (migrants, gays etc) that make people uncomfortable and immediately trigger a reflexive signaling with non-racist, non-homophobic etc opinions when in uncertain company, clearly driven by fear that someone might rat out to Facebook, workplace, social circle and increasingly the law. “Hate speech” prosecutions for things said or done in private is new and the UK is further along in this than most countries.
Russians don’t react to these subjects at all in the same way and I haven’t actually found any subjects that would make Russians nervous about snitches that might be listening. Putin is clearly not one of them, even though the Western media wants us to believe that Russia is one giant personality cult. Russia seems to be much more free than the West right now, even if on paper it has all sorts of laws that can (and probably eventually will) be used to crush dissent.
I have this pessimistic view that actual freedom is a sign of a country in transition – the old power faction has lost its means to intimidate and no new faction hasn’t established intimidation yet – and the reason why Russia is relatively free now is that Putinism is not a genuinely new force, it’s a faction of old Soviet elites reasserting a bit of control that they will lose once they get senile. Russia had a brief transitional freedom period between monarchy and communism, too.
The old Soviet elites did lose control for good.
It is just that the post-Soviet Russian elite ist not as entrenched as elites in the West.
Russian still remember the time before the new elite took over.
Anything that mentions jews, blacks, homosexuals, Muslims, brown third worlders. If anything is even remotely seen as insulting you are pretty much committing a criminal offense.
no – when most people are mostly content the authorities can mostly ignore radicals (unless they’re actually blowing things up)
but now most people are moving in the not content direction so the cage is coming down
(reverse analogy with Russia where things are moving in the more content direction)
your links prove the opposite point
which is the police in liberal dominated towns (like London, Cville or Portland) using the threat of antifa violence to shut down right wing protests/rallies
not really – there was a Pearl Harbor attack on the media/academia which then curtailed freedom of non-PC speech by stealth
the authoritarian way works of course but it requires permanent and total control of the media/academia
It worked it the imperial civil service exam in China and with Confucianism basically serving as a state religion and legalism it’s method of extremely harsh enforcement.
Really? So what old Soviet politician or captain of industry lost his job? I’m not aware of any. If any Soviet politician lost his job due to the USSR breakup, it was only due to some other Soviet politician taking it.
Confucianism and Legalism are rival, ultimately incompatible philosophies.
I mean the Chinese emperors tried to synergize it because they believed Confucianism was too soft to govern a well ordered society, and so needed legalism, as an incredibly harsh but fairly effective mechanism when applied reasonably impartialy.
I suspect that in the long term the authoritarian way is the only viable option if you want to save civilisation.
Freedom is a weapon with which to smash civilisation. That’s all freedom has ever been.
Most of them.
https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/28651909/
That’s like listing Obama’s cabinet, pointing out that none of these guys are in Trump’s cabinet and then declaring based on that that American elites were replaced. All that happened was some Soviet elites kicked out by other Soviet elites. If you want to disprove this, try naming powerful people in Russia who don’t come from Soviet elites.
Yeltsin and Putin are both from Soviet elites, Yeltsin even a former Politburo member. What happened to the USSR was a power grab by national Soviets against the central Soviet, led by the Russian Soviet leader Yeltsin in collusion of the other national republics. It was definitely a continuation of Soviet elites – Yeltsin just had his title changed and a bunch of smaller republics became independent with their local Soviet leaders still in charge, leaving only a few central committee members without a job.
Putin coming to power is a step back to the other direction as that coup was obviously backed by some of the surviving deep state intelligence organs and those had been linked more with the central Soviet structure than the Russian Soviet Federative oh Jesus Christ the commies should have been shot just for the crime of making up these names.
Of course…Britain is dying rapidly, and the process will accelerate if Brexit is successfully sabotaged by May and her fellow traitors.
Your definition of Soviet elite…
…counts even people outside the Soviet elite like VVP as part of them.
Yes and no.
It was a power grab, but it included a purge of the elite and replacement with newcomers.
He got the job because someone had to preserve Yeltsin’s state.
Others would not be competent, credible and loyal to Yeltsin.
I think in the short term an authoritarian response to PC insanity is probably the only way fast enough to save civilization
however I also think there will be an optimum societal synergy which will likely involve a lot of freedom (probably within biological constraints which are just as authoritarian but self-imposed)
i.e. i think a libertarian society is possible but only if you first have a bunch of fascists build a wall and then selectively breed libertarians inside it.
Nonsense. Who do you think the 90s-era and current elites are? Anti-Soviet revolutionaries?
Their gay balloon could barely get off the ground. Anglos keep taking L’s.
Anti-Soviets who benefited from the fall of the USSR and its elite.
I’d assume they were fairly low-ranking in 1991
USSR died almost 30 years ago. At some point people from high positions within the USSR were no longer in charge of Russia.
Putin was a fairly young man when the USSR fell apart but he was a communist party member, graduate of a good Soviet university, and servant of the Soviet state (KGB). When the Soviet Union fell apart, he was working at high position in the mayor’s office of the USSR’s second largest city. This is, obviously, elite.
If you want to contrast a truly revolutionary situation, review Stalin’s, Lenin’s, Trotsky’s Khrushchev’s positions within the Tsarist Russia’s system. While some were of elite background, they were mostly dissidents and criminals.
What a silly and ignorant thing to say.
It is perhaps like when the Obama administration replaced the Bush administration. Obama went from senator to President. Yeltsin went from chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet to…president of Russia. His first prime minister, Ivan Silayev, had been..premier of the Soviet Union.
Other Soviet Prime Ministers under Yeltsin, in order, with their Soviet-era elite backgrounds described, were:
Oleg Lobov (acting): First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic
Egor Gaidar (acting): long-time member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and an editor of the CPSU ideological journal Communist during perestroika
Viktor Chernomyrdin: deputy Minister of the natural gas industries of the Soviet Union
Sergey Kiriyenko: Too young to have done much personally during Soviet times. But grandson pf prominent Cheka member who was personally awarded by Lenin. So from an elite Soviet family.
Yevgeny Primakov: Chairman of the Soviet of the Union, one of two houses of the Soviet parliament. From 1990 until 1991 he was a member of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s Presidential Council
Sergei Stepashin: In 1981-1990 he taught at the Higher Political School of the Ministry of Internal Affairs
Putin (see above)
As usual, truth is somewhere between the two.
Anecdotally, a lot of people who are in a good situation economically now, or who became in 2000s, already were, or had family, in more important jobs in the 1980s, 1970s – a lot have parents with important jobs earlier (some its grandsparents).
Any arbitrary poll amongst people with apartments in London, compared to a control population – would find a much higher representation of people who have some kind of family connection in former group, although they might not say it.
But direct causal link is sometimes very clear, sometimes not clear at all (or non-existent).
Also there are a lot of people who are economically successful now, that did not have any relation to anyone with any kind of important jobs in the past.
It would be interesting to see if someone can try to study about social mobility situation between the 1980s to the 2000s, compared to other countries.
In supposedly “social mobile” countries like America, the people economically in a good situation now, are of course still often somehow connected to people in higher position jobs in even many decades and more ago.
No, they were mostly high ranking. In addition to Yeltsin, almost all of his PM’s had elite positions in Soviet times. The fall of the Soviet Union can accurately be described as the Soviet elite blowing up the system they no longer believed in anyways, and reorganizing the place in a way that they liked better.
While some who didn’t want this to happen lost out, the ones who won and were in control, were from the same elite.
Yeltsin went from chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet to president of Russia. His first prime minister, Ivan Silayev, had been premier of the Soviet Union.
Here are Yeltsin’s other Prime Ministers, in order, with their Soviet-era elite backgrounds described:
Oleg Lobov (acting): First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic
Egor Gaidar (acting): long-time member of the Communist Party, editor of the CPSU ideological journal Communist during perestroika
Viktor Chernomyrdin: deputy Minister of the natural gas industries of the Soviet Union
Sergey Kiriyenko: Too young to have done much personally during Soviet times. But grandson pf prominent Cheka member who was personally awarded by Lenin. So from an elite Soviet family.
Yevgeny Primakov: Chairman of the Soviet of the Union, one of two houses of the Soviet parliament. From 1990 until 1991 he was a member of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s Presidential Council
Sergei Stepashin: In 1981-1990 he taught at the Higher Political School of the Ministry of Internal Affairs
Putin: communist party member, graduate of a good Soviet university, and servant of the Soviet state (KGB). When the Soviet Union fell apart, he was working at a high position in the mayor’s office of the USSR’s second largest city.
If you dig into the backgrounds of other prominent people you will see elite Soviet backgrounds in pretty much all of them.
Not really. If one person says 2+2 = 4 and another person claims 2+2 = 8, the “truth” is not 6.
There may be exceptions, but pretty much all of the 90s elite were also Soviet elite. These was not some sort of radical takeover by non-Soviets or anti-Soviets. It was simply the Soviet elite deciding to abandon the old Soviet system an reorganize the country to their liking. Thus the 90s reflected elite Soviet values.
Of course, the USSR was destroyed about 30 years ago. Some others with non-Soviet elite backgrounds have joined the elites by now. But the idea that the 90s were a break from Soviet times in terms of who was in charge, is absurd.
Rather: Soviet elite who benefited from the fall of the USSR.
I’m thinking over the richest people I’ve met.
One guy – perhaps a direct family connection. Other people it’s not clear (I don’t know) any direct connection.
I meant currently, the siloviki were generally not high ranking in 1991. Putin held a somewhat important post, hence he was interviewed back then.
Because it has been almost 30 years since the USSR broke apart, people in their prime back then would now be in their 70s or 80s. The ones in power now would not be have been big-shots in the 1980s or earlier.
The point was that the post-Soviet transition was not a changeover in elites: the 90s elites were also Soviet elites. It was just a reorganization, to the benefit of Soviet elites and detriment to regular Sovoks.
In Soviet times, Putin was an up-and-comer, a KGB officer who served as head of some department in the mayor’s office of the USSR’s second largest city.
PM Medvedev was young, but graduated from a good Soviet university, was a Communist Party member and worked for the Leningrad mayor.
Defense Minister Shoygu was second secretary of the Abakan City Committee of the CPSU (Abakan); from 1989 to 1990 – Inspector of the Krasnoyarsk Territory Committee of the CPSU and from 1990 to 1991 – Deputy Chairman of the State Committee of the RSFSR for Architecture and Construction. Not bad for a Soviet guy from the provinces.
FM Lavrov – third and second secretary in the Section for the International Economic Relations of the USSR. There he was involved in analytics and his office also worked with various international organizations including the United Nations. In 1981, he was sent as a senior adviser to the Soviet mission at the United Nations in New York City. In 1988 Lavrov returned to Moscow and was named Deputy Chief of the Section of the International Economic Relations of the USSR. Between 1990 and 1992 he worked as Director of the International Organization of the Soviet Foreign Ministry
Minister of Internal Affairs Vladimir Kolokoltsev – a 30 year old chief of a police station in Moscow when the USSR ended.
You can find similar backgrounds.
Ivanov had a strong Soviet era resumé, but he’s gone now
It has to be remembered that authoritarian and totalitarian societies are very different things. An authoritarian society can be relaxed and easy-going. There are certain limits that cannot be transgressed but within those limits there can be a very large degree of freedom. And very few people actually want to transgress those limits. There is no reason why an authoritarian society cannot be a very pleasant place in which to live.
In a totalitarian society there are no limits within which freedom is permitted. Everything is regulated. Liberalism and democracy tend inevitably towards totalitarianism.
True, of course a lot of this has its origins in the Board of Deputies.
“…selectively breed libertarians…”
Homo Novus, anyone?
Britfags, “We may not have the right to own steak knives or send mean tweets, but the Russian bear shall not have Estonia!”
https://twitter.com/paulmasonnews/status/1018918912015073280
Anything that’s “offensive.” The fact that its so poorly defined makes it much worse, because you can never know where is the borderline.
a lot of guardian/BBC writers have an ethnic hatred for Russia – guilty conscience over what their grand-parents did?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/10/snp-english-national-identity-class-cultural-divide
V. I. Kydor Kropotkin: “Logic is on our side: this isn’t a case of a world struggle between two divergent ideologies, of different economic systems. Every day your country becomes more socialistic, my country becomes more capitalistic. Pretty soon we will meet in the middle and join hands. No, my dear doctor; you’re going to defect because you want to live.”
From “The President’s Analyst” (1967)
Britain voted to leave the EU, against all the experts quoted on MSM against Obama’s advice and against the British governments wishes. The then PM and the May who is now PM, were dead against it. But they allowed a referendum and the people spoke. That is real freedom.
And yet here we are with Brexit practically dead and buried.
Cucoos return to other speicies’ nests they haver laid eggs in, and if a cuckoo mother finds her cuckoo chick or egg missing from the nest she parisitised , she attacks the remaining baby birds of the mother who had the temerity to reject a cuckoo.
The EU don’t want a deal now there was a diplomat of long experiencing who said it is very obvious from reading the EU document on Brexit (which he said nobody else seems to have dome) that the EU are going into attack mode.
You get furious push back from the other side after the smallest victory, and treachery from your own . A bitter series of disputes, and one is going to come out very much ahead when it is over. We are no longer regarded as their mugs, maybe we are our own. That’s just life.
Britain is a strange country. You can criticize the Queen, you can criticize British people but you cannot criticize Jews.
Imagine if that would have been the case in Israel. You can criticize Jews but you cannot criticize British people in Israel. Sounds so wierd right? But that is what we have in Britain. And this was the case in Britain even before WW2, before the Holohoax.