Tolerance and terror

Reflections on ‘Reflections on the Revolution in Europe’, Part Seven

Part One: Europe’s absent-minded revolution
Part Two: Welcoming the stranger
Part Three: Leaving behind the history written in blood
Part Four: On French assimilation and British multiculturalism
Part Five: Team Islam and Team France
Part Six: Disappointment of the Diaspora

Liberté is perhaps the cornerstone of Europe’s political values. It was for ‘freedom’ that the West had fought Nazi aggression and for freedom that it had opposed communism for so many decades. European love of freedom, tied to a highly individualistic culture liberated from familial or religious pressure, is arguably what made the West different. And freedom would be the biggest casualty of the new moral order, slowly and often imperceptibly.

The social and demographic change sweeping Europe occurred at a time when the New Left in the United States began to employ a tactic of social shaming to censor deviant thinkers, a process that would later become known as ‘political correctness’. This would have a direct impact on how Europeans responded to social changes over which they had little control; indeed the new intolerance sweeping across the Atlantic would prove to be stronger in European countries which lacked America’s legal checks. As a result, numerous politicians and writers would find themselves in trouble with the law for questioning the benefits of ‘diversity’.

Political correctness involved ‘well-intentioned white lies, wishful thinking, and petty misstatements’, in Christopher Caldwell’s words, but ‘even when political correctness showed a tendency to authoritarian excess, its self-important perpetrators resembled Gilbert and Sullivan characters more than Stalinist henchmen’.

Although often absurd, and too petty to be taken seriously by serious people, this was one reason why it succeeded: ‘a new, uncompromising ideology was advancing under cover of its own ridiculousness – not as the Big Lie of legend, perhaps, but as something similarly ominous that might be called the Big Joke.’ Yet, ‘as anyone could see, its advance was also accompanied by intimidation and fear.’