R.I.P. Parliamentary Democracy

To those who haven't noticed, to the dim of wit, the socialights, the evaders and the hard of hearing: WE ARE THROAT-DEEP IN HORSE MANURE, primarily because we are encouraged to voluntarily forfeit the faculty that makes us humans human: to reason, the ability to properly identify, to integrate concepts into a mental body of ideas that conform to reality. And then there's the inability to weigh the portent of a particular case. The march of the debilitizers rolls on.

Because of an uptick in both frequency and severity we yesterday felt the necessity to open up a new dossier on Articles named "Ruled by the Mob" (not to be confused with the tyranny of the majority, or mob rule). It consists in a political innovation (at least in our time), that is now temporarily culminating in a case in Britain: the criminalization of the opposition.

Thanks to the Obama campaign in the US - which was as close to total war as one can get without actual bloodshed - the dossier is already quite lengthy.

It occurred last Thursday November 27 when the anti-terrorist squad of the Metropolitan police arrested Shadow Minister for Immigration, Damian Green MP, while his private papers and computer files in his home and office in the House of Commons were ransacked and confiscated.

This violation against the state of parliamentary democracy happened on thinly veiled, trumped up charges of possible "intent to disrupt the visit of the Queen to the Houses of Parliament". What's next, one might ask: Jesuits thrown in dungeons for disturbing the peace in St Peter's? But that's not the point!

The following question is intriguing, but it also misses the essence: who has been infiltrating swathes of British society and has propagated to act over and beyond his or her authority? If the surfacing of the black hand of Common Purpose (CP) cabal is too contrived for you, try this.

Roger Kimball on his blog on Pajamas Media deals with the case in "How Democracies Perish, British Edition": "The Honorable Member’s offense? Embarrassing Gordon Brown’s government. How did he do this? By revealing in debate on the floor of the House of Commons and in various lapses, failures, and dirty-little-secrets about the government’s immigration policy (...) Mr. Green was doing exactly what a member of the Opposition should do: shedding light on the government’s failures in order to make it more accountable to the public."

Kimball goes on to quote Janet Daley in the London Telegraph:

"The object of the exercise seems to have been intimidation and the flaunting of power. Short of an outright, totalitarian suspension of democracy, this is about as serious as it gets. Freedom is under threat in ways that we would not have thought conceivable a generation ago. The threat seems to be coming in various forms from a government desperate to save its own credibility and to be so convinced of its moral righteousness that it can justify the most blatant abuses of what we had taken to be the fundamental principles of a free society."

Some of the comments to the post are worth quoting in full:

#7: “…it is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect” --George Orwell

#8: "As Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, put it “This is something you might expect from a tin-pot dictatorship, not in a modern democracy.” Socrates would beg to differ. If you want to avoid going down the road that leads to this sort of thing, it helps to know how we got here in the first place. The Left’s substitution of “democracy” for freedom is a key first step to their overall goal of taking the shackles off government and placing them back on the wrists of individuals. What makes a society free is a limited government, not an elected one."

So much for Barack Obama and his contempt for negative rights, which he popularly described as "what government cannot do to you". Rather than suffering the horrors of neglect by the state, he prefers the positive rights that chain a free individual once again to the risk-free nursery of the tribal collective.

The case is also born out in an excellent article by essayist Fjordman on the site of The Brussels Journal: "The Importance of Cicero in Western Thought". It's lengthy, but worth reading in its full glory. Here's one excerpt from Hayek's work "Constitution of Liberty" that's relevant to the case in hand (p. 146):

- Caption: young Cicero, reading - mural by Vincenzo Foppa, ca. 1464 -

"Cicero indeed became the main authority for modern liberalism, and we owe to him many of the most effective formulations of freedom under the law (...) that we obey the law in order to be free (...) during the classical period of Roman law it was fully understood that there is no conflict between law and freedom and that freedom is dependent upon certain attributes of the law, its generality and certainty, and the restrictions it places on the discretion of authority."

Freedom, as well as free will are often confused with acting on whim - another case of wrongful identification - which is indeed associated with mob rule, or tyranny by the majority which is in fact democracy.

As Sam Holliday pointed out in a recent essay on this blog, "A US Weimar Republic? Red Flags: Our Republic": [America's Founding Fathers] "created a federal republic, and wrote the Constitution of the United States, based on the tenets of classical republicanism, which is dependent on sovereignty being held by citizens themselves. The Founders shared a fear of tyranny, either by dictators or Caesars, and sought ways to protect freedom; their solutions were decentralization and checks and balances. It was a remarkable compromise designed as a safe guard against mass emotionalism."

The Left and increasingly also some on the Right are blind to the perils of recent trends towards emocracy, collectivism, bailouts and nationalizations, corporatism, peace-offerings and libations to theofascists and now, demonization and criminalization of the opposition. The Government that perpetrated this abomination is - to this moment - in power.

We stand by what we concluded yesterday in a note on the precursors of censorship: "Tolerate it at your peril."

Update:

Times just reported that the police acted without a warrant and in the course of an investigation into a series of leaks traced back to the Home Office. We are not in a position to investigate, but will show no signs of surprise if Acting Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson or the directly responsible underling, as was the case in the De Menezes shooting, turns out to have undergone training by the nefarious Common Purpose (CP), "to act beyond authority" (see above). N.B. There was one (1) Labour MP who protested the matter during the Commons Debate. Kudos to him; the rest are too demoralized to compute the longer-term course of their ideas.

- Filed on Articles in "Ruled by the Mob" -