Racism as thoughtcrime - Orwell seems more right than ever

Telegraph Blogs (U.K.) ^ | June 3, 2009 | Ed West

[Schnucki]

The last decade have been a golden age for George Orwell and his greatest work, 1984. While the novel has always been prized, I remember a time when it was considered a great piece, but not a prescient one. As the age of genetic engineering dawned in he Nineties Huxley's Brave New World seemed far more accurate (though less well written).

And yet in 2009 Orwell's predictions seem more eerily true than ever. It is not so much the more obviously Soviet elements, like the economic poverty and the state brutality, that have turned out true - quite the opposite - as the mental straightjacketing.

In particular his predictions of "thoughtcrime" and "newspeak" have turned out very close to the mark, and for the latter one only has to read the Guardian Style Guide or look at the Biased BBC blog.

Thoughtcrime is a very dangerous concept, and is the reason why the Left-wing Orwell has become a hero not just to the centre-Right but also to the far-Right, or at least the anti-immigration Right (as well as libertarians, for obvious reason).

Orwell could not have foreseen how race would come to obsess western thinking, so that racism would be considered the worst thoughtcrime of all. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and the fight against racism, a righteous cause, has become a pretext to clamp down on individual freedom and quash dissent.

The Mapherson report in 1999 introduced the idea of thoughtcrime into the law by introducing the concept that if a crime was perceived to be racist, even if there was no proof, than it must be so. It was a huge blow against individual freedom, and done for the best of reasons.

And because racism it wrong, that report even went as