Love or loath Peter Hitchens, one has to agree that his work is fantastically recalcitrant and written in wonderfully muscular English prose. The Parallax Brief’s twelve readers should follow this link and read his whole article on what he views as the fake joy which has manifested during the celebrations for the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall; however, one particular section, on freedom, caught the Parallax Brief’s attention.

“…there were admirable aspects of East German society, as many former East Germans will now tell you. The trouble is that the price paid for them was much too high, and that the East German system, which is well described in the book Stasiland and the film The Lives of Others, was cruel, often to the point of being actively murderous, intrusive, corrupt, wholly dishonest and power-worshipping.

Well, there are lots of governments like that, and ours is slowly but alarmingly turning in that direction. Would that have happened if the Cold War had continued to keep the domestic left out of political office, and if the warning of the real existing Big Brother state over there had continued to exist? I wonder. I have often thought that the best solution for East Germany would have been for it to be taken over by Disney, and run as a vast theme park in which people could see the otherwise unbelievable operation of socialism in action. I saw East Germany at first hand, and even I find it difficult to believe what I know to be true. How will the next generation learn from this awful mistake? They won’t credit that it actually happened.”

Whether or not one agrees with Hitchens’s now familiar doomsaying about the current levels of liberty in Britain and our trajectory for the future, these two paragraphs illustrate something that people all to often forget.

The temptation is often to dismiss movements like Nazism by arguing that ‘we’ would never fall for something that that, and making disdainful comparisons between the freedom loving people of the west and those dupes further east willing to sacrifice liberty for prosperity.

But such thinking is slothful.

Tyranny need not come via revolution, or be imposed on an unwilling nation by a ruthless demagogue, but may actually come via popular consent.

There are many situations in which tyranny may be welcomed by a population, most of which, such as grave social and economic disorder and hardship, are well understood. However, most of the time, tyranny creeps upon a society: the population doesn’t notice, politicians act with the best intentions, police, soldiers and secret services just want to protect the country, and the press feels it can’t criticise.

Perhaps, for instance, we should think about that in relation to the news yesterday that every single website you visit, phone call you make, and email and text message you send will now be saved by the communications provider for a minimum of one year, and will be accessible by the government.

The same goes for free speech. Making an overtly racist speech, or hurling anti-semitic insults, or criticizing harshly a religion may be distasteful — and it is clear any reasonable society would scorn people who do so — but that same reasonable society would permit them, because free speech is absolute.

Yet we have now lost this right in the United Kingdom. And we all think it’s jolly reasonable, because can’t these hateful people be shut up? Well, yes, they can, but then we won’t be free to say what we think anymore.

Who has the right to make the decision about what is can be said and what cannot? Who decides what political views the Parallax Brief can hear and which are too insulting for him to be exposed to? Who has that authority in the UK? And what happens when everyone then thinks you’re saying something unpleasent?

Our country and way of life is precious, but one cannot protect freedom by taking it away.