LETTER

UPSET?  YES?  GOOD.

 I understand that a lot of people are upset with my letters to the Aylmer Bulletin.  Good.

“If it isn’t hurting, it isn’t working,” as Nigel Lawson once quipped.

The fact is that criticism is the greatest gift that God gave us, for, without criticism, there is no improvement.  Be a prima donna at your peril.

The generation before me died in the thousands on the beaches of Normandy, not to stop racism nor sexism, for the ordinary people in the street had little or no knowledge of the death camps of either Stalin’s Soviet Empire nor of National Socialism’s Germany. They died in the cause of “Liberty” at the core of which was the right of free speech.

Unlike other candyfloss “rights” like the right to high speed internet, or right to free health care, each the product of the mind of some cocky bureaucrat or some would-be politician on the make and instituted by countries with more cash than sense, the right to free speech is central to the functioning of our civilization and one that is granted, not by some bigwig politician, but by God.  

If the student who doesn’t turn up for his class, yet still gets a pass, he/she will build bridges that will collapse.  If a sad person is given drugs instead of dealing with their problems, they’ll be dead at 45 from cancer. If the bearded dude in a dress is not told that he looks a jerk, he’ll walk around wondering why he has no real friends, just a bunch of phoneys trying to give him “support”.  

Living in a world of make-believe does nobody any favours and the obsession with “hate-speech” is a toxic, corrosive poison that’s trying to force honest people to lie and creating precisely the regime that all those who fought in two world wars signed up to oppose. Indeed, even Russia in 1917 and Germany in 1933 had still been democracies and had remained so until demagogues had swindled the public into believing that there was this mystic force called “society” that no-one could see nor touch whose rights came before those of the individual and his/her liberty.

Aristotle viewed democracy as not an end in itself, but a sad stepping stone to tyranny of the mob.  If we are not careful, we shall follow suit as our liberty is undermined by these scum.

Robert L Thompsett, Aylmer