The Imprisonment and Likely Death of Tommy
For those of you who have not heard, Tommy Robinson, founder of the populist English Defence League, was arrested by police while streaming a Facebook live video outside a what the media politely calls a “grooming” trial in Leeds on Friday morning.Robinson was taken immediately to prison.The charge was breach of the peace.
“Grooming” the practice of preparing a child for a life as a catamite. A Muslim gang was on trial for raping, sodomizing, and selling hundreds of victims into sexual slavery, some as young as eleven. It was to protect their rights that the police acted with alacrity to prevent Mr. Robinson from speaking in public.
That the Muslim gangs in prison will murder him is almost certain. The court in this case enacted a death penalty, using the flimsiest of figleaf excuses. Outrage is widespread, and deservedly so.
I have nothing to say that other conservatives have not said better. England is fallen.
As Kipling correctly predicted, the British Empire, once the envy of the world, once the single force most strongly bent toward spreading civilization worldwide, at a time when civility and refinement had reached its height, has gone the way of Nineveh and Tyre.
I will add one note from my legal training. The law in England does not allow cameras in court, on the theory that the defendant cannot have a fair jury trial if the news (or even private individuals with cameras) give too much publicity to the trial. We in America used to have such a rule: when famous trials were reported in the evening news, all that was shown was a sketch drawn by an on-site sketch artist.
What we never allowed in America is a court of law ordering a complete news blackout, and having newspapers obey, even to the extent of taking down old posts and stories on their websites from before the court order. That is prior restraint and ex post facto both at once.
The most hideous thing for me was seeing Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) merely saying that because he had a wife and family, he could not afford to break the law, and speak up. And he is a man of more than ordinary boldness.
But in a despotism, there are no living heroes. There are martyrs who oppose and there are quislings who cooperate, and that is about it.
Robinson violated that rule in a previous case, and was given a suspended sentence. This is like being on parole: any breach of the terms dictated by the court triggers the sentence. That is why Robinson was bundled off to jail in an hour.
It is shocking and sad to see England, with the oldest parliament in the world, the mother country of the Magna Carta, slipping into despotism. Weimar Germany was also a first world functioning democracy, complete with courts of law and civil rights, that went this route.
But the Englishmen with enough true grit to take up their potato peelers and stage a general mutiny against tyranny have all fled here to America over the last two centuries, so who, there, is going to fight the good fight?
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
