Zersetzung in the National LGBT+ Police Network
Political Policing In The Name of Humanity
There is a book written by a former political prisoner that contains some interesting comments on the redemptive quality of a prison term. “The strictness of prison life, paired with kindness and understanding, generally has a calming effect on prisoners,” he writes. “A friendly nod of the head, a pleasant word—these often work miracles, especially with the sensitive prisoners.” He notes the restorative effect of chess, of a good book, of an hour's meditation during which a prisoner might reflect on his inner soul. “I discussed work with many prisoners in the penitentiary. Life behind bars without work would be worse punishment in the long run.”
Following his release, the writer had the good fortune to be recruited to the prison system and, in time, became what we would call a prisoner governor. True to the humanity borne from lived experience, he put his ideas to work and placed the words Arbeit Macht Frei above the prison gates.
No sooner was Europe liberated from the fascists than the zealots were at it again. “In the name of humanity!" they cried, imagining that the Germans of the newly formed GDR were a breed apart from the Germans who had waged war on the rest of Europe. Even after its fall in 1989, Von Schnitzler, the great media propagandist of the Democratic Republic, remained convinced of the wall’s service to humanity. It was a hard, protective border keeping at bay those whose natural bent was toward fascism.
Given all this goodwill in the service of humanity, it is remarkable to note the overlap between the despot-serving police force of the Ba’ath Party, directed from palaces dripping with the opulence of Baghdad, and the agents who took their orders from the concrete and linoleum of grey Berlin. Humanitarian regimes, convinced by their own goodness, operate in the same brutal ballpark as those in service of unmitigated evil.
President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, gives us the simple equation: LGTQI+ ideology equals humanity. Nations, cities and communities which fail to understand this are, in her words, humanity free zones. The tacit message is that dissidents are less than human or, at the very least, should have only limited access to suffrage, publication, platforming, assembly, speech and other human rights. Presumption of innocence, trial by jury, habeas corpus and Article 10 may more easily be dispensed with when the enemy is evil and the humanitarian dream, conceived within the cruciformed smart glass of the Berlaymont Building, is pure.
Resistance to one aspect of the utopian dream is to be declared as an enemy of it all. Hence, the LGBAlliance, which only advocates for the lesbian, gay and bisexual aspects of the rainbow, is dismissed as a biological-essentialist Hate Group with a weird obsession with genitals. Fair Cop, meanwhile, is unofficially classed as a terrorist organisation because it holds fast to the quaint notion that ideology is less important than law. Sarah Phillimore and I are regarded as gender-critical Baader Meinhof Gang and, as such, we naturally pique the interest of the police.
In Britain, The National LGBT+ Police Network has created what is known in the military as a Forward Operating Base (FOB), from which it serves the strategic goals of its European masters. Proposals include: Banning gender conversion therapy, banning opposition to the dissemination and promotion of LGBTIQ propaganda (as committed by the Hungarian town of Nagykáta); banning Regional Charters of Family Rights (as declared by over 100 regions, counties and municipalities across Poland); banning opposition to legal gender recognition (such as Article 33 of the Omnibus Bill T/9934 in Hungary); closing legal lacunas to protect gender identity within hate speech laws; promoting the teaching of gender ideology in schools; and, most significantly, in making a comparison with the Stasi, criminalising opposition expressed either in public or in private. At the height of its powers, the Stasi had one informant for every fifty of its citizens. In Rainbow Europe, the police have made it possible for everyone with a smartphone to be an informant. Its online reporting portal, True Vision, has a logo that resembles an all-seeing eye.
This Forward Operating Base cares as little for privacy as it does for the sovereignty of post-Brexit Britain. As with the most successful annexes, ideological agents have already been embedded in strategically significant posts. The Law Commission last year proposed the removal of the private dwelling defence in relation to hate speech law. In October 2020, The College of Policing extended its Hate Crime Guidance to expedite the surveillance of children’s conversations in schools. Scotland has the most draconian hate crime laws in Europe. Humberside Police, which in 2020 was likened to the Stasi by the High Court, flies a rainbow flag outside its new £14 million custody suite. When the police tell us who they are, we really should believe them.
Sometimes, the police will make a well-publicised arrest, as happened to Marion Millar who made herself an enemy of the state by photographing ribbons hanging in a tree. Being purple, green and white, the ribbonry did not suggest a rainbow and was therefore indicative of dissent. Arrests are rare. More often, the police employ discrete methods of control, publishing untruths or issuing demands designed to put the public in a cognitive spin: being offensive is an offence (Merseyside); not all hate crime is a criminal offence (Nottinghamshire Police); No Terfs On Our Turf (Greater Manchester Police); Preferred pronouns are a human right (Cheshire Police); 1 in 12 trans people are murdered (North Yorkshire Police); 14% of all people personally know a trans person who has suffered murder (Avon and Somerset Police); you cannot be a police officer if you do not believe humans can change sex (Norfolk Police); retweeting a feminist verse is a precursor to murder (Humberside Police). In May, officers operating the anonymised account of The National LGBT+ Network randomly tweeted: “We see you. We have reported you.”
Who has been reported? To which police force? And for what? To ask these questions is to miss the point entirely. The report may not exist at all. It may exist but sit idle. It may sit idle until is activated to sabotage a job application. It may prompt a knock at the door. The point is, we know nothing beyond the chilling fact that we have come to the attention of the police. Which police? Again, we do not know as the police refuse to tell us.
Messing with your head is not a new strategy. Zerzetsung, which translates as decomposition, was state-sanctioned gaslighting, a form of psychological manipulation practised by the Stasi that left the victim without visible scars, nevertheless, in a spin. Decomposition, in a literal sense, is the process whereby substances are broken down into simpler organic forms, as typically occurs after death. It is the experience of Josef K in Kafka’s The Trial. The individual is broken down from their own sense of self, punishment is separated from justice, guidance is separated from law. In Rainbow Europe, we can add to this list the separation of words from meaning: victims and suspects exist without crime; proof exists without evidence; and the police keep records of what they call non-crime crimes. For most people, who shudder at the thought of a speeding ticket, this is the mother of all head fucks. And in the land of the humanitarian Rainbow Police, that is entirely the point.
scary scary stuff
Thank you, a brilliant piece - as strong, as erudite and as clear as ever.
To see the bizarre statements of deep political madness by 'our' police is disturbing to say the least. When viewed together like this, their worryingly misguided and ludicrous collection of non-crimes and invented misdeeds demonstrate the condensed absurdity, yet dangerously authoritarian nature of our so-called agencies of law and order.
As they 'plod' through the muds of cloying Stonewall-driven ideology and attempt to instil a new Rainbow Dawn upon the great, bigoted unwashed, their craven, anti-democratic commandments and their striving to take England into a New Puritanism will surely crash and burn as a new Gender Critical Sunlight cascades over them. This Sunlight is guided by people like Harry Miller, Sarah Phillimore, Maya Forstater and Graham Linehan, and many, many brave others.
Thank you.