How about a little something for Veteran’s Day, or Remembrance Day as they call it across the pond.

The Quiet Part Out Loud

It is said that as a person gets older, they tend to be more willing to speak their mind. After all, when the next big event in life is likely to be the last event, what is there to lose?

So it probably should not have come as a shock to the hosts and producers of Good Morning Britain last Friday when they interviewed one-hundred-year-old Royal Navy and Arctic Convoy veteran Alec Penstone on live TV, and he went off-script, saying the quiet part out loud.

When the co-hosts asked Penstone for his thoughts on Remembrance Day and what it should mean for the country, the humble veteran responded with sad sincerity: “I can see in my mind’s eye those rows and rows of white stones. All the hundreds of my friends, everybody else, who gave their lives. For what? The country of today? No, I’m sorry, the sacrifice wasn’t worth the result that it is now.”

[Que mic drop]

I’ve been saying this for years- that the Allied efforts were for naught and did more harm than good, given the state of the world generally and the mess that is Western Civilization today. But Mr. Penstone has more right to do so than most. Penstone was a young man when the Second World War started, and he initially volunteered as a messenger for the Air Raid Precautions organization in London during the height of the Blitz. He said of his time in London, during some of the worst bombing of the war, “The moments at 15 years of age, pulling bodies out of bombed buildings you grow up very quickly.”

His father, a veteran of the Great War, made Penstone vow not to serve in an infantry role due to the horrors he’d witnessed in the trenches. So he joined the Royal Navy as a submarine-detector, and ended up in one of the most deadly assignments of the Second World War, on the Arctic Convoys. He also served in minesweeping to clear the waters for the D-Day landings, and in the far east, fighting Japan. He is typically seen wearing a rack of British medals from his war service including the 1939-45 Star, the Atlantic Star, the Arctic Star, the Pacific Star for service in Burma, and the Defence Medal for his service in the Air Raid Precautions organization. Separately on a red ribbon, Penstone wears the insignia for a Knight of the Légion d’Honneur for his role in the liberation of France. On his right breast, Penstone wears several Russian Medals including the Medal of Ushakov for convoys and other USSR-era convoy medals.

By all accounts, as we define such things, this man is a hero of the British people. So the broadcasters were flummoxed. Host Kate Garraway started blinking quickly as her internal programming directed her to express fake sympathy and passive-aggressive understanding. “Oh, Alec, I’m sorry you feel like that,” she said, as if Penstone’s honesty were a sign of poor mental health. Adil Ray, a comedian from immigrant-heavy Birmingham and the son of a Punjabi Muslim father and an Indo-Kenyan mother, excitedly asked, “What do you mean by that, though?” You could sense that Ray was trying to catch him out, or hoping Penstone would denounce the patriotic White Brits who protest illegal immigration as “far-right extremists”, no different than the Nazis he fought eighty years earlier.

Instead, Penstone bemoaned the sorry state of freedom in a censorship-addicted United Kingdom in which actual “thought police” arrest Brits for expressing opinions. “What we fought for was our freedom. We find that even now, it’s a darn sight worse than what it was when I fought for it.”

Note that Mr. Penstone did not elaborate on which freedoms were in question: Freedom from fear? Freedom from declining prosperity? Freedom from being groomed as a young girl by Pakistani rape-gangs? Or freedom generally to be and to say what one sees fit? By consensus, people assumed he meant freedom of speech. I don’t know, and I don’t want to put words in his mouth.

In any event, Garraway tried to humor the veteran by sucking up to him with the usual platitudes. “I want you to know that all the generations that have come since — including me and my children — are so grateful for your bravery. It’s our job now, isn’t it, to make it the country that you fought for.” [I think I just threw up a little.]

In short, what the corporate sponsors of the show wanted the hosts to ask was, “Britain today! Isn’t it lovely what we’ve built!”

And Mr. Penstone’s reply was the hurtful truth: No, it isn’t.

Freedom From Free Speech

As noted in an American Thinker article:

Authorities in the U.K. are well on their way to turning native Brits into a minority within their own homeland in the next few decades. Anybody who objects to such demographic replacement is censored for expressing unapproved opinions and targeted for criminal harassment. The British government would rather cover up the crimes of Islamic invaders than admit that foreigners are raping, robbing, terrorizing, and murdering the British people. As is true of most governments in Europe and North America, the British Establishment criminalizes dissent by outlawing unapproved points of view as “misinformation” or “hate speech.” British politicians even express disgust at native Brits waving their kingdom’s historic flags. “

One reporter noted, “The white stones [Penstone] envisioned represented not just sacrifice, but a contract — a covenant that those who survived would live in a nation worthy of those who didn’t. In Penstone’s assessment, that contract has been broken. And who could argue with him?”

As if to underscore the point, the next day, a member of Turning Point UK (the British version of Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA) was arrested for “Breach of the Peace”. What was he doing? Throwing bricks or swinging fists? Yelling at passers-by with a megaphone while swilling a pint? No. He was peacefully debating a Muslim activist on a street-corner. He was caught red-handed being thoughtful, polite, and expressing his opinion- which runs contrary to the laws in Britain these days.

Indeed, across the United Kingdom, people are being arrested every single day for what they say or post online. Recent reports estimate that roughly 30 people a day are hauled in by police for so-called “offensive” speech posted online. According to a report from the Daily Telegraph, the UK arrests 12,000 people per year in violation of Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988. These laws criminalize “grossly offensive,” behavior online or sharing material of an “indecent, obscene or menacing character.” The net result: people are arrested over memes online and comments overheard in public. If your feelings get hurt, you’ve been “menaced”. The Thought Police will press charges on your behalf. Yes, simply having a dialogue can get you arrested.

It goes without saying, though it still gives me pause, that I would be in serious trouble for this blog in Europe. Even though I consistently preach non-violence and make a consistent and concerted effort to back my assertions with facts, it could easily be misconstrued as hate-speech for singling out certain races and demographic characteristics for special attention. Frankly, I don’t write to protect peoples feelings, and I don’t mind being called a racist. In Europe, and especially the U.K., that could get me in arrested.

Meanwhile, as Britain welcomes “irregular arrivals” and quarters them in hotels, White British citizens are arrested for expressing their opinions- however peacefully, and regardless of the topic. For example, in April a woman was convicted of holding a sign outside an abortion clinic reading “Here to talk, if you want” in Bournemouth. Doubtless, someone felt “menaced.” In a news item making the rounds as I write this, a family was arrested in London for flying the Union Jack from their car while driving in an area described as a Muslim Zone. Ironically, asking where the “White Zone” is would likely get me arrested.

In Scotland a few weeks ago, a man was arrested for displaying a sign that included the fourteen-words: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white Children!” I mean, my God, how hateful: wanting to take care of your people and tending to your children’s future! Oh the humanity!

And so on. We could spend an hour exploring examples of contrarian beliefs being punished and silenced in Britain. Or how law enforcement there seems more concerned with protecting the feelings of illegals than preventing grooming gangs from raping children, going so far as to establish a new intelligence unit within the UK’s National Police Coordination Centre to monitor social media for early signs of anti-migrant unrest.

After all, in the UK, the Human Rights Act of 1998 does give protection to free speech but as a “qualified right”, meaning the government can restrict that right if doing so is deemed “necessary in a democratic society”. Naturally, it’s the people in power who determine if curtailing criticism of them or their policies is necessary. What could go wrong?

Sadly, it doesn’t look like it is going to get better any time soon. A recent survey by UK based YouGov found that when British adults were asked what was most important when it came to online behavior: 28% said it was that people were able to express themselves freely but 61% prioritized keeping them safe from threats and abuse.

“People tend to prefer safety to free speech [online],” argues Anthony Wells, a director at YouGov.

Come on Britain, nut up!

Even back in 2021, a YouGov poll of Britons found that a majority of those surveyed – some 57% – had sometimes stopped themselves from expressing political or social views because of the fear of being judged or negative responses. For those who believe that free speech is under threat in that country, these figures can be used as evidence that decades of political correctness have had a chilling effect on people’s ability to express their opinions. The real result? Politicians and Social Justice Warriors run roughshod over common sense, and common decency, knowing that no one is going to challenge them.

“Our definitions of what constitutes hate speech, and I think a very broadened definition of what constitutes harm, is meaning that people feel like they are walking on eggshells and they’re frightened – not just that they’ll have the police around, but that they’ll be canceled if they say the wrong thing,” ~ Baroness Claire Fox

What, you might ask, does this have to do with America? After all, this is Amerika Erwache!

To which I reply: just wait. First, our “free speech” here is also under assault. Even Trump’s Attorney General lap poodle Pam Bodi has said, “There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech”. Couple that with Trump’s lawsuits against media outlets he doesn’t like, and the continued consolidation of large media companies, and the not-so-subtle algorithmic discrimination found in search engines and AI responses, to say nothing of Charlie Kirk’s murder, and it is easy to argue that speech in America is not as free as you might think.

Second, Trump and his ilk will not be in office forever. The pendulum is going to swing back the other way, and soon. We saw how Biden’s autopen used social media and deplatforming to silence speech in the first half of this decade. Given how the Left loves to emulate the worst that Europe has to offer, suppression of speech in the UK will invariably find its way here. Also, it’s worth mentioning that a Muslim was just elected mayor of our country’s largest city, just like London. Best we take note.

The Decline of Western Civilization

Which brings us back to British veteran Alec Penstone. One notes that he did not say a thing about how brown Britain has become in his lifetime. Or about the growing income inequality in the UK– which is quite similar to what we see here. Or anything about rape gangs, immigrant fueled stabbings, or the UK’s feckless leadership.

No, what he said was “All the hundreds of my friends, everybody else, who gave their lives. For what? The country of today. No, I’m sorry, the sacrifice wasn’t worth the result that it is now…What we fought for was our freedom. We find that even now, it’s a darn sight worse than what it was when I fought for it.” And while the focus immediately went to the issue of free-speech, if you read between the lines, you’ll notice he said a great deal more than that.

Amerika (und Britannien) Erwache!

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