Only Totalitarian States Have Thought and Hate Crimes

The UK footballer Rio Ferdinand has been hit in the eye and left bleeding by an object - a coin - thrown into the pitch from the crowd during the derby match Manchester United versus Manchester City.

This is the kind of fans' behaviour on which the Football Association should concentrate, not the various campaigns to stamp out "racism" in fooball.

As the saying goes, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.

Let's be clear. "Racism", if defined only as an attitude or a way of thinking, cannot and should not be a crime. Only actions derived from it can.

Criminalizing "racism" defined purely as a way of thinking means establishing a thought crime.

And thought crimes exist only in states which are totalitarian or going in that direction, as George Orwell described so accurately in his highly-predictive, political futuristic novel 1984, in which Big Brother, the leader of the totalitarian "Ingsoc" (English Socialism) party in power, controls every individual's single movement through telescreens.

Similarly, "hate crime" is a thought crime.

As a consequence, there should be no aggravation for a crime if it's considered motivated by racism. Murder is murder, full stop. Whether you are killed for racism or for your money, you end up dead. The alleged aggravation is, again, nothing other than the presumed crime of "racism", which is a thought crime.

That goes for verbal insults too. If the circumstances of the insults are such to warrant a prosecution, then they should be prosecuted, but whether the insults are regarded as "racist" or the product of "hatred" should be totally irrelevant.

We have been brainwashed - or attempted to be - that the fight against racism is so noble that every means, even the loss of civil liberties, is acceptable for its sake. But we should be vigilant.

Believing that one stands on the moral high ground and that unpleasant measures (in this case instituting thought crime and thought police) are justified for a noble goal - otherwise known as Machiavelli's The Prince's motto "the end justifies the means" - is the first step towards the establishment of illiberal and despotic societies, as past events following revolutions, from the French Reign of Terror to Leninism and Stalism, amply illustrate.