The censor will see you now . . .
BERMUDIANS may want to consider petitioning Pope Benedict to have the island's Premier elevated to the College of Cardinals. Maybe then The Man would only expect us to kiss his ring.
Additionally, once he's capped and robed in red and ensconced in the Papal Court of an individual even Vatican insiders refer to as "God's Rottweiller", the Premier would be among a throng of like-minded (that is to say, closed-minded) souls.
He would be extremely well placed to lobby for the position of Grand Inquisitor, a job for which he seems to be uniquely qualified. It's one that would allow the Premier to indulge all of his fantasies about extinguishing free expression with the full force of a sovereign state behind him. Perhaps he could even revive the Vatican's Index of Forbidden Books given that suppression of heretical and ideologically suspect views is clearly uppermost on the Premier's mind these days.
An increasingly reactionary Vatican may be one of the few places on earth that would embrace this Premier's censorious notions (although Castro's Cuba is another jurisdiction where he might find kindred spirits: there citizens are routinely rounded up and jailed for reading Steven King novels ? not on the grounds of suspect taste but for suspected ideological deviation. This is the same culture-resistant regime, of course, which Alexander the Lesser has seen fit to enter into a "cultural" pact with). In a nominally democratic Bermuda, where freedom of expression is constitutionally guaranteed (at least until it's abolished by a voice-vote in the House of Assembly, the Premier's latest bad-tempered whimsy is not only undesirable but of such bilious nastiness that Bermudians should feel an Arctic chill running up and down their vertebrae.
As is reflected in his plunging job approval ratings, this increasingly peevish Premier's powers of persuasion have diminished to the point where he probably couldn't get Tom DeLay to accept a free holiday. So he's certainly in no position to convince Bermudians to accept either the generalised fatuities of his "Social Agenda" or a fits-and-starts Independence initiative. Given there have been better organised riots than his administration's programme for the island, this public backlash was only to be expected. So now rather than attempt to sweet-talk or even cajole Bermudians into following his lead, the Premier is reduced to lashing out at them by making outrageous threats to sic the Thought Police on his critics.
When Alexander the Lesser has both the time and energy to direct the Department of Communication & Information (which should probably be renamed the Ministry of Truth) to upbraid and investigate a web blog where a poster has had the temerity to poke fun at We, The Premier, Bermudians should be seriously worried.
By turns bumptious, sinister and unintentionally funny, the statement issued in the Premier's name managed to invoke the self-contradictory precepts of both lese-majesty and state-enforced conformity, a favourite fallback position of Leftist authoritarians intent on immobilising dissent.
Based on the sorry evidence, it seems not only has this Premier's funny bone been surgically removed but also those parts of the brain that control higher thought, emotion and reasoning. Perhaps at this stage he should might want to think about putting his overly sensitive hackles under the knife as well to avoid any such future public displays of hyper-sensitivity.
But there's little likelihood of that happening. This Premier has, after all, been the ringleader of a Conspiracy of Silence since assuming power after the July, 2003 Parliamentary coup d'etat.
He prefers stifling debate in Parliament by invoking ? usually erroneously ? procedural technicalities to avoid answering embarrassing questions about housing projects planned for Mary Victoria Road. And the Berkeley Institute. And the Bermuda Housing Corporation. And just about any other subject likely to cause him discomfort.
He steadfastly refuses to answer questions from the Press, from the people and, increasingly it would seem, from his own Parliamentary backbenchers.
unfortunate tendency to block out that which he does not want to hear has culminated, of course, in his cranky resistance to the concept of a referendum on Independence ? the ultimate act of censorship, the ultimate refusal to hear the voice of the people.
No wonder he is now so quick to invoke the oppressive spectre of the Thought Police.
In one respect, his actions ? or overreactions ? this week were pitiful. But they were also emblematic of this Premier's misplaced priorities and frightening contempt for public opinion.
And what's genuinely worrying, of course, is that he not only has the full power of Government agencies at his disposal to actually follow up on his threats to silence dissenting voices but he also has his defenders.
There are those who would put their own intellectual integrity into temporary abeyance to sanctify the Premier's outrageous threats; there are those who know better who believe even the most shameful gaffes by this Premier necessitate a closing of the ideological ranks rather than risk providing his critics with any ammunition in the form of internal ructions.
Consequently, as gifted and good-hearted a soul as Calvin Smith is reduced to writing apologias for the Premier's anti-referendum stance, manufacturing contrived rationales that amount to little more than those "Why-it-is-necessary-to-destroy-democracy-in-order-to-save-it" arguments so beloved of aspiring despots. Another of the Premier's more ardent but less inspired champions has already suggested his critics be rounded up en masse and charged with sedition. Another has called for web logs to be banned on the grounds they both critique and satirise Bermuda's leadership (given Government is doing such a respectable job of satirising itself, maybe they are indeed surplus to present requirements).
This odious tendency towards the authoritarian norm of enforced conformity and the annihilation of dissenting opinions is also manifesting itself in the civil service. A few weeks ago one of the probationary Thought Policewomen at the Ministry of Truth left an incendiary four-minute voicemail at this newspaper's office. It was a sustained rant that resembled one of those endless and nonsensical monologues by a minor state functionary in one of Vaclav Havel's plays that parodied the bureaucratic and authoritarian tendencies of East Bloc states. The Thought Policewoman's used bureaucratic language as a nightstick, attempting to beat both perceived non-conformity and the historical record into submission with the Official Version Of Events.
She was incensed the visiting replica of the had been described ? accurately ? in a headline as a "slave ship". The vessel was, she insisted, a "freedom ship". It was to be referred to in such terms in any future references this newspaper made to the ship.
Allowances can perhaps be made for both her youth and inexperience. But not for her cavalier abuse of both logic and history. The became a "freedom ship" precisely because the human cargo being transported aboard her in July, 1839 took matters into their own hands and seized the vessel during a bloody mutiny. is synonomous with the quest for freedom precisely because those enslaved aboard her fought for it. To obliterate that fact not only demeans their heroic actions but also makes a nonsense of why the replica was built ? to celebrate the indomitability of the human spirit.
type of diktat makes you wonder what type of training the Thought Police go through to be so completely indoctrinated in self-deceit and hypocrisy. It also makes you wonder what the hell your tax dollars are being spent on by this Government.
The term Orwellian is so overused (and misapplied) that it's almost lost its power these days. But there are aspects of Bermudian society today that could fairly be labelled by this name. The term can be used in two ways. To describe a political situation as "Orwellian" is to conjure up images of the tyrannical crushing of individualism by a centralised authority. But to describe resistance to such actions as "Orwellian" means there are those within a state whose primary allegiance is to the truth and who will fight back against crushing, state-enforced conformity.
While it's certainly worrying that the first definition applies to some of the actions of this Government, it's heartening that the second can equally apply to those who are steadfastly resisting its creeping encroachments on both individualism and individual liberties.