The Martialist: The Magazine For Those Who Fight Unfairly

Thoughtcrime,
they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed
forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but
sooner or later they were bound to get you.

– George Orwell, 1984

If you’ve never read 1984,
you need to do so now. I read the book for the first time in
1984. While Orwell’s Animal Farm is an insightful
and sobering parable of collectivist socio-politics. 1984 is Orwell’s
prescient masterpiece. The societal trends Orwell predicted in
describing his dystopian London have not merely been realized in
contemporary society; they have become pervasive.
Ubiquitous public surveillance, government micromanagement in the lives
of citizens, the militarization of police and the brutalization of
private citizens at the hands of some portions of law enforcement…
these are self-evident. Much more insidious, and much more potentially
harmful, is the Orwellian phenomenon that is also the most subtle.

It is thoughtcrime.

Society is evolving. With each
passing day, it becomes more like the thought-controlled totalitarian
nightmare of Orwell’s vision. What’s worse, it is doing so with the
consent and sanction of the very people it oppresses, for most of our
citizens blithely accept the establishment of thoughtcrime as a
cultural, civil, and even criminal offense.

Thoughtcrime in contemporary
society began as “political correctness” and “multiculturalism.” These
are cultural movements that hold as their central tenets the notions
that some terms, phrases, and lines of thought are intrinsically
offensive and inappropriate for public discourse, and that history has
traditionally been the exclusive domain of dead white European males
whose injustices to all other cultures have been whitewashed (while the
historical contributions of other cultures have been simultaneously
omitted from the record), respectively. The scions of political
correctness and multiculturalism took root in our schools and in our
government, teaching our children and pushing through legislation that
made it thoughtcrime to adhere to the old ways of
the culturally insensitive, ethnocentric Anglos whose evil designs on
power the movements were designed to foil. As these movements gained in
influence and in converts, it became a cultural crime — punishable by
social censure — to engage in politically incorrect language or
ethnocentric attitudes. Thus, kicking and screaming, would those who
adhered to traditional values be dragged into the
brave new world advocated by political leftists (who are at the
forefront of the establishment of thoughtcrime).

The movements became pervasive and
their effects have been felt in all facets of contemporary life. Sexual
harassment on the job was once considered to be demanding sexual favors
from a coworker under threat of losing the job or opportunities for
advancement. Now, one can be guilty of “sexual harassment” simply for
complimenting a coworker on her appearance, hanging up a swimsuit
calendar, or even looking to long (staring or “ogling”) at someone.
Colleges and universities, once bastions of free thought and the
exchange of ideas, have become Orwellian prisons in which speech codes
rule the day and students can be harassed, punished, and even expelled
for using a forbidden word or advocating a politically incorrect
concept in public or in a school paper. Government officials once paid
lip-service to religious belief, but now all mention of religion (at
least those religions popular with dead white Europeans) are being
purged from the public square and any prayer or mention of one’s god is
considered offensive and potentially hateful.

Consider these few
examples: 

• In March of 2007, a group of
  Republican students were charged by school officials (and face academic
  punishment) at San Francisco State University with “desecration” of
  paper mock-ups resembling Hamas and Hezbollah flags (the symbols of
  Middle Eastern terrorist groups). Specifically, a complaint filed by
  another student charged the Republican students with “attempts to
  incite violence and create a hostile environment” and “actions of
  incivility,” essentially attempting to criminalize academically a political
  protest.
• In February of 2005, LeMoyne
  College in Syracuse, New York, expelled student Scott McConnell from
  its Masters program. His grades were good and he committed no breach of
  the college’s rules. His only crime was writing a paper
  in which he advocated a return to the use of corporal punishment in
  American schools. McConnell was eventually forced to enroll
  elsewhere. 
• Last year (March, 2006), a
  Quaker employed as head of Reference and
  Instructional Services at Bromfield Library on Ohio State University’s
  Mansfield campus was informed that, by unanimous faculty vote, he was
  to be investigated for “sexual harassment.” His crime? He recommended
  (in his capacity with the library) that freshman read several
  conservatively themed books such as The Marketing of Evil
  (which, among other things, describes the cultural marketing campaign
  used to legitimize “gay rights” in society) and Senator Rick Santorum’s
  It Takes a Family.
• Actor Isaiah Washington
  voluntarily entered rehab
  after he prompted howls of societal outrage for denying
  publicly that he called a fellow actor a “faggot.” 
• The Weather Channel’s
  Heidi Cullen, a climatologist who
  hosts the program The Climate Code, said late last
  year that “global warming” skeptics should be stripped of their
  American Meteorological Society credentials for daring to
  question whether “global warming” is a man-made phenomenon (or that it
  is even occurring). Cullen is, essentially, equating global
  warming skeptics with Holocaust deniers. “If a meteorologist can’t
  speak to the fundamental science of climate change,” Cullen wrote,
  “then maybe the AMS shouldn’t give them a Seal of Approval. Clearly,
  the AMS doesn’t agree that global warming can be blamed on cyclical
  weather patterns…” 
• In March, 2007, the United
  States 9th Circuit
  Court of Appeals ruled that public employers “are permitted to curtail
  employee speech as long as their ‘legitimate administrative interests’
  outweigh the employee’s interest in freedom of speech.” Specifically,
  the phrase “Natural Family, Marriage and Family Values” posted in a
  meeting notice on a City of Oakland bulletin board was found by the
  City (as affirmed by the 9th Circuit Court) to be “homophobic” and to
  constitute “sexual-orientation-based harassment.” 
• Again in March, a New Jersey
  Superior court judge equated all
  homeschooling to child abuse, decrying the state’s lack of control over
  home-schooled children on the grounds that such children could be
  harmed by their parents without the State’s oversight. “In today’s
  threatening world,” said Judge Thomas Zampino, “where we seek to
  protect children from abuse, not just physical, but also educational
  abuse, how can we not monitor the educational welfare of all our
  children?”
• In Vancouver, Washington, a
  group of high school students was
  suspended for holding a prayer group in the student commons. (In March
  of 2007, they were told they could register as a school group and be
  provided with a classroom for these activities.) 
• Within the last year, The
  View‘s Rosie
  O’Donnell accused television personality Kelly Ripa of homophobia,
  accused Miss USA owner Donald Trump of immorality
  and hypocrisy, and accused the producers of American Idol
  of racism and “weightism.” In all cases, the accused parties felt
  compelled to address these irresponsible allegations in the media. In
  each case, O’Donnell engaged in her slander without any proof
  whatsoever of her assertions; she simply decided that she knew what
  these people were thinking and called them out for
  their behavior on these grounds. 
• In 2005, a Pentecostal pastor
  in Sweden was acquitted by Sweden’s
  high court. The crime for which he was tried was “inciting hatred
  against homosexuals,” an accusation made after a 2003 sermon in which
  he characterized homosexuality as “a deep cancerous tumor on all of
  society.” 
• In late 2002, Senator Trent
  Lott effectively ended his political
  career when he praised 100-year-old Senator Strom Thurmond at the
  latter’s 100th birthday party. “When Strom Thurmond ran for president,
  we voted for him,” he is reported to have said. “We’re proud
  of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we
  wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years, either.”
  For these words, Lott was accused of racism (Thurmond ran on a
  segregationist platform during the presidential election in question).
  He apologized repeatedly, but was damaged political goods from that
  point on. 
• In 2001, a college Republican
  group distributed posters in support
  of the war in Afghanistan. the group’s members were harassed on campus
  and told their posters were “hate flyers.” 

Legally, the first of the “hate
crime” legislation gave political correctness and multiculturalism the
force of law. Now, the government is not merely supposed to concern
itself for punishing you for what you’ve done. No,
now we presume that it is possible to know what you were thinking
when you committed a crime, and to punish you more severely
for thinking incorrect thoughts while engaged in
your crime. It is not enough to prosecute you for assault or vandalism,
for example; now we must further punish you if your victim was one of a
number of protected socio-political and/or ethnic pressure groups (and
thus a member of a specially protected class). While prosecution under
“hate crime” legislation is notably rare (if not absent entirely) for
crimes committed by ethnic minorities whose victims are white, any and
all crime commited by white men and women against persons of color or
those who are members of other pressure groups (such as homosexuals)
usually becomes national news and prompts calls for further
indoctrination — excuse me, sensitivity and anger-management training
— in our government and educational institutions.

There was a time when, to commit
an offense, one had to commit an offense. That is,
one had to affirmatively commit some action that could be seen,
objectively, to constitute infringement on another’s sovereignty, a
violation of another’s rights. To intimidate someone, you had to
threaten them in so many words. To sexually harass someone, you had to
make explicit demands. To offend someone… well, you could offend them
in all the ways you can offend them now (though there are more ways to
offend people today), but if you did offend them, there wasn’t much
more they could do than be offended. These days, to
offend anyone for any reason, no matter how hypersensitive their
sensibilities, is to risk becoming a pariah, losing one’s job, and
being verbally and even physically harassed and threatened — all under
the aegis of the righteous indignation of the politically correct,
whose motives are alleged to be pure and whose watchword is, laughably
enough, tolerance!

There was a time when ignorant,
prejudiced people threw around the term “nigger.” There was a time when
vulgar schoolchildren threw around taunts like “faggot” and “queer.”
Now, the epithet “nigger” is the unspeakable “n-word.” Now the insult
“faggot” is the hateful epithet “the f-word” (supplanting the venerable
fuck). Now, any insult of any kind is equated to the
worst of racial epithets (the “n-word”), and this in turn — using a word
— is equated to burning crosses on people’s lawns or even to
participating in lynch mobs.

As the myriad ways in which one
can commit thoughtcrime is ratcheted up, the standards against which
these offenses are judged become more mercurial and even viciously
unfair. Now, one need not even use words that are offensive. All that
is required is for some member of a special interest group to accuse
you of speaking in code, of hiding your crime of
hate behind words intended to mask your feelings. Now, the politically
correct Thought Police presume to tell you not just what you said, but
what you meant to say, and they will punish you for
what they claim you thought if they cannot nail you
for what you actually said. Just as criminals in the dystopian SciFi
film Minority Report are arrested before
they commit crimes the government’s psychics claim they will commit,
our society’s thought criminals are now being tried and convicted in
the court of public opinion for what they meant to
do or say rather than what actually happened.

To commit throughtcrime is to make
anyone else uncomfortable for any reason. You
cannot control another person’s feelings, and one’s feelings are not
tools of cognition — but those politicians, lawyers, activists, and
agitators ramming political correctness and multiculturalism down our
throats care only about their feelings.
Specifically, they believe they have the right
never to be offended, never to feel bad for any reason. If you make
these people feel bad, you are not simply in disagreement with them; you
have committed an offense against them.

I’ve experienced this myself at a
previous job. Not once, but twice, I was reported to Human Resources by
an unnamed coworker (whose identity I was never allowed to know). This
person had seen me use a small pocketknife to open
a box of paper and reported me to HR for “making her feel
uncomfortable.” This was done without my knowledge and without my
participation; I was violating no policy (and I was not the only worker
in the office with a pocket knife). My crime was making her feel
bad through no direct action of my own.
The simple fact that I was not politically correct, by her delicate and
hoplophobic standards, constituted an offense for which my job was
threatened.

Worse, when you disagree with
those who are politically correct, when you hold an opinion in
opposition to the arbitrary and often capricious guidelines they have
instituted by socio-political bullying and judicial fiat, you don’t
merely upset them; you enrage them. This is because
those who insist on political correctness are fundamentally insecure
people. When you believe you should never feel bad for any reason, that
you have a protected right never to feel bad, you
live in fear and trepidation at the prospect of being upset, of having
your delicate sensibilities offended. When a free-thinking individual
dares to disagree with your politically correct dogma, he or she denies
you affirmation of your beliefs. To deny someone this
affirmation was once simply to disagree with him. Now, disagreeing with
those who are politically correct is the commission of an explicit
offense. Denying affirmation and validation to the scions of
politically correctness denies them what they believe to be their right
and their entitlement. It is thus a form of theft, a manner and a
matter of affront.

It is thoughtcrime.

The establishment of thoughtcrime
is exclusively a function of the political left. This is because, to be
a leftist, one must relinquish all ties to reality. The leftist’s
wishful thinking supplants any realistic appreciation for the world as
it is. The leftist’s feelings supersede any logical analysis of the
causes and effects of societal phenomena. The leftist’s desire to
control his fellow human being’s behavior in an effort to prevent
anyone from feeling bad in any way at any time
overrides any rational impulse to hold people accountable for their
actions and to force individuals to develop the emotional and
intellectual fortitude to cope with ideas and opinions they dislike.

Because leftism requires the
individual to suspend thought, free and critical
thinking becomes a threat. This threat cannot be tolerated by the
Thought Police, it must be stamped out as the crime against leftist
demagoguery that it is. Thoughtcrime, therefore, is integral to the
success and necessary to the further encroachment of leftist political
and economic thought. As long as thoughtcrime continues to be
crime — and as punishments for thoughtcrime become more severe even as
the potential list of thoughtcrimes grows ever longer — libertarians,
conservatives, and classical liberals will lose ground to the leftists
who seek to establish Orwellian and totalitarian control over their
fellow human beings. In the world of the leftists, all animals are
equal — but some animals are definitely more equal than others. This
is intolerable in what is supposed to be a free society.

Thoughtcrime and its establishment
are relevant to this publication because martialism and
the mindset of self-defense are quickly becoming classified as
thoughtcrimes in popular culture.  The ideology of leftism is
ascendant and has been for some time, as evidenced by ever-stricter
“gun control” laws and the increasing likelihood of facing jail time as
punishment for acts of legitimate self-defense.  This is the
society we live in.  This is the bleak future we face.
 We cannot afford to stand by and let it happen.  We
must speak out about it.  We must be willing to offend.
 We must brave charges of thoughtcrime and continue to stand
behind the philosophy of martialism.