For the first time, what has happened to John Cleese isn’t funny. Instead, he is living the adage “when you laugh, the world laughs with you; when you cry, you cry alone.” He is because, sadly, he is a voice crying out alone. Alone because Britain of today has done everything it can to intimidate its citizens from crying out at all.
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As anyone who knows anything about British comedy, John Cleese has been at its forefront for six decades. His work is iconic, from Monty Python to Fawlty Towers to numerous movies and television appearances. So important has Cleese been to modern British culture that it is impossible not to recount the importance of the shows in which he has starred, and so integral has he been in these that it’s equally impossible to list them without seeing his performances in your mind’s eye.
Yet Cleese is today starring in something that is no laughing matter in Britain. Because of a series of posts about Islam, Cleese is threatened with cancelation for the first time in his career. (RELATED: The People Who Once Laughed With John Cleese Are Now His Punchlines)
As a comedian, Cleese made his living and societal mark by observing and lampooning British conduct. Then, the world laughed with him. Now, he is crying out against certain Islamic practices; in today’s Britain, that can make you very lonely indeed.
On Sept. 22, Cleese was referred to Prevent, a British program designed to assess speech for radical content and possible links to terrorism. The referral claims his social media posts trip “several indicators used in PREVENT risk assessments for anti-Muslim hate and counter-extremism concerns.” (RELATED: The Unfathomable Horror of Britain’s Rape-Gang Holocaust)
There is nothing in Cleese’s posts that were included in the pro-Islam 5Pillars (a website concentrating on British Muslim news) article that indicates any reason for counter-extremism concerns. There is not, because Cleese was merely stating his opinion. The complaint against Cleese’s opinions is intimidation, pure and simple. (RELATED: The Fall of Britain — and the Warning for America)
While Cleese may be the lonely voice on Islam in today’s Britain, he is not alone in running afoul of government censorship in Britain. Two years ago, J.K. Rowling challenged Scotland’s hate crime law by audaciously describing transgender women as men. As she posted on the day the law took effect:
Scottish lawmakers seem to have placed higher value on the feelings of men performing their idea of femaleness, however misogynistically or opportunistically, than on the rights and freedoms of actual women and girls. It is impossible to accurately describe or tackle the reality of violence and sexual violence committed against women and girls, or address the current assault on women’s and girls’ rights, unless we are allowed to call a man a man. Freedom of speech and belief are at an end in Scotland if the accurate description of biological sex is deemed criminal.
In both cases, it is clear Cleese and Rowling have merely been stating their opinions in public. There is nothing inherently dangerous about either — nothing, that is, unless you consider thinking dangerous. (RELATED: Fry vs. Rowling)
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What is equally clear is that government censorship runs in a consistent ideological direction: from the left. The statutes Cleese and Rowling are facing were intended to dissuade comments that run counter to a leftist agenda. (RELATED: The Global Censorship Cancer)
Fortunately, neither Cleese nor Rowling has been silenced. This certainly applies to their earlier work, which has enriched us all. It equally applies to their contemporary words.
Cleese and Rowling are informing us of their points of view, something that used to be commonplace in Britain, the cradle of modern democratic rights. We are once again richer for them.
This time, though, they are informing us of something even more important. They are informing us of the erosion of British rights and, even more, Western values, occurring under a leftist guise of inclusivity that is instead being used to enforce exclusivity: the Left’s value system.
The effectiveness of this leftist exclusivity is shown by the intimidated silence with which Cleese and Rowling’s comments are received. While their stature is great enough to shield them from the statutes, not so much for average Britons.
One of John Cleese’s most trenchant comedic performances was a Monty Python skit on the Ministry of Silly Walks. It hilariously lampoons government’s petty pretentiousness. It is tempting to laugh off what has now befallen Cleese, something he himself did: “All good comedy material. For those with a sense of humor.”
But what has befallen Britain is no laughing matter. It is beyond the petty pretentiousness of government bureaucracy; it is instead a form of government tyranny. And it endangers a free society. Cleese’s experience is a reminder that the Brit’s stiff upper lip is a thing of the past; the thing of the present is the British government’s desire to keep the Brit’s lip buttoned down regarding their policies.
READ MORE from J.T. Young:
Philly Fraud: What Woke Wrought
The Left’s Victimhood Is About Strategy not Sympathy
Republicans Can’t Win Telling Only Half the Story
J.T. Young is the author of the book Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed America’s Socialist Left from RealClear Publishing. Follow him on Substack.
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