Janet Albrechtsen, and never mind the ideas when you can settle for a routine dose of abuse ...

(Above: George Orwell's personal account of his time in Spain fighting for the socialist cause).

The problem with Janet Albrechtsen of course, is not a question of free speech.

It's that no one can shut her up.

The drivel, always with a right wing bias, that comes from her keyboard is published on a regular, defensive, and inaccurate basis in The Australian, giving her opportunities to whinge, moan, lash, bedevil, excoriate and expound from a national masthead, backed by an unseemly amount of Murdoch money, without which the unprofitable rag would likely fold.

It's part of the victimisation process the right endures regularly, routinely, and even when in power. Access to a national masthead, and the right to yammer on endlessly, as in Mad march of political correctness. Oh the suffering ...

And it invariably involves simple-minded distortions of interesting truths.

And invariably George Orwell's name always bobs up - such an Orwellian dude - even though Orwell was an eccentric life-long socialist.

Here's Albrechtsen's typical invocation:

In Quadrant last year, Shelley Gare wrote that those who are totsched find "their efforts left to expire soundlessly like a butterfly in a jar". When Orwell wrote his 1938 classic Homage to Catalonia, which addressed Stalinist Russia's involvement in the Spanish Civil War, the left-wing literati simply ignored it.

Reading this throwaway remark, a reader might be inclined to forget that Orwell's 1938 classic Homage to Catalonia addressed Orwell's involvement in the Spanish Civil War fighting on the socialist side, along with the peculiar, idiosyncratic, personal events that led him to fight for POUM, rather than the Soviet-supported International Brigades, and the events in Spain that led him to become a life-long anti-Stalinist. (For that kind of information, you must leave the pages of the The Australian, and trot off to the book's wiki, here).

But then Orwell was a difficult author during his lifetime, with very mixed results. Albrechtsen makes great play of Homage to Catalonia only achieving sales of 1500 by the time of Orwell's death, but then only 1,100 copies of Down and Out in Paris and London, of 1,750 printed, with the left overs remaindered.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying was a turkey on release, lost during the first days of the second world war, and it was really only Gollancz flogging The Road To Wigan Pier to its newly formed Left Book Club that made it something of a 40,000 print run solid seller.

The deeper irony with Animal Farm? Well apart from that conservative banker T. S. Eliot turning it down for its Trotskyite line, and a restrained initial print run of 4,500, and a mixed reception in the UK, it only became a wider success when it hit the United States ... when J. Edgar Hoover and various US agencies found it to their political taste.

The Signet book in various printings has sold millions of copies. The introduction reprints a Times Literary Supplement article (August 6, 1954) which quotes Orwell: "Every line 1 have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism...," but omits the rest of the sentence "and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it."

Sssh, whatever you do, don't mention the democratic socialism. And when Time reprinted the 1954 edition?

The editors' preface echoes Time-Life's aggressive anti-Communism, and while seeming to appear fair uses catch phrases such as "Stalinist betrayal," "Communist duplicity," and "pig commissars." Muggeridge is a bit more even-handed; at one point he argues that "Animal Farm is as relevant to contemporary America – where the Century of the Common Man has become the Century of the Common Millionaire – as ever it was to Soviet Russia." (and there's a lot more fascinating information on Orwell and his first editions at this exhibition, here).

We've strayed far from Albrechtsen, but for a reason, because life is more interesting, diverse and lively than allowed for in her simplistic abstractions.

Suffice to say, Orwell at various points in his publishing life was ignored, and not for reasons of Stalinist conspiracies, and not just by the left-wing literati, but by the book buying public in general.

And routinely, he's been praised and used by people whom, in the normal course of things, he would have loathed, especially those who glibly ignore his devotion to his own peculiar brand of democratic socialism.

And that's the way it goes with all of Albrechtsen's litany of whinges and moans. As usual, climate science rears its ugly head:

It's used by those who tell us that climate change will destroy us all if we do not act immediately. The sceptics are being totsched. Opposing views? What opposing views?

To which one might ask, Opposing science? What opposing science?, unless of course you take the view that science is simply a matter of views and personal notions and contentions, and isn't subject to any kind of burden of proof, and so climate science can be utterly destroyed by reference to alarmists and warministas, in much the same way as intelligent designers and creationists can stand alongside Darwinists, and claim their scepticism is being totsched.

But perhaps the funniest routine is what Albrechtsen calls the consensus con, as if there isn't a deep-seated consensus amongst the commentariat.

Here's Gerard Henderson yesterday in the Herald:

There is room for a thoughtful discussion about Western culture, immigration and birth rates, which can readily co-exist with opposition to terrorism from the extreme right, the extreme left or militant Islamism ...

... mass murder in Norway should not be allowed to inhibit free speech. That would be counter-productive.

And here's Albrechtsen:

Over the past few weeks, some on the Left have claimed that those of us who have raised questions about multiculturalism, immigration and the relationship between Islam and modernity have blood on our hands for the mass murder in Oslo. Here, murder is used as a muzzle to close down free speech. And this is just the latest addition to a growing list of tactics to curb free speech, and even worse, to stifle genuine inquiry.

Talk about a consensus, the consensus of course being that the commentariat only wants to preach truth, justice and enlightenment, and has been unjustly persecuted by unholy leftists ...

As for a genuine enquiry into the relationship between European Crusader Christianity and mass murder? Seeing as how Albrechtsen has expended an enormous amount of energy over the years explaining how Islam results in rape, murder and mayhem, and so might be interested in a little balancing of the books?

Forget it Jake, this is Janet Town.

It turns out that this stifling genuine inquiry is part of a vast political conspiracy involving PC, which is to say political correctness and the PC crowd.

PC has victimised all sorts of people, from Mark Steyn to poor long suffering Andrew Bolt. The PC crowd, it seems, are Islamic:

The PC crowd is clever. They know there are no useful legal tests about hurt feelings and inciting hate. They enact nice-sounding laws, build bureaucracies and wait for them to blossom and bludgeon free speech. They have effectively co-opted Islamic-style oppression to prohibit debate; be it about Islam or anything else they wish to fence off from free speech.

Here's what the pond wants to know. If the PC crowd is so clever and so Islamic, why on earth can't they shut Janet Albrechtsen up?

Week after week she yammers on about nothing, and her final par is as good an example of this yammering as you might find:

The principles are clear enough: free speech is not a Left-Right thing as Mark Steyn said. It's a free-unfree thing.

Uh huh. Which presumably is why Albrechtsen constructs the entirety of her argument as a left-right, Islamic wrong-Janet right thing.

You don't get to cry in favour of free speech just to defend those with whom you agree. And free speech must include the right to offend. If we prosecute offensive opinions, we just encourage ever more ridiculous claims to protection. We fuel that marketplace of outrage. And we end up shutting down the true genius of modern Western civilisation: the contest of ideas.

Uh huh. Except everybody persecuting the commentariat must shut up, stop totsching ideas and deliver the consensus con that rightly belongs to the commentariat ... on George Orwell, climate science, and yadda yadda, what else ya got? Julia Gillard two legs bad, Tony Abbott four legs good.

Now there's a contest of ideas.

But here's the rub. Albrechtsen's piece is an ideas-free zone. She wilfully refuses to deal with Orwell on his own ground, she burbles that views are sufficient for science, she delivers a long list of hapless, long suffering commentariat victims, and best of all, she blames stifling political correctness for Pauline Hanson:

... remember this: the stifling political correctness that rejected an open debate about immigration in the early 1990s helped fuel the emergence and popularity of Pauline Hanson.

Uh huh. Pauline Hanson is all the fault of stifling political correctness, somehow enacted while John Howard was in power and encouraged the disendorsed Liberal candidate to speak her mind, and then took several months to make up his mind that he didn't much like what was on her mind (but in the meantime, how the possums had been stirred).

Well here's a thought.

John Howard = stifling political correctness.

Yes, after going down the rabbit hole with Albrechtsen, and biting into the mushroom, things get really weird. And paranoia can result:

The other trick is to quietly exclude certain people from the national discourse. It is best summed up by a German word: totschweigtaktik. To be totsched is to be subjected to death by silence: books, ideas, people that challenge the status quo are simply ignored.

Death by silence? Janet Albrechtsen? Tell 'em they must be dreaming ...

Hold on, I get it now.

I thought the column was about ideas and freedom and so forth and etcetera, and actually it's just a set of comedy stylings about the evils of leftists and Islamics.

Here at the pond, we'd love to earn a charge of Islamophobia, but truth to tell, Islamic viewpoints are almost entirely absent from the opinion pages of the mainstream media. Which is why we'll continue to settle for the Pellists, the Jensenists and the commentariat, such as Albrechtsen, who love to talk about the freedom of ideas, but can't deliver any ideas where it counts ... like climate change and George Orwell and extremist mass murderers with a Crusader Christian agenda ...

(Below: and speaking of an absence of ideas and facts, a reader recently reminded the pond of Janet Albrechtsen receiving a drubbing from Media Watch, long ago, and The Australian's considered response).