From Hate Crime to Thoughtcrime. In Orwell’s classic novel 1984, thoughtcrime is the crime of thinking criminal thoughts, “the essential crime that contained all others in itself”.16 Hatred is permitted, indeed is mandatory, in Orwell’s dystopia, so long as it is directed against enemies of the state. But any heretical thought brings with it the prospect of grave punishment. Orwell demonstrates how, by policing language and by forcing people to carefully consider every aspect of their behaviour, orthodoxy can be sustained and heresy ruthlessly suppressed. In 1984, no hard evidence is necessary in order for someone to be held guilty of thoughtcrime. As with hate speech and hate crime today, the authorities in the novel have unlimited latitude to interpret people’s words and actions as having suspicious motives. The preoccupation with language and etiquette of those who propose hate speech regulation, and the significance that they ascribe to words, are reminiscent of the strategies employed in 1984 to reduce people’s capacity to think prohibited thoughts. As one character says in the novel, “in the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it”.17 The human instinct to question received wisdom and resist restrictions upon thought is, ultimately and thankfully, irrepressible. But inasmuch as this instinct can be repressed, the authorities must first encourage in the populace a form of wilful ignorance that Orwell calls “crimestop” – in 1984, the principal means of preventing oneself from committing 14 Explanatory report, Additional Protocol to the Convention on Cybercrime, Concerning the Criminalisation of Acts of a Racist and Xenophobic Nature Committed Through Computer Systems, Council of Europe, 28 January 2003 <http://conventions. coe.int/Treaty/en/Reports/Html/189.htm> 15 See “Blunkett admits Shipman error”, BBC News, 16 January 2004 <http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/ 3404041.stm> 16 George Orwell, 1984 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), 21. 17 Ibid., 55.
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