In 1968, I was a History & Politics joint honours student at Liverpool University (it didn’t need sponsorship in those days) at a time when my French oppos were tearing cobbles up from the Parisian streets and throwing them at the cops.

This all seemed wonderfully romantic to me at the time. There were long mornings spent in the Arts Block coffee lounge (when we should’ve been in lectures) discussing the imminent collapse of the revisionist running-dog lackey lickspittle government of Harold Wilson – a swine backing the American Diem regime in Vietnam…how could he? – and endless debates about how, when a consensus for Socialism had been reached, the organs of the State would wither away to produce the eternal Utopian equality of which we were all so certain.

But there was just one dimension of this that didn’t work for me. Somehow, I found it impossible to see Ted Heath as a vengeful Tsar, or the good old English copper as a fascist, or indeed the Queen as a final vestige of Absolute Rule over the chained and hopelessly oppressed but interminably brave working class. This may have something to do with the fact that, quite obviously, none of them were any such thing…especially the working class, most of whom were keen Enoch Powell fans.

The politics department at the time (and the student body as a whole – with the exception of the Engineers, who were mainly polite middle class Arabs or English Nazis) was riddled with conspiracy theory. Danny Cohn-Bendit, Tariq Ali, and almost all LSE students were under surveillance, about to launch a counterculture, and probably also on the verge of a world movement to destroy the CIA….which had of course killed JFK, and then programmed Sirhan Sirhan to murder RFK.

I visited the US and spoke to Californian students convinced that the only reason Dick Nixon was interested in bringing the boys home from Veetnarrn was so he could use them to intern every radical in the country. I even spoke to one bloke who told me how Jack Kennedy “had been diddling Marilyn Monroe and that’s why the Hollywood mafia rubbed him out”.

All of this gave me, before too long, a lifetime aversion to conspiracy theory. Back then, my aversion was based on the Space Cadet ability of the liberal Left to see two bluebottles crawling up a window as a conspiracy. And I retained this view pretty much up until 2004.

Fast forward 45 years from 1968 to 2013, and while the idea of incompetent egomaniacs signing up to Vatican or Zionist Elder global plots remains ridiculous to me, this should not blind any of us to several creeping trends being created by mad people with shared interests. I’ve nothing against them having shared interests, but I draw the line at them wanting my views not to be shared with anyone.

Over the last twenty days alone, we have seen laws passed in Spain, France, and Greece forbidding the criticism of (or even negative views about) the state of the banking system and the economy – or indeed even to demonstrate the citizenry’s dislike of it. Much as I can’t deal with 75+% of the UK Guardian’s output, we have also seen MI6 threatening to charge and imprison journalists there for the heinous crime of peddling the truth. And of course in the US, we have watched as various individuals were hounded and run to ground

Now pardon me for breathing here, but this really is not 1960s leftist paranoid bollocks: it is an attack – not concerted, but certainly loud and cacophonous – upon the right of media organisations and individuals to offer an alternative view. Not a seditious accusation, not an uninformed polemic attack, and not a rabid libel against certain individuals: no….these laws ban different interpretations of the Truth.

Yesterday we had the worst example so far, when Shinzo Abe secured final passage of a bill granting Japan’s government sweeping powers to declare state secrets. The Bill won final approval of the measures after opposition parties forced a no-confidence vote in Abe’s govt in the lower house.

Well now, we don’t want any of that, do we? As Zero Hedge points out today. ‘the first rule of the pending Japan’s Special Secrets Bill is that what will be a secret is secret. The right to know has now been officially superseded by the right of the government to make sure you don’t know what they don’t want you to know’. This contains a horrible echo of that which I posted about two days ago in relation to Mark Williams-Thomas and his company accounts: not only are they a secret, the Act of Parliament allowing them to be a secret is a secret.

One Abe Cabinet member opined after the hoo-haa of yesterday’s proceedings, “just as Germany needed a strong man like Hitler to revive defeated Germany, Japan needs people like Abe to dynamically induce change”.

It would be just great if I was making all of this up, but you can check it out every which way that suits your fancy: it’s on the public record, because the Japanese media still have the right to print neutral stories about how, in future, they won’t be able to publish negative stories any more. You can hold your breath with no danger in attendance of that outcome, because it is both inevitable and imminent.

I first sniffed this arrival of totalitarian abuse of the law when Super-Injunctions loomed over the horizon of our culture during 2009. Am I surprised that sociopathic lawyers with zero consequences awareness of their relentless search for fees were in the vanguard of liberty destruction? Not even slightly….although I applaud and admire those beyond the Human Rights industry who are prepared to stand up against it.

Let me tell you something. It’s only one bloke’s view, but I’ve been around the block and been given a dose of reality meths more than most. Today, the Prime Minister is a creature of fascist business. Today, your average middle and upper-ranking copper is bent in favour of fascist media interests. Today, the Royal Family has negotiated a deal without public inspection to ensure its members can behave in a despicable manner without any media being allowed to report that behaviour. Today, laws are being quietly launched under the radar to make it cheap and easy to silence internet criticism of Government policy. Today, the incomes of the former working class are being nibbled to death by a million sticklebacks.

This is real, it is here, and it is not a product of the fevered imagination of an old guy who has lost it. Sleep well tonight: and as from tomorrow, try to keep your eyes and mind open at all times.

Earlier at The Slog: new chart shows how the end is night for the stock markets