EU Moves Toward Authoritarianism

by Lorna Salzman (September 2016)

On May 31st of this year the EU Commission issued a press release, the first part of which follows and which contains a major contradiction in that it takes a token position in favor of free discourse, but nonetheless expresses an intent to censor the media and the internet. This is the kind of centralized unaccountable power typical of the EU which led to the pro-Brexit vote in Great Britain and has the distinct potential to arouse similar outrage at the EU and ultimately similar political responses. 

European Commission and IT Companies announce Code of Conduct on illegal online hate speech

Brussels, 31 May 2016

The Commission together with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft (“the IT companies”) today unveil a code of conduct that includes a series of commitments to combat the spread of illegal hate speech online in Europe.

The IT Companies support the European Commission and EU Member States in the effort to respond to the challenge of ensuring that online platforms do not offer opportunities for illegal online hate speech to spread virally. They share, together with other platforms and social media companies, a collective responsibility and pride in promoting and facilitating freedom of expression throughout the online world. However, the Commission and the IT Companies recognise that the spread of illegal hate speech online not only negatively affects the groups or individuals that it targets, it also negatively impacts those who speak out for freedom, tolerance and non-discrimination in our open societies and has a chilling effect on the democratic discourse on online platforms.

Perish the thought that the left or liberals could ever espouse the basic civil liberty of free speech. Perish the thought that the EU commission could actually defend Europe’s right to free speech. As things stand now, those who allow radical violent Muslims the right to vilify Jews and Christians and call for their extermination are free to continue their calls for violence, while critics of sharia law, honor killings, the subjugation of women and child marriage are cursed as “Islamophobes” and are now facing a curb on their free speech rights while crazed Muslims are given free rein. One could hardly find a better excuse for those who oppose the EU to accelerate the exit of some European countries from the oppressive reign of the EU authoritarians, whose leader, Jean Claude Juncker, has actually issued threats to all of Europe about what would happen to them if they considered an exit from the EU.

How many more civil liberties will be sacrificed in order to appease potential terrorists….. as if terrorists were actually reasonable and easily diverted from their fanatic cause? How can the elite bureaucrats so disastrously misunderstand the real roots and motivation of religious fanatics? They are not on a mission to insure that women’s bodies are covered or that schools serve halal food or to protect Muslims’ right to attend mosque. They are on a global mission to impose sharia law and a Muslim caliphate, and all those who do not agree with them will be slaughtered, wholesale in bombings, or one at a time in local attacks by “lone wolves.”

Europe is in the direst of straits. Its civilization and future are now threatened….a threat not reduced but amplified by the EU’s timorousness and trembling in the face of uncontrollable religious fanaticism and determination. Europe is no longer safe, nor are its survival and identity guaranteed. The dark side of this is the recusal of liberals from the battleground, leaving the field entirely to the radical right, neo-Nazis and pseudo-populist nationalists and ethnic isolationists. This is already happening in Hungary and other eastern countries will soon follow suit. And many Europeans will have no alternative but to support them at the very least, and join them as the situation becomes explosive.

This is defense of lives and property, and not least the preservation of civil society institutions and the rule of law. 

The open borders of the world have armed violent illegitimate struggles of “resistance” in far greater numbers than they have actually helped protect victims, and any look at the recent genocides in Africa and the drug-infused wars in Latin America are proof of this.

No one, the UN included, helped Rwandans and Congolese protect themselves or prevented Serbia from carrying out “ethnic cleansing” until hundreds of thousands had been killed. The American left, Noam Chomsky and Ramsey Clark stridently defended Milosevic and opposed the intervention of NATO to stop Serbian atrocities and ethnic cleansing. Worse still, money from abroad has increased Hamas’ military capacity, rather than being spent to repair the country and the economy. Yet the left has no problem with the re-arming of this terrorist group even as it blames American invasions and military support for dictators and monarchs like Saudi Arabia, and the failed state of crazy-like-a-loon Pakistan.

increase what is now just simmering anti-Semitism in Hungary and Belgium, but something more ominous and overt. Already there are voices urging a more powerful show of Christian doctrine and worship as an antidote to Islam. There is no comfort in this.

 

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Politics as if Evolution Mattered,” which addresses the intersection of evolution with socio-political policy. 

 

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