Battleangel

Well, even though Americans ought to mind their own business and protect what little liberty they think they have, Gerard Alexander, visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute raises a couple of good points regarding the undermining of basic liberties in Europe as of late. Of course, I’d like to, in part, blame the US for prodding us along with its post-911 rule set but that doesn’t change the fact that these things are happening and that we have a great many cheerleading pundits and salivating politicians over here that are only too eager to consolidate their power.

Nevertheless, three disturbing trends now underway in Europe together represent the greatest erosion of democratic practice in the world’s advanced democracies since 1945. First, anti-Nazi laws are being adopted in places where neo-Nazism poses no serious threat. Second, speech laws have been dramatically expanded to sanction speech that “incites hatred” against groups based on their religion, race, ethnicity, or several other characteristics. Third, these incitement laws are being interpreted so loosely that they chill not just extremist views but mainstream ones too. The result is a serious distortion and impoverishment of political debate.

The praise ends there, and from that point forward, Alexander fails to make the right connections. He fails for instance to mention the Holocaust Industry and the Israel Lobby, probably because it is one of the things that Americans can’t really talk about freely. Sure, they wont go to prison but they will certainly never get another job with a prestigious think tank and so the curtailing of civil liberties must be described as a great deal more sophisticated in the US.