Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Not a bug but a feature   [Mark Steyn]

Andrew, Daniel Hannan is quite right that "the EU is undemocratic, not by oversight, but because it was designed that way". As David Warren writes of the reborn EU constitution:

The most frightening proposal is the one least appreciated: to create a European “charter of fundamental rights” that will accomplish the precise opposite of what it claims. It will swing the iron claw of “progressive thought” through the soft flesh of human variety, enterprise, and freedom, on an unprecedented scale.

It is time people realized that “human rights codes” are a weapon employed by the state to suppress disapproved behaviour by the individual. They cannot be wielded by the individual against the state, as independent civil and criminal courts could be. They are star chambers used, and designed to be used, to mount show trials, in which persons who fail to snap to attention when commissar issues the latest political corrections may be publicly demonized.

Lest you think Mr Warren is laying it on a bit strong, how about this item?

Last week, a German court sentenced a 55-year old Lutheran pastor to one year in jail for “Volksverhetzung” (incitement of the people) because he compared the killing of the unborn in contemporary Germany to the holocaust.

(You can read it in the original Kraut here.) One of the ever widening differences between the US and Europe is that in the former (despite the best efforts of McCain-Feingold) there is stilll a First Amendment while in Europe it's ever more assumed that there is no such thing as a "right to free speech": instead it's the state's role to serve as the arbiter of approved speech. (Via Kathy Shaidle.)

06/26 07:51 AMShare