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The EU, though, now threatens free speech in Britain. The threat derives from the Charter of Fundamental Rights, acclaimed by EU leaders at the Nice Summit in December 2000, and now part of the draft EU constitution proposed by the Constitutional Convention presided over by M. Giscard d’Estaing. The Charter contains an implicit list of subjects that EU citizens have no right to talk about.
This result comes about through Article 54, the final article of the Charter. Article 54 says (in its entirety):
Nothing in this Charter shall be interpreted as implying any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms recognised in this Charter or at their limitation to a greater extent than is provided for herein.
Any activity … any act. A speech that is critical of one of the rights recognised by the Charter must surely be an act or activity aimed at the destruction or limitation of that right; a fortiori if the speaker expressly urges that the right be rescinded or limited. A newspaper or magazine article to the same effect must also be such an act-if it is not, what is?
Nothing in this Charter. Article 54 therefore trumps Article 11, which grants EU citizens a “right to freedom of expression” and provides that they should be free “to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers”. Article 11 should be annotated to say that its pretty sentiments apply only to ideas that don’t challenge the content of the Charter.
Here we see the true source of terror for modern politicians — the idea that masses might talk back to their betters. As with the McCain-Feingold campaign finance “reform”, the essential thrust is to prevent independent discussion of contentious issues. The EU Constitution is, astonishingly, far more straight forward and honest about it than McCain-Feingold.
Ejecting American imperialists out of the country: 2 million dead
Building communist utopia: 1 million refugees, hundreds of thousands of “reeducated” political prisoners, basic human rights suppressed, economy ruined while the rest of Asia is thriving
Admitting after three decades that your stupid communist policies have failed and the experiment is just about over: priceless.
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This FrontPage article accuses Jane Christensen, the 9/11 conspirozoid teaching at a North Carolina University, of being a Holocaust denier. I did a little googling and found this e-mail exchange between Christensen and fellow conspirofreak Mark Robinowitz (editor of oilempire.us, a website ugly enough to make your eyes bleed), who condemns her for linking to Holocaust deniers and blatant anti-Semites on her faculty homepage. Christensen’s response? “I rather think the ‘Holocaust’ denial sites have a great deal of credibility since the ‘Holocaust’ was the greatest hoax of all.”
If you aren’t intellectually honest enough for the people who run creepy 9/11 conspirozoid sites, there will still be a place for you at North Carolina Wesleyan University, I guess.
Yet if you put this kind of thing in a Tom Wolf book, he’d be accused of being too heavy handed in his satire.