Maggie's Farm

Orwell: "Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."

Speech crime, from Brussels Journal: "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." Read the rest.

More thought crime: "Belgian homosexual activists have brought charges against Mgr André-Mutien Léonard, the Roman-Catholic bishop of Namur, for homophobia, a criminal offence in Belgium according to the country’s 2003 Anti-Discrimination Act. In an interview last April in the Walloon weekly Télé Moustique, the bishop is said to have described homosexuals as “abnormal” people." Whole thing also at Brussels Journal

Euroland is going crazy with inventing speech crimes. It's sounding like the Soviet Union. Apparently Europeans don't mind being stripped of their freedoms, because I see no rebellion and no defiance - all I see is passive submission to the creeping, incremental tyranny of bureaucrats and politicians. One day, the honest among them will wake up and realize "I am afraid to think, to write, and to speak."

Flares quoted Roman historian Sallust today in a piece titled The Road to Serfdom: "Few men desire liberty: The majority are satisfied with a just master." A quote:

It occurs to me that there are two standard mechanisms by which our liberties are gradually removed, one for each party. Either they must be removed in the name of National Security or they must be removed in the name of Doing Good (aka Helping Poor People, Ending Poverty, Stopping Global Warming, Serving Gaia, etc.). It has famously been stated that "patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels", but I would submit that it is holier-than-thou do-gooderism which is the last refuge of mountebanks.

Amen to that.