Censorship In Europe :: essays research papers

Americans think of Europeans as essentially like themselves. They believe European societies are like their own-rooted in the rule of law, freedom of religion, democratic government, food market competition, and an unfettered press. In recent years, however, Europeans exact given up an essential liberty freedom of speech. It is true that in the United States prevailing orthodoxies on whatsoever questions are ruthlessly enforced but it is still legal to say just about anything. Not so in much of Europe. In the kick the bucket decade or so countries we think of as fellow democracies-France, Germany, Switzerland and others-have passed laws that limit free speech for the same crude ideological reasons that drove the brief, unsuccessful trend of campus speech codes in the United States. Today in Europe there are laws as bad as anything George Orwell could have imagined. In some countries salutes have ruled that the facts are irrelevant, and that certain things must not be said whet her they are true or false. In others, a defendant in court who tries to explain or defend a forbidden view will be charged on the spot with a fresh offense. Even his attorney can be fined or go to jail for trying to mount a defense. In one case a judge ordered that a booksellers entire stock-innocent as well as offending titles-be burnedJust as Eastern Europe is emerging from it, westward Europe has entered the thought-crime era, in a return to the mentality that launched the Inquisition and the wars of religion. It is a tyranny of the left practiced by the very people who profess shock at the tactics of Joseph McCarthy, an solve of raw power in the service of pure ideology. The desire not merely to debate ones opponents but to disgrace them, muzzle them, fine them, jail them is short contrary to the spirit of civilized discourse. It is profoundly disturbing to find this ugly sentiment codified into law in some of the countries we think of as pillars of Western Civilization. At the same time, these laws cannot help but draw attention to the very ideas they forbid. Truth does not generally require the help of censors.There are dickens subjects about which Europeans can no longer speak freely. One is race and the other is Nazi Germany. "Anti-racism" laws generally take the form of forbidding the expression of opinions that might stir up "hatred" against any racial or ethnic group.