Freedom Circling the Drain in Europe
By Tom Gilbreath
Foreign Policy Magazine called it, “The Speech That Stunned Europe.” On February 14th, Vice President J. D. Vance addressed the Munich Security Conference. His speech came one day after yet another in a series of recent attacks on that city, carried out by Muslim terrorists.
There are many highly consequential elements to the Vice President’s speech, but I want to focus here on only one — the erosion of fundamental human rights in Europe. From that continent, Christianity, along with the freedoms that follow it, spread to much of the world. Now, rights such as the freedoms of religion and speech abruptly end with the application of one of several labels. And those labels are easily applied by the government so that government leaders can protect their power. The labels include “hate,” “radical,” and “extremist.”
Vance spoke of Romania where, in December, they “canceled the results of a presidential election based on the flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency and enormous pressure from its continental neighbors.” Vance said, “I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election. He warned that if things don’t go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany, too.”
Vance brought up the Cold War. He said, “Consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, that closed churches, that canceled elections. Were they the good guys? Certainly not, and thank God they lost the Cold War.”
He reminded them that last year in the United Kingdom, officials convicted a man for praying silently — not on the abortion clinic’s property, but within fifty meters of it. As Vance said, the man was, “not obstructing anyone, not interacting with anyone, just silently praying on his own.”
Then, in October of last year, “the Scottish government began distributing letters to citizens whose houses lay within so-called ‘safe access zones,’ warning them that even private prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law.” Vance added, “Naturally, the government urged readers to report any fellow citizens suspected guilty of thoughtcrime.”
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz rebuked Vance, saying: “We’ve created institutions that ensure that our democracies can defend themselves against their enemies, and rules that do not restrict or limit our freedom but protect it.”
The argument that we must restrict free speech in order to “protect” free speech sounds like something right out of 1984. Remember Orwell’s warning. His fictional Big Brother government used slogans like, “War is peace,” and “Freedom is slavery.” “Censorship protects free speech” fits right in, but sadly, there’s nothing fictional about it.
A new global totalitarianism is on the march in Europe, and it will not be satisfied until Antichrist himself rules the world.
