Censorship In Europe :: essays research papers

Americans think of Europeans as essentially like themselves. They believe European societies argon like their own-rooted in the rule of law, freedom of religion, democratic government, market competition, and an untied press. In recent years, however, Europeans bugger off given up an essential liberty freedom of speech. It is true that in the United States prevailing orthodoxies on most questions are ruthlessly enforced still it is still legal to utter just about anything. Not so in much of Europe. In the last decade or so countries we think of as laddie democracies-France, Germany, Switzerland and others-have passed laws that limit free speech for the same crude ideological reasons that host the brief, unsuccessful vogue of campus speech codes in the United States. Today in Europe there are laws as bad as anything George Orwell could have imagined. In virtually countries courts have ruled that the facts are irrelevant, and that certain things must(prenominal) not be said whether they are true or false. In others, a checkant in court who tries to explain or defend a forbidden view will be charged on the spot with a fresh offense. Even his lawyer can be hunky-doryd or go to jail for trying to mount a defense. In one case a judge ordered that a booksellers whole stock-innocent as well as offending titles-be burnedJust as Eastern Europe is emerging from it, Western 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 beneficial by the very people who profess shock at the tactics of Joseph McCarthy, an exercise of raw power in the service of pure ideology. The go for not merely to debate ones opponents but to disgrace them, muzzle them, fine them, jail them is utterly contrary to the spirit of civilized discourse. It is profoundly move to find this ugly sentiment codified into law in some of the countries we think of as pillars of Western Civiliza tion. At the same time, these laws cannot help but draw attention to the very ideas they forbid. Truth does not broadly speaking consider the help of censors.There are two 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.