One of the points that I often emphasize at my own blog is that there simply is no First Amendment in Europe.
Just ask Madonna:
Prosecutors plan to keep an eye on Madonna’s weekend concert in Duesseldorf to see if the pop diva repeats the mock crucifixion scene that has drawn fire from religious leaders.
Johannes Mocken, a spokesman for prosecutors in Duesseldorf, said Tuesday that a repeat of that scene during Sunday’s concert could be construed as insulting religious beliefs.
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Mocken said authorities would rely on media reports rather than sending observers to the concert and that the show might be covered by laws protecting artistic freedoms.
Read that again: “might be covered.” So not only is there no blanket freedom of expression, but what partial protections do exist are so vague that even the prosecutors don’t know how they apply to whom under what circumstances.
Of course, we have our own “freedom of artistic expression” problems here in the U.S., most of which can be summed up in three letters: FCC. And there is still a small smattering of Robert Bork acolytes who preposterously insist that the First Amendment doesn’t apply to art at all.
A successful artist such as Madonna already needs enough lawyers to put on a mega-concert. She shouldn’t need a criminal defense counsel too.
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And if you think Europe is bad, then try Africa:
A Zimbabwean man is in police custody after allegedly making insulting remarks about President Robert Mugabe.
Tichaona Muchabaiwa was arrested at the weekend at a police roadblock, the official Herald newspaper reports.
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He is to be charged under a law that makes it illegal to “undermine the authority of or insult the president,” a police spokesman said.
I guess there are no Bush-style “free speech zones” in Zimbabwe. Go figure.
One Comment
This is indeed a problem. Elsewhere in Europe and the UK, you cannot insult Islam (as discovered by BNP chief Nick Griffin in the UK) or question the Holocaust (as David Irving discovered in Austria). Griffin was prosecuted by the Crown and Irving remains imprisoned.
Yet I think that while we as Americans shake our heads over such blatant denials of free speech (even if, like George Will, you find Irving to be ‘reptilian’), the atmosphere here can be just as hostile to open discussion of certain topics. Rather than be stuck in jail, you’ll be dismissed from your job or faced with a lawsuit. Perhaps there is merit in saying that limiting free speech is necessary for keeping the peace in a multi-ethnic, multiracial, multi-faith society. If you can’t insult Judaism, you can’t insult Christianity, you can’t insult Islam, and so on like dominoes. But that then leads me to question whether, as President Bush insists, “diversity is our greatest strength.” As Tucker Carlson has asked, where, exactly, is the evidence of that? It is an article of faith (breach of which is heresy) that “diverse” societies are superior in every possible way, yet they seem to be negatively correlated with freedom of expression. Not to mention a whole lot of other things we once took for granted.