Replies

It truly is un freakin believable that you can get jail time for the words that come out of your mouth.

Europeans are really stupid.

But then again, insult allah and you die!

What a concept!!

We take our freedoms too much for granted.

"It truly is un freakin believable that you can get jail time for the words that come out of your mouth.

Europeans are really stupid."

Hasn't it usually been that way, over there? They've had different types of regimes throughout its history, but when have they explicity stood up for unregulated and free political speech?

Europeans on the other side of the channel have never experienced the common law freedoms that evolved from the Magna Carta and the Glorious Revolution. Continential Europe has traveled the path of a parlimentary system without the common law constitution of England or the written, popularly ratified and judicially protected constitution of the USA model. Thus, coalition governments, the head of which is the leader of the majority or coalition plurality, are limited only by such abstractions as voluntary, non-binding declarations of human rights and the outer limits of public tolerance.

Those societies are unfortunate to have felt the heel of the tyrant's boot since medieval times and have smelled the odor of his death camps. They have seen their constantly changing borders governed by those who were able to force allegiance through fear and compulsion while suppressing opposition with unrelenting violence.

Thus, while it would seem a natural and inevitable event to have present governments extend the freedom they enjoy to include the voice of any and all dissent, the traumatic experiences of the mid-20th Century are still an echo in too many citizens' ear and the grave markers of those killed by the Nazi terror are still too visable for the allowance of freedom of expression to that degree.

In the past few weeks there have been many posts on FR that, though outlandish and irresponsible, (not to mention patently unconstitutional) long for the days when the USA had a sedition act from the 18th Century and resurrected during WW I. That logical and philosophical inconsistency should illustrate the irony of the mind set that expresses bewilderment at the article from Austria while, at the same time, wishing to impose something far more sinister on the American public for those who openly disagree with current governmental policies. Or, is the entire matter of freedom of the speech we hate an issue of situational ethics and ad hoc policy that can be molded to fit that speech with which we disagree violently enought to punish those with the temerity to utter it?

Curious conumdrum, no?

[Europeans are really stupid.]

Actually it was the American and other Allied occupiers who insisted that the Germans and Austrians outlaw Naziism. Here in Germany, it is still illegal to own a copy of "Mein Kampf". That was basically an American occupation law institutionalized. It is a legacy of a once-important theme.

If America gets nuked, it is possible that "Fahrenheit 9-11" will become illegal in the USA...or the Koran...?