We must challenge the entire political culture that brands once-commonsense views as ‘far-right’ and beyond debate.

By Mick HUME

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We now know that free speech has been added to the condemned list of supposedly ‘far-right’ causes which cannot be tolerated in the heart of Europe. That is the lesson from the attempt by three mayors and the Brussels police to cancel last week’s National Conservatism conference (co-sponsored by The European Conservative) in the capital of the European Union. And this is only the beginning.

Conservatives have now effectively been declared the new heretics in European politics, who must be silenced by the righteous forces of EU orthodoxy to prevent them spreading their message. In the run-up to June’s EU elections, anybody concerned about the future of European democracy needs to stand up for free speech for all.

The municipal mayor of Brussels made no pretence about his censorious political agenda. His official statement declared that the NatCon conference had to be shut down because there were people there “reputed to be traditionalists” who dared to espouse “ethically conservative” views. Even worse, some of us attending NatCon might express a “Eurosceptic attitude” towards the centralised EU, and insist on supporting the dreaded principle of “national sovereignty.” The horror, the horror.

All of this, decreed the city’s mayor, meant that NatCon Brussels 2024 was a “far-right” gathering that could not be allowed to happen. Despite the fact that speakers included the elected prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, alongside popular political leaders such as Nigel Farage, Éric Zemmour, Suella Braverman and several members of the European Parliament, NatCon apparently had to be suppressed in order to ‘defend democracy.’

The authorities conspired to have the first two conference venues cancelled, and then sent in the police to blockade and try to close the third venue. Only the fortitude of the organisers and the Claridge venue’s owners, and an emergency court ruling secured in the middle of the night, allowed the second day of the event to go ahead.

As political figures including the prime ministers of Belgium and the UK belatedly emerged to criticise the censorship campaign, it became clear that the Brussels mayors had overplayed their hand this time. But let us not be fooled. What they tried to do to NatCon was a sign of things to come, as the left-liberal elites in Europe seek to suppress the rising tide of populism.

As I noted in my speech to NatCon, we have now seen what the EU’s much-vaunted ‘rule of law’ really means in Brussels–that is, whatever it takes to isolate and silence their opponents. Cancel culture, which the left has long insisted is a right-wing fantasy, is a real, advancing threat to freedom of speech that arrived in Brussels with the force of a police riot van and will be coming soon to a city near you.

Today it is the forces of the intolerant left that have assumed the role of a new inquisition. It was not always so, of course. Relaxing outside a restaurant in the Campo de’ Fiori on a family visit to Rome last year, I gave my wife and in-laws a distasteful post-lunch lecture about the statue that looms over the square, a few metres from where we were sitting. The hooded figure of friar-philosopher Giordano Bruno stands in the campo where Bruno was burned to death as a heretic in February 1660, on the orders of the Pope and the cardinals of the Roman Inquisition, for denying the truth of core Catholic doctrines such as transubstantiation. Bruno was burned alive with his tongue tied down to suppress his ‘wicked’ words, and his books were banned.

Bruno’s grisly story is a reminder that the ideas of free speech and toleration are relatively modern, and won only through hard struggle. It is also a reminder that freedom of thought and speech were not always associated with conservatives, particularly those of a religious calling. As late as 1691, the French Catholic theologian Jacques-Benigne Bossuet could boast that, “I have the right to persecute you because I am right and you are wrong.” No liberal nonsense about everybody being ‘entitled to their opinion’ there.

The Sunday we were in Rome, the base of the Bruno statue was surrounded by plastic sacks of garbage, looking for all the world as if somebody was about to put a match to them. They cook artichokes or fettuccine rather than heretics in Rome these days, but free speech is under mortal threat in Europe once more.

The boot is now decidedly on the other foot. Conservatives and Christians in Europe can find themselves persecuted by woke elites and authorities for expressing traditional beliefs about anything from God to gender. They may not be burned at the stake, but they can be cancelled, prosecuted, lose their livelihoods if not their lives.

The dominant liberal-left establishment is today the primary enemy of free speech in the European Union and the wider West. This situation has been a long time coming. When I started as a radical young British writer 40 years ago, I still imagined that my most heartfelt principles of free speech and democracy could belong to the Left. It was already evident, however, that the Left’s policy of ‘No Platform’—first for fascists, then for Tories, now for almost anybody who disagrees with them—marked the abandonment of that legacy.

Today we see the Western Left allied with Islamists openly against free speech, especially for conservatives. They demand their right to chant antisemitic hatred on the streets of European cities and American campuses, whilst demanding new blasphemy laws—in the guise of ‘hate speech’ legislation—to outlaw criticism of Islam everywhere, from the media to the classroom.

Like it or not, conservatives, Christians, and Jews have been forcibly turned into the heretics and blasphemers of the new inquisition, dissenting from the prevailing orthodoxy. That label should be nothing to fear. Early Christian leaders defined their own views as ‘orthodox,’ from the ancient Greek for ‘right belief.’ The views of their opponents were branded heresy—from the Greek for ‘choice of belief.’ As I wrote in my free speech book, Trigger Warning:

The thing that has always got you branded as a heretic is making an intellectual choice. Heresy is the desire to choose what you believe in and to dissent from the authoritative dogma of the day. What better case for freedom of speech could there be than that? Those deemed heretics of one stripe or another have often been the heroes, the whipping boys and the causes celebres in the historic struggle for freedom of speech.

Let us choose, then, to stand by our principles, from “ethically conservative” opposition to trans ideology to “Euro-sceptic” support for national sovereignty, however hard they try to outlaw them as ‘far-right’ heresies against the EU orthodoxy.

It is only right that, in response to the impact of cancel culture, many conservatives have become more fulsome supporters of free speech than ever before. It is important, however, that the Right does not make the same mistake as the Left who—like Josef Stalin or the Ayatollahs—support freedom of speech only for those who agree with them. Free speech is an indivisible liberty that we defend for all or none at all. The acid test is always ‘freedom for the thought that we hate.’ Remember that next time you’re tempted to call for the state to ban or censor the speech of freedom-phobic Islamists and trans activists.

In the end, it is only those views deemed extreme or offensive—or these days, ‘far right’—that will need defending on the ground of free speech. The mainstream can always look after itself. And once we invite the state to ban ‘offensive’ speech, it means giving the authorities licence to police what we say, too.

The clash at the NatCon conference confirms that freedom of speech is a central issue of our times. It is time to stand up and be counted, to declare our opposition to cancel culture in all its forms, from ‘hate speech’ laws to Big Tech’s biased ‘fact-checking.’

In response to the battle for NatCon, the MCC Brussels think-tank—another co-sponsor of the conference—has launched the Brussels Free Speech Declaration. Readers can sign the draft declaration here.

The need is even more pressing with the approach of June’s elections to the European Parliament. Free speech is the lifeblood of democracy. If politicians are not free to say what they honestly believe, and voters are not free to hear it all and judge for themselves, how can we exercise a genuine democratic choice? Yet in the run-up to June, we can already see how the EU elites will use every trick in the book, from scares about online ‘disinformation’ to allegations of Russian interference, in order to control the debate and disallow views of which they disapprove. As we have warned before in Democracy Watch, Big Brussels is watching you.

In the end, the NatCon conference in Brussels was saved by a late-night court order. We should be grateful to the judges who saw sense, and especially to the fearless lawyers from ADF International who made the case for freedom. But there are even bigger battles ahead. It is a matter of challenging the entire political culture that brands once-commonsense views as ‘far-right’ and beyond debate.

We cannot leave it to any judge or a clause in the Belgian constitution to defend free speech. We might do well to recall the words of U.S. judge Learned Hand who, speaking at a wartime liberty rally in New York’s Central Park in 1944, warned against investing “false hopes” in paper laws and the courts to protect freedom. “Liberty,” he said, “lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.” Now is the time to ensure that the torch of liberty continues to burn in the heart of Europe.

Original article: The European Conservative