‘Judging Freedom’ edition of 24 December: The Totalitarian EU

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‘Judging Freedom’ edition of 24 December:  The Totalitarian EU

In today’s conversation with Judge Andrew Napolitano, we discuss the terrible sanctions recently imposed by the European Council on retired Swiss military intelligence expert Jacques Baud for what is said to be his pro-Russian disinformation (an outrageous defamation) and the precedents for such extrajudicial violations of citizens’ rights to free speech, to property rights and more. As I say here this goes straight back to the seizure of assets of Russian oligarchs early in 2024 after the start of the Special Military Operations on charges of their ‘being friends of Putin’ and other nonsense that would never be accepted in a court of law. The problem may be said to go still further back to the breach of international law when the U.S. seized embassy and consular properties of the Russian Federation during the Obama administration in December 2016 to hand a poisoned chalice to the incoming Team Trump.

 My point is that rule of law works for all of us only when it is defended against each and every violator.  Failure to bring legal action and/or high-level lobbying against violators can only lead to escalation and spread of abuses over time. That is how we have reached a situation where none of us in the Alternative Media today can feel safe in the European Union, although as I say here, it is highly unlikely that any American will be put on EU sanctions lists for fear of enraging Trump and putting in jeopardy America’s nuclear umbrella and NATO support for Europe. But if you are a Swiss or some other third country national: watch out!

We also delve into the deeper problem that makes cases like Baud’s so intractable: the absence of any system of checks and balances, of division of powers whereby an independent judiciary could review cases of abuse like this and compel the offending executive to back down.  This fundamental problem must be put at the door of the Left-leaning highly intellectual caviar socialists who played a very important role in writing the foundation documents of the EU, and who assumed that their successors would be equally well-intentioned and tolerant of others’ views.   Well read, they may have been but they did not pay due attention to the 19th century political scientists who reasoned that men can be overbearing, oppressive and must be held in check by limitations on the power written into the constitution. In this regard, it should come as no surprise that the EU institutions today lend themselves to totalitarianism. Elon Musk is right: the EU must be deconstructed and rebuilt in a way that better protects democracy and specifically protects all human rights of its citizens, starting with freedom of expression, which is now being trampled upon.

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Published by gilbertdoctorow

Gilbert Doctorow's latest book, "War Diaries. The Russia-Ukraine War, 2022-2023" is a unique contribution to literature on the war thanks to the author's reports on the Russian home front written during his periodic visits to St Petersburg at a time when Russia no longer issued visas and nearly all Western journalists had left the country. Doctorow's two-volume "Memoirs of a Russianist" published in 2020 also constitutes a category of its own, consisting largely of diary entries rather than reminiscences written decades later.. Volume 2 focuses on the community of 50,000 expatriate managers working and living in Moscow during the 1990s, about which none of his peers has yet to write. Gilbert Doctorow is a professional Russia watcher and actor in Russian affairs going back to 1965. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College (1967), a past Fulbright scholar, and holder of a Ph.D. with honors in history from Columbia University (1975). After completing his studies, Mr. Doctorow pursued a business career focused on the USSR and Eastern Europe. For twenty-five years he worked for US and European multinationals in marketing and general management with regional responsibility. From 1998-2002, Doctorow served as the Chairman of the Russian Booker Literary Prize in Moscow. During the 2010-2011 academic year, he was a Visiting scholar of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Mr. Doctorow is a long-time resident of Brussels.

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