Multiple European Union states are breaking with post-war liberal conventions and openly imprisoning prominent political opponents and intellectuals for ideological crimes.
The tactic being used by these
governments is “rule through law,” as opposed to rule of law. The strategy is commonly
deployed in nations like Saudi Arabia against journalists, intellectuals and
opposition figures who are targeted for repression first, then selectively
prosecuted using often vaguely defined existing laws after.
Greece
Earlier today a judge in Athens condemned
almost all of Golden Dawn’s elected officials, including sitting European
parliament member Ioannis Lagos, to years in prison.
Nikos Michaloliakos, Golden Dawn’s General
Secretary, was given 13 years for
a RICO-style charge that alleged his patriotic Greek party, which until
recently was the third most popular in the country, is a criminal organization.
Michaloliakos was not tied to any specific
crime, but prosecutors used editions of his group’s magazine featuring articles
about Germany during World War II from the 1980s and 90s to argue that their
political ideas were a form of violence in and of themselves.
In
a public statement published
to the Golden Dawn website Michaloliakos blamed the court’s ruling on Golden
Dawn’s sudden electoral rise in 2013, stating “They say we are a criminal Nazi
organization. [If that’s true] why did they wait 30 years to charge us?”
He accurately pointed out that Golden Dawn was
never accused of being a criminal organization since its founding in the 1980s.
It was only after May 2012, when the party achieved 7% of the vote, that the
Greek state decided it was time to arrest them in 2013.
Slovakia
Yesterday another nationalist elected
official, Marian Kotleba, was sentenced to four years in
prison by the Slovak government for handing out checks for
1,488 Euros to poor families in 2017. State prosecutors accused Kotleba, who
leads the politically ascendant People’s Party – Our Slovakia, of using 1488 as
a secret code for “white power.”
Kotleba’s party holds 17 seats out of 150 in
parliament and has been steadily growing. Its existence has put pressure on
conservatives to begin speaking to nationalist issues and against corruption, a
factor that has upset the nation’s rulers and contributed to last year’s failed
attempt to get the People’s Party outlawed. Kotleba plans to appeal the
decision.
If the Supreme Court upholds Kotleba’s
conviction, he will be permanently banned from running for office and will be
the first Slovak parliament member to be imprisoned since the fall of
communism.
France
In France, patriotic intellectual and Yellow
Vest activist Hervé Ryssen is now a month into his year and a half jail
sentence for “anti-Semitism” that focused on pointing out the scientific
impossibilities of the Holocaust narrative.
Ryssen has for years been dragged through the
court system by lawyers affiliated with France’s Jewish organizations, such as
LICRA. A letter signed
by a diverse contingent of French public figures belonging to the nationalist,
artistic and Muslim communities expressed outrage at Ryssen becoming a prisoner
of conscience.
Veteran Front National leaders Jean Marie Le
Pen and Bruno Gollnisch both condemned Ryssen’s incarceration, stating that it
revealed that France was becoming a dictatorship where people are viciously
punished for crimes of opinion.
Both Gollnisch and Le Pen were expelled from
the party by Marine Le Pen, who has now renamed the party National Rally and
taken it down a route of social liberalism and Zionism.
Marine Le Pen’s boyfriend and National Rally
vice president, Jewish politician Louis Aliot, took to Twitter to attack
Ryssen’s defenders, claiming that freedom of speech and “provocation” (hate
speech) are not the same. The sentiment was endorsed by Le Pen,
who hypocritically defends critics of Islam on free speech grounds.
Spain
The leadership of the Spanish nationalist
movement — Pedro Chaparro (National Democracy), Manuel Andrino (Spanish
Falange), and Pedro Pablo Peña (National Alliance) — are exhausting their final
appeal of a prison sentence handed down to them over counter-protesting
left-wing Catalan separatists in 2013.
Prosecutors allege that the three leaders were
responsible for a confrontation that occurred between members of Madrid’s
“antifa” and Spanish patriots.
Last year, Chaparro, Andrino, Peña and others
began mending fractures in the large but deeply sectarian Spanish nationalist
movement, putting aside differences to found the electoral bloc “ADN: Spanish
Identity.”
Catalan language media is eager to
see the men behind bars. If their last appeal fails, they will serve years in
prison.
“Sending a Message”
The myriad
of “human rights” NGOs that complain when Eastern European countries try to
block George Soros from influencing their elections are all lauding this
Europe-wide crackdown.
A statement published on the conviction of
Golden Dawn’s parliamentary bloc by Amnesty International’s European Director,
Nils Muižnieks, hailed the decision as a victory against anti-immigration
sentiment, “This verdict sends a clear message to political groups with
aggressive anti-migrant and anti-human rights agendas in Greece and across
Europe that violent and racist criminal activity – whether perpetrated by
individuals on the street or members of parliament, will not go unpunished.
On
Kotleba’s conviction, multiple liberal NGOs backed by international finance
declared the imprisonment of political
opponents a triumph for democracy, “We are glad that
extremism in Slovakia is finally being punished and addressed with the
appropriate attention” the groups commented.
Various
Jewish organizations have also celebrated the embrace of hard power by nervous
liberal elites currently enduring a worldwide crisis in them and their failing
institutions.
While many European nations have hate speech laws, this is the first
time in recent memory that liberal democracies have mustered the nerve to begin
sentencing elected officials to long prison sentences for their ideas. These
acts are highly discrediting to the neo-liberal project and will likely have
unforeseen consequences in the future.
