A Word on Vladimir Putin

The EU-Moldova agreement and the soft tyranny of human rights

by Paul Wood

All over the blogosphere (dread word, as Wallace Arnold would have said) unpleasant people and perfectly nice ones are siding with Vladimir Putin as he invades a sovereign state and causes unnecessary deaths. Why? Because they see that he is opposing the EU.

Opposing the EU and political correctness, which right-wingers on the net often call 'cultural Marxism'. 

It's paradoxical that the people who blame Stalinists of the Frankfurt School for political correctness (please click on this very important link) hope that a fairly unreconstructed former KGB man will deliver them from it. But then history is full of paradoxes, ironies and black humour.

I disagree with those libertarians, who should know better, who think Mr. Putin 'is better than the scoundrels who rule us' (Dr. Sean Gabb). Mr. Putin is much, much worse - more authoritarian and less democratic than the Euro-establishment and immeasurably more corrupt. Read Ben Judah's and Masha Gassen's excellent books on him. 

From Moldova's point of view, so far the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been a good thing. Moldova has now been offered a trade agreement by the EU which would have been impossible otherwise. I hope Moldova agrees to it but one of the things Moldova has to sign up to in order to do make a very preliminary step towards integrating with the EU, which does not hold out the promise of Moldova ever joining, is to make illegal many sorts of forms of discrimination, including discrimination against homosexuals. 

This is highly controversial in Moldova (as in Ukraine) and is used by the Russians as a good stick with which to beat the EU - 'a vote for agreement with the EU is a vote for homosexual marriage'.  

Making racial discrimination illegal in the 1960s in the UK, whether you approve or not, was undoubtedly a great restriction on freedom of contract and an extension of state power. It was very unpopular and the Conservatives fought to have it apply only to companies, not to individuals. Speaking in opposition to race relations law Enoch Powell made his famous 'Rivers of Blood' speech. Later sexual discrimination also became illegal.

Margaret Thatcher, who was never a social conservative, went along with the anti-discrimination laws and QUANGOs she inherited, but in my judgement conservatives should want individuals to be able to to discriminate or not to discriminate without fear of the police. This has nothing to do with whether discrimination is or is not objectionable but is about people to being free to make their own decisions.

I remember when after some years of study I returned to work in the late 1990s I found the workplace had been transformed by draconian political correctness and feminism - and this while a Conservative administration was in office. Now employment law and law in general is even more restrictive.

I clearly remember rejoicing back then, because I care very deeply about freedom, that only sexual and racial discrimination were illegal, not discrimination on religious grounds or discrimination against homosexuals. These things, too, have subsequently been made illegal - and throughout, it appears, the EU. What is truly shocking, I discover now, is  that there is no longer any point my campaigning to change these laws, because they are embedded in EU law and cannot be changed, not at least without a decision of the whole EU. And there is no EU-wide political community to persuade our masters to make such a change, which directly opposes the ideology they believe in. There is no demos and therefore no democracy.

I hope Moldova does sign up and I also hope - but certainly do not believe - that Eastern European countries like Poland and Romania fight within the EU to get rid of these restrictions on freedom. I am pretty certain that will never happen and so I do understand why many people in Moldova want nothing to do with the EU.

The wind is blowing in the opposite direction. Rights nowadays in EU law do not mean freedoms - they means entitlements. In Romania a constitutional amendment last year to entrench the legal definition of marriage as a "union between a man and a woman" - an innocent enough thing you might think - was defeated because the Social Democrat Prime Minister Victor Ponta said it would give Romania as bad a press in Western Europe as Hungary had received by enacting a similar provision. What the amendment simply meant, of course, was that homosexual marriage could not be introduced without a referendum, so the amendment was not an illiberal or authoritarian measure but a very democratic one. Yet the Romanian government knew they would be accused of being antidemocratic if they did not quash it. 

“When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."

Why can't every country decide for herself on whether people can marry people of their own sex and a thousand other questions, from caning in schools to capital punishment (I am opposed to both, by the way) to smoking in restaurants (it should be up to the restaurant owner to decide) and so on and so on? 

This is not a minor sideshow but the essence of what living in a democracy means.

Still, Russia is much less free and much less democratic - this is not a point of view but a fact.

Link to A Political Refugee From the Global Village...

Republished here with permission.