The European Union recently announced the first recipients of its new European Order of Merit, the organization’s highest award. The headliner was Angela Merkel, former Federal Chancellor of Germany, who indeed personifies the European Union for both her fans and her critics. For many years, some of us have criticized Merkel as one of the leading forces behind European censorship efforts that have eviscerated the “Indispensable Right.”
Not surprisingly, Merkel called for more censorship and attacks on free speech to a thrilled audience of EU bureaucrats and globalists.
In one of the most ironic moments, Merkel declared, “Europe was not handed to us. It was built treaty by treaty, crisis by crisis and by people who chose solidarity over division and cooperation over self-interest.” Indeed, it was not handed to them.
As I discuss in my new book, “Rage and the Republic, the EU was formed by design to incrementally get citizens in Europe to give up their national identities and rights:
The EEC worked to remove barriers to trade and coordinate national regulations to achieve greater uniformity. As nations conformed to such transnational standards, the final step toward transnational governance became less of a conceptual barrier for citizens, particularly younger citizens…
…The evolution of the EU is a cautionary tale. It began with assurances of marginal coordinating bodies and policies over areas like nuclear power and scientific research. Through this planned incrementalism, each insular move was defended on its narrow purpose while dismissing objections as nationalistic or conspiratorial. That planned incrementalism worked brilliantly in getting citizens to accept transnational governance.
Merkel was critical in that effort. She is blamed for opening the borders to a flood of undocumented immigrants that has caused rising violence and protests throughout Europe. However, her crowning jewel was the crackdown on free speech. She can honestly claim that Germans (and Europeans as a whole) have fewer rights after her public service. She increased the power of government, stripped away free speech rights, and reduced national identities without firing a shot.
Merkel consistently opposed free speech, building a censorship system that gave the government ever greater control over speech. Her decision to first apologize to authoritarian Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for a satirical poem and then approve the prosecution of the comedian is a shocking and chilling disgrace. Now, she is throwing her support behind a crackdown on “hate speech” on social media like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube — radically expanding the already broad scope of government regulation of speech.
Merkel declared, “I support efforts by Justice Minister Heiko Maas and Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere to address hate speech, hate commentaries, devastating things that are incompatible with human dignity, and to do everything to prohibit it because it contradicts our values.”
Merkel was a driving force in using such subjective standards as “compatibility with human dignity” as a foundation for government-imposed speech controls.
Merkel also threatened social media companies, warning they would face a government crackdown if they failed to get rid of “fake news.” Merkel insisted that such postings must be dealt with by the companies or the government will step in.
In her speech in May to the EU, Merkel doubled down on her attacks on free speech as a threat to the world order. She called for the prosecution of American companies for spreading “disinformation” and “hate” online.
She denounced the “so-called social media” platforms as still not facing “accountability for lies.” She added, “I can only encourage you to continue regulating social media.”
I could think of no better recipient for the first European Order of Merit. No one better sums up EU values than Angela Merkel and her unrelenting campaign against free speech. For globalists who have called for “A New World Order with European Values,” Merkel is the perfect personification of a globalist dream of a world of regulated speech and transnational government.