RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15806/germany-ecri-free-speech

Europe has a large web of hate speech laws and policies, thanks in part to the efforts of ECRI — an unelected body — and the Council of Europe.

Finally, ECRI “strongly welcomes the German government’s implementation of its recommendation [in ECRI’s fifth report on Germany] to introduce into the law an obligation to discontinue the public financing of political parties and other organisations that promote racism” and recommends that such a procedure against the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party be examined.

Since 1994, ECRI has been dispensing its highly politicized recommendations to European governments in confidential government consultations removed from public scrutiny. Only the final reports are published.

As this kind of arguably undemocratic governance, where an unelected body of “experts” tells national governments how to govern on fundamental issues such as freedom of speech, has been ongoing for several decades now, one can only assume that either Europeans approve of these measures or are entirely ignorant of them.

The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) recently published its sixth monitoring report on Germany. Even though Germany has some of the most repressive hate speech laws in Europe, ECRI decided that, according to it, Germany is still not doing enough.

Never heard of ECRI? Here are a few words by way of introduction:

ECRI, which describes itself as “independent” is the human rights monitoring body of the Council of Europe — not to be confused with the European Union. The Council of Europe is composed of 47 member states, including all of the 27 European Union member states. Its decision and policy making body is the Committee of Ministers, made up of the foreign ministers of each of the member states. Its most famous body is the European Court of Human Rights. The Council of Europe, unlike the EU, cannot make binding rules on its member states. Last year it celebrated its 70th anniversary. The Council of Europe calls itself the “continent’s leading human rights organization… All 830 million people living in this common legal space have an ultimate right of appeal to the European Court of Human Rights”.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15892/eu-failure-coronavirus

All the evidence suggests that the majority of European governments are ignoring the EU’s advice, and acting unilaterally to tackle the impact of the pandemic on their citizens.
The divergence in approach among various member states indicates that European leaders are — as they have been from the outset — acting selfishly in their own national interest rather than for the good of the EU as a whole.
It also means they are in breach of some of the EU’s fundamental principles, such as the single market which requires all member states to conduct business on an equal footing. The fact that several countries are allowing various businesses, such as construction, to return to work, whereas in other nations they have been banned from operating during the lockdown, means that disparities will inevitably develop in the economies of member states, a fact that is likely to increase tensions between European leaders in the months to come.
The problem for the EU is that, now that so many European countries have already taken matters into their own hands, any attempt by Brussels to impose a unified approach to ending the lockdown will surely be a case of too little, too late.

The deepening divisions among European nations over their response to the coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the inability of the European Union to provide strong and effective leadership in times of crisis.

Faced with arguably the greatest challenge Europe has faced since the end of the Second World War, the EU’s failure to help coordinate the actions of the 27-nation bloc in tackling Covid-19 has once again brought the organisation’s institutional failings into sharp focus.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/happy-birthday-margrethe-bruce-bawer/

Queen Margrethe of Denmark turns 80 today, and to commemorate the occasion she gave an interview that appeared in the newspaper Politiken on Saturday. The conversation was wide-ranging, but the part that made headlines throughout Scandinavia was her admission that while she considers climate change an important issue, she’s not personally panicked about it, and that while she’s aware that climate does change – “it has changed and is changing all the time” – she’s not certain whether humans directly influence those changes. Let it be emphasized here that this is one queen who actually knows something about these matters: she studied prehistoric archeology at Cambridge and hence has an extremely long-term perspective.

(This isn’t the first time, by the way, that Margrethe has failed to strike the approved tone on climate change: in more than one New Year’s address, for example, she’s celebrated the melting of Greenland ice because it opens up the possibility of exploiting the island’s rich natural resources.)

The reactions to the queen’s birthday interview came swiftly. Søren Jakobsen, a commentator on Danish royal affairs, expressed surprise and dismay that she’d waded into such “controversial” waters. Danish scientists lamented what they considered Her Majesty’s unfortunate ignorance. And Uffe Elbæk, a member of the Danish parliament, responded in the strongest terms he could come up with: he compared the queen to Donald Trump. But the critic who seems to have gotten the most attention is Sikandar Siddique, another parliament member. Describing the interview in a tweet as a “coarse, irresponsible, and decidedly misleading intrusion into the political debate,” Siddique called on the Royal Palace to retract the whole thing. For good measure, he told the newspaper BT that the queen was ignoring an “existential crisis.” And in a letter to the daily Ekstra Bladet he went full Greta Thunberg: “Are 250 million refugees not a catastrophe? What about the lack of food? The extreme weather that is killing millions? What about the lack of clean water, which will have disastrous consequences for billions of people?” Siddique demanded that Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen “put the queen in her place.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/04/the_populists_next_door_no_ones_talking_about.html

The new, trailblazing party governing the French-Canadian province of Quebec deserves more attention than they’ve received this side of the border.

Although being a quite young party as well as an openly nationalist one (a deep oddity for globalist Canada), the Coalition for Quebec’s Future — or ‘CAQ’ as it’s known by its French acronym — trounced the Justin Trudeau-affiliated Quebec Liberal Party in elections in late 2018 and currently commands a huge majority in that province’s parliament. Roughly one year on, the party’s showing conservative nationalists everywhere that if it can do it, you can to.

CAQ, which similar to Trump blends socially conservative policies with economically protectionist ones, has taken advantage of Quebec’s unique jurisdictional position in Canada like few parties before it — among other things, Quebec’s allowed to a large extent to shape its own immigration and multicultural policies.

In its first year as the province’s governing party, it’s unrepentantly asserted French-Canadian cultural hegemony in Quebec and has barreled over critics in the broader Anglo-Canadian media. This has made them wildly popular in la belle province and should make them a big source of inspiration for President Trump and his supporters this election year.

Millionaire entrepreneur and current Quebec premier Francois Legault created the CAQ party in 2011. Formally a cabinet minister with the pro-independence Parti Quebecois (PQ) party, Legault managed to peel away a wing of the party that wished to forgo outright separatism (which has been on the wane in Quebec since its heyday in the 1990s) and seek instead greater autonomy within Canada’s existing federalist structure.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/iranian-and-us-ships-come-dangerously-close-as-disputes-continue-in-persian-gulf_3314174.html

Nearly a dozen Iranian naval vessels made “dangerous and harassing” maneuvers near U.S. Navy and Coast Guard ships in the Persian Gulf, also known as the Arabian Gulf, U.S. Naval Forces Central Command said on Wednesday.

In a statement, the Navy said that 11 vessels from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN) came dangerously close to six U.S. vessels, repeatedly crossing their bows and sterns while they were conducting integration operations with U.S. Army Apache attack helicopters to support maritime security outside of Iran’s territorial waters.

Iranian naval vessels came as close as 10 yards of the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Maui, and within 50 yards of the USS Lewis B. Puller, a ship that serves as an afloat landing base, according to the statement. Other vessels among the U.S. ships included the USS Paul Hamilton, a Navy destroyer, and the USS Firebolt.

The U.S. ships attempted to issue multiple warnings, through bridge-to-bridge radio, long-range acoustic noise maker devices, and five blasts from the ships’ horns, but U.S. crews received no response from the IRGCN.

The IRGCN vessels responded after roughly one hour by radio and moved away from the U.S. ships.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/world-health-organisation-not-immune-to-criticism-australian-pm_3314192.html#

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Australia will continue to support the World Health Organisation (WHO) but he said they’re not immune from criticism and should do things better.

This is because had Australia relied on WHO advice back in January, “Then I suspect we would have been suffering the same fate that many other countries currently are,” said Morrison.

“I mean, [Australia] called [the pandemic] weeks before the WHO did,” he said.

At the time, on Jan. 14, the WHO advised countries that there was no human-to-human transmission of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as novel coronavirus.

However, we now know that this was wrong and that by at least mid-December, the CCP was aware that human-to-human transmission was occurring in mainland China, making the virus ripe for spreading. Yet the CCP did not admit this until Jan. 20, after over 5 million people had left Wuhan.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/04/australian-strategy-and-the-gathering-storm-in-asia/

The US world order is a suit that no longer fits.
               —Fu Ying, Chair, Chinese National People’s Congress, Foreign Affairs Committee, 2016

Over the next decade two challenges face Australia which, in combination, seem likely to transform our strategic fortunes for the worse. The first challenge is the need to confront the reality that the great project of Western liberal globalism conceived in the 1990s is slipping into the pages of history. The second challenge is the return of great power competition, most particularly in the form of the rise of a revisionist China that is determined to assume global superpower status and to become the hegemon of Asia. China’s geopolitical ambitions mean that the 2020s and beyond will be marked by a Sino-American struggle for mastery of Asia in which Australia will be directly and fatefully involved.

Outside of expert circles, few Australians seem to grasp the implications of these major strategic changes. It is the purpose of this article to explain the dynamics of a gathering storm in Asia and to make the case for a national rejuvenation in thinking about defence and national security strategy.

The end of liberal globalism

For the past quarter of a century, Australia has been a major beneficiary of the West’s global triumph in the Cold War. This era coincides with the most dramatic growth in Australian prosperity since the boom of the second half of the nineteenth century. The Australian economy tripled in size, and per capita GDP grew by 182 per cent, between the early 1990s and the second decade of the new millennium. Yet, as we enter the 2020s, the age of liberal globalism is disappearing—as documented by a group of Anglo-American scholars and commentators as politically diverse as John J. Mearsheimer, Bill Emmott, Steven D. King, Patrick Deneen and Michael Burleigh. The reasons are not hard to detect. Put simply, the liberal global order is ebbing away because of a self-induced crisis of legitimacy. Liberal globalism has become a system that privileges transnational elites over national voters; seeks to preference the rules of international institutions over domestic democratic legislation; promotes universalism over patriotism; and has pursued open borders rather than controlled immigration, so creating new forms of populist nationalism. As Patrick Deneen writes in Why Liberalism Failed (2018), the global liberal project has promoted a form of elitist progressive politics that has accelerated economic inequality and fragmented the civic and spiritual bonds that underpin cultural life in democratic nations. There has been a backlash from ordinary voters and the Western public has discovered a fundamental truth: it is easier to change elites than it is for the elites to change the public.

Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union and Donald Trump’s America First policy are merely the early results of an emerging array of new democratic political forces driven by a renewed sense of nationalism and cultural conservatism. By the early 2030s it is possible that the rump of liberal globalism may still operate with its assorted transnational elites meeting annually in a glare of electronic publicity at Davos. Yet such gatherings will increasingly resemble the irrelevant universalism of the late Holy Roman Empire and be confined to symbolic gestures on climate change, arms control and economic inequality.

The real drama in world affairs will emanate from the strategic competition developing between the United States and China.