Wednesday, April 6, 2022

The Toxic Aspects of European Culture

By Kyle Smith

Wednesday, April 06, 2022

 

How much is freedom worth? Knowing, for instance, that your nephew in college can’t be locked up for saying rude things on Twitter after a few beers? Or that you might actually be able to start a business without an unreasonable level of interference from the state? The U.S. respect for liberty is no mere abstraction, and its downstream consequences are evident.

 

In his thorough and authoritative book Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent, my colleague David Harsanyi notes that Article 10 of the European Union’s Convention of Human Rights begins by promising “the right to freedom of expression” but then lists so many exceptions that the so-called right becomes meaningless. The EU might as well state that people have the right to drive except on weekdays. Article 10 calls for “penalties” for any speech that might, for instance, affect “the protection of health or morals” or “the protection of the reputation or rights of others.” If someone feels his “reputation” is harmed, you could be prosecuted for nearly anything. A harsh movie review? A joke about a soccer player? If someone in power feels like bringing the hammer down on you, heaven help you. Thousands of Germans are convicted and fined for insults every year. Germany also outsources censorship by imposing huge fines — up to 50 million Euros — per instance of “hate speech” or defamatory “fake news” that doesn’t get deleted within 24 hours of notification, a law that predictably leads social-media companies to become their own speech police.

 

Before you cheer, remember that people from a political party you oppose sometimes attain power, and they might decree your friends guilty of “hate speech.” In Britain alone, police wasted time logging 119,000 non-criminal hate incidents into a database. Is that a smart use of police resources? Far better to have a robust culture of disputation and to accept that feelings may be hurt than to start locking up those who run afoul of the powerful. Six European countries have laws that impose larger penalties for defaming a public official than a private citizen — the exact opposite of the U.S. So draconian are European laws restricting speech, that trying to comply with them leads to absurdity: Twitter once blocked a voter-registration campaign by the French government because its censors thought the tweets might run afoul of French law. Europe’s much-vaunted “right to be forgotten” is equally troubling because it requires Google and other companies to remove from the public discourse important information such as negative reviews of physicians and even references to the crimes of murderers. The right to be forgotten is a right to cover up one’s misdeeds.

 

European secularism is a point in its favor among Europhiles, but Harsanyi (an atheist) teases out the implications. Our charitable giving, which is strongly linked to religiosity in America, vastly outpaces Europe’s by a factor of seven dollars to one, per capita. When Haiti was struck by a horrifying earthquake in 2010, Americans rushed to donate $519 million within weeks. Americans raised $2.78 billion for the victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The U.S. also leads Europe in rates of volunteerism — and has done so for many years. Secular Europhiles will be alarmed to learn that citizens of several European countries are forced to pay taxes to support the churches of Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland. The establishment clause prevents this from happening in the U.S.

 

Europe’s secularism has disastrous demographic implications; as in the U.S., more religious people tend to have more children, but religion is nearly extinct in Europe except among Muslims. The number of working Europeans peaked twelve years ago, and now the entire continent is in a death spiral. This means fewer and fewer producers to support more and more of the infirm and elderly. Working people are bound to be hit with ever-greater tax burdens in the future.

 

Desperate enticements, such as Denmark’s highly subsidized day care and twelve months of paid family leave, are not working. Italy pays women to have children, and the birth rate has fallen to 1.3 babies per woman. Of the 20 most rapidly shrinking countries, 18 are in Europe. In Germany, the economic engine of Europe, things are looking especially dire: Almost 40 percent of the population will be over age 60 by 2050. After Japan and Monaco, it’s the oldest country on earth. Immigration is the only apparent solution, but the country’s ability to assimilate immigrants is suspect.

 

That ongoing failure brings up another sharp distinction between America and Europe: We are far more inclusive and pluralistic. Tolerance is baked into the American creed. In Europe, 90 percent of Jews report having suffered some form of antisemitic assault, threat, or insult, and they can be forgiven for suspecting that the state does not necessarily support them. A German court ruled that the firebombing of a synagogue in Wuppertal was not antisemitic because the three Palestinians who threw Molotov cocktails at the building were merely calling “attention to the Gaza conflict.” They were given suspended sentences for arson. When Italy first elected a black minister, in 2013, at one of her first public appearances, a man threw two bananas at her, and a populist senator, who never apologized and remains powerful, joked that she reminded him of “an orangutan.” Germany has 500,000 black citizens but only one of them is in the parliament, and he is regularly subjected to racism. Protections for existing workers and dislike of newcomers effectively bar immigrants from many jobs, which is one reason why a 2017 study found that under 20 percent of adult Muslims in Europe had full-time jobs.

 

At bottom, it is the American belief system that makes this country better than our European competitors. Individualism, pluralism, and economic and political liberty are cherished much more by Americans than by our cousins across the ocean. Those who say America should become more like Europe are calling for diminishing the qualities that make the U.S. the greatest country on earth.

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