Three lessons from the censorship of the NatCon conference in Brussels.
Three lessons from the censorship of the NatCon conference in Brussels
A shocking event this week has laid bare how real the intimidation of citizens who wish to speak freely has become in Western countries.
The left-wing mayor of a district in Brussels, the capital of the European Union, ordered the National Conservatism Conference that had convened there to be shut down, only seven weeks before 27 countries vote in the EU’s parliamentary election.
The key issues in that vote — immigration, threats against free speech, the family, bureaucratic overreach, Ukraine, Europe’s stagnant economy — were precisely the ones being discussed at the conference by leading figures including Britain’s pro-Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. The leaders of several national parties that are polling in first place in their EU elections were also present.
Farage, who was speaking onstage when Brussels police arrived to order the proceedings closed, said he was now more convinced than ever that Britain was right to leave the EU in 2020. “Whenever we talk about cancel culture, the Left always say it doesn’t exist,” Farage noted. “Well, this event has now gone global, we can see that it does happen and that it is a very pernicious form of censorship.”
Another speaker, German Catholic cardinal Ludwig Müller, was visibly shocked by the sight of 16 police officers blocking the entrance to the meeting space when he arrived. “This is like Nazi Germany,” he said. “They are like the SA.”
The thuggery backfired. Even though the Tunisian-born owner of the conference venue saw his car towed away by police and received threats by them to turn off his building’s electricity, he stood firm in his belief that the NatCon speakers should stay and speak.
Belgium’s prime minister, Alexander De Croo, said this misuse of the police was “unconstitutional,” and in the early morning hours of Wednesday the country’s highest administrative court lifted the injunction against the event. The court rejected the arguments of the local district mayor, Emir Kir, that the meeting was a threat to “public security” and concluded that his reasons were politically motivated.
Kir’s flimsy justifications are now shown to have been even more specious than first thought. His order to shut down the NatCon meeting cited his view that its “vision is not only ethically conservative (e.g. hostility to the legalization of abortion, same-sex unions, etc.) but also focused on the defense of ‘national sovereignty’, which implies, amongst other things, a ‘Eurosceptic’ attitude.” It also stated that some of the speakers “are reputed to be traditionalists” and that the conference must be banned “to avoid foreseeable attacks on public order and peace.” Kir later tweeted his desire to make clear that the conference was “not welcome” in Brussels.
This is a twilight-zone level of hypocrisy. Before Kir sent in the police, his left-wing colleague, Philippe Close, the mayor of the City of Brussels, had personally pressured the originally planned high-end venue for the NatCon conference to cancel its contract with the group only 72 hours before the meeting day. But just last June, Mayor Close fêted Tehran mayor Alireza Zakani, a key official of Iran’s tyrannical regime, who co-chaired a conference in Brussels.
Kir himself, the highest-ranking elected official of Turkish origin in Belgium, is highly controversial. In 2020, he was expelled from Belgium’s Socialist Party following his meeting with a delegation of Turkish mayors that included representatives of an ultranationalist Islamic party that backs the Erdoğan government’s crackdown on religious freedom, its harassment of Christians, and its denial of Turkey’s 1915 genocide against the Armenians.
While many public officials will now ritually cluck disapproval of the ham-fisted attempt to shut down the NatCon conference, there are broader lessons from the incident that aren’t likely to be reported much.
First, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born human-rights activist who broke with Islam over its treatment of women and was forced to leave the Netherlands for the United States in 2005, was scheduled to speak but canceled because of a family obligation. She is unequivocal that the anti-free-speech action in Brussels was the result of “an unholy alliance between Islamists and the far left”:
What we have witnessed here is an unprecedented collaboration between Antifa, local politicians, and the police, in the capital of the EU, to shut down a peaceful meeting of political dissidents. If they can get away with police-state tactics as shameless as this, against a gathering that included a cardinal, high profile British and French politicians, prominent intellectuals, and the head of government of an EU member state, what does it say about the state of liberal democracy in Europe?
Second, the left-wing agitators trying to shut down free speech are very brittle and don’t realize how their panicked actions reveal their true nature.
The Washington Post’s coverage of the incident mourned that the ban on the NatCon conference gives conservatives “a further opportunity to rail against cancel culture and Brussels overreach.” Britain’s left-wing Guardian expressed despair that the controversy put the NatCon event “on the map.”
Toby Young, who is the director of Britain’s Free Speech Union, told the European Conservative that the attempt to silence NatCon speakers shows that “European elites are terrified of the coming wave of populist revolts and are using any means necessary to fend them off.”
Lastly, we are seeing a complete divergence between the obsessions of political elites and the problems that ordinary voters feel should be dealt with to make their daily lives better. David McGrogan, an associate professor of law at Northumbria University, notes the “disjuncture between the sheer scale of ambition evident in the claims that our governments typically nowadays make (that they can save us from disease and from climate change, that they can alleviate poverty, that they can make us healthier, that they can decide what is true and what is not, etc.), and the vapidity and incompetence of the actual human beings who are engaged in the practice of government.”
He adds, “The picture that emerges is one of an incipient hegemony, which is increasingly intolerant of opposition, but which is at the same time very brittle, subject to bouts of histrionics, and not very competent or capable of thinking things through. Does that sound to you like a recipe for good, calm, strategically sensible government?”
Not at all, which is the best explanation of the populist revolts sweeping so much of the world. I have reported from previous NatCon meetings and can attest that they are attended by sober critics with sincere views and only a small number of grifters. Some of their proposed solutions — gauzy industrial policy, an effective end to legal immigration, a new coziness with unions — are opposed to my views, but they have every right to express them. If they aren’t allowed to represent the views that millions of people obviously hold, this would only strengthen their assertion that governing elites are no longer serious about anything except the suppression of dissent.
As Paul Coleman of the Alliance Defending Freedom International, the group that went to court to block the Brussels blockheads from shutting down the NatCon event, puts it, “how can Brussels claim to be the heart of Europe if its officials only allow one side of the European conversation to be heard?”