thefloutist.substack.com<https://thefloutist.substack.com/p/free-speech-and-its-enemies> “Free speech and its enemies.” Patrick Lawrence 6–7 minutes ________________________________ <https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Ve3b!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe10c7175-0aea-4b94-9933-9fab5faab770_1200x835.jpeg> Thought, language, action. Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1957. (Pedro Ribeiro Simões, cc by 2.0/ Wikimedia Commons.)
This is the first of two essays The Floutist publishes, one glancing back and the other forward, as a year ends and another begins. We wish all our subscribers and readers the best for the New Year. —The Editors. 28 DECEMBER—“We are just so shocked,” a German friend residing in Switzerland wrote the other day. “These cases affect us very much, as they will have consequences for us all.” What cases would these be, you may wonder. What cases and what consequences? You may especially wonder about cases and consequences if you are an American reliant on corporate media: Europe is convulsing as the “centrist” authoritarians who purport to lead it impose what looks to me like an historically unprecedented regime of censorship and the suppression of speech, but none of the mainstream dailies or broadcasters in America have had a word to say about it—a point to which I will shortly return. It was the case of Jacques Baud that prompted my German friend’s distress—or radically escalated it, better put, for she had had an other-than-sanguine view of Europe’s drift toward tyranny long before news of Baud’s fate broke. And so to some particulars. Jacques Baud is a Swiss citizen now residing in Brussels. He was formerly a colonel in the Swiss army and served for many years as an analyst in Swiss Intelligence and in the Swiss Foreign Ministry. He has held senior positions at the United Nations and was more recently an adviser to N.A.T.O. covering Ukrainian affairs. Baud is now 70 and has for some years applied his exceptional expertise to analysis and commentary on war, peace, geopolitics, and affairs of state, work that has earned him a reputation for insight and integrity. His most recent books are The Russian Art of War: How the West Led Ukraine to Defeat and Operation Al–Aqsa Flood: The Defeat of the Vanquisher, which explains the events of 7 October 2023 by way of Israel’s incessant breaches of international law over 75 years. Max Milo Editions<https://maxmilo.com/en/collections/english-version?srsltid=AfmBOoqL8cwELPr-kQ0e1JXGcfDu5nJnyj3jxEij9P5V1I-ZrxmtKBHu>, a small French house, brought out both books last year. On 15 December the European Union imposed sanctions on this distinguished man. He is now on the E.U. Sanctions Tracker, which lists the names and offenses of those the E.U. has summarily blacklisted. Here is Baud’s entry<https://data.europa.eu/apps/eusanctionstracker/subjects/180245> on this truly diabolic website: Jacques Baud, a former Swiss army colonel and strategic analyst, is a regular guest on pro–Russian television and radio programmes. He acts as a mouthpiece for pro–Russian propaganda and makes conspiracy theories, for example accusing Ukraine of orchestrating its own invasion in order to join NATO. We are now in the land wherein those who propagate disinformation assert that they are countering “disinformation,” and let us observe our quotation marks, for “disinformation,” in Baud’s case as in many others, means accurate information. If you can follow. To net this out, Jacques Baud has written thoughtfully and extensively on the war in Ukraine and its bearing on relations between Russia and the West. This includes a sound analysis of N.A.T.O.’s advances to the Russian Federation’s borders, the U.S.–orchestrated coup in Kiev in 2014, the West’s subsequent betrayal of the Minsk Protocols, and the Biden regime’s purposeful provocation of the military intervention Russia began not quite four years ago. Whether or not one agrees with Baud’s take on this or that question, his is well-supported work. And the E.U. has just comprehensively sanctioned him for it. Any European now risks the same if, to bring this home with an especially egregious example, he or she states perfectly discernible truths as to what prompted Moscow’s “special military operation” in February 2022. If invited to make this case on a Russian television station, the offender is yet further beyond the pale. There are other aspects of the Baud case that have paying-attention Europeans in an uproar. Baud has not been charged with any criminal offense. There has been no investigation into his work, no evidence has been presented, there will be no judicial process, and he will have no opportunity to respond to the “case”—quotation marks again—the E.U. makes against him. The sanctions he now faces were imposed in an exercise of extrajudicial—as in unlawful—power. As Costas Lapavitsas, a professor at S.O.A.S., put it in a piece Brave New Europe published Christmas Eve<https://braveneweurope.com/costas-lapavitsas-jacques-baud-and-the-demise-of-the-eu-as-a-liberal-project>, “An individual was punished by executive designation alone.” We have all read endlessly about sanctions and how much or little they matter, but in Baud’s case—and there are others facing this designation—they are grave. Baud’s assets are now frozen in the E.U. and he cannot travel. He cannot access his bank accounts and various sources of income are blocked. As of now it is a criminal offense to transact with him—to sell him a house or groceries, to take in his shirts, to repair his car. “Although the regulation allows minimal subsistence payments,” Lapavitsas writes, “the effect is to paralyse a person economically and professionally.” The Baud case is horrific all by itself, and so I give it generous column inches, but it is horrific times ten when we consider its larger implications—its “consequences for us all,” as my German friend put it. Censorship and attacks on free speech are nothing new on either side of the Atlantic, to state the obvious. It is two years this coming spring since Germany refused entry to Yanis Varoufakis<https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/why-germany-bans-and-arrests-israel-critics-including-jews-by-yanis-varoufakis-2024-04>, the honorable Greek economist and activist, who was to attend a congress on Palestine in Berlin. The Biden regime was notable for its connivances with Silicon Valley and its assaults on free speech. These have worsened dramatically during the first year of Trump II. It comes time to understand our moment for what it is—the circumstance now upon us. -- http:www.antic.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "SERBIAN NEWS NETWORK" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/senet/PH0PR13MB5446F73F99F0D650D42F96E9AE84A%40PH0PR13MB5446.namprd13.prod.outlook.com.
