Sometimes a friend needs to hear the truth, even or perhaps especially if it hurts. Europe is a case in point. Vice President JD Vance delivered the painful truth at the Munich Security Conference, and the fact that it made his German hosts literally cry underscores both the veracity of his message and the state of denial to which our trans-Atlantic friends have sunk.
“This conference started as a trans-Atlantic conference,” Chairman Christoph Heusgen said at the event’s closing. “After the speech of Vice President Vance on Friday, we have to fear that our common value base is not that common anymore.” He then burst into tears.
What did Vance say to make Heusgen weep? He said plainly that European nations should allow their citizens to speak freely, even on contentious issues such as abortion and mass migration, and that they should honor the outcome of free and fair elections. For Europe’s governing class, such a vigorous defense of democratic values was shocking.
Before becoming the Munich Security Conference chairman in 2022, Heusgen served as Germany’s ambassador to the United Nations, where he infamously laughed at President Donald Trump’s suggestion that Germany’s national security has been compromised by its dependence on Russian energy. Trump has since been completely vindicated by Germany’s economic weakness after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Before that, Heusgen served as former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s under-secretary for foreign and security policy, overseeing Merkel’s disastrous open-border migrant policies. He is the epitome of an arrogant European oligarch whose naive energy and immigration policies weaken and divide Europe’s great powers.
When Vance said, “The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America,” Heusgen was the type of leader the vice president was talking about.
After detailing how the governments of Romania, Sweden, Britain, Scotland, and even the United States suppress speech they disagree with, Vance warned, “What no democracy, American, German, or European, will survive is telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns, their aspirations, their pleas for relief are invalid or unworthy of even being considered.”
Unfortunately, Vance’s message is needed here at home as much as across the Atlantic Ocean. On Face the Nation this Sunday, host Margaret Brennan attacked Vance’s defense of free speech, claiming, “he was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide.”
It is difficult to imagine a more ignorant statement or one that better elucidates the threat that the cadres of such people as Brennan and Heusgen pose to democracy across the Western world.
The Weimar Republic did not have free speech. While Article 118 of the German constitution of 1919 forbade censorship, Article 48 of the same document empowered the state to “temporarily suspend” freedom of speech and other “basic rights,” whenever “public order and security are seriously disturbed or threatened.”
Weimar Germany routinely shut down newspapers, forbade certain people from speaking, and arrested those they deemed a threat.
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Not a single Jew was killed during World War II by words. They were murdered by physical violence inflicted by a tyrannical regime that, like today’s German government, frequently prosecuted citizens for expressing disfavored opinions. Government suppression of speech is inconsistent with democratic values except in very limited wartime circumstances and is especially antidemocratic when the suppressed speech relates to issues of political, ideological, philosophical, religious, or cultural importance, such as when life begins or who and how many people should be let into a political community and from where.
The Heusgens and Brennans are still not ready to listen to people who say things they don’t like. They arrogantly assume they know best. So expect more tears.
