Progressive Europe once again lets its repressive roots show
As the UK starts (late) looking at the legality of its latest colonial practices in Iraq — and to a lesser extent Afghanistan — while the U.S. is sort of like a kid with his fingers in his ears chanting “la, la, la, la,” pretending like it’s now doing nothing wrong with an Obama in the White House instead of a Bush, Europe may have been feeling a little left out of the culture war. It shouldn’t.
Overtly xenophobic posters featuring graphic design with Gestapo influences were used to successfully lobby against one of the world’s more impressive forms of architectural expression last week: the minaret. Maybe the Swiss government was trying to appeal to Geert Wilders, the nearby Dutch politico whose wet dream seems to be to see star-and-crescent armbands on every Muslim’s coat sleeve.
Now, as an atheist, all your faith-based pointy sky thingies have roughly the same spiritual connotation to me. Nevertheless, one cannot help being in awe when visiting either the Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca or the Cathédrale Notre Dame de Paris, and if it weren’t for these structures, I don’t think I’d have a use for religion at all. But if I could actually live inside one of these buildings around the clock, I could see how they might inspire belief in a divine what-have-you of some sort.
So it’s interesting that on the one hand, there was a debate about “free expression” in Switzerland over whether some hate posters should be taken down or not (some cities said yes, while others said no), but a law banning the minaret isn’t considered censorship in the same vein. Because as long as you have a building code that allows for tall sky thingies with religious connotations to exist, you’re censoring people if you tell them what their own sky thingy has to stand for. As long as this rule is on or near the books in Switzerland, it cannot claim to be either a place of free speech or real democracy, and that should cause some problems in the EU neighborhood. And if it doesn’t, that will signal which direction Europe is again headed.
In the test of history, those who warned against war crimes have been forgiven.
