Wikipedia editors serving long sentences in Saudi Arabia since 2020

This created an intense competition where the best ideas would survive.

As trade grew so did the exchange of ideas in Europe. Different regimes had different views on intellectuals. Famously, Da Vinci and Voltaire had multiple patrons through their lives.

The Iraq war is a textbook example of this. We claimed it was all about freedom and democracy, but the reality was that we had long supported Saddam while he fought an incredibly bloody war against Iran in the 80s, but he eventually fell out of favor when he started growing too ambitious and invade Kuwait. In the end, the US decided it would be better to just try and do the job ourselves and just overthrow him directly and nation build in our image in Iraq (and Afghanistan), surrounding Iran on both sides and setting things up for the next stage.

We all know how it turned out, both Iraq and Afghanistan are looked upon as disasters, as both countries saw untold death and destruction, and aren’t any better off for it.

Does that mean that I personally, as a citizen of the west think that the western values we profess are inferior, or have some sort of image of “noble” Muslims that are perfect and can do no wrong? Of course not. I am a reflection of the culture I was raised in and hold western values deeply. Which is why it enrages me that people chauvinistically look down upon people from other societies while ignoring the fact that we’ve gone into their countries and committed literal war crimes and pardoned the offenders. [0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/27/eddie-gallag...

Searching for Romanian Law 107 of 2006 brings up an anti-discrimination statute and an article from civic-nation.org that says[0]:

>Anti-racism Act № 107/2006 (preceded by government decree № 31/2002) prohibits the operation of organizations of fascist, racist or xenophobic nature, participation in such organizations, the use of symbols of this kind, as well as the occultism surrounding personalities who were guilty of crimes against peace and humanity. The law also foresees criminal liability for the Holocaust deniers. By the end of monitoring this Article has not been used towards anyone.

My read on this is that it's substantially similar to the German constitutional prohibition on Nazis. And as I said in the footnotes before, I do not believe Nazis are entitled to free speech, on the grounds that their explicit political ideology is to censor and kill people. If there's an example of this prohibition being unfairly used against people who are not Nazis, then I will happily rail against it and add it to my list of "shitty things governments do". But as it stands this is not "evidence that America is the only country with free speech". It's about as much of a difference as permissive licensing vs. the GPL.

I still agree that the anti-abortion protester in the UK was being censored. To square that off with my prior paragraph of assertions, anti-abortion activists don't pose a threat to free speech like how Nazis do. They are irksome and morally repugnant but not censorious.

Australia has no express right to free speech, which is a constitutional problem. However, Canada does has a right to free expression, which functions the same as it does in Europe. In either case, the amount of potential or actual harm to free speech is nowhere near "jailed for 20 years for editing Wikipedia" levels of censorship.

And America is not a free speech haven either - in fact, our censorship problem is arguably worse than Europe's. Left-wing activists were routinely investigated and attacked for decades by the CIA and FBI. The intelligence community uses classification and espionage law to silence and punish whistleblowers. This was all done under the auspices of a textually unmodified 1st Amendment.

[0] https://civic-nation.org/romania/government/legislation/anti...