Death of Democracy : West is losing right to free speech

American author and journalist Matt Taibbi said that this is an incredibly serious moment in U.S. and European history

 Detention of Telegram messenger’s co-founder Pavel Durov in France is an element of a broader campaign of the US and the EU aimed at criminalizing not only dissent but private communication also, said American author and journalist Matt Taibbi .

“The detention of Pavel Durov has to be understood as part of a wider campaign in the West to criminalize not just dissent, but private communication,” Taibbi noted.

“As you know, free speech has always been a core American value, as is the right against ‘unreasonable’ government intrusion. Our current government wants to revoke these ‘inalienable’ Constitutional rights, and replace them with new systems of mass surveillance and censorship. The aggressive enforcement of Europe’s Digital Services Act – which requires private platforms to censor – is a major escalation in the campaign against free speech in Europe and the US,” he stressed.

“Homes of [ex-UN inspector] Scott Ritter and [political analyst] Dimitri Simes were raided here in the [United] States, apparently for disagreeing with US policy in Ukraine (which they call ‘spreading misinformation’),” Taibbi continued. “Donald Trump’s former advisor Steve Bannon, who hosts the most popular conservative podcast (‘War Room’), is in jail for contempt of Congress, a charge we haven’t used to jail people since the 1950s,” he added.

“This is an incredibly serious moment in U.S. and European history. The right to free speech is the basis of modern social democracies and we’re in the process of losing it,” the journalist said.