Fake ‘Anti-Fascists’ Are the Militant Wing of EU Cancel Culture

Ironically, the most fascist people in Europe today are the "anti-fascists" of the Left and their enablers in the Left and Centre Parties.

From The European Conservative

By Mick Hume

In the face of attempts to censor conservatives in Brussels, we need to stand unequivocally for free speech for all.

Recent attempts to censor conservative views in Brussels confirm that the militant threat to free speech today comes not from the ‘far right,’ but from the fake ‘anti-fascists’ of the left. And that these relatively few activists can only succeed because the mainstream and the authorities, who no longer believe in the European principle of free speech, give in to their demands for censorship. 

It is now obvious that, even in the capital city of the supposedly civilised European Union, cancel culture has been normalised. And ‘Antifa’ is only the militant wing of a mainstream campaign to silence national conservative voices.

In George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel, 1984, the character O’Brien from the Big Brother regime’s Thought Police provides this grim vision of an authoritarian, unfree society: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

To update Orwell, and give a glimpse of anti-freedom in Europe today, we might instead say: “…imagine some eggs being thrown at a hotel door—for one minute.”

Because that was all it took for the wannabe Thought Police of Antifa to launch an attack on free speech in Brussels this week. A handful of idiots from the ‘Poulettes Antifascistes’ group (they are fake anti-fascists, but the ‘Young Chickens’ part of their name at least seems appropriate), turned up in the dark and threw a few boxes of eggs at the outside of a five-star hotel which was due to host an event for the MCC Brussels think tank. 

Result: an instant pavement omelette, a hasty cancellation of the meeting by hotel management, and silence from the Brussels elite. The dedicated freedom advocates of MCC Brussels managed to find an alternative venue at the last minute, and their meeting was a great success. Nevertheless, the damage had been done to the cause of freedom of speech and assembly in Brussels. 

This followed a series of similar Antifa paint and graffiti attacks on venues in the city that have staged MCC Brussels events, intended to scare them off in future. The message is clear: those who dare to uphold national sovereignty and democracy, and question the centralising grip of ‘woke’ ideologies in the EU, should not be permitted to meet or speak about anything in Brussels.

The MCC Brussels meeting that Antifa tried to get cancelled this week was entitled ‘Trump’s New World Order’ and featured two prestigious intellectual speakers: James Orr, associate professor at the University of Cambridge in England and chair of the Edmund Burke Foundation UK, and Guglielmo Picchi, a former Italian government minister now at the Machiavelli Center for Political and Strategic Studies. A modern-day Nuremberg Rally it was not.

But the content of the meeting didn’t much matter to the intellectual poulettes of Antifa. For them, as their statements and graffitied slogans spell out, simply branding MCC Brussels as ‘far right’ or ‘extreme right’ is enough to justify cancelling all of the think tank’s events. 

As ‘Thelma,’ an Antifa activist, declared after the attack on the Stanhope Hotel, such discussions cannot be allowed because “the MCC Brussels’ conferences are very close to the themes of the Trumpist far-right: racism, sexism, transphobia, climate scepticism etc.” The catch-all “etc” in her statement speaks volumes: they believe anything at all that goes against the left-wing grain of Brussels politics should be banned.

These leftist censors have appointed themselves the unelected arbiters of what can be said or thought in a democracy. They are fake anti-fascists who, as MCC Brussels points out, actually “behave like the nihilistic thugs that assisted the spread of fascism in Europe in the 1930s.” 

So how do they get away with it? Look at the response of the supposedly democratic, anti-fascist authorities. At best, they are shrugging their shoulders and looking the other way; at worst, encouraging the intolerance of Antifa.

Last year, let us recall, the mayor of Brussels used the courts and police to try to cancel the important Natcon conference in the city, which was co-sponsored by MCC Brussels and The European Conservative and featured leading national conservative politicians from across Europe. 

That official attack on free speech in the heart of Brussels was so blatant that even Belgium’s prime minister and top judges felt obliged to intervene, and the conference was able to continue. Yet, while hailing that legal victory, we also warned that it was clear that the war on free speech would only intensify. So it has proved.

Brussels municipal council recently read from an Antifa script by voting unanimously to declare Europe’s capital an “anti-fascist city,” in the front line of “the resistance.” But, resistance to what? There are no ghostly armies of fascist stormtroopers jack-booting around modern Brussels.  By ‘fascism,’ they really mean the growing national populist revolt against the EU establishment; or, as the eco-left councillor proposing the motion put it, “far-right ideologies are very much alive today”. And they agree with Antifa that such populist ideas should have no place in the bastion of the EU elites.

That is why there has been so little response from the political mainstream to the latest attempts to censor conservative discussions. Even more than last year, it seems, creeping cancel culture has taken hold of the heart of the EU. 

Little wonder that, as reported on europeanconservative.com, Balázs Orbán, the chairman of the board of MCC, was moved to write an open letter to the current prime minister of Belgium, pointing out that “The encroachment of cancel culture into Brussels — the symbolic and political heart of the European Union- should concern anyone who values liberty”, and urging him “to take a firm and principled stand in defense of freedom of speech and peaceful assembly. … Freedom is our most precious possession-which is why we must not give in to bullying.”

The cowardly bullies of Antifa are now the militant wing of an increasingly-everyday culture of cancellation and censorship in Europe. It is remarkable how leftist radicals have become the loudest and most violent enemies of freedom of speech. They have entirely buried the Left’s own history of fighting for free speech and democracy. It seems that to be “left-wing” now means to be an intolerant bigot.

The words of left-wing heroes of history such as Rosa Luxemburg—“Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently”—or Orwell  himself—“’If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”—would nowadays be condemned as ‘far-right extremism’ and ‘hate speech.’ 

In response, we need to stand up and loudly demand free speech for all, with no ifs or buts, as the lifeblood of a free and democratic Europe. Let them be free to call us supporters of the populist revolt whatever slanderous names they choose. We will not be silenced or deterred by insults, injunctions, or eggs.