The Weekly Forum - 11 April
14 april 2025 | Forum for Democracy Intl
Which is more important – democracy or woke rights? We have known the EU’s answer to this question for some years. When the European Parliament voted a resolution on Hungary in 2022, saying that Hungary was violating European values, it mentioned sexual issues like LGBT rights and gender far more often than it talked about elections or democracy. Three years on and little has changed. When the Volt party asked Dutch parties this month to sign a letter protesting about LGBT rights in Hungary, a majority of parties did so. But when FVD MP Pepijn van Houwelingen asked Dutch parties to sign similar letters about the cancellation of elections and candidates in Romania and France, all of them refused. ‘Liberal democracy’ has disappeared so far up its own backside that it is no longer either liberal nor democratic.
FVD International director, John Laughland, was Peter Lavelle’s guest on Crosstalk to discuss this very matter. Everyone has rightly been shocked by the developments in Romania and France – they seem to be adopting the Iranian model for presidential elections, where candidates are vetted in advance by the religious authorities before being allowed to stand – but unfortunately they are only the latest in a very long series of outrages committed against democratic principles, going back at least to 1992 when Denmark was forced to vote a second time on the Maastricht treaty. The discourse against ‘populism’ is nothing but elitism and snobbery dressed up in clever language, a way of pretending to be democratic while in fact holding the people in contempt.
Watch John Laughland’s interview here
One of the key structural problems about modern democracy, apart from the cancellation of elections, is the way that government spending is outsourced to agencies which are then not controlled by parliaments. This is the USAID scandal. But the USAID problem exists in other countries too, including in Europe. Pepijn van Houwelingen pressed a Dutch minister on this recently. USAID works closely with other countries and – worse – some countries, including the Netherlands, even give money to USAID. (Its budget is already in the billions, so one wonders why.) There are lots of conspiracy theories about the deep state but this scandal is sadly a very clear illustration of the deep state in operation.
On The Forum & Friends this week Dr Andrew Kaufman questioned germ theory – the belief that we catch diseases from germs and thus from other people. Instead, he argues, illnesses come from malnutrition, trauma and poisoning. It was a fascinating talk which shakes to their very foundations our assumptions about illness.