The Weekly Forum - 13 June
16 juni 2025 | Forum for Democracy Intl
Is freedom a right or a social good? FVD believes it is the latter (and no doubt the former too). Freedom is a social good because if people are free to do and think as they please, then society will generally benefit from the ‘open market’ in ideas and activities. Unfortunately, today’s European states are structurally hostile to such diversity. Instead, as Thierry Baudet explained recently in parliament, they are governed by cartels. It is unfortunately a natural human phenomenon, in politics as much as in economics, to want to ‘control the market’ – by appointing your friends to high places, by stifling dissent, by creating narratives which sustain the power structure. This is not only unjust, it is also bad policy because it means that new ideas and fresh modes of thought are sidelined or silenced. Society suffers as a result. Democracy is supposed to create a system which breaks such cartels but currently it does not function at all in the West. Listen to Thierry’s magisterial presentation and you will understand why.
Watch Thierry’s speech here (translated by AI)
To put it bluntly, the system is rigged. Gideon van Meijeren MP had the sad confirmation of this recently in the committee of enquiry into Covid. This is a group of MPs looking into the way the pandemic was handled five years ago. But it turns out that what they can look into is controlled by the civil servants working for the committee. MPs do not have their own right of access to documentation or witnesses. When Gideon realised this, he asked for a meeting with the committee chair. He and the committee members refused to accept any change to this bizarre arrangement which means that the MPs are but front men for a rigged enquiry. So Gideon decided to resign. The self-perpetuating system has won - and democracy and transparency have lost. Society suffers.
None of this is new. As Thierry said, you can find it all in Plato. Former FVD senator Paul Cliteur also discussed freedom at FVD’s Springtime School, held on Ascension Weekend in a beautiful 17th century château in Gelderland. Cliteur proposed a reading of Schopenhauer to the students and told the well-known story of Galileo and his run-in with the Holy Inquisition. If freedom of ideas is a general social good, it is all the more imperative to preserve it in universities, where ideas are the principal activity. Unfortunately academic freedom, like other freedoms, have evaporated in today’s West, as the Left seeks to stamp out all forms of divergence from its own line. Leftism is unfortunately now also supported in this by Islamism which similarly seeks to destroy dissent. Europe is abandoning centuries of liberal tradition in favour of an ever duller and more brutal authoritarianism.
Read Paul Cliteur’s lecture here
As the war expands out in the Middle East, we were delighted to have Steven Jermy and Mark Sleboda as our guests on The Forum this week to discuss the military aspects of the Ukraine war in the light of the recent spectacular drone attacks on Russian air bases deep inside Russia.