Pascal Lottaz, who runs the YouTube channel Neutrality Studies and is also a TFF Board member, talks with Professor Glenn Diesen of Norway, a TFF Associate. In different ways, they express their deepest concerns at the news that the EU Council has placed sanctions on Jacques Baud. You may read here how the Council formulates its – loose and politically biased – accusations.
In addition to the above conversation, we’d like to recommend a very fine article about this tragic, self-destructive EU turning point by Jvan Ricciardella, “When Expertise Becomes a Crime: The Jacques Baud Case and the Silent Mutation of European Democracy”.
He presents Jacques Baud to his readers and explains why this is a deeply troubling decision that punishes a person who, in more than one sense, comes from within the Western system and has served by Switzerland, NATO, the OSCE and the UN with his vast expertise.
Among his concluding warnings, this one stands out:
The most uncomfortable question raised by the Jacques Baud affair is not whether he is right or wrong in his analyses, but whether Europe still possesses the democratic confidence to tolerate being wrong, to allow competing interpretations to coexist, and to trust its citizens to evaluate arguments rather than suppress them through administrative force.
When sanctions replace debate, when dissent is equated with disloyalty, and when expertise becomes dangerous once it contradicts official positions, the democratic claim of the European project begins to erode from within, not through tanks or coups, but through fear, conformity, and the quiet abandonment of pluralism.
Indeed! If this can hit Baud, every free expert now has to be concerned about her or his future.
PS
Shortly, TFF will follow up with a backgrounder to the EU-NATO disinformation warfare and how it is organised and conducted to the detriment of free opinion formation.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jan Oberg.