Claudio Grass: Freedom of Speech Dying a Slow Death in Europe

For decades, Western democracies operated under a comfortable consensus: censorship was a blunt instrument reserved for authoritarian regimes, while the “free world” relied on open debate, robust dissent, and constitutional safeguards. This sentiment allowed Western leaders to feel superior over the rest of the world, to lecture other countries on democratic principles and, in some cases, to invade and bomb them too, to spread these ideas by force. In recent years, however, that narrative has collapsed under the weight of its own hypocrisy.