Freedom is never free. It is not free of cost, or of supervision, or of limits. No society anywhere has complete freedom of speech, and there are boundaries to freedom everywhere, also known as walls. These are manned – deliberate word – by defenders who are not remotely free, who must obey orders and if need be die in the name of freedom. What is freedom for the rest of us is usually uniformed servitude for them. Amongst their many tasks can be the intrusion into the privacy of “suspects”, opening their letters and listening to their phone calls.
Such violations of individual freedom are not the invention of the internet, but the hallmark of all “free” societies everywhere. In the name of freedom, freedom is endlessly compromised: And without such compromises, freedom is soon forfeit to the most ruthless tyrant who can (and will) use freedom’s liberties to destroy it, either personally within a small criminal group, as with Al Capone, or politically, by seizing an entire state. Who does not mourn the failure of the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, to arrest Lenin when he arrived at the Finland Station?
Amongst the “suspects” today are Russia, still, for obvious reasons, and China, which (maybe intentionally: My inner-jury’s still out on this one) six years ago this month infected the world with a deadly virus, and of course paedophiles. And – roll of drums plus a fanfare of glorious trumpets! – step forward the hero of the hour, the Danish SD MP, Henrik Sass Larsen – yes, Henrik, please take a bow. Thank you. Lovely bow-tie, by the way, and fancy that: Two kinds of bow in the one sentence! Now what are you famous for in Denmark? What? I can’t hear you. Henrik. SPEAK UP!
Ah. Silence still. Dear me. So I’ll do the talking for you. The reason you’re famous in Denmark is that when the Danish police raided your home, they found over eight thousand “paedophile” (wrong word surely: it should be paedophobe) images and video files, some 450 of which belonged to Category 3, and I have no idea what that “3” consists of, and nor do I want to know, plus a “sexdukke”.
Now one of the great joys of working for Brussels Signal is that, aside from working with some really great, independent-minded people, one occasionally gets a special treat: Last year, for example, I went to Poland, and met some of the patriots who are fighting the EU’s imperial designs to undermine the essence of Polishness. But at no stage when I started this journey did I imagine that I would even hear of, never mind have to explain to you, dear readers, what a “sexdukke” is.
Look away now please: It is a baby-like doll for having sex with, and that is easily one of the most terrible sentences I have ever written. Sexdukkes are apparently imported from China, and if you wondered why the Chinese look down on us Europeans, now you know. As it happens, the poor Danish police didn’t realise what it was, so merely took a photograph of it in Henrik’s bedroom and collared him for the images only. He was then not given a free swimming-lesson courtesy of the Royal Danish Air Force by being dropped from a C-130J Hercules 100 miles – or 160 kilometres: metric or imperial, it’s up to you – over the North Sea and allowed to make his own way home. Instead, he was the beneficiary of that other very Scandinavian stretch of water, namely Clement-Sea, being slung into the slammer for just four months.
However, that kindly ocean did not confine its munificence to such a ridiculously short jail-time. As a former SD – not, not as in “Sexually Deviant” but “Social Democrat” – MP, his party arranged for him to draw his pension early, primarily because his political career was now over. That IS a surprise. I wonder why.
Larsen’s excuse for all this internet-trawling was that he was sexually-abused when he was a child and he was trying to find his abuser. Sigh. The law is the law on such matters everywhere, and paid access to these sites is merely enriching the organisers of child-rape. Anyway, what words does a man (and it’s always a man) type when he begins his first search, without alarm bells ringing across the world? Is there a secret code for such evil? If there is, then it’s no longer a secret. A circular quandary to which there is no decent answer. Let us move on.
The Larsen-case has prompted an online furore about the EU’s control of internet-chat being the precursor to Orwell’s Big Brother. But it’s not that simple. Society is full of give-and-take contracts. We must not show our children pornography but must send them to school, and we may not drive them there on the wrong side of the road. And so on, ad infinitum. Freedom is guarded by rules and by endlessly renegotiated compromises. The only absolute rule is the absolute absence of absolutes, they invariably being the weapon of oppressive government. That is why juries are central to modern civilisation, for they transfer power from the ruling caste of like-minded lawyers to ordinary folk. The recent horror-rulings on immigration by European courts are precisely what you get when you hand the law to undiluted lawyers.
Of course, juries are not perfect: They can be culturally corrupted or misled by perjury, and what was justice in 1825 would seldom pass for justice today. But there can often be a strange consistency in how law operates. By the cultural norms of 20th century liberalism, Oscar Wilde was an innocent man wrongly jailed for engaging in homosexual acts. Yet in both the UK and Ireland today, he would nonetheless be imprisoned for paying for sex. And where did this bizarre law come from? From the enlightened Scandinavian paradise of Sweden, on whose sexual-legal shores the Clement Sea clearly does not wash: After all, one man’s freedom can be a mother’s dungeon. Nothing in life is simple, least of all laws governing sexual matters: Doubt me, ask the sexdukke.
Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.
What Britain and Ireland do is mimic the US to delude themselves they are modern