Who's Vladimir Bukovsky? And Why Hobbes?

Bukovsky was a Russki dissident and writer, who was the first to expose the use of "psychiatric" imprisonment of political dissidents in the Soviet Union.

He doesn't care for the European Union. But take his statements and change a couple of words (like, say, switch "Europol" for "DHS"), and it becomes a bit more compelling, no?

"Go through all the structures, all the features of this emerging European monster, and it more and more resembles the Soviet Union. Of course, it’s a milder version of the Soviet Union. Please don’t misunderstand me...it has no gulag. It has no KGB, not yet. But I’m very carefully watching such structures as Europol, for example. And that really concerns because this organisation will have power probably even more than the KGB. They will have diplomatic immunity. I cannot imagine the KGB with diplomatic immunity. That’s even more frightening than it is."

About "hate speech,":

"What you have observe taken in perspective, is the systematic introduction of ideology which will be enforced later...and apparently, that's the whole purpose of Europol. Otherwise, why would we need it? That for me is very suspicious. And I'd watch very carefully who is persecuted for what and what is happening now.

That is one field in which I am an expert. I know how gulags spring up."

Resume Soma treatments...

HT: Orwell

That's related to Hobbes.....how?

Let's begin with the trenchant observation of Fr. Schall:

"We are losing our liberties because of our 'rights.'”

So?

...Many fine scholars such as Jacques Maritain, John Finnis, and others have worked valiantly to save “rights” terminology from relativism, the context in which it is understood in modern political philosophy. They have not prevailed in baptizing it as was their intent, even though they provide plausible arguments about why it need not be a relativistic concept. These arguments are simply ignored or rejected by most rights advocates, though seldom confronted intellectually.

David Walsh has noted that the word “rights” still retains a vague relation to some stable grounding in being. Today, however, “rights” mean what Hobbes, its original formulator, claimed: namely, the word rights means whatever the de facto political authority says it means. A “right” is what the government defines and enforces as a right, nothing more, nothing less.

That's the connection to Bukovsky, the Gulag, and "Europol." Coming soon to a theatre near you.