mr president in an appendix to george orwell wrote a chapter on newspeak and he talked about how language could be vitiated and changed and thereby change our thought
the example he gave was the word free
he could only envisage the word free being used in newspeak to mean this dog is free from lice this field is free from weeds so the concept of intellectual or political freedom disappeared because there were no words to express it
it was an uncannily prescient example because that is more or less what has happened to the word free in our lifetime
it used to mean a freedom against state coercion freedom of speech freedom of assembly freedom of worship it now means an entitlement
i have a freedom to work i have a freedom to use the national healthcare system or whatever
this report on human rights has moved from the concept of rights as a guarantee of personal liberty to a right as a claim on everybody else
instead of guaranteeing our rights to be treated equally it asserts our rights to be treated differently
there is not a crisis of human rights in europe there is crisis of democracy and we do not tackle that crisis by shifting power from elected representatives to unelected jurists
