France’s President Emmanuel Macron has defended artwork which appears to depict a child being orally raped by an adult after protestors threw paint on it.
The graphic painting titled fuck abstraction! depicts an entirely nude, muscular adult forcing what appears to be a naked, slightly built male child kneeling with his hands bound behind his back to fellate him.
Someone who objected to its pedophilic content splashed it with purple paint at the Palais de Tokyo modern art museum in Paris, prompting France’s increasingly unpopular globalist president to leap to its defense.
“Targeting a work of art is an attack on our values,” Macron complained.
“In France, art is always free and respect for artistic creation is guaranteed,” he added.
Hypocrisy.
Miriam Cahn, a Swiss artist in her seventies, has claimed that the work, supposedly a tribute of sorts to victims of alleged war crimes in Bucha, Ukraine, does not depict a man and a child. She claims the victim’s childlike size and physique is intended to represent “the corporeal power of the oppressor, and the fragility of the oppressed” — but many are unconvinced.
Indeed, the Association Juristes Pour l’Enfance (Lawyers for Childhood) appealed to the courts and the State Council to have the painting removed under child protections laws, but were unsuccessful.
Lawyers for the Palais de Tokyo hailed judges’ refusal to intervene, like Macron, as victory over “attempts at circumventing the right to freedom of expression by way of so-called child protection”.
Such references to “freedom of expression” will be risible to observers familiar with just how weak free speech protections are in France, with a woman in her fifties who referred to Macron as “filth” currently due to appear in court for the crime of “insulting the President of the Republic” in June.
Neither the United Kingdom nor the European Union have anything resembling America’s First Amendment to protect free speech.
Unlike the First Amendment, which tells the state what it cannot do with respect to abridging people’s civil liberties, Europe’s so-called freedom of speech protections derive from the European Convention on Human Rights, which tells citizens what they can do.
The British, infamously, can be charged for making “grossly offensive” remarks or jokes on Facebook, Twitter, or even in private WhatsApp groups, while laws like the one being used to prosecute a woman for insulting President Macron are fairly common across Continental Europe.
In Germany it can be a crime to insult any public official, with a lockdown and vaccine sceptic being fined €16,500 (~$18,175) for calling two politicians “mendacious, corrupt, power-hungry, characterless and dishonorable creatures” in an email.
These German speech restrictions even extend to foreign officials, with the authorities controversially pursuing a case against a man who wrote a rude poem about the Turkish president quite far, until public backlash forced a climbdown.
More recently, people have found themselves being arrested for having the “wrong” opinions on the war in Ukraine, with a German recently fined €4,000 (~$4,400) for having a Russian ‘Z’ symbol on his car and a Polish woman being put on trial for accusing the Ukrainian government of a “lack of integrity” and saying she “believe[d] in Russia’s victory and help for us Slavs” in a social media post.
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