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Here's some potentially very bad news. CNET News.com's Lisa M. Bowman reports that international policy-makers last week ended a round of talks aimed at setting common rules affecting online trade and commerce.

On a brighter note, Ms. Bowman says "they made little progress in bridging divisions that threaten to delay a pact." Let's hope this steaming pile is more than delayed, but sunk entirely.

Bowman says that the Hague Convention on Jurisdiction and Foreign Judgments is almost unknown outside international policy circles, but could have broad implications for consumers and businesses by setting new rules for online copyrights, free speech and e-commerce if it is approved. She notes that "U.S. representatives claim the pact threatens free speech and could force Internet service providers to become global content police."

She cites Jamie Love, director of Ralph Nader's Consumer Project on Technology (CPT) noting: "In a nutshell, it will strangle the Internet with a suffocating blanket of overlapping jurisdictional claims, expose every Web page publisher to liabilities for libel, defamation and other speech offenses from virtually any country, (and) effectively strip Internet service providers of protections from litigation over the content they carry."

As regular readers know, I am a free speech advocate and a proponent of an open and free Internet, and these draconian threats from would-be thought and speech police disgust me.

A salutary example is the recent dust-up between French courts and Yahoo! over the sale of Nazi memorabilia in Yahoo's US Website, with a French judge imposing fines of $14,000 a day for every day the Nazi auction site was not blocked to French surfers. Yahoo unfortunately capitulated, although it is fighting the ruling in a US court, asking that French law be declared unenforcible in the U.S.

Some who haven't bothered to think the implications of that through carefully enough might be tempted to regard it as a relatively minor infringement of Web freedom, or perhaps even a commendable one, but the issue is not the Nazi junk, but rather the imposition of political correctness by Star Chamber authorities. It is the not-so-thin edge of the wedge, and if we don't dig in our heels and fight tooth-and-nail to preserve freedom of speech and expression, you will wake up one day soon and find that a lot more than Nazi gimcracks are being censored and banned. Think of the implications once China or certain hard-line Islamic countries are empowered through the Hague treaty to take action against political comment or parody on the Web, for instance.

The proposed Hague treaty would require participants to agree to enforce each others' laws on a variety of topics even if they prohibit actions that are legal under local laws.

"People don't realize what a disaster this could be," Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation is quoted saying. Ms. Bowman says Stallman and others hope that more people will rally to fight the treaty as they learn of its potential impact, by contacting delegates and lawmakers. "We can't assume it will die of its own accord," he said. "We have to stop it."

This thought and speech policing issue of course extends far beyond the Web. One problem is that while most people in, say, Canada and the US will pay lip service to being supporters of free speech, there has been over the past decade or so a disastrous erosion of true free speech principles, which are constantly being corroded by the onslaught of political correctness indoctrination in education, the media, and other cultural engines.

Last week, Nobel Prize-winning writer and activist Wole Soyinka said that Canada and the United States are bowing to the "neo-fascism" of political correctness even as people elsewhere, notably in Iran, fight to throw off tyranny. Mr. Soyinka described North America as a place where "the new commissars of thought" have taken over and are destroying creativity by insisting that everyone speak in correct terms. "I cannot help but observe that, in several countries, but most notoriously in the United States and Canada, the world of intellect and originality appears to be under siege." Mr. Soyinka, winner of the 1986 Nobel in literature, observed, speaking at the University of Alberta where he accepted an honorary doctorate of letters.

Exiled from his native Nigeria where he was jailed twice for challenging the authorities, Mr. Soyinka, who now teaches in the United States, remarked at the irony of how thought is being stifled here by "the new conformism" at the same time people in Iran, a country that once embodied intolerance, are emerging from oppression.

Soylinka called political correctness a "pagan deity" upon the horns of which in the academic world he has seen numerous people's careers blighted and ruined because they didn't toe a politically correct line. People and institutions in Canada, he continued, "have to decide whether they are on the side of power and constriction, or freedom and creativity."

The malignant perniciousness of what Soylinka characterizes as the "moral confusion and social guilt" underlying political correctness was driven home to him several years ago when he received another honorary doctorate at another Canadian university, and included in his acceptance speech some words of support for novelist Salman Rusdie, under a "fatwa" death sentence from the Iranian regime for allegedly insulting Islam in his book. "The Satanic Verses," and who by happenstance was also in Canada being similarly honored at another institution. He received a hearty ovation, but, as he relates:

"It was not until dinner afterwards, that I learnt exactly against whom this 'courage' was understood to have had been directed. No, it was not in the direction of the would-be killers of the writers but against the leaders of the new Canadian orthodoxy. Rushdie had become part of some a general cultural discourse; in the process, it was suddenly (or progressively) decided that he had not been sensitive to he cultural feelings of others, thus it was politically incorrect that his cause should be espoused! Murder it seemed, could be tolerated in the cause of Political Correctness. I had apparently taken on , quite innocently, the new commissars of thought whose domination, in that area of intellectual exchange at least had become total. This was the unholiest out of all."

I think that Mr. Soylinka is correct in his suggestion that it is still only a loudmouth minority of nincompoops who subscribe wholeheartedly to the political correctness religion. As he notes, "The hallowed community of thought and creativity on that occasion appeared to be divided mainly in two: a minority of notional sophisticates who espoused the now 'politically correct' view on Salman Rushdie with nothing short of religious fervour, and -- two -- the rest, who had been cowed, literally bludgeoned into submission. Hovering around the two groups floated the vocal stormtroopers of genuine minority causes, clear-sighted, and cynical. Their agenda was limited but profitable -- to exploit the moral confusion and social guilt that had been implanted in that Canadian community and thus obtain the maximum social benefits from such a situation. They were at least honest and unapologetic - I could understand and frankly, applaud their opportunism."

On the latter point i disagree. Cynical opportunists are perhaps the most dangerous blackguards of all.

The full text of Mr. Soyinka's Alberta speech is available at:
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/city/speech.html

I encourage you to read it and think about it. Then write, phone, or email your congressman, senator, or member of parliament and demand that the U.S. and Canada wash their hands of the Hague political correctness Internet treaty.

Lisa Bowman's report can be read here:
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-202-6345725.html

Charles W. Moore

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