Lock up your partners, children and valuables: the smokers are coming! No, the British are not donning their redcoats and heading for the Americas, nor are the French lower classes preparing to storm the Bastille again, but something of great importance has been happening in Europe this last week.
Serious legitimate protest is occurring against the ramparts of European anti-smoking government. It’s been largely unreported in the press, but demonstrations of considerable size have recently occurred both in Belgium and Bulgaria. (And also now in Ukraine – see Latest News below).
3,500 international smokers from many countries in Europe took to the streets of Brussels to protest against unfair legislation and the unwarranted persecution of citizens who indulge in a legal activity. They read out a statement denouncing the EU’s policy against smokers.
In Sofia, Bulgaria, some 2,000 protesters also took to the streets: again their protest was about the curtailment of rights for a minority engaging in a legal pastime. Some even displayed yellow stars reminiscent of the last European regime that chose to victimise minorities (a kind of real-life Godwin’s Law?)
The people of Europe clearly see the inherent wrongness of the Tobacco Control Industry and are publicly rebelling against it in a legal manner. It is time that smokers worldwide stood up for their freedom to make adult choices and European citizens are at last beginning to fight the likes of Stanton Glantz, who began this whole era of persecution in California.
The protesters have a legitimate voice, the voice of freedom that is ringing loud and clear across Europe and will light a spark among those oppressed in Australia and New Zealand where the laws against smoking are ruthlessly expanded and enforced on a minority whose only ‘crime’ is to indulge in a legal habit.
Nowhere in the world should such a message ring more true but in America where all this started: their National Anthem proclaims it as ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’. Freedom is worth fighting for and the citizens of Europe and Bulgaria have now engaged publicly in that fight.
It’s time to support these lawful protesters, wherever you are in the world. It’s time to tell your representatives that you do not want this persecution of minorities to go on, by letter or by lawful protest on the streets.
Already the alcohol prohibitionists are using the same tactics as tobacco control and so too is the anti fat and sugar lobby. We, the smokers, are not alone in this, it affects others too. Eventually those who pull the strings of hatred, who seek to remove your freedom, will encroach on something you enjoy and once those puritanical people get their claws into you they will ruin your lives for you, so even if you do not smoke, even if you do not drink, even if you are not fat, your freedoms will be taken along with other minorities’. If you steal the freedom from one group then you steal the freedom of all mankind.
H/T Frank Davis/Reinhold
LATEST NEWS: It looks as if Ukraine is also about to relax its smoking ban in restaurants and bars.