Can the principle of freedom of expression be used in propaganda that supports censorship?

Stephen Pollard

By Denis Rancourt, PhD

Yes it can. Here is a good example.

In this article, "[a]s editor of the country’s leading Jewish newspaper, The Jewish Chronicle," Stephen Pollard, pays lip service to freedom of expression by being critical of “snowflakes”.

Snowflakes are not the state. Snowflakes do not use lethal violence to silence dissidents and political participation in the affairs of global and regional state aggressors. Rather, snowflakes are a social phenomenon that results from decades of evisceration of the state educational system by design, away from independent thought and towards emotional malleability.

The snowflake culture is nurtured by an exploitative political class, and that relation can lead the state to pass laws that degrade freedom of expression, especially when the repressive laws also prevent political challenge to the (for now) dominant correctness constituency.

In presenting snowflakes as the nexus of suppression of speech, Pollard achieves two primary propaganda goals:

1. He opens with the pervasively promoted Israel-lobby meme and political device that The Holocaust is a “unique evil”, as though this were a given law of nature. Actually, “The Holocaust” is not a unique evil and is extensively used in propaganda and extortion schemes, as conclusively established in Professor Norman Finkelstein’s landmark 2000 book “The Holocaust Industry”.

2. He covers up by omission and substitution the Israel-lobby-driven current aggressive state attacks against freedom of expression and political participation rights: criminalization of criticism of the very state of Israel, cast as anti-Semitic “hate speech”; criminalization of so-called Holocaust denial (any questioning of historical events surrounding the Nazi holocaust); and statutory civil liability for supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) civil-society campaign against Israeli occupation (e.g.).

Mission accomplished.

So, while many Western states are prosecuting and jailing ordinary citizens for their beliefs and expression, as “hate speech” or as civil campaigns allegedly motivated by anti-Semitism, in Canada, France, Germany, the USA… Pollard invites us to have an emotional reaction against “snowflakes” because snowflakes are silly.  In doing so, he quotes Orwell.

Snowflakes don’t scare me. They will be offended and insulted back into reality if and when reality imposes itself. State laws and state militarism to dominate domestic and foreign populations on the other hand are precisely the instruments that lead to “unique evils”.