I checked and double-checked to see that the comment I made on Michael Enright's cookie-cutter condemnation of those who wanted to keep Steve Bannon's quite successful PR campaign for fascism out of Canada fell within the posted CBC standards for comments, the last time I looked it had been removed from the comments on Michael Enright's entirely predictable, 1960's style torch-song speech for "free speech - free press" absolutism.
Which, I have always held is the perfect right of the CBC or any other organ of the media to do. I remember back when it used to be worth going to for the exchange with the adults who eventually fled Duncan Black's Eschaton, that I defended his right to remove comments when someone whined about him having excluded comments on the basis of it "violating the First Amendment" which it, of course, in no way did, Duncan Black not being the U. S. Government, the only entity covered by even a rational reading of the First Amendment instead of the fundamentalist reading which is so disastrously fashionable today.
But it is interesting that media corporations, individual editors, individual writers claim for themselves the goods that come with choosing to exclude some voices from their properties, their newspapers, their magazines, their blogs and websites, and podcasts, their radio and TV shows, of refusing to suffer the certain ill-effects to the content of their properties, their intentions and their reputations of allowing just anyone to say just anything while they are more than prepared to leave the collective mind of The People, the electorate, REAL LIFE entirely vulnerable to suffer the effects that they refuse to suffer for their own little corner of virtual reality.
What Enright said was a string of the predictable cookie-cutter rote phrases. For example:
It was atop a double byline op-ed that argued Steve Bannon should not be allowed to debate writer and renegade Republican David Frum at a Munk Debate in Toronto next week. The resolution: "The future of western politics is populist not liberal."
Sounds tame enough, but the authors of the op-ed argue that if Bannon is given any kind of public forum, Canada is risking its Charter of Rights and Freedoms, threatens what they call "our sense of belongingness in society, and undermines the mutual trust on which the sharing of public space rests."
That's an awful lot of social damage to be caused by the mutterings of a lone, right-wing American gas bag.
They wind up the piece by declaring that Bannon has no respect for liberal democracy.
Which misses the entire point. I don't care if Bannon has no respect for democracy, but I do care if Canadians do.
"Banning Bannon is good for democracy" is so Orwellian in concept, I wonder if the duo was paraphrasing him.
"War is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength."
They certainly weren't channelling the George Orwell who said; "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
Orwell, thou shouldst be living at this hour.
That stuff might have been believable back when the kinds of Western "conservative parties" that won elections and formed governments in places like Canada and the United States were merely pro-rich and not overtly fascist, the kind of governments which lies with the abandon that the one that Steve Bannon helped bring to the United States does, that is led by a degenerate and lying criminal who has a large following, who, after two years of the most overtly fascistic governance the United States has had still is not a certainty to lose the mid-term election and whose re-election is not guaranteed to not happen. But that's no longer the "the West" that we live in.
The least deniable thing about Donald Trump is that he, as a public persona and a politician is 100% a creation of the American free press, if you include television and American hate-talk radio as press. And the U. S. Supreme Court does.
Bannon is in the business of using the corruption of elections through the corruption of voters vulnerable to lies to promote fascism AND HE IS SUCCESSFUL IN DOING IT. He is hardly the only one who has done it, he has had enormous help by billionaires, domestic as well as foreign who use the media, in the United States FOX, Sinclair, Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, other various and smaller fascist propagandists and spreaders of poison through the free speech of the free press AND IT WORKS TO DESTROY DEMOCRACY.
The central idiocy of Enright's line is that it equates the ability of fascists to lie themselves into power through lies designed by PR methods for easy sale and the lying appeal to the worst in their audience with the ability of people who want egalitarian democracy to tell the often far less enticing and often harder to accept truth.
The central idiocy of Enright's style of free-speech, free-press absolutism is that it refuses to acknowledge that there is everything different between the truth and lies and that lies are poison to democracy, they are poison to freedom, they are far easier to sell because they don't have to acknowledge the often difficult, often unpleasant and often merely boring qualities of reality, they can be shaped to be pleasing and easy to sell.
If Orwell's nightmare government told the truth with the ruthlessness that it told its lies, Orwell wouldn't have had a scary novel to sell because it would have been as boring and unenticing and unfascinating as good government tends to be. It would have been even more boring than Michel Enright's cookie-cutter torch song to free-speech absolutism is because good government doesn't tend to carry the theatricality of such torch songs. Good government is more boringly honest than that.
Enright's line has something more in common with Steve Bannon's line than he would like anyone to notice and that is deceptive simplicity and a stubborn refusal to acknowledge that real life has largely refuted the easy slogans of free speech absolutism. Egalitarian democracy is not 100% the same thing as "free speech - free press". Freedoms such as that are secondary rights, they are dependent on equality and the right of The People to elect their government ON THE BASIS OF A TRUE AND ACCURATE VIEW OF REALITY. You would think that a professional journalist would appreciate that their own ability to tell the truth is dependent on the very things that Steve Bannon not only intendeds to destroy but has come very close to doing so in the United States, "the land of the free and the home of the brave" by whipping up racist paranoia through the very media which Enright works in.
The inability of free speech absolutists to learn from history, even the history they are living through is one of the most extraordinary things I've witnessed in the past twenty years. They have their lines and they will repeat them as democracy is undermined, as it cracks, as it falls into ruin. They will mouth the same platitudes about free speech and free press even as the only ones who are free are those who support fascism and the oligarchs who mount fascist government on their behalf. The media that agrees with the most brutal and oppressive governments in history and the world was always free to support the brutal establishments, lying on their behalf as FOX does, as Sinclair does, as CNN and ABC and NPR will repeat while posing as their alternatives.
Enright's lines are good, they are PR products and have been honed for easy sale to people who like to think well of themselves. The experience of seeing democracy destroyed by lies in the modern, post WWII, post Soviet world proves that it is wrong. Steve Bannon understands how to use those lines, today the greatest champions of "free speech" are American fascists, Nazis, white supremacists and the media professionals who are enabling them. They are wrong, if we don't realize that it's more complicated than that now, we will in the aftermath of the disaster they bring. If there is anyone to pick up the pieces.
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