On Tuesday I will summarize this past week's cross-examinations in preparation for the Zundelsite judicial review. Today and tomorrow are fillers I had prepared to free myself for this important legal stage. What's shaping up is tantalizing, to say the very least. Just bear with me for now.
I have before me three articles that tell me that Canadians are finally waking up to the thieves of Free Speech - two in the form of a Letter to the Editor, and one an editorial from Salmon Arm, B.C., where Ellen Pressler, a well-known patriot activist, recently won a substantial victory against her Communist-inspired defamers. The latter had claimed that Eileen and her husband were building a weapon-spiked military compound, replete with electronic surveillance etc, when in fact they had built for themselves a retirement home with barns and henhouse as well as a honeybee shack.
All three articles speak out against the censors, as can be seen in this editorial, simply titled "Free Speech" (July 4, 1998) by Paul Willcocks, commenting on Judge Owen-Flood's rejecting a request that Eileen Pressler be awarded a token one cent in damages to "compensate" her for the lies told about her. The judge gave her $11,500. (Separately, her husband was awarded compensation in the mid-five-digit range.)
Writes Willcocks, commenting on this trial:
"Free speech used to be the Left's issue.
"No more. Now the nominal left . . . want to deny the right to express views that they have decided are wrong. (...)
"They are not prepared to accept the law. They simply want to silence those they find objectionable. . . . In a free society you have free speech - with legal limits. If people step over those limits, you charge them. If you disagree with them, you argue. But you don't simply use the tyranny of the majority to silence them."
Clear words. And kudos to Paul Willcocks.
The second article is titled "Labelling ideas undermines discourse" by Michael Britton, (Ottawa Citizen, June 19, 1998). It reinforces a point my ZGrams have hammered at for quite some time:
"An easy and therefore increasingly popular method of attacking ideas is to label them as hateful in some sense. No substantiation of this judgment of the idea's proponent's motives is provided, in most cases; in most cases, the term is considered sufficient to address the argument. (...)
"By applying this term, the columnist is making a rhetorical appeal to (the) readers' emotions at the expense of cheapening an important word and idea."
Commenting on yet another editorial writer who had taken cheap shots at Ernst Zundel in some separate write-up, Mr. Britton angrily points out:
"He states, without support, that 'Ernst Zundel's views . . . have nothing to do with history and even less with politics. His views are anti-Semitism - pure and simple.'
"Anti-semitism is a very emotionally charged term, bringing to mind images of Jews mercilessly attacked on every level for their faith.
"Here, however, Ernst Zundel is killing nobody, enslaving nobody, enfranchising nobody. He is, as I understand it, simply choosing to state that he believes that the immense body of incontrovertible evidence for the Nazi Holocaust is a fabrication.
"Surely a more convincing refutation than this of Mr. Zundel's position is possible. Mr. Zundel's motivations are unknown to us. He could be mistaken or misled, or he could be attempting to undermine Jewish credibility, but the argument against him is much more effective on the rational ground of evidence than the emotional ground of name-calling."
Right on to this one, too!
A third letter, this one written by John Angus, published in the same issue and titled "Interest group opposes a freedom that protects it", makes an even sharper point:
"It was with a degree of weariness I read yet another attempt by a special interest group to curtail Canada's freedoms in the name of suppressing unpopular opinion. ("Make Holocaust Denial a Crime: B'nai Brith, June 16).
(...)
"What manner of learned man would not be ashamed of such a statement? What nation would hold such an inanity aloft as a declaration of the rights of its citizens? If those who make unpopular speech are not to be protected, then who is? (...)
"In Canada, it seems an entire group of allegedly educated people can selflessly (sic) proclaim that freedom is limited to those who share their beliefs. Without the slightest sense of irony or history, B'nai Brith has unwittingly (sic) adopted one of the basic tenets of those who perpetrated the Holocaust: We don't like what they say, so let's stick them in prison.
"And for what? To stop a few screwballs from denying the Holocaust? (...)
Right now the campaigns of self-righteous, narrow-minded organizations are far more dangerous to Canada's freedoms than a few anti-Semitic cranks."
Please note that I even refrained from using my "Bless you's!" at strategically important points. Let no one claim we aren't making inroads and that we aren't grateful! We're always grateful for small favors - and the tide is now turning against censors even in a country as phlegmatic as to what is happening in the People's Republic of Canada!
Ingrid
Thought for the Day:
"The debate about the free flow of information which has been going on for so many years will soon be settled - by engineers, not politicians."
(Arthur C. Clarke, distinguished science fiction writer)