Totally off the topic we're dealing with this week - namely the Borovoy in-house bugle to his tribesmen to go easy on their censorship frenzy, lest it starts crunching them - a fellow scribe and good friend of many, Bradley Smith of CODOH.com, did some quaint ZGram editing, to wit:
"Been thinking about WHERE TRUTH IS DESTINY AND DESTINATION. I think it is close to being redundant, and especially gives that impression when it comes up on the screen everyday.
"It might be more effective if you cut "AND DESTINATION."
"Aside from "destiny" and "destination" both referring to end times, "destiny" is a big thought - "destination" is an everyday thought.
"This means that you start the phrase with a grand idea, and end with an everyday idea. If you want to keep both words, I would change their order, beginning with the everyday idea and build to the grand idea.
"But "destiny" includes "destination", so you don' really need it--maybe. Not that you asked, but you know how we artistes wool the language around.-"
Well, Bradley is right - and I stand corrected. Good writers ought to have a dictum: "Less is more!" Henceforth, the fringe is history!
Now back to Borovoy who has some pungent things to say to the tribe in his newly published "The New Anti-Liberals":
Borovoy:
Unfortunately, the Canadian Jewish Congress's drift into pro-censorship positions has not stopped at the anti-hate law. The CJC wound up supporting the false news prosecution of Holocaust-denier Ernst Zundel. This section of the Criminal Code was particularly dangerous. It prohibited the conscious dissemination of false material that was likely to cause injury ". . . to the public interest." Nowhere, however, did this section define its terms.
While it might appear acceptable in the abstract to bar the deliberate telling of lies, in the concrete such a ban could endanger much political and even historical discussion. As reprehensible as Holocaust denial is, we must remember that the law at issue had the capacity to muzzle other speech. If denying the Holocaust could provide a criminal prosecution, what about denying the enormity of Stalin's crimes or denying the magnitude of the Inquisition?
Zundelsite:
Yes, what about it? Part of the reason, at least, that the "gassing" story assumed such grotesque proportions in the public's imagination was that it ***needed to be exaggerated*** in order to keep the story of the Jewish-Bolshevik involvement in two horrendous world wars contained.
Some of us even think that the reason the Iron Curtain lasted as long as two generations is that the six or so concentration camps in Poland, where the "gassings" were supposed to have taken place, needed to be kept away from public scrutiny until a third, dumbed-down, brainwashed generation was sufficiently distant from actual history to have the intellectual capacity and historical perspective to even question the gigantic hoax.
But keeping up this ceaseless German-bashing was the old sorcerer's trick: Keep your eyes on one stimulus so that you miss the other.
Borovoy:
Indeed, people in political situations frequently accuse each other of falsehood, and frequently there is at least an arguable basis for the charge. At the time of Canada's 1988 election campaign on free trade, for example, virtually all parties accused each other of lying. What is often at issue, of course, are not matters of fact, at all, but matters of opinion. In any event, the parties to the 1988 campaign might well have tended to exaggerate their own claims and minimize those of their adversaries. But imagine the impact on the debate if such exaggerations and minimizations had produced serious threats of criminal prosecution.
Even if the defendants would ultimately have been cleared because of inadequate proof that they had knowingly lied, the campaign would have suffered. A critical danger to freedom of speech is the very existence of a law that could threaten us for engaging in normal democratic debate. Moreover, the people most likely to be intimidated are those with unpopular ideas. Unless they were particularly imprudent or exceptionally courageous, they could well decide that it is better to be quiet than to risk the ordeal of a prosecution. That's why public opinion, rather than legal coercion, should decide the truth and falsity of most public policy claims.
Zundelsite:
Well, your perfect example is Germany where the law is so vague that if some poor German sucker claims that not "6 million" but only "five million 999,999" people were genocided, he stands a chance of five years in the slammer.
Nowhere is it specified just what Germans are supposed to believe. Some people have tried to pin the German government down for a definition of political correctness - to no avail at all.
To make a second point, no one who knows Zundel would call him "particularly imprudent." That leaves "exceptionally courageous" - which is exactly what he is.
It takes courage to have done what he has done with his lifetime - to have drawn his line in the Canadian snow and told the Holocaust extortionists: "To here, and no further!" He has braved his ordeals of prosecution, and it is bearing fruit all over our restive globe.
Borovoy:
The Supreme Court of Canada recognized all this even if the Canadian Jewish Congress did not. In the context of the Zundel case, the Court struck down the false news section as an unconstitutional infringement of free speech. This doesn't mean that any kind of false news law would have suffered such a fate. There could be no reasonable objection, for example, to a law which prohibited the spreading of false news in situations where there was an imminent peril to life or limb. It would be acceptable, therefore, to punish a television station for falsely broadcasting that enemy missiles were on their way to strike Canadian cities. But such a law would have to define its terms in the kind of precise language that was nowhere to be found in the section that the Court invalidated and the CJC sought to uphold.
Zundelsite:
Revisionists maintain that if whole countries are bled dry with a hoax of monumental proportions, that can be likened to a psychic attack of equivalent enemy missiles.
After all, even as we speak, the state of Israel is benefiting from an acknowledged 13.5 million economic booster shot a day, courtesy of the United States benevolence - 365 days a year. That is a lot of money that could have gone into public health, better housing, saner education, control of national borders etc. It's not exactly as though this systematic lying to the American public has no adverse effects on the well-being of the citizens who underwrite the hoax.
As one ZGram reader described it succinctly, referring to Peter Novick's new book, "The Holocaust in America":
". . . (Novick) examines how American Jews specifically have, at great expense, time and trouble, moved "Holocaust consciousness" to the center of American life and kept it there under the greasy and overbearing (Jewish) thumb.
"By the 1980s and particularly the 90s, with Holocaust education made compulsory in high school, the erection of Holocaust memorials, and the opening of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., it came to have "transcendent status" as "the bearer of eternal truths".
"And what for? Why, the whole thing was a long-term investment, of course, with even greater anticipated cash profits."
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Thought for the Day:
"CHILDREN of Holocaust survivors are now suing the pants off anyone they can find culpable for the big H, because they were forced to grow up in dysfunctional families.
"If successful, this will establish a European tit from which the Zionist state can permanently suck."
(Letter to the Zundelsite)