The iconic anti-Duplessis Editor-in-Chief of Le Jour Jean-Charles Harvey wrote that, Liberty cannot accommodate a policy that tells people what to think and how to speak. Events of the past week brought those words back in critical relief.
Patrick Provost, a tenured, published and respected Professor of Immunology at Universit Laval who specializes in micro RNA, was suspended without pay for eight weeks for comments he made at a conference last December where he questioned the need for vaccinating children. The FDA, CDC and Health Canada themselves had at various times questioned the same issue. Provost said, I was just doing what I was hired to do. I searched the literature and gave a speech. Being censored for doing what Ive been trained to do and hired to do is hard to believe. But now we are all apparently supposed to be in lockstep groupthink. Thankfully his union has asked for his reinstatement with back pay.
In another incident, the federal CRTC has ordered Radio Canada to apologize because a complaint was received about a radio talk show in 2020 where two participants spoke the full name of Pierre Vallires book White N..... of America. The CRTC said the N word was not used in a, discriminatory manner but Radio Canada did not do enough to mitigate the effect the word could have on its audience. Thankfully again, some 50 leading Quebec journalists signed an open letter defending free speech and attacking censorship. Quebecs professional journalists association called the CRTC decision, a dangerous precedent that imposes censorship upon media that is as exaggerated as it is unjustified.
There is a dangerous current running through society that for the sake of not offending anyones sensibilities, it is acceptable to engage in censorship.Public sanctioning of individuals daring to use certain words and express unpopular opinions.
This is wrong and dangerous. It kills free speech and buries the lessons of history. The only objective standard for limiting freedom of expression is overt incitement to violence. Every other standard is totally subjective and depending on who wields power, censorship can and has been used against the just and the innocent.
Do we really want to mitigate the effect of anti-Black racism and antisemitic diatribes? No! The only way to raise the consciousness of the public is to allow the full thrust of hate to hit people like a hammer. Attempts to water down the reporting of hate speech or unpopular opinion will have the opposite effect and suppress the revulsion that people should feel and the open debate that we must be allowed.
Our new era of woke censorship is a dangerous slippery slope. And it is paternalistic, having at its core a belief that people dont have the intelligence - or the right - to make up their own minds. It was not too long ago that the writings of D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller were banned because they were too sexually arousing and portrayed lesbianism and homosexuality. They supposedly irritated sensibilities. It was not too long ago when the Rev.Martin Luther King, Jr. was charged and jailed for disrupting the public order for organizing the Birmingham Bus Boycott and for leading civil rights marches. It was not too long ago that Premier Maurice Duplessis passed the Padlock Law to attack Jehovahs Witnesses because he felt they would,corrupt Quebecs Catholic sensibilities. And it was not too long ago that three school commissions in Britain stopped teaching the Holocaust because they felt that since they had a large number of Muslim students it would possibly incite hate against them.
This kind of censorship - self-imposed or legislated - is anathema in a free society. When we censure Professors for opinions we negate the role of scholarship. When we seek to protect emotions from words, we create a nation of dullards. Life is not pleasant. Thats the reality. But open debate empowers and arms the minds of the public which is the surest protection against hate and disinformation. It must be done in a free battlefield of ideas. Not in state and societally imposed prisons of the mind. We have done enough damage making history only an elective in Sec.V. We have ignored the warning that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
Never forget, those who today censor to be correct can tomorrow be replaced by those who censor to be corrupt.
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Censorship will kill free speech and bury the lessons of history - The Suburban Newspaper