timeimmortal

Blazing Cat Fur writes in a brief note regarding this post and Warren Kinsella’s response to the article I quote therein.

I see Kinsella tried to debunk the citizen article

I think the operative word, O Reader, is “tried” — you can read Kinsella’s piece for yourself, but here are the meaty and relevant parts, I think.

Gardner’s column is worth reading, but - in my world - quantitative data will always trump a census statistic and a few anecdotes. If it wasn’t out of print, then, I would recommend that you all pick up a copy of Hate on Trial: the Zundel Affair, the Media, and Public Opinion in Canada, published in 1986 by my friend Professor Conrad Winn. Conrad, who is a polling expert at Carleton University, sampled public opinion during the 1985 trial of Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel. He found the trial not only alerted people to the fact of the Holocaust, it turned them against Zundel in droves.

In a poll of 1,054 respondents taken right after Zundel’s trial, Canadians proved the media libertarians wrong, as they often do. Half (47 per cent) said their feelings toward Jews were unchanged by the trial, while one quarter (24 per cent) said they became more sympathetic toward Jews, and only 2 per cent reported less sympathy.

Kinsella would seem to be attempting to state, based on the above, that it was because Ernst Zundel was tried that public opinion shifted still further against his anti-Semitic rantings. This is a dangerous conclusion to draw, because it can lead one to think, erroneously, that it is through acts of censorship perpetrated by government agencies and courts that “the people” can be made to think “correctly.” And indeed, that would seem to be the conclusion that Kinsella, a self-confessed censor and an advocate for the existence of the HRCs, draws.

That would mean, O Reader, that Canadians either did not change their opinion of Jews or became more sympathetic toward Jews out of fear of government reprisal.

This would seem, then, to fly in the face of Dan Gardener’s observations about how allowing Fred Phelps to speak his hate openly has, in the end, only served to inspire Kansans (not exactly known for being of a progressive bent) to side not with Phelps, but with those Phelps denigrates.

But in fact, Kinsella’s story does not quite mean what he thinks it means, nor does it actually fly in the face of what Dan Gardener says — in fact, it affirms it. Zundel was a nobody with a small audience to begin with — few Canadians had even heard of him, and hardly anyone gave him the time of day. When he was put on trial, more and more people were able to become aware of his views. And in an analog to the case of Phelps and Westboro in Kansas, it was in hearing discussion about Zundel’s opinions that inspired nearly 25% of Canadians to become even more sympathetic to persons of Jewish descent than they already were. The fact that it took a trial for Zundel to gain a wide enough audience is an interesting little factoid of history, but also irrelevant.

The Zundel trial and its ouctomes, at least as regards public opinion toward Jews, proves the freespeecher arguments valid — given the chance, Canadians will tend to make the right decisions when they hear someone uttering hateful speech. So why not give people the opportunity to be as open in their hatred as they can possibly be? As was the case with Zundel, many of the haters won’t even find a wide enough audience to have any impact on public opinion (and thus will not be a threat). And the ones that do will, for the most part, either make people shrug their shoulders in dismissal or inspire people to move their own opinions away from those of the haters.

That’s the beauty of the “marketplace of ideas.”

I wonder how Kinsella missed that? And I wonder if it was his intent to argue in favour of government coercion of citizen opinion?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

The Alberta Liberal Party stands up for freedom of expression:

The Alberta Liberal Party supports Mr. Levant’s freedom to express his opinions and to maintain, what the American Supreme Court termed, “the marketplace of ideas“. If citizens and publishers don’t maintain the limits of their freedoms it would bring about a chill in fundamental freedoms which could adversely affect all Canadians. The Alberta Liberal Party shares the opinion expressed in Ross v. New Brunswick School District No.15; when discussing the importance and limits of expression, Justice La Forest opined in s. 2(b):

“…[freedom of expression] is not restricted to views shared or accepted by the majority, nor to truthful opinions. Rather, freedom of expression serves to protect the right of the minority to express its view, however unpopular such views may be…”

I think it would be fair to ask every Progressive Conservative candidate what his or her party’s take on this issue is. Freedom of expression is, frankly, a substantially more important issue than oil revenues.

That would seem to be Mr. Kinsella’s contention, at any rate. Or, rather, his contention would seem to be that because immature youth of today scrawl Nazi symbols on the walls of public bathrooms, MP Dr. Keith Martin should withdraw private members Bill M-446 and all the rest of us in Canada should just not worry about the HRCs or their mission of Censorship.

To be fair, I actually agree with Warren on one point:

That look like a useful contribution to the marketplace of ideas, to you? Perhaps Keith Martin and the editorial-writers at the Globe, Gazette and Post think it is, but I sure don’t.

No, I don’t much think it’s a useful contribution to the marketplace of ideas. But, equally, so what? So it’s a useless contribution to the marketplace of ideas. Again, so what?

Usefulness is a dangerous criteria to begin to use in determining what constitutes acceptable vs. unacceptable speech in any ostensibly free nation, much like wantedness is a dangerous criteria to use in determining whether it is acceptable, morally or under the law, to terminate the life of a human being prior to the point of natural birth. That is because usefulness, like wantedness, is a side issue, a distraction, a dodge that would-be censors can use in an attempt to justify the unjustifiable.

No, scrawling “White Power” and two swastikas on the bathroom wall is not a useful contribution to the marketplace of ideas, anymore than drawing a picture of a penis on the same wall would be. Strangely, I don’t hear Mr. Kinsella arguing that depictions of human anatomy should be outlawed. I mean, he makes the point of mentioning that the scrawlings he took a picture of* are at “a kid’s eye level**” — if this is all about “the children,” then one would think that Mr. Kinsella, and all decent people, would be every bit as up in arms over grotesque depictions of the human anatomy on bathroom walls as Mr. Kinsella is over this bit of Nazi-eqsue rubbish. Why should some scrawlings be allowed and others disallowed, if in fact all of them send poor/bad/hurtful/disgusting messages to the children?

The beauty of the marketplace of ideas is analogous to the beauty of the actual open-air market, of the sort that one finds all over places like, for example, Greece. At a food market, you can tell within seconds when rotten meat is on display, and react with appropriate revulsion to it. In the marketplace of ideas, the same principle applies; when rotten ideas are aired, the rest of us can react — almost immediately — with the appropriate levels of revulsion. We can hear these ideas and make the conscious choice to reject them.

When ideas are suppressed, even distasteful ideas, people will go in search of them, because curiosity is a part of the human condition. That alone is sufficient argument against the imposition of censorship through the human rights commissions. That those who would seek to maintain the imposition of censorship are reduced to taking pictures of bathroom scribblings to advance their cause is just icing on the cake, I suppose.

* who whips out a camera — even a cell-phone camera — whilst sitting on the can, anyhow?

** perhaps this is a clue as to the probable age and level of maturity of the person who composed the scrawl in question? And maybe, just maybe, could it be that we don’t want to be talking about censoring freedom of expression in Canada because some ten-year old thought to draw a swastika or two just for kicks?

Update: I like Kathy Shaidle’s take on this:

With all due respect to my commrade in arms Jay Currie, I believe he is missing the key point of this entire story, which is:

Jesus in a rainhat! Warren Kinsella is taking pictures of graffiti in public washrooms for &*$#’s sake!!

Seriously, what do these pictures prove besides:

a) crazy men shit, and

b) Warren needs a life?

Is there, like, some connection between this graffiti and that concentration camp they’re building on the old Varsity Stadium site?

What? Nobody’s building a concentration camp in downtown Toronto?!

It’s been how long since the Christie Pits riots? Wow, that long, eh…?

This would be like blaming Orville Wright for 9/11 — except that 9/11 actually happened.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!