This blog is also about how language is used, bent and imposed in order to (morally) disqualify people who have a different opinion – that is, to corrupt free speech. The goal is to prevent the exchange of arguments, i.e. to restrict rational discourse to a self-defined bubble of pensée unique (English mainstream ideological conformism).
This works according to the mechanisms that are described by N. Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent: before the 18th century the ruling class defined what could and could not be said, and enforced the rule by (physical and legal) coertion. Since free speech is officially in place, the ruling class has developed other methods of controlling thought. In the 50s, the U.S. persecuted people for their political opinion (McCarthyism). During Vietnam war, in the U.S. there was no rational exchange with people who argued against this war: they were placed outside of the realm of discourse, blamed for being anti-patriotic and working against their own soldiers. Today tables have been turned but the mechanism is still the same: the goal is to clear public space of certain opinions.
Today’s version of thought control is political correctness: pick the people whose opinions you don’t like and charge them with any of the popular -isms or -phobias: racism, fascism, sexism, antisemitism, xenophobia, homophobia. Once this is done we don’t need to talk to these people, whatever they may say on whatever topic is wrong. Crying wolf when there is no wolf around is inflational these days. You accuse somebody you don’t like of any of these -isms / -phobias and you have won. No need to argue.
When there is a real wolf around, you may dislike him and say so. You may also choose not to talk to him (with the risk of polarizing society into waterproof bubbles, which may fly back into your face: see D. Trump). But you should not try to make him shut up. There is an increasing number of laws, especially in France (lois mémorielles), which try to control thought by making certain opinions illegal. The limits of free speech are clearly defined (see the conditions for the U.S.). Extending them to make opinions illegal is falling back into the pre-18th century state of affairs where each government defined a list of illegal opinions. The modern situation then is the same, except that “free speech” is still in the showcase. Older governments censored overtly – today censorship is accompanied with the claim that there is no censorship. This is another piece of feel good-based thought control: make people believe they live in a free society that is soooo much superior to others (past and present) when the only thing that differs is the list of items you are not allowed to say.
Before opinion control was done by spotting the group of people you don’t like and name the group-defining property (e.g. communism), which you then tried to outlaw. This required argument: you had to explain why, say, communism is bad. Today you don’t need to argue because you hide behind words that are positively (“open society”) or negatively (“hate”, “being exclusionary”) loaded and pretend to be content-neutral. You then charge the people you have singled out given their opinion X not because of this opinion, but because they either instantiate a negatively loaded word or do not comply with a positively loaded item. That is, you don’t say “I don’t like his/her stance on X because of this or that reason”, but you say “s/he is X-ist, exclusionary, does hate speech etc.”.
Here are some examples of opinion control using positively / negatively loaded words:
Your genetic/religious properties make you either an antisemit or a self-hating Jew.
Anybody who criticizes the Israeli government regarding its policy in the occupied territories will be either said to be antisemitic (non-Jews) or a self-hating Jew (Jews). Implication: your membership in a religious / ethnical group determines your opinion. A Jew cannot criticize the government of the Jewish state. A non-Jew can, but then for sure this expresses his/her antisemitism. Noam Chomsky is regularly called a self-hating Jew when he expresses criticism of the Israeli action in the occupied territories. And Jewish oganizations regularly try to prevent him from expressing himself publically. Relating opinions to group membership (religious, genetic) is the exact reverse of Enlightenment.
Migration control
In Europe, people who are in favour of a migration control of the kind that is in place in Canada are regularly called xenophobic, racist and fascist.
“Hate speech”
is a word imposed recently by the dominant ideology, suggesting that expressing hate is a bad thing that should be prohibited. In practice only those are charged with hate speech who express hate against the dominant ideology. When representatives of the dominant ideology express hate against people outside of the pre-defined bubble, that’s ok: D. Trump, B. al Assad, Vl. Putin, M. Le Pen and so on. “Hate” is a veil when one does not want to argue with somebody, whose position can be dismissed on “objective” grounds. What is never mentioned when somebody is charged with hate speech is that there are laws and judges which define whether saying X is legal or not. In enlightenment, democracy and an “open society” (on which more below), anything that is not illegal is a possible contribution to public discourse. People raging against hate speech try to substitute their own law to the real law, i.e. to restrict the space of opinions that are available.
Open society, being “inclusive”
According to the dominant ideology, being “open” and “inclusive” is highly valued, while being “closed” and “exclusionary” is supposed to be very bad and out of the question for a respectable member of society. Hence favouring the entrance of migrants into a country characterizes an “open society” (which has nothing to do with K. Popper’s Open Society), while restricting their admission is an ugly “closing” and “exclusionary” reflex. In the same way as “hate”, these words are content-neutral and sugggest that “closed, exclusionary” is bad per se, while “open, inclusive” is good in and of itself. Following this logic, murderers and other criminals who are dangerous for other people should not be emprisoned because that would be “exclusionary”, when we are all so human and only ever want to include. And of course promoters of opennenss will strongly call for an exclusionary treatment of sexists, racists, fascists and so on, who must not be “included”. What this means is just that being “inclusionary/open” or “exclusionary/closed” is not good or bad per se, neither for promoters of inclusion / openness nor for others. Everybody includes or excludes according to what is supposed to be included or excluded, and for which reason. But the deceptive ideology sold is that content and reasoning play no role and exclusion is always bad – except for when the inclusive exclude, but that we won’t talk about.