GAZALIGHTING or WHO ARE YOUR HEROES?

No one finds it the least bit interesting when folks suddenly flip reality on its head and offer up the very arguments they just finished spending weeks and months and years loudly and aggressively shooting down? That phenomenon occupies me. This sort of behaviour is so frequent at present it could be a weekly show on CBC Radio.

Speaking of which, did you catch the recent Front Burner episode on CBC about the keffiyeh? The feature came about because the Ontario legislature has a policy of prohibiting political signs and symbols on the premises and, given the ongoing Arab-Israeli war and the seven months-worth of weekly protests, the Speaker of the legislature moved to ban the scarf for being a provocative and divisive political symbol. The order caused an uproar, particularly from supporters of a member who chose to defy the ban but also, and just as vigorously, by folks on the opposite end of the political spectrum, including the Conservative Premier.

To be clear, I support our freedoms of opinion and expression and even wish they were more broad and better subscribed and enforced. I'm fundamentally opposed to the banning of (or coercing people into using) signs, symbols, or slogans of any kind. Prohibitions of this sort tend to be unhelpful on a variety of fronts. And, further to my thinking, why would anyone want folks to conceal who they are and what they stand for, whatever that looks like?

However, where this issue becomes interesting, for me at least, is that I don’t think almost anyone complaining about the legislature's prohibition holds my view. Why? Well, they aren't making free speech claims and holding to those; instead, they're making claims about this piece of cloth being an essential cultural symbol and artifact, along with completely baseless claims around racism. Too, the folks running with those (wild) assertions are most definitely the same people involved in or celebrating restricting free expression, "deplatforming" people, censoring certain ideas and themes, tearing down and banning other flags and participating in the dismantling and destruction of other symbols, memorials, and monuments. And they did that not by reasoning through, gaining broad popular support for, and enshrining some new principle that we all agree to then apply to the world. No. They and a smattering of friends, representing effectively none of the population, decided they were personally upset and just went and took matters into their own hands (while assuming they were not establishing a precedent that would then be used against them.) And they see no hypocrisy between their stated principles and beliefs, and associated condemnations and proclamations, of just a few months or years ago (around such things as freedom of speech, platforming, triggering, microaggressions, words as violence, safe spaces, and so much more) and today (when they reject all of that, at least for anyone other than themselves). Apparently they're blind to their own curious brand of sanctimony. And, too, apparently they don't see this as Orwellian, Soviet-style mindfuckery.

Want to read more?

Subscribe to peregrinepulp.com to keep reading this exclusive post.

Subscribe Now