In the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s hapless protagonist Winston Smith is required to iterate the Party slogan: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” ((George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Available at The Complete Works of George-Orwell.)) Orwell adumbrated a world where past and present are controlled by the message. The corporate media, marketing world, and others also realized the power of the dominant message. Hence, it is not surprising that those with a vested interest would seek to control the message. One way of doing this is to control the media for, as Marshall McLuhan popularized decades ago, “The medium is the message.” ((Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1964): 7.))
In the case of Palestine/Israel, the Zionist-owned or -controlled media will attempt to control the discourse. The Lobby and Zionist media have controlled discourse most effectively. To assure future control, the message reaching the next generation must also be controlled.
In Toronto, one alternative public school, TheStudentsSchool (TSS), studies the occupation of Palestine and the war crimes committed in perpetuating the occupation. That was too much for the manifestly Zionist National Post newspaper. ((The National Post even deigned to publish a story wherein the Simon Wiesenthal Center evoked the WWII Holocaust for the fraudulent news of Iran requiring labeling of its Jewish citizens. See “Iran eyes badges for Jews,” National Post, 19 May 2006. Removed from the Post site, but available online at Free Republic.)) An indignant article was published, and an investigation of TSS teacher John Morton was launched.
Barbara Kay, whose disinformation I have covered before, ((See Kim Petersen, “Defining Racism,” Dissident Voice, 26 November 2007 and Kim Petersen and BJ Sabri, “Defining Israeli Zionist Racism,” Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, & 12Dissident Voice, December 2007-January 2008.)) is zealously vigilant against education about the Zionist occupation – something she views in a bizarre reversal.
Kay uses George Orwell’s Animal Farm as a metaphor: teachers are “pigs” and high school students are “newborn puppies.” ((Barbara Kay, “Barbara Kay: Teaching hate at Toronto’s alternative school puppy mill,” National Post, 4 March 2009.)) Kay charges that TSS is indoctrinating the high school students.
Some of Morton’s colleagues within the Toronto District School Board (TSDB) reacted “with dismay” at his possible censure from “a misleading and possibly libelous article which appeared in the National Post.” Morton’s colleagues labeled Kay’s Animal Farm analogy “preposterous” and “the opposite of what is alleged to be happening at TSS and other schools – i.e. repression of open discussion and debate of the Israel-Palestine conflict…”
The TSDB communique argued that making students critically aware was a moral imperative:
For teachers and school administrators to ignore this situation, especially as conflict in the region assumes proportions of a humanitarian crisis, would be pedagogically unsound, morally irresponsible and contrary to principles of inclusive curriculum and the TDSB’s Equity and Foundations Statement. Moreover, as citizens of a state that is a signatory to the Fourth Geneva Conventions, we have the obligation to educate our students about International Law and how to think critically about states which are in violation of it.
Indoctrination?
Kay advocates debating “both sides of the story.” This is reasonable. However, long after facts have been established, the demand for “balanced reporting” becomes disingenuous and is, itself, a bias. For what is meant by “balance”? Does balance mean that when confronted by 100 verifiable facts of war crimes that 100 specious and mendacious factoids from the perspective of the war criminals must be presented? What does the application of critical thought hold for a universal balancing of views?
I took Kay up on her penchant for discussion and emailed her asking for clarification/substantiation of eight points. ((Kay, to her credit responded to this writer, neither John Morton nor anyone from with TSDB responded.)) First, I questioned whether Kay was implying that high school learners lacked sufficient critical thinking ability, and I asked what evidence she had that the learners were indoctrinated and that their critically thinking was being suppressed?
She went off on another tangent:
*Implying* that high school students have not yet mastered critical thinking? My dear, most adults with university degrees in my opinion have not mastered the art of critical thinking, for critical thinking is not so much a matter of basic IQ as it is exposure to a wide variety of *objective* facts, a wide variety of opinion around those facts and a great deal of practice in analysis and interpretation – not to mention a certain historical referential depth that no high school student can be expected to have.
Critical thinking might well be an underutilized skill. But my query was not about whether high school students had “mastered critical thinking.” I asked whether she denied that students have “critical thinking ability.” ((The entirety of the email correspondence is readable here.))
Kay took extreme exception to students being presented the film Occupation 101 ((Occupation 101 is highly recommended and viewable online.)) in a room without any adults present:
It is the role of a high school to prepare its students to think critically, which involves exposure to thinking, not memorizing. The school in question is shutting down critical thinking and presenting one side of a story as though it were settled fact, which is not the case at all. The story they are being fed is being presented by advocates and activists in a political cause, not by history teachers. That is why I call it indoctrination and it is indoctrination by any definition of the word.
Indoctrination according to Dictionary.com: “to instruct in a doctrine, principle, ideology, etc., esp. to imbue with a specific partisan or biased belief or point of view.” Critical here is “biased belief or point of view.” Facts are not partisan or biased, and hence, the presentation of facts is not indoctrination. Ergo, to label something as indoctrination requires that the critic refute the facts, thereby exposing them as biased beliefs or falsehoods. Kay did not do this, and she ignored my invitation to refute the facts. Kay merely asserts. Abraham Lincoln compellingly argued that “assertion” is an inexcusable falsehood: “I believe it is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false is guilty of falsehood, and the accidental truth of the assertion does not justify or excuse him.” ((Roy P. Basler (ed.), Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1946): 187. Limited availability online.))
Kay states, “Gaza is not occupied – Israel left in 2004 – and you make no mention of the provocations that caused this war.”
As for Gaza not being occupied, that is semantics. When a country’s airspace, borders, and coast are controlled and blockaded by another entity (a UN official called the blockade “devastating” for Palestinians ((Reuters, “UN to Israel: Ease ‘devastating’ Gaza blockade,” Haaretz, 3 April 2009))), then I submit that it is equally or more sinister than an occupation; it is a siege.
Kay evaded each question that I posed in our “discussion”; instead she resorted to personalized attacks:
If you knew anything of the history of the area, and of the five wars – all started by the Arab states – and of the terrorism that predated the Occupation against Israel, perhaps we could have a discussion. But your ignorance and bias and hostility are set in stone. And that is precisely why it is dangerous for young students to be listening to people like you, and not to be presented with an alternate view.
In Kay’s worldview, it is an “Occupation against Israel”!
Orwell on Democracy and Censorship in Animal Farm
Kay rails against any depiction of Israel as the aggressor without presenting the Zionist viewpoint, ((This is fine because the Israeli viewpoint often corroborates the abuses of the Jewish state that Kay denies. For example, see Amos Harel, “Testimonies on IDF misconduct in Gaza keep rolling in,” Haaretz, 22 March 2009.)) saying this endangers democracy and must, therefore, be stopped. The absurdity of Kay’s position is easily revealed by an analogy which would require that each time Nazi World War II atrocities are mentioned that a Nazi viewpoint must be presented for balance. ((Kay, however, poses on the issue of balance in education as she knows well — or should — that it does not exist within the corporate media. Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky have meticulously documented this in their Propaganda Model. See Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 2002).))
Kay advocates a veiled censorship: young learners can be presented information that is disputed by another group as long as the disputing group can present its information. As I have argued, this is fine when each side substantiates its facts. However, facts must not be balanced with factoids.
While Animal Farm does depict the dangers of indoctrination, Kay has missed much of the point of Orwell’s novel. In the intended preface to Animal Farm — itself subject to censorship — Orwell argued against the suppression of uncomfortable truths: the silencing of unpopular ideas and inconvenient facts by “censorship that can be enforced by pressure groups.” ((See George Orwell, “The Freedom of the Press” (Proposed Preface to Animal Farm).))
Orwell wrote,
If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way.
Orwell argued for freedom of speech; he did not advocate any fettering of speech with provisos to balance “the truth.”
Orwell held it to be a fact that “intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist.”
Kay concluded her article, “George Orwell said it with puppies and pigs, but the message was the same: HAIA, whose reach is extending into other high schools as I write, is dangerous to democracy and must be stopped.”
Is this really Orwell’s message of danger to democracy? He wrote,
[T]here is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought.
I submit that Kay has twisted the thought of Orwell and the evidence for her claims is either non-existent, mendacious, or wrapped in ad hominem. Readers are invited to critically contemplate and draw their own conclusions.
I further submit that Kay and the National Post feigned a desire for both sides of an “issue” to be presented. The Zionist media is concurrently attempting to silence university professors. Dennis Rancourt, a tenured full professor and highly recognized physics professor at the University of Ottawa, is being hounded — purportedly for his “political views about the Palestine-Israel conflict” — by the CanWest Global Communications Corporation (owner of the National Post) through its Ottawa Citizen newspaper and a recently appointed pro-Zionist university president, Allan Rock. ((See “Statement by Dennis Rancourt Regarding His Dismissal by the University of Ottawa,” Academic Freedom, 10 April 2009.))
Education and Conscience
We live in a world ravaged by the scourge of war, a world where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, where socialism is a taboo word, where corporations have the rights of persons, and when the capitalists run their corporations into the ground, the masses are expected to acquiesce to socialism for the capitalists.
It is in the powerful nations, often built through the dispossession of the land and resources belonging to the Indigenous peoples, that capitalists, their corporations, and their private banks have grow topsy-turvy gargantuan, enriching themselves off war, looting resources, and by immiserating the workers until the workers could no longer buy what the companies made; consequently, the greed of the companies spelled their own downfall.
But what could keep such a system charging along head on until its own predictable doom? Why would the people not solidarize, withdraw their labor, demonstrate in the streets, and refuse to be killers and cannon fodder for the government’s military? I submit that the answer lies largely in the controlled worldview presented to the masses via the corporate media.
Propaganda and disinformation are mighty tools. It is said that information is power, so if one controls information, then one would, according to the aphorism, be powerful. The media are a preponderant source of information. There is an inherent bias in that the corporate media have the money to dominant the presentation and propagation of information in the world.
There is also another adage which holds that power corrupts, absolute power corrupting absolutely. Thus the masses are presented a worldview that conforms to the parameters set by the capitalists and their desire for money, control of information, and power – which, ultimately, will lead to the greater corruption of capitalists and their eventual downfall (unless or until bailed out by socialism).
How to escape the onslaught of propaganda and disinformation? Certainly not by censorship; because who will be entrusted with the responsibility to censor? It is necessary that people be empowered to think for themselves, to be open-minded and sufficiently skeptical to information presented to them, to research, discuss, analyze, and draw conclusions – what is commonly referred to as critical thinking.
Consequently, unfettered critical thinking is not something one would expect to be encouraged within a capitalist society, and certainly it wouldn’t be expected in the corporate media except as a mere buzzword or ethereal concept, something designed not to draw too much serious attention.
The Foremost Task of Education
What should be taught in society’s schools? In a statement to a Brooklyn church minister on 20 November 1950, the renown physicist Albert Einstein put forward his thought:
The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Our morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.
To make this a living force and bring it to clear consciousness is perhaps the foremost task of education. ((Heklen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Albert Einstein — The Human Side: New Glimpses from His Archives (Princeton University Press, 1979): 83. It should also be noted that the editors in their book make the argument that Einstein was a Zionist. It is debatable.))
The ways of the past have not eliminated inequality, poverty, racism, and warring. It seems obvious that a new direction is called for.
Within the education system, social justice entered the high school curriculum last September in the province of British Columbia. Opening the doors to social justice issues and inviting critical thinking pose powerful challenges to the old power structure. ((One school board in southern BC sought to censor the teaching of the Social Justice course in its district causing demonstrations by the students. Catherine Rolfsen, “Gay-friendly course halted by Abbotsford school board,” Vancouver Sun, 21 September 2008.)) A better way lies in exposing (not indoctrinating) young minds to the ethical paucity of capitalism; the alternatives of anarchism, socialism, and communism; the ravages wrought by imperialism, colonialism, and Zionism – including arguments for and against. Preparing learners for critical thinking is crucial, but critical thinking alone is insufficient. Learners must be exposed to issues of life, morality, and social justice and be encouraged to analyze, draw their own conclusions, and defend them. When the ground is prepared, a potential arises for an increasingly enlightened and sophisticated younger generation. The world needs a generation that can organize, plan, demand, and build a better society where social justice has meaning beyond academic discourse – where social justice might become a reality.