Propaganda is a dark and devious art. It exploits ignorance to peddle dogma. It violates truth, logic and right reason. It is the negation of philosophy and science.
It confines understanding in a straight-jacket of faux dictionary definitions. Like a woke lexicon, it is precious, politically correct and distorts language. For as Orwell well knew, once language is unnaturally twisted, monstrous misrepresentation follows. And the consequences can be very dangerous and real.
Such were the wages of Nazi propaganda. It is sometimes alleged that there has recently been a recrudescence of Antisemitism. Usually this is a stalking horse for apologetic excuses for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians and the global condemnation it properly attracts. This is a sleight of hand fallacy, citing a secondary phenomenon of the Fascist Right for a primary development on the Democratic left, with a view to compromising and confounding the latter. Accordingly, the contention that Antisemitism is on the rise in the mainstream is patently false and misleading. For as the scholarly Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism acknowledges, the rising democratic criticism of the conduct of the State of Israel is a clean, different thing from the marginal Neo-fascist return to the traditional politics of scapegoating Jews.
To speak of Israeli crimes against Palestinians is no abstract hyperbole. In 1948, Zionist militia broke out of their enclaves to attack Palestinian communities who had been disarmed during British repression of the Great Arab Rebellion of 1936-9, that had protested British imperial demographic engineering of the Mandate.
Read the waffle by David Farber in Pearls and Irritations.
[Editor: If ever there was a convoluted diatribe …]