Dear Editor:
RE: Just like Hitler? (Jan. 28).
I fully support the Wellington Advertiser’s policy to restrict any publishing of conspiracy theories, misinformation and alternative facts.
Lies are a form of censorship because they bury or distort actual truth. Phony patriots wearing flags claim they should be allowed to spread conspiracy nonsense because, they claim, our ancestors fought to preserve their right to free speech.
My family fought in both World Wars but they were fighting for the truth – not for a pack of lies poisonous to our democracy.
Lies are censorship and that is why Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin attacked the press as “enemies of the people,” and then spread their alternative facts to justify the murder of millions of their own citizens.
Lies are effective tools used to control behaviour and to convince people to blindly follow without questioning the lie. Rabble rousing is an old political and military tactic. Inciting a mob to violence isn’t difficult if they have been indoctrinated with fear created by false “truth.”
The Nazi Party in the 1930s called the newspaper lugenpresse, which means “the lying press,” because they wanted people to distrust factual reports about what the Nazi Party was truly saying and doing. This is censorship at its worst, which is now called propaganda.
The gatekeepers of real truth are the responsible journalists and editors who fact check and work hard to verify that what they publish is real, true, accurate and provable.
Conspiracy misinformation presented as fact, and other forms of untruth pushed as real and true, usually to induce fear, can only harm us all and lead to division and potential violence in Canada just as it is doing right now in the U.S.
Allan Goudie,
Fergus