Freedom of expression by Juan Manuel de Prada

The exaltations and absolutist defences of the freedom of expression, including those coming from means that are of Christian inspiration or that are declaredly confessional, to justify the blasphemous and aberrant caricatures of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo prove to be delirious. But let us not be confused: those who have made such defences do not profess the Catholic religion, nor do they find inspiration in Christian philosophy, even though they pretend to, taking advantage of the consternation caused by the vile assassinations of the cartoonists; but that they are janissaries of the “Democratic Religion,” a perversion of thought that consists of substituting the healthy defence of democracy as a form of government—which, by means of political representation, facilitates popular participation in the exercise of power—with the defence of democracy as a foundation of government, as a demented religion that subverts whichever moral principle, sheltering itself in supposed majorities, in reality, masses cretinised and influenced by the repetition of sophisms.

The janissaries of this religion want the cretinised masses to accept their sophisms as axioms (propositions that seem self-evident), among which (sophisms) one discovers the so-called “freedom of expression” in its absolutist version. To create such axioms, they resort to the method anticipated by Aldous Huxley in "Brave New World", which consists of the repetition, for a thousand or a million times, of the same affirmation. In Huxley’s novel, such repetition was attained by means of a repetitive mechanism that spoke without interruption to the subconscious, during hours of sleep; in our time, it is attained through mental saturation with the hogwash that the mass media serves us, infested with janissaries of the Democratic Religion who defend an absolutist freedom of expression: a freedom without responsibility; a freedom to damage, injure, calumniate, offend and blaspheme; a freedom to sow hatred and spread lies amongst the cretinised masses; a freedom to condition the spirits and incite them unto evil. Those who defend this “freedom of expression” as an unlimited right are the very ones who defend a “freedom of conscience” understood not as a freedom to morally choose and righteously act, but as a freedom to choose the most perverted ideas, the most vulgar passions and most egotistical ambitions, and put them in practice, pretending, moreover, that the State guarantees their realisation. Let us not be fooled: those who defend the freedom to publish blasphemous caricatures are defending a destructive freedom that only leads to decadence and nihilism.

Christian thought teaches us that freedom is not an end in itself, but a means to attain truth. If an “in order to what” is not added to the word “freedom,” it becomes a meaningless word, a sickeningly ambiguous word that can protect the greatest aberrations. As Castellani said, “freedom is not a movement, but a power to move; and what matters in the power to move is the ‘towards where,’ the ‘in order to what.’” There can be no freedom to offend, to incite hatred, to encourage depraved passions; there can be no freedom to insult a fellow’s faith and blaspheme against God. Christians are distinguished because they say a prayer in which it is asked: “Hallowed by Thy Name.” Janissaries of the freedom of expression want that Name eliminated, degraded and ridiculed, for the greater honour of the Democratic Religion. We do not mind them: whether they wear suit and tie, or cassock and zucchetto, they are deluding themselves, they want to turn us into a cretinised mass.

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