Though lily-livered fools have been demanding they be “protected” from ideas they don’t like for several years now, it’s terrifying how quickly this terrible idea has moved from the lunatic fringe to the mainstream. – “Suppression”
For one educated in the Seventies and Eighties, and trained as a librarian in the early Nineties, the landscape of intellectual freedom has become almost unrecognizeable. For the majority of my life, and the majority of time for which “Banned Books Week” has existed, top-down censorship attempts in the Western world were rare; attempts to ban books, censor websites and suppress speech generally came from non-government authoritarian groups and the majority of educated people could be counted on to oppose and ridicule them. But in this century, the sick need to control others’ thoughts grew as the internet made it easier for those thoughts to be shared, and early last year top-down government censorship returned with a vengeance thanks to the Great Unwashed eagerly swallowing racist claims about “human trafficking” and magically baneful effects of anything to do with sex. The US enacted FOSTA, leading to a wave of internet censorship; the UK is trying to build a massive firewall comparable to China’s; the EU has enacted law after law allowing greedy corporations and finger-pointing Prunellas alike power over others’ web-browsing; and every two-bit dictatorship has recognized that all it needs to do to justify thought control is parrot Western “hate speech” idiocy. Free speech (derided by “progressive”-flavored authoritarians as “freeze peach”) has noticeably declined all over the world:
…First, ruling parties in many countries have found new tools for suppressing awkward facts and ideas. Second, they feel emboldened to use such tools, partly because global support for free speech has faltered. Neither of the world’s superpowers is likely to stand up for it. China ruthlessly censors dissent at home and exports the technology to censor it abroad. The United States, once a champion of free expression, is now led by a man who says things like…“free speech is not when you see something good and then you purposely write bad”…Censorious authoritarians elsewhere often cite Mr Trump’s catchphrases, calling critical reporting “fake news” and critical journalists “enemies of the people”. The notion that certain views should be silenced is popular on the left, too. In Britain and America students shout down speakers they [disagree with]…and Twitter mobs demand the sacking of anyone who violates an expanding list of taboos. Many western radicals contend that if they think something is offensive, no one should be allowed to say it. Authoritarians elsewhere agree. What counts as offensive is subjective, so “hate speech” laws can be elastic tools for criminalising dissent…
That article has a lot of good examples of the rise of (often violent) censorship, but beware; even the authors of this ostensibly pro-free-thought piece have been infected by the need to choose a “side” and skew information accordingly. As I wrote four years ago, Ray Bradbury’s view of future censorship practices was prescient; where else but in “a culture which values feelings above thought” could a video display service ban an historically-important anti-Nazi diocumentary from 1938 for violating its policy against “hate speech”? Or perhaps Google is just feeling a bit self-conscious, given that it’s currently in a fascist collaboration to develop a censorship-enabled search engine for China. Meanwhile, the US is trying to silence Edward Snowden by seizing the profits from his new book; I suggest you buy a paper copy to preclude Amazon’s stealing electronic copies from your Kindle at the behest of its pals in Washington. The censor-morons are loose, and they’re attacking the small targets so their totalitarian masters can expend their energy on big ones like the internet, the publishing industry and what little is left of the independent press.
Who knew at the time that despite all the shortcomings of the period, the 70’s through the 90’s would come to be the golden age of civil rights in the US? In the past 20 years I’ve watched the courts roll back decades of hard won 1st amendment victories built up over the 50 year preceding it. Anyone crazy enough to fight for the 1st amendment through the court system is branded by the media as a monster out to “undermine the morals of our young,” the same charge leveled against Socrates over 2,400 years ago. You would think they could come up with new talking points to help the government undermine our rights.
At some point the American people and their media decided the 1st amendment was written to protect the rights of citizens from being offended. From there it was natural for authoritarian politicians to step in and exploit the growing illiberal view of the public. Your Ray Bradbury reference is spot on.
Silly movies like Animal House once openly mocked the very blow hard authoritarian politicians in government we now offer unquestioning deference to. Is it not the hallmark of slaves to always do what those in authority ask of them? The media breathlessly repeats every sex hysteria related lie as the public breathlessly reads and believes every word. Sex has now become the modern day heresy and we find ourselves in the midst of a full out witch hunt.
The media rightly complains that Donald Trump has worked to undermine the media’s credibility in reporting on political corruption, but they fail to acknowledge how their choice over the past two decades to blindly repeat the lies and hysteria of corrupt politicians left them exposed to credible attacks of fake news from the current blowhard in the oval office. Yes, it’s possible that both Donald Trump and the media are both corrupt beyond redemption.
“China ruthlessly censors dissent at home and exports the technology to censor it abroad.”
This statement ignores the fact that China actually imported that censorship technology from the US just as surely as the Nazi’s imported computers used to collect data on their citizens from IBM. There is this fiction that if we are not careful America will become like China, but as the Prism program after 9/11 shows, it is China that is becoming more like America.
Everyone should buy Edward Snowen’s book. Unfortunately, many American’s consider him a traitor for exposing the government’s illegal surveillance activity. It’s the American’s in Plato’s cave who are ready to tear apart anyone trying to drag them kicking and screening from the shadow animal images on the wall to the healing affects of the sunlight.
What you have said was spot on, and I consider Snowden a real American Hero.
I miss the 90s, back then I foolishly believed that only the governments and right-wing religious sides were pushing for banning and censorship of free expression. Being liberal and progressive, I was told, was rooting for free thought and spirit, the ability to express yourself. Organizations like the ACLU and EFF were fighting for internet rights, and academics was constantly publishing op-eds about the need for protection of our rights and freedoms from assault of authoritarians. Only the religious crusaders and pearl clutching parents were calling for banning books, censoring video games, curtailing sex and sexual liberties.
Oh boy was I lied to! Over the past 10 years, and especially the last 5 with the rise of social media, social justice, Trump, and so called millennial feminists, did it become obvious just how much so called ‘freedom’ people really wanted.
The internet went from a frontier of freedom into a locked down, tightly controlled monopoly of corporate products. Society itself turning into a heavily monitored, constantly wired mass of consumers.
Agree wholeheartedly, and I’m surprised Twitter and WordPress haven’t banned you yet (both have banned Heartiste, but he is now on Gab).