On Censorship

 “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

- United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 2)

 

 Typically, censorship is considered as ‘the oppression of the creator’, be it be works that are of rhetorical, written, or image based nature.  Historically though, censorship focused on ideas as demonstrated by the silencing of Socrates, Giordano Bruno, Galileo Galilei, Salman Rushdie, and many others; most notably Political Dissidents.  For those who seek to censor, the problem is not the author, it is the recipients; think of it like a constrictor snake, for while you can take a slash after slash at the snake’s body, but you can only truly stop it by lopping its head off.

  Metaphorically speaking, the audience writ large is the muscles and the author is the brain and while it is difficult to slice every muscle it is a lot less work to remove the head.  While the UN has many flaws, Article 2 got this part correct by including the word ‘receive’.  One litmus test towards validating the integrity of the UN is see what happens with Article 2 and how well it is enforced moving forward.

 Many countries and cultures throughout history exercised the tool of censorship.  The UN post WWII sought to remove this tool from the tool box of both the dictators and the despots that were noted in WWII; unfortunately the UN is at best a political paper tiger as at the end of the day it has no force and therefore by extension no power, that is unless the member states wish to go to war; a situation that is contrary to the UN mandate. 

 Those who seek to censor seemingly feel that they have multiple paths to success; the level of censor’s concern will dictate the means of censorship.  The lowest level is the act of discrediting the person disseminating the idea.  And when this does work, the next level up seems to be a campaign of what we currently call ‘cancel culture’; this is a war of monetary attrition, where the advertisers and their agents are caught in the middle.

The penultimate step in censorship is punishment and when the process is not punishment enough then the penalty no longer remains proportional, and is regulated to legal statutes and legal precedence.  The final solution to the dissident question is the Socratic Method; though in this case the Socratic Method is not about asking questions, it is more focused on the hemlock portion of his life experience.  Going against the orthodoxy is a tricky line to walk as those who wish to censor are still human and so their reactions will lack a well defined path, which causes unpredictability.

 Lady Justice is to be blind and balanced, though now it seems that those who work on the behalf of Justice no longer represent that Lady, and as such, Justice now comes across as a harlot ready to work for their pimp of choice.  This is the result of partisanship, identity politics, the victim of oppression narrative, vote chasing, and Human Rights Commissions.

‘When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.’ - George R.R. Martin (via Tyron Lannister)