FreeSpeech and Censorship: Thread

[grarpamp]

The Woke Inquisitors Have Come For The Freethinking Heretics

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18659/woke-inquisitors

by J.B.Shurk via The Gatestone Institute

Attacks on free speech are on the rise.

https://summit.news/2022/06/22/student-kicked-out-of-uk-college-for-supporting-deportation-of-illegal-immigrants/
https://nypost.com/2022/05/14/kiel-wisconsin-school-charges-kids-for-using-wrong-pronouns/
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/06/14/biden-climate-adviser-gina-mccarthy-calls-on-big-tech-to-censor-opposers-of-bidens-climate-agenda/
https://www.theepochtimes.com/twitter-suspends-doctor-who-shared-study-showing-pfizer-vaccine-impacts-semen_4553511.html
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/06/11/dissident-football-coach-fined-100k-for-wrong-thoughts/
https://reclaimthenet.org/paramount-says-it-wont-censor-old-content-to-please-modern-audiences/
https://www.dw.com/en/kids-classics-get-a-politically-correct-makeover/a-16510731
https://www.nspirement.com/2018/08/26/chinas-destruction-of-cultural-sites-during-the-cultural-revolution2.html

A British college recently expelled a student for expressing support
for the government's official policy of deporting illegal immigrants.
A Wisconsin school district charged three middle-schoolers with sexual
harassment last month for refusing to use the plural pronoun "they"
when referring to a single classmate. US President Joe Biden's
National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy recently encouraged social
media companies to censor from their online platforms any opinions
that contradict Biden's climate change narrative.

In its continued commitment to preserve the government's monopoly over
COVID-19 information, Twitter actually suspended a medical doctor for
merely sharing a scientific study that suggests the Pfizer vaccine
affects male fertility. And the NFL's Washington Commanders fined
defensive coordinator Jack Del Rio $100,000 and forced him to
apologize only weeks ago for having expressed his opinion that 2020's
summer of riots across the United States after George Floyd's death
was more destructive than the few hours of mayhem at the Capitol on
January 6, 2021.

In contrast, it has become newsworthy that entertainment powerhouse
Paramount has chosen not to censor old movies and television shows
containing content that today's "woke" scolds might find "offensive."
In a "cancel culture" world where censorship and trigger warnings have
become the norm, preserving the artistic integrity of a film is now
considered outright daring. In fact, even publishers of old literary
classics have begun rewriting content to conform with "politically
correct" sensibilities.

Examples such as these, where personal speech is either censored or
punished, are becoming much more frequent, and anybody who minimizes
the threat this increased intolerance for free expression poses to a
democratic society is either gullibly or willfully blind. As any
defender of liberty knows, nothing more quickly transforms a free
society into a totalitarian prison than crackdowns on speech. Of all
the tools of coercion available to a government, preventing
individuals from freely expressing their thoughts is most dangerous.
Denying citizens that most basic societal release valve for pent-up
anger and disagreement only heightens the risk for outright violence
down the line. Either silenced citizens become so enraged that
conflict becomes inevitable, or the iron fist of government force
descends on the public more broadly to preemptively curtail that
possibility. Either way, the result is a disaster for any free
society.

For Americans who cherish free speech, this undeniable war on language
and expression is jolting but not shocking. Whenever censorship
slithers back into polite society, it is always draped in the mantle
of "good intentions."

Fifteenth-century Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola's "bonfire of
the vanities" destroyed anything that could be seen to invite or
reflect sin.

The notorious 1933 Nazi book burning at the Bebelplatz in Berlin
torched some 20,000 books deemed subversive or "un-German".

During Communist China's decade-long Cultural Revolution in the 1960s
and '70s, the vast majority of China's traditional scrolls, literature
and religious antiquities went up in smoke.

All three atrocities were celebrated as achievements for the "greater
good" of society, and people inebriated with "good intentions" set
their cultural achievements aflame with fervor and triumph. Much like
today's new censors who claim to "fight hate" because "that's not who
we are," the arsonists of the past saw themselves as moral paragons,
too. They purged anything "obscene" or "traditional" or "old," so that
theocracy, Nazism, or communism could take root and grow. And if
Western institutions today are purging ideas once again, then it is
past time for people to start asking just what those institutions plan
to harvest next.

We in the West are running — not walking — toward another "bonfire of
the vanities" in which normal people, egged on by their leaders, will
eagerly destroy their own culture while claiming to save it. This time
around the "vanities" will be condemned for their racist, sexist,
transphobic, anti-science or climate-denying ways, but when they are
thrown into the fire, it is dissent and free expression that will
burn.

There will one day be much disagreement as to how the same Western
Civilization that produced the Enlightenment and its hallowed regard
for free expression could once again surrender itself to the petty
tyranny of censorship.

Many will wonder how the West's much-vaunted "liberal" traditions
could meekly fold to the specter of state-controlled speech.

The answer is that the West has fallen into the same trap that always
catches unsuspecting citizens by surprise: the steady encroachment on
free speech has been sold as a "virtue" that all good people should
applaud.

First, certain thoughts became "aggravating factors" that turned
traditional crimes into new "hate crimes" deserving of additional
punishment.

Then the definition of what is "hateful" grew until politicians could
comfortably decree anything at odds with their agendas to be examples
of "hate."

Who would be for "hate," after all? Surely no-one of good sense or good manners.

Now "hate" has transformed into an elusive description for any speech
that can be alleged to cause the slightest of harms.

>From there, it was easy for the state to decree that "disinformation,"
or rather anything that can be seen to contradict the state's own
official narratives, causes "harm," too.

Those who despise free speech told society, "If you do not punish
hate, then you're a bigot." And today, if you oppose the government's
COVID-19, climate change, immigration, or other contentious policies,
your harmful "disinformation" must be punished, too.

It is a slippery slope, is it not? Once governments normalize
censorship and the punishment of points of view, free expression is
firmly stamped with an expiration date.

After the Nazis went down this poisonous path, repentant Germans built
a public memorial to remember the book burning at the Bebelplatz and
ensure its tragic lesson was never forgotten. On a plaque in the
square is a commemorative engraving, paraphrasing the 19th century
German writer Heinrich Heine:

    "That was only a prelude; where they burn books, they will in the
end also burn people."

That warning comes with no expiration date.