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Shut Up! On Censorship

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Since long before I started posting on this blog almost seven years ago, I’ve been concerned with freedom of speech on one hand and censorship on the other. Including the censorship which has been applied to me, almost turning me into an academic unperson (one reason for continuing to post for as long as I can). And including that which others have fallen victim to. I therefore thought I’d start thinking a little about the matter. Who knows, perhaps one day these few notes will serve as the starting point for yet another book.

So here goes.

What is censorship? The attempt by one person, or group of persons, to prevent others from speaking their minds.

When did censorship begin? There probably never has been a society without censorship. If not of the formal kind, exercised by personnel specifically authorized for the purpose, then of the informal one that is rooted in public opinion. It is as Hobbes said: absolute freedom can only exist in a desert. That applies freedom of speech as it does to any other kind.

What makes censorship possible? The power some people exercise over others. In other words, the existence of government, institutionalized religion, organized public opinion, or all three.

What conditions favor censorship? Dictatorship. War (“truth is the first casualty”). All kinds of disasters for which no one wants to take responsibility. Bigotry. Monotheistic religion (“You shall have no other God before me;” “There is no Allah except for Allah”).

Who has done the censoring? In the past, it was almost always rulers and/or priests who set up the appropriate legal authority to enable them do so. Nowadays, thanks to the social media a growing number of private organizations are also involved; what started as an instrument for liberation has turned into the most extensive system ever devised for preventing people from saying “inappropriate” things. See under Facebook, see under Twitter. For what they have been doing to those dared express their approval of former President Donald Trump, including Trump himself, I hope they rot in hell. And may their place soon be taken by other platforms which will allow even “Bozos” to say what they think.

Shouldn’t those who mislead public opinion by pronouncing and spreading falsehood be censored? They should. Beginning with the authors of the Bible who, without any proof, have claimed that God exists and keeps interfering in human affairs.

Who has been censored? In general, those who 1. Produced and disseminated information considered undesirable by using any of the available means; such as speech, writing, the plastic arts, photography, film, broadcasting, and, nowadays, the Net. 2. Those who were of some consequence. If only because there are so many of them, there was often no point in censoring nobodies; that, however, seems to be changing.

He makes contemporary Christian writings as entertaining unlike any rhetorical analysis of a thesis on religion. tadalafil buy india The most essential components are included in the HVAC system such as vibration isolator, gas burner, gas line, condensation probe viagra line, compressor, condenser, and many more essential coils, etc. However, viagra cheapest pharmacy remains first choice for men who don’t want to consult with the physician or stand in a queue over the counter. Through viagra prescription this, body relaxation is highly achieved. Socrates apart, the list of those who have been censored or punished for speaking their minds includes Giordano Bruno… Francis Bacon… Galileo Galilei… Thomas Hobbes… Baruch Spinoza… René Descartes… John Locke… Isaac Newton… Charles de Montesquieu… Heinrich Heine… Arthur Schnitzler… Thomas Mann… Boris Pasternak… Jean-Paul Sartre… André Gide… Simone de Beauvoir…

What methods does censorship use? 1. It destroys as much of the “secret” or “heretic” or “dangerous” or “unsuitable” material as it can. 2. What it cannot destroy, it seeks to keep secret 3. It silences those who produce, transmit, or distribute the material that is being censored, either before it is published or after it has been. For an  account of the way one of the most rotten, most reactionary, regimes in history used to do it, see Maxim Gorky, The Mother (1906).

What kinds of material has been censored? Depending on the time and place, 1. Anything that might anger the gods or contradicted the way the established servants of religion saw the world. 2. Anything declared to be immoral; especially if, as in the case of Socrates, it was considered likely to “corrupt” the minds of the young. 3. Anything that might present a danger to government, either from within or from the outside.

Why is censorship dangerous? Because 1. It is, always has been, and always will remain the instrument of tyranny par excellence. 2. Because of its all but inevitable tendency to spread. Until, in the end, what started as a cloud no larger than a man’s hand comes to cover the entire sky, making not only speech but even thought itself impossible.

What is the effect of censorship? Very often, to draw people’s attention to the speech, or information, that has been censored. As, for example, happened to me when, following an Israeli court order banning a Palestinian movie, Jenin, Jenin, I made sure to watch it on YouTube. 

What fate will overtake censorship in the end? Here it would seem that the last word was said some nineteen hundred years ago. The author is the Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus (Annals, 35):

The Fathers* ordered his** books to be burned… but some copies survived, hidden at the time, but afterwards published. Laughable, indeed, are the delusions of those who fancy that by their exercise of their ephemeral power, posterity can be defrauded of information. On the contrary, through persecution the reputation of the persecuted talents grows stronger. Foreign despots and all those who have used the same barbarous methods have only succeeded in bringing disgrace upon themselves and glory to their victims.

 

*   The members of the Senate.

** The reference is to Aulus Cremutius Cordus, a Roman historian who lived under Tiberius. In 25 CE he fell foul of Sejanus, the corrupt but all-powerful commander of the Praetorian Guard, who had him brought to trial for allegedly offending the memory of the late Emperor Augustus. He ended by committing suicide.

And It Is Not the Only One

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Snowden, Permanent Record, Kindle ed., 2019.

Let me confess: I have never been a whistle blower. Let alone a spy. I came to Snowden’s book after reading a review written by Anat Kam. Ms. Kam is a young Israeli woman who, years ago as she was doing her military service, came to the public attention by blowing the whistle on some of the Israeli Army’s illegal activities. She was caught, tried, and paid a price by spending several years in jail.

Somewhat to my surprise. I discovered that the most interesting passages were not those in which the author describes his own path to stealing official secrets and publishing them. Rather, they were those in which he reflects on the world the Net has created. If I quote them at some length then that is because they struck a bell with me.

Locs. 626-55

“One of the greatest joys of those [early] platforms was that on them I didn’t have to be who I was. I could be anybody. The anonymizing or pseudonyimizing features brought equilibriums to all relationship correcting their imbalances. I could take cover under virtually any handle or “nym,” as they were called, and suddenly become an older, taller, manlier version of myself. I could even be multiple selves. I took advantage of this feature by asking what I sensed were my more amateur questions on what seemed to be the more amateur boards under different personas each time…

I am not going to pretend that the competition wasn’t merciless, or ha he population—almost uniformly male heterosexual, and hormonally charged—didn’t occasionally erupt into cruel and petty squabbles. But in the absence of real names, the people who claimed to hate you weren’t real people. They didn’t know anything about you beyond what you argued, and how you argued it. If, or rather when, one of your arguments incurred some online wrath, you could simply drop that screen name and assume another mask, under cover of which you could even join in the mimetic pile-on, beating up on your disowned avatar as if it re a stranger. I can’ tell you what wet relief that sometimes was.

In the 1990s, the Internet had yet to fall victim to the greatest iniquity in digital history: the move by both government and business to link, as intimately as possible, users’ online personas to their offline legal identity. Kids used to be able to go online and say the dumbest things one day without having to be held accountable for them the next. This might not strike you as the healthiest environment in which to grow up, and yet it is precisely the only environment in which you can grow up—by which I mean that the early Internet’s dissociative opportunities actually encouraged me and those of my generation to change our most deeply held opinions, instead of just digging in and defending hem when challenged. This ability to reinvent ourselves meant that we never had to close our minds by picking sides, or close ranks out of fear of doing irrevocable harms to our reputations. Mistakes that were swiftly punished but swiftly rectified allowed both the community and the ‘offender’ to move on. To me, and to many, this felt like freedom.

Imagine, if you will, that you could wake up every morning and pick a new name and a new face by which to be known to the world. Imagine that you could choose a new voice and new words to speak in it, as if the ‘Internet button’ were actually a reset button for your life. In the new millennium, Internet technology would be turned to very different ends; enforcing fidelity to memory, identitarian consistency, and so ideological conformity. But back then, for a while at least, it protected us by forgetting our transgressions and forgiving our sins.”
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Locs. 986-92.

“It’s nearly inconceivable now, but at the time Fort Meade [home of the National Security Agency, MvC] was almost entirely accessible to anyone [the same applied to other sites with which I was familiar, including the Capitol MvC]. I wasn’t all bollards and barricades and checkpoints trapped in barbed wire. I could just drive onto the army base housing the world’s most secretive intelligence agency in my ’92 Civic, windows down, radio up without having to stop at a gate and show ID… That’s just the way it was, in those bygone days when ‘it is a free country, isn’t it?” was a phrase you heard in every schoolyard and sitcom.”

Locs. 3963-73

“It [the NSA) was, simply put, the closest thing to science fiction I’ve ever seen in science fact: an interface that allows you to type in pretty much anyone’s address, telephone number, or IP address, and then basically go through the recent history of their online activity. In some cases you could even play back recordings of their online sessions, so that the screen you’d be looking at was their screen, whatever was on their desktop. You could read their desktop. You could read their emails, their browser history, their search history, their social media postings, everything. You could set up notifications that would pop up when some person or some device you were interested in became active on the Internet for the day. And you could look through the packets of Internet data to see a person’s search queries appear letter by letter, since so many sites transmitted each character as it was typed. It was like watching an autocomplete as letters and words flashed across the screen. But the intelligence behind that typing wasn’t artificial but human: this was a humancomplete.”

End of quotes.

By now, in addition to reading everything, they can see and hear everything. Too often, even when your computer or smartphone are turned off. If some scientists are to be believed, soon enough they will be able to reach into your thoughts as well as your dreams.

All this, in a country that has long claimed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave. And it is not the only one.

Book of the Month

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B. Bueno de Mesquita and A. Smith, The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics, New York, NY, Public Affairs, 2011

From time to time, as if by some miracle, one has the pleasure of coming across a good book on political science. A book, say, like Kautilya’s Arthashastra (The Science of Politics) which goes back to the third century BCE. Or Machiavelli’s Prince, which was ritten in 1512. Or, to mention a modern example, Edward Luttwak’s 1969 volume, Coup d’Etat. A book whose author does not content himself with trying to answer abstract questions such as what the origins of government are, what it is, why it is needed, what its purpose is, what its elements are, how it has developed through history, how it is constructed, what kinds of government there are, etc. etc. But one that offers practical advice on what is almost the only thing that matters: namely, how to gain as much power as possible and keep it for as long as possible.

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith have written such a book. Right from the beginning, they make it clear that their work is about power, not the glory of God, or morality, or how to improve the lot of the governed. For them (as for George Orwell in 1984, incidentally), the objective of power is power; something which rulers have known and understood since time immemorial, but which philosophers, academics, and assorted do-gooders tend to overlook. Forget about religion, philanthropy, justice, equality, liberty, fraternity (fraternity!), ideology, community, and similar soft-headed fancies. They exist, if they do, in order to serve power, not the other way around. At best they may adorn it; but only fools believe they form its essence.

As the authors, following Thomas Hobbes, say, the key point is that no one is so strong that two or three others, joining together, cannot overcome him. In other words, no man can govern alone; he, much less often she, needs supporters. Simplifying a little, this means that there only exist two forms of government. In one, which throughout history has been the most common by far, the man at the top must make a relatively small number of key supporters happy in order to keep the majority of people in check. In the other, which historically has been far less common, the benefits of government are distributed among a far larger number of people. The former is known as autocracy, the latter, as democracy. As Machiavelli, speaking of aristocrats versus commoners, says, government consists of a balancing-act between the two groups. Anyone who forgets that is lost.

Having erected this framework the authors use it, in my view very effectively, in order to answer a whole range of questions. If dictatorships are often poor that is because, by extracting the resources in question, they discourage people from working and producing. If dictatorships have an abysmal human rights record that is not, at any rate not necessarily, because dictators are bad people. It is because, in order to survive, they have to extract as many resources as possible from the majority of the people so as to pay off their supporters. If natural resources-rich dictatorships often have the worst human rights record of all, that is because, controlling the resources in question, the number of supporters they must bribe is even smaller than in other regimes of the same kind.

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If democracies rarely fight one another, that is because the people at the bottom—who, under this kind of regime, do have a voice—seldom have much to gain from war. The same consideration also makes democracies wary of casualties; if their rulers do not care for the dead and the injured, at any rate they are forced to put on a pretense, attend funerals, stand to attention, shed crocodile tears, etc.

Yet do not deceive yourself. Democracies are not necessarily peaceful. Precisely by virtue of being democratic, they simply cannot stand the idea that someone does not like them or share their alleged values. As Franklin Lane, who was President Wilson’s secretary of the interior, once put it: “If the torch of liberty fades or fails, ours be the blame.” Off with the Kaiser’s head! From ancient Athens through the French Revolution to the USA, there are few things democracies like doing better than beating down on small, weak dictatorships. Just ask Kim Jong un.

Briefly, it is all a question of who supports whom and what resources he or she is allocated in return. Morally speaking, democratic rulers are no better, no less inclined to doing whatever they can to cling to power, than their autocratic colleagues. The one difference is that the former rely on the many to keep the few in check; the latter do the opposite. In return, democrats provide some public goods: such as roads, education, healthcare, and, most important of all, the kind of stable legal framework people need in order to work and to prosper. This basic fact, and not ideology or people’s personal qualities, shapes the nature of the governments they form and lead.

Though oversimplified at times, the volume is a real eye-opener. All the more so because it deals, implicitly if not explicitly, not merely with states but with every kind of hierarchical organization: including churches, corporations, trade unions, and what have you. And all the more so because, in the end, all it deals with are things as they have always been, and are, and will always remain.