Tuesday, August 4, 2020

Censorship

Censorship is becoming a big problem in this country, in more ways that one.  I'm not a Libertarian as far as censorship goes.   But I think we need to be very, very careful in restricting freedom of expression.

There was a reason the Founding Fathers made the First Amendment the one protecting freedom of expression.  "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof or abridging the freedom of speech or the press or the people peaceably to assemble......"  These men were wise and they realized that once a government ("Congress shall make no law......") can control people's thoughts, self-rule is all over but the shouting.

We encounter today two variations of censorship.  Both are included in this sentiment, "I may disagree with what you say," or write or....., "but will fight to the death your right to say it."  It's a misconception that the French philosophe (yes, philosophe, not philosopher) Voltaire wrote this.  He almost assuredly didn't, but he also most assuredly believe it.  Federal and state governments have, over the years, attempted to curtail certain speech.  Often it's in the name of national security, in wartime, etc.  But citizens can also exercise censorship through a variety of means--ostracism, boycotts, and today, peer pressure under the guise of being "woke," "cancel culture," and other current evils.  (Oh, there I did it.  I spilled the beans as to my views.  Ha Ha Ha.)

Freedom of expression means, above all, protecting the right to say things that are not popular, indeed, things that are despicable.  (I'm not talking here of slander, pornography, etc., but the expression of ideas.)  It's easy to allow people to say and write things that we like or support.  It's the ideas we hate that need to be protected.  Laws and social pressures are not the ways to combat such hated ideas.  That includes views that favor fascism and communism.  Those views need to be, not censored, but defeated in the arena of ideas. 

I wonder, in schools today, if students are taught about Frank Collin and his American Nazis in the late '70s.  They wanted to hold a march, a demonstration, ("peaceful" of course) in Skokie, Illinois.  Skokie was the target because of the sizable number of Jews who lived there.  Some of the Jews were relatives of survivors of the German Nazi extermination camps; some were survivors themselves.  I won't go into the history of the legal battle, but it is worth studying.  Ideas we hate......

Today, although I am still very wary of Big Government's penchant and abilities to control what is said, printed, and even thought, I think a bigger danger comes from the "woke" and "cancel culture" people.  This has come to the utterly ridiculous.  We've all read or heard of people who have been forced to resign or even been fired, who have issued apologies to snowflakes, er, people who have been "offended," for what they have said.  Locally, a teacher was dismissed for, it now appears, several tweets/twits (I can't help myself with that!) he made.  One was, "Liberals suck!"  (My aversion to that word, "suck," is well known.  I hate it and always have.  But, if the shoe fits......)  Another was simply, "Trump is our President!"  There have been other dismissals and forced resignations nationally at big-name companies, newspapers (Isn't that the epitome of irony?), and television networks.  I imagine liberals might take offense at such a characterization "suck!", but aren't conservatives often called names, too?  Aren't conservatives--or so I've read and heard--"greedy" and "selfish," "bigoted" and "racist," and "white supremacists," among other things?  (I don't know where that leaves people like Thomas Sowell, Larry Elder, Walter Williams, Kira Davis, Candace Owens, and others.)  In fact, one of the e-mails the local school district received urging this teacher's dismissal called the President "a fascist."  (OK, no doubt like a majority of those throwing around the word "fascist," the letter-writer likely has no real idea of its meaning and its historical context.  But they heard--probably didn't see it as that would entail reading, Ha Ha Ha--it somewhere and it sounded good and got a desired reaction, so......)

Intelligent people I know, ones who have been educated to examine different viewpoints, to listen to all sides, before making judgments have also jumped on the bandwagon of intolerance.  I was struck a while ago by a guy who was very tentative in expressing to me the beginnings of an opinion that wouldn't fly with the woke folks.  In a way, I was offended.  (Ha Ha Ha!)  But my initial response was not at all critical, but open and tolerant, and he eventually said a lot more that the woke folks wouldn't tolerate.  I agreed with all of it.

This, the woke censorship, the cancel culture, and the like is what we need to combat.  I wonder how loudly these self-ordained censors would cry if their ability to yell and scream was, ahem, "canceled."

1 comment:

guslaruffa said...

Good article. Yes, we are being censored by the big mouths in Social media and government to a large extent. But if it’s kept on the intellectual level, it cannot be dismissed