Nothing demonstrates the success of the Marxists’ Long March through the institutions perhaps quite so much as the decline of respect for freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is the key principle of the Enlightenment. It was so important to the enlightened Founding Fathers of the United States that they made it the first of their Bill of Rights.
Free inquiry and the free exchange of information were also key principles of the scientific revolution.
But free speech is under dire threat. Islamic nations are trying to influence the United Nations to instil blasphemy into international law. The world’s most populous nation lives under a rigidly un-free communist dictatorship. The Western left hate free speech – not just fringe, ultra-leftist thugs like Antifa, but supposedly respectable bastions of centrist liberalism.
In a frankly stunning op-ed published in the Atlantic, two academics are cheering on the Silicon Valley oligarchs who are rigorously censoring free speech in the West. Even more shocking, they’re openly praising China’s panopticon surveillance state and its iron control of its citizens’ speech.
The authoritarian left aren’t even hiding their agenda any more.
Before the pandemic, [tech giants] were targets of public outrage over life under their dominion. Today, the platforms are proudly collaborating with one another, and following government guidance, to censor harmful information related to the coronavirus.
“Harmful information”, of course, is whatever runs against what our new overlords have decreed. The idea that the Chinese virus may have escaped from a lab is fast approaching fact. Just don’t try and say so on Facebook.
Civil-rights groups are tolerating these measures—emergency times call for emergency measures—but are also urging a swift return to normal when the virus ebbs[…]
But the “extraordinary” measures we are seeing are not all that extraordinary[…]as surprising as it may sound, digital surveillance and speech control in the United States already show many similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China.
The authors can scarcely conceal their excitement at the growing surveillance and censorship of the internet. For all that it poses as a sober assessment of the situation, the clear undertone of the article is salivating anticipation of the coming panopticon.
The article is long – 3,000 words – but it’s worth reading in its entirety. It’s an eye-opening glimpse into the mindset of the anti-free speech establishment.
Even if you don’t read it all, the following spine-chilling paragraph says everything you need to know about what we’re up against.
In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong. Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.
They actually said that.
The mealy-mouthed wittering about “a society’s norms and values” are just a spoonful of sugar on the shit sandwich that is this astonishing clarion call for Orwellian thought control. The intent of the article is clear: everything you say and read and hear must be rigidly controlled by your masters. After all, free speech is “harm”:
The harms from digital speech will also continue to grow, as will speech controls on these networks. And invariably, government involvement will grow.
Never was C. S. Lewis’ warning more apt or necessary: “Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive…those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end”.
But it’s all for your own good, don’t you see?
Now shut up and do as you’re told.
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