Book burning, part 1: The fear of good arguments

This is the first section of a 2 part article by Rusere Shoniwa on the suppression of free speech by government and Big Tech – and the possibilities for resistance. In part 1, Rusere explains how, by censoring debate and purging content, Big Tech is carrying out a war on democracy with the full support of our governments. This war is only necessary because the ‘misinformation’ being censored poses a credible threat to the ‘new age medievalism of lockdowns, masks and coerced and mandatory vaccination‘. You can read part 2 here.

In the digital age, destroying truth and liberty will be a far less messy business than in the old book-burning days but, paradoxically, far more effective. We can’t rule out some marching of boots and stamping on faces – after all, lockdowns in Australia are being enforced by the army – but, for the most part, there will be no fanfare as vast amounts of information on the internet are quietly flushed down the memory hole.

For totalitarianism to take root and prosper, the population must first be presented with and asked to unite against an enemy that can never be defeated. An invisible virus is the perfect undefeatable enemy and the door to totalitarianism is the biosecurity state. Control over the final frontier of human freedom – our own bodies – is being ceded to a global biomedical security state amid warped narratives about a perpetual health threat.

If the population is to be kept in a state of permanent terror, it will need to be properly ‘informed’ – propagandised – about the virus’ never-ending threat. The enemy of ‘information’ – propaganda – is of course ‘misinformation’ – code for: ‘arguments we can’t counter’.

Laws to control the peddlers of ‘misinformation’ will be drafted and speeches crafted to sell them, not that much selling will be required in the age of rule by decree. ‘Misinformation’ will of course have the broadest definition possible to capture all manner of threats to the new biosecurity state. The irony is that these speeches will be delivered by the same people who have enacted the most destructive policies in generations using an avalanche of real misinformation through government and media supported propaganda. This irony will be lost on a public still sold on lockdowns, masks and testing perfectly healthy people for disease, while leaving those with real illnesses to rot at home – a public still sold on fear.

Free speech and open debate, the things we now pay lip service to but collectively don’t value or even understand, are being stripped off the already paper-thin veneer of civilisation. The wisdom imparted in the words of Walter Gilbert, Nobel Prize winner for Chemistry, is no longer understood:

The great lesson of history is that knowledge develops through the conflict of viewpoints, that if you have simply a consensus view, it generally stultifies, it fails to see the problems of that consensus; and it depends on the existence of critics to break up that iceberg and to permit knowledge to develop.¹

Walter Gilbert

Opposed by a few, the laws would probably pass unnoticed by most, because they won’t affect the ‘average’ person. Your library is fireproof if you think that Jacinda Adern is or should be the single source of truth in New Zealand. Adern certainly did not mince her words when she publicly stated that her Ministry of Truth had drummed in the dangers of Covid ‘pretty diligently for a full two-week period of sustained propaganda‘. Yes, you read the last word in that sentence correctly. She said that.

Your library is fireproof if you have never questioned ‘The Science’ propagated by public health bodies worldwide to justify the strangulation of societies with the new age medievalism of lockdowns, masks and coerced and mandatory vaccination.

Sites like Medium.com, champions of cancel culture, have nothing to fear from the coming book burning. Medium.com, contrary to its claim, doesn’t exist to change the world. The pet project of a tech billionaire, it exists to reinforce corporate values with corporate tech business models for content and revenue generation. Like all Big Tech platforms, you’re free to say anything you want to … as long as you don’t breach the site’s ‘community guidelines’ which are expeditiously invoked to delete accounts that question the ethics of vaccine evangelism or biomedical passports – anything that seriously questions the current official Covid mainstream narratives. Not for nothing is it called Medium, where left liberals, masterfully embracing doublethink, compete to conjure up the most garment-rending expressions of disgust with Trumpian ‘fascism’ while supporting the bio-fascism of vaccine passports.

The grim reality of the new era in censorship is that Big Tech is waging an all-out war on democracy, with the full support of your government. Signalling complete alignment with government interests, Facebook and other platforms are removing groups and politicians opposed to lockdowns or vaccine mandates and passports. Their actions are both absurd and bold as they tirelessly dig digital mass graves for free speech.

As far back as October 2020, Reclaim The Net reported on a mass YouTube purge that saw channels with millions of viewers collectively wiped out under Big Tech’s new Orwellian ‘harmful conspiracies’ and ‘coronavirus misinformation’ policies. As of May 2021, YouTube’s collaboration with the EU has resulted in the deletion of 850,000 ‘disinformation’ videos.

This purge would be wrong even if the videos were compiled and loaded by chimpanzees from your local zoo. In a civilised society that claims to respect rational debate as the path to truth, there can never be a justification for censorship of ‘misinformation’. After all, the more misinformed the argument, the easier it should be to counter it. However, a deep-seated belief held by those in power is that dangerously dumb arguments must be supressed because a dangerously dumb population cannot be trusted to discern good from bad, smart from dumb. This contempt for the electorate goes to the heart of why a proper functioning democracy was always an illusion in the first place.

But it isn’t merely arrogant paternalism at play in Big Tech’s display of its new fascist fangs. The autocrats are not fearful of dangerous misinformation; they are fearful of dangerously good arguments because the bulk of what they are calling ‘misinformation’ is in fact valid scientific debate that threatens the entire edifice of the official Covid narrative. Which is not to say that all the opposing dissenters are right, but they have a right to be heard. By everyone.

Dr Robert Malone, a pioneer of mRNA technology, Nobel Prize winner Dr Satoshi Omura, Dr Peter McCullough, internist, cardiologist and epidemiologist at University of North Texas are just a tiny sample of the huge number of eminently qualified dissenting scientists and medical practitioners whose views have been censored. Are they a bunch of crackpots who need to be clobbered with the censorship baton?

Obviously not. And even if they were, censorship would not be the answer. This information is being purged precisely because it poses a credible threat to the government sponsored propaganda backed to the hilt by mainstream media and Big Tech. The gloves are off and the current censorship bloodbath is only a taste of what the autocrats are prepared to do to silence a debate they can’t win on an open and free playing field where the best ideas would prevail.

Cloaking censorship in a defence of the truth is a form of absurdism that only very powerful psychopaths engage in as a form of sadistic humour. It’s Big Tech’s way of laughing at us as it flaunts its crimes against free speech – from the sublime argument that the right to free speech bestows a right to curb it through to the ridiculous banning of a professor of communications, and expert propaganda researcher, for criticising Facebook’s attempts to dictate the terms of public debate, thus eliminating any doubt that they are trying to dictate the terms of public debate. It’s the classic reaction of an insecure and stupid bully when confronted by a rational intellectual. A Facebook post in which the professor referred to former UK-politician-turned-Facebook exec Nick Clegg as ‘the greatest vegetable in British political history’ may have been the deciding factor in the ban, making the thin skin of the Big Tech dictatorship all too transparent.

Big Tech’s arbitrary ‘harmful conspiracies’ and ‘misinformation’ policies are exempt from public scrutiny because they are enacted by a private monopoly. This monopoly position should prompt government scrutiny precisely because of its huge consequences for free speech but this isn’t happening because the speech that the monopoly hates is the same speech the government hates.  

Perhaps the only thing more galling than Big Tech’s abuse is the fact that the world has been willingly corralled into one giant public debating room, not realising that the room was owned and controlled by a psychopath. With hindsight, we should not be surprised that we are now being held hostage to psychopathic global capitalism, drunk on its own power, and by governments reduced to an administrative arm of global capital.

Silicon Valley and pro-lockdown governments vs free speech and truth

The harmonious alignment of pro-lockdown governments and Big Tech is patently evidenced by the full-throated cries of lawmakers everywhere for Big Tech to join them in the noble cause of supressing dissent. Ireland’s Justice Minister enjoins Big Tech to do its bit in curbing public protest, while here in the UK, MP David Lammy goes a step further by accepting money from Facebook for promotional services rendered while publicly exhorting the platform to increase its already fascist levels of censorship.

Back in October 2020, the Democrats in the US made it very clear what they wanted from Big Tech when Democratic Senator from Massachusetts Ed Markey, speaking to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at a Senate hearing, demanded more censorship:

The issue is not that the companies before us today [are] taking too many posts down. The issue is that they’re leaving too many dangerous posts up.

Sen. Ed Markey D-Mass

If our lawmakers don’t think there is enough censorship, is it any wonder that Big Tech giant Microsoft has formed a censorship coalition of the willing, including media giant BBC, with the Orwellian (sorry, that word again) sounding name of Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity and cutesy acronym C2PA?

If you follow the campaign trail money, it’s not difficult to see the clear lines in the raging US civil war. Silicon Valley, having donated overwhelmingly to the Biden/Harris campaign, is now offering its services as an information controller. This is hugely consequential for the Republican Party whose base is not only highly sceptical about the mainstream Covid narrative but seems to be the only source of real resistance to it in the US through its expanding network of alternative media channels where it is giving a voice to all dissenting Covid narratives.

Having consummated its marriage to the Biden administration through Silicon Valley administration appointments, Big Tech boldly declared war on the Republican Party with the suspension of the American President’s social media accounts after the Jan 6 Capitol Hill riots. High ranking Republicans probing any aspect of the Covid narrative from lockdown restrictions to vaccine injuries now find themselves in the cross-hairs of a digital coup led jointly by the Democrat administration in power and its Silicon Valley billionaire allies.

From a purely pro-free speech and libertarian standpoint, it is quite shocking to behold so-called liberal Democrats in America threatening to enact ‘war-on-terror’ style legislation directed at the conservative right-wing of America while Republican members of Congress and Senators beg Big Tech to stop turning off the microphone while speaking to their constituents.

To the extent that uncensored news serves democracy by holding power to account, it is a public utility. That public utility has unquestionably fallen into the hands of a private monopoly. The seeds of fascism sprouted when governments surrendered economic power and policy decisions to global capital. The open love affair between the Big Tech monopoly and pro-lockdown governments represents the blooming of the fascist flower.

Now read Book burning, part 2: Normalising the abnormal, where Rusere analyses how the war on reality has been waged in the past two decades and explains that the growing desperation of government tyranny is a logical response to the increasingly vocal resistance.

References

1. “The AIDS Catch” (documentary produced and directed by Joan Shenton, shown on Channel 4, British television), Meditel Productions, 5 March 1990