censorship is good...

MY SPEECH IS GOOD,
Yours is Evil

by H. Millard (c) 2000

Not long ago, according to news reports, a Jewish group announced that it was teaming up with various internet providers to censor and stop the publication of what the group doesn't want people to see or read. We've seen the same thing from Christian groups also, but the major difference is that the Christian groups mostly want to censor free speech rights relating to sexual matters, while the Jewish group is after political and philosophical speech.

The Jewish group often labels these things that they don't want people to see or read: "bigotry, hate, racist, anti-Semitic." Now, if the call to censor free speech was aimed exclusively at on-line threats, this would be one thing, but chillingly, the call is to censor virtually any free speech that the Jewish group doesn't like, and this is accomplished through the simple device of labeling any speech it doesn't like with one of the aforementioned boogey man words.

Those who set themselves up as Lords of Speech and try to restrict free speech, need to be reminded that petty tyrants throughout history have always used some fine sounding phrases and words to deny civil rights to others, and to censor speech that the petty tyrants didn't like.

Consider the history of the Talmud, a book revered by Jews, as just one example of what happens when the small-minded among us have their way. Over the centuries, the Talmud was censored, re-written, burned, and banned, because various petty tyrants believed it was "anti-Christian," or "evil" or sanctioned "baby sacrifices," or any of a host of other "hateful,bigoted,racist" things.

Because the Talmud was so labeled, mobs in various nations were worked up into a frenzy at different times, and the result was often violent acts against Jews based, not on a fair reading of the Talmud---which, remember, was banned and couldn't be read---but upon the characterizations of what it said by those who put the hateful characterizations on it.

Perhaps, if the people were able to read the Talmud they would have come to different conclusions as to its content and much of the violence directed at Jews, would have been prevented. Perhaps there might not even have been a Holocaust.

The place for ideas,whether we like them or not, is right out there in front of us. The founders of this nation realized that, and gave us, not the l0th or l2th or 14th Amendment to protect free speech. Instead, they put our protections for free speech right in the very first amendment.

It is the First Amendment which is the wellspring of our democracy. It is from the First Amendment that all freedoms flow. Without the right to free speech and expression, no other freedoms are genuine.

One of the methods used by petty tyrants in their quest to keep speech that they don't like stiffled, is to take a worst case example, say, something like "Kill all_____(fill in the blank)," label it "hate speech" and then lump all other speech they don't like under this worst case example. Another method used by the petty tyrants is to take a particularly gruesome crime, claim that the crime was due to race or other characteristic such as sexual orientation, and then claim that those who committed the crime were motivated by hate speech they read or heard.

All freedom-loving citizens should resist all calls at censorship, and particularly those that call for censoring political and philosophical speech, which is what seems to be happening with this call to censor the internet.

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Miss Liberty  bound and gaggedReferences: (links may expire...)
A Brief History of the Inquisition
Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
PIRATE NIETZSCHE PAGE
Berkeley Free Speech Movement - Photography by Ron Enfield
THE FIRST 10 AMENDMENTS TO THE CONSTITUTION
The Blue Ribbon Campaign for Online Freedom of Expression
Quotes by subject: Book burning
Censorship and Free Speech links
A virtual war -- The unprecedented battle raging in cyberspace between pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian/Moslem hackers may have serious consequences for the entire Internet.--
Censorship in the news
more on Internet Censorship...
The Conspiracy to Erect An Electronic Iron Curtain - An Essay by L. R. Beam
Hot Graphics from Flaming Text!