Del Beccaro: Censorship Is The Tool Of Dictators
Censorship is the Tool of Dictators
By Thomas Del Beccaro – pls share
As the November election approaches, the pro-censorship views of many prominent Democrats are on full display. At the same time, using a tactic familiar to history, they claim that it is their political opponents that are a threat to democracy.
Censorship, however, has always been the tool of the authoritarians seeking to protect their power.
By contrast, dissent is the mother of democracy – and, without that right, all others are soon lost.
Importantly, this November, Americans will decide which direction the United States will turn – whether they know it or not.
The current main protagonists in this fight, of course, are Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
Harris fashions herself as one of the protectors of American “democracy.” Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama have done the same. They do so, despite advocating, to one degree or another, the regulation, if not outright censorship, of free speech.
Hillary Clinton recently argued that Americans that engage in what she calls “propaganda” could be “civilly or, even in some cases, criminally charged” as a “deterrent.” Back in 2022, she attacked “tech platforms” claiming that they “amplified disinformation.”
Also in 2022, at Stanford, Obama spoke of the need for “solving the disinformation problem” indicating that “regulation has to be part of the answer.”
Meanwhile, Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz has said that there is “no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.”
Returning to Harris, she said of Elon Musk not long after he purchased Twitter, that he “has lost his privileges.” She went on to say that “There has to be a responsibility that is placed on these social media sites to understand their power. They are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight and regulation, and that has to stop.”
Worse yet, the Biden/Harris Administration, according to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, pressured Facebook to “censor” Covid 19 content. Most troubling of all, Biden and Harris instituted a ‘disinformation governance board’ to combat what they would determine was “disinformation.”
If you are keeping score, Obama, Hillary, Biden and Harris, who comprise the last four Democrat nominees for president and their last two presidents, have raised the specter of disinformation and censorship with Biden/Harris actually instituting an Orwellian government agency to control it.
Meanwhile, it is the Democrats’ mantra, as Hillary Clinton said, that Trump poses a danger to “our country and the world.” Beyond that, she said “I don’t understand why it’s so difficult for the press to have a consistent narrative about how dangerous Trump is.”
Of course, the press outlets favorable to the Democrats have repeated that mantra so dutifully that it could almost be argued that the Party Press era of the1800s, when the political parties owned many of new outlets, has returned.
More importantly, by seeking to curb free speech and by coordinating government and media messaging, wittingly or not, those Democrats now join a long list of authoritarians and dictators in that endeavor.
In the early 1300s, those in power of the Venetian Republic, cracked down on dissent for the “stability” of the Republic or so they claimed. In truth, they were cracking down on those who had challenged their power.
The Venetian power brokers set up a spy network, the Council of Ten, to accomplish their means. Six centuries later, in the prelude to Italian fascism, the now centralized Italian government of the 1920s did much the same, including by closing down opposition newspapers.
Their tactics were also the prelude to the fascism of Hitler.
Although initially freely elected, Hitler aggressively sought to impose a uniformity of thought and messaging as part of his effort to consolidate his power. In time he would transform the National Socialist Party of Germany to what history now knows as the Nazis.
To accomplish his goals, Hitler empowered his infamous Minister of Propaganda, Goebbels, as the BBC notes, who “controlled the media and arts, making sure that Germans were fed Nazi ideology while censoring other information . . . [and] any media that conveyed anti-Nazi ideas or even other ways of life, were censored.”
More recently, censorship was used by the communist government of Poland during the 1970s and 1980s in a last gasp attempt to hold onto power. The military dictatorship of Brazil did the same between 1964 and 1985. The current government of Brazil is doing much the same now. In 2020, Belarus’ dictator Alexander Lukashenko resorted to arresting more than 30,000 people in response to protests in 2020.
Of course, America has its own dark history of censorship. In the early 1900s, under Democrat President Woodrow Wilson’s Sedition Act, over 1,000 Americans were jailed. Long before that, under the Sedition Act of John Adams’ presidency, politicians and journalists were jailed. Of the latter circumstance, Thomas Jefferson questioned whether the American experiment with freedom was coming to a swift end.
Jefferson did so knowing that, as I wrote in my book “The Lessons of the American Civilization,” – “dissent is the mother of democracy.”
Keep in mind that for almost all of history, mankind has been ruled. Dissent was made treasonous by those in power so they could maintain their power.
Only when economic power was wrested away from those in political power could real freedom begin to emerge. Once it had, voices of dissent could then follow.
In our own country, it was the economic maturity of the American colonists that necessarily preceded Patrick Henry’s demand “Give me Liberty or give me Death.” In history, most often economic self-determination is a necessary prerequisite to true political self-determination and the more dispersed economic power is from political power, the more stable the republic and the more extensive the freedom.
In America today, economic self-determination is slowly being strangled by centralized government. At the same time, government has become America’s largest industry by far – drawing economic and political power closer in the process.
As it does, those in power seek to limit dissent to protect their power. They want Americans’ money but not their two cents.
Like so many before, they claim it is necessary for the good of the democracy.
Make no mistake that it is not – for there can be no freedom without the unabridged right of even the least among us to challenge those in power.
That is a clear Lesson of the American Civilization and that Lesson is on the ballot this November.
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The Lessons of the American Civilization
