The speech=violence roots of attacking dissent by both the left and the right
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Nikhil VJ
Sep 2, 2018, 5:40:41 PM9/2/18
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https://www.naturalnews.com/2018-08-30-tech-giants-censorship-is-an-online-ethnic-cleansing-campaign.html
SPEECH = VIOLENCE
When you equate the two, you unleash an Orwellian nightmare from both the left and the right.
The left claims that conservative opinions or even the PRESENCE of people who disagree with them, are "harming" people as if it's actual violence. And they use that to justify the most unprecedented wave of censorship that we have seen in the history of the internet.
The right claims that these old professors and poets talking about people's rights being violated are "harming" the nation by proxy of harming "development". And they use that to justify prosecution of human rights defenders.
Oh, and the assertion by very compassionate people claiming to be standing up for minorities that some speech even though not directly calling for violence (aka the legal definition of hate speech) it still causes them hurt and so everything must be banned, only harms those very minorities in the long run. Here's a video for folks who are on that train, it's something that you have to think long-term rather than short-term to understand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15IWB9-r07M
Both sides : the left and the right : are also implementing the flip (and the inevitable) side of that equation with deadly consequences:
VIOLENCE = SPEECH
Under this assumption, punching people, beating them up, killing them, is regarded as a legitimate form of expression of one's opinions.
Of course, it takes two to dialog and if you physically harm one of the participants then you're not going to have a dialog. In all these years I had witnessed the right wingers do this. Since the past 3 years or so I'm increasingly seeing left wingers do this in the West. And the west's mainstream media is completely taking the violent side's side on this, even going as far as out-right lying about some events where the video footage clearly showed that the leftist ANTIFA members were the ones instigating and committing the violence.
And that was just at the individual violence level. Structural violence has gone even worse. The banning of entire publishers like NaturalNews, infowars and untold hundreds of other voices off the social media platforms that everybody uses, with no official specific reason given till date that can be defended in a court of law, and just over-arching excuses that would need you to ban CNN, BBC etc first if you were being sincere about it (all those wars? Saddam Hussein having WMDs? Libya? Syria? C'mon people I wasn't born yesterday. Mainstream media has peddled far more fake news and has actually killed millions through their reporting. If you're going to ban news publishers for fake news, ban these mass murderers first), is one example of structural violence, and very much an all-out information war with a direct political intention to influence a country's elections by controlling what the population sees and hears, being carried out by the left and being applauded by self-proclaimed liberals.
The moral bankruptcy of the most-repeated defense "but they're private companies" is revealed with one simple mental exercise: How would you react if a prominent left-leaning voice like The Guardian was completely censored by Facebook, Google, Twitter, and their website denied crucial services like digital payments, advertisement hosting or traffic load balancing, which would make even their main website easy to take down with DDoS attacks, effectively censoring them completely? Would you then still persist with your argument "but they are private companies, it's completely ok if they ban whoever they want to ban" ?? I think not. Besides, it was Obama who during his presidency declared that without the US govt's help, Facebook etc wouldn't exist. Those "private companies" are there only because of extensive taxpayer-funded subsidies and deep structural help from government that is functionally equivalent to public utility companies that supply electricity, gas etc. There are strict neutrality laws that ban such companies from denying service to people at personal discretion. If these companies start doing political censorship, they are violating the neutrality commitment under which they got all that government assistance and were able to become platform monopolies, and this opens them up to getting sued as a publisher rather than being a neutral platform which they have legally claimed themselves to be since their inception.
The catch with supporting arbitrary censorship and meddling by social media giants? Well, what harm can possibly come from a few powerful individuals with zero accountability deciding what should be permitted to be shared, viewed or not, with zero appeals procedure and zero transparency, on the internet?
What if I told you that every alternative news source and independent voice saying anything against India's ruling government is going to meet exactly the same fate (online, that is. Offline they might even get murdered and you'll never know) as Infowars did, and with FAR LESSER coverage? Today India's dissenters are 100% dependent on Twitter, Facebook, Google. They're nowhere near the levels of America's independent media. What will they do when that rug is swept away from below their feet?
The censoring of Infowars and several others was a global advertisement by the billionaire capitalst elites who have invested heavily in Facebook, Google, Twitter etc to all wannabe tyrants around the world: "we can switch off your opposition for you, at extremely low cost. Just do us so and so favors...". They don't give a shit about your cause, it's all about the money for them. There are reasons why world leaders visit the offices of these tech giants and meet them behind closed doors. Those are the people that the global "liberal" left is in bed with right now. Those are the left's "allies in the fight against hate" as is euphemistically quoted (and of which I don't trust one single word).
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There was a SOLID REASON why for so many decades the gold standard of humanity was :
Speech and Violence are NOT THE SAME.
You're not supposed to treat people speaking their mind like criminals.
And you're not supposed to react to ideas that you disagree with with violence, you're not supposed to make it your life's mission to prevent others from hearing what you don't like. That only proves that your ideas won't last in the sunlight of openness.
Gandhi would have agreed with this. His writings would have earned a "far right extremist" tag from today's left if somebody wrote the exact same things today.
The increasing abandonment of the principles of nonviolence by the left, and the embracing of anti-democratic, top-down, secretive tactics like shadow banning, censoring etc is going to bite all the people's movements in the backsides when governments around the world take the cure and start using the same mechanisms. Short-sighted leftists have unleashed an Orwellian nightmare. One person's wayward actions will be applied to all, everybody will be painted as evil, just as it has been done by the mainstream and left leaning media in the US against conservatives. Everybody who dissents with the status quo will be branded as fake news peddlers, everybody will be censored or banned or arrested. The shortsightedness that has been exhibited by the people who call themselves Liberals speaks volumes. If they can't see through the consequences of installing vast subjective censorship mechanisms without transparency or appeal process across the internet, then I don't think they can be trusted with anything. Tomorrow if we do some "peoples revolution" and put them in power, what is the guarantee that they won't destroy democracy, if merely getting a foothold in the head offices of tech giants has made them behave SO big-brotherly? Why is this behavioural pattern (self-righteous certainty and censorship of everyone who disagrees with you) practically mirroring the history of every country that's had a leftist revolution?
I'll leave you with some text shared recently by someone we've all been diligently trained by our dear mainstream media (the same people who have caused the slaughter of millions of people, and who know want all their competition censored because they can't compete with them in the free market of ideas) is the enemy of all freedom of speech: (emphasis mine)
"Censorship is a very dangerous thing & absolutely impossible to police. If you are weeding out Fake News, there is nothing so Fake as CNN & MSNBC, & yet I do not ask that their sick behaviour be removed. I get used to it and watch with a grain of salt, or don’t watch at all"
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