America, the Beautifully Censored
Saturated in an Orwellian utopia, there is a quote in George Orwell’s 1984 that is so chilling, so eerie, and yet so incredibly relevant — considering big tech’s recent “cleanse” of conservative ideas on social media — that is should send an existential shockwave through every American.
“The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”
Progressive ideology has mistaken that happiness is more important than freedom. Mankind has a false perception that this choice is a pendulum, but it is a spectrum, one that America has had a very hard time wrestling within 2020. When we come to a place where our desire is to censor what we disagree with in order to avoid the sad state of affairs, is not liberty or poised thought, it is the very manifestation of extremism.
The outrage I possess over big tech’s censorship of conservative accounts and apps is not an affirmation of the rhetoric being censored, but a deep disdain for political theatre and persecution of what people consider disagreeable thought. I am not a conspiracy theorist, I lean center-right, and there are many things that the GOP does that infuriates me. But know this: the censorship of political ideologies that the powerful disagree with is dangerous, and warnings are inked in thousands of apocalyptic fantasy and history books for that very reason.
Mao ZeDong, the father of communist China, used the technique of censorship of capitalist/democratic ideas to achieve and maintain communism in the People’s Republic of China. But, as we know from Mao, censorship is not the acme of political power — it is the conception. Mao later went on to murder millions of people, silence opposition parties, and devastate the country until he died.
I don’t dispute some of the rhetoric being disgusting and childish. What I do dispute is watching the evolution of the American institution where anti-semitism and child-pornography reproduce like rabbits on social media, but civic theatrics are deemed a rhetorical enemy of the state.
Many will read this and laugh at what they consider to be a heinous conspiracy, wicked rhetoric, or atrocious embellishment. Before you comment, do your research. Tell me, from a historical context, when censorship has ever benefited a republic. If you think that censorship will end once the disagreeable rhetoric stops, you are naive. Another favorite quote from 1984 is this: “We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.”
