Good Censor, Bad Censor

In a week that has seen both the condemnation of the US National Security Agency for surveying emails and other personal data worldwide, and major calls in the UK for the complete blocking of online pornography, the pressure to control and rein in the internet is growing stronger and stronger.

There is no such thing as good or bad censorship, as there are only good or bad people and content, visual, verbal or written, is what it is. It is how we, as adults, react, or respond to it that gives content its power, be it private, moral, political, sexual, criminal or offensive. Yet the internet with its labyrinthine pathways and myriad ideas, images, and views, reflects all mankind. It is our psyche, a huge digital Id into which we pour our thoughts and impulses.  Each day we upload the minutia of our lives, be they bland, brutal or base, good or bad, moral or immoral, legal or illegal, whatever mankind is capable of, the internet absorbs and stores it. Then, when we plug in, we have a choice, of what amongst man's cerebral detritus, to look at, read or ignore. 

Now our governments want to control, monitor and in some cases, expurgate sections of the internet in much the same way that doctors use electro-convulsive therapy to wipe out and erase parts of the brain. The result, even on a digital brain, is likely to be just as brutal and damaging.

Google is the current internet bugbear, chastised for the amount of tax it does or doesn't pay, and ordered by governments to stop this, or block that. Google is attacked relentlessly, but because of its size and financial clout, has been able to pretty much ignore these assaults on its propriety. However, the current furore around the activities of the US's National Security Agency (NSA) has caused Google's chairman, Eric Schmidt, to worry that the internet is about to suffer from a process of "Balkanisation", in which, like the countries of the Balkans, the internet begins the process of fragmenting as national governments seek to exert greater influence over it, essentially breaking it up.  Thereby creating a series of tightly controlled national networks and ending forever our current open communication platforms and the free flow of information that has been at the centre of the internet since its inception some twenty plus years ago.

This drive to control the internet and breakup the power of independent US companies like Google and Amazon with their huge stores of data, is coming not just from Authoritarian regimes like China and Iran, but from the law makers of the European Union. EU lawmakers in the wake of the National Security Agency scandal, are using the fear of data snooping to promote the idea of creating their own internet platforms separate from the likes of Google et al. Indeed for many European lawmakers the move now is to push for the ringfencing of their national networks which in turn will force internet companies like Google to comply with local rules for protecting local data and so on.

The result, according to an EU spokesman is that "You are likely to get a federation of different data centres, each fiefdom with its own different rules", which aside from its immediate aim of protecting its citizens data from the prying eyes of US intelligent agencies, becomes more sinister if used to repress political or other perceived subversions.

Indeed the fact that the National Security Agency (NSA) is spying on foreign nationals and probably eavesdropping on phone calls and reading the occasional email should not surprise or excessively worry us as this is what intelligence agencies do, and given that Facebook can already interpret everything from our taste in music to our political allegiances from analysing our 'Likes', the activities of the NSA will not make much difference to someone after your personal data. What should worry us are the calls for national security surveillance to be stopped or monitored, presumably by human rights lawyers and EU functionaries, as that will begin rendering any kind of clandestine snooping potentially unworkable, with possibly disastrous implications for our ongoing national security.

We should expect the United States, the most powerful country on earth to protect its people from attack, as likewise we expect our UK government agencies to do the same and as our main ally to share information and data when necessary. In effect, we expect our intelligence agencies to get the terrorists and our enemies before they get us and to do that successfully agencies need to snoop, spy and lie. Indeed, surveillance and data gathering are crucial, and by the very nature of their work the agencies involved need to be able to operate in secret, and monitoring the mass of internet traffic worldwide is a big part of that. Where this falls down is when those actions are perceived either as a threat to the citizens in whose name the surveillance is being carried out, or as a threat to other friendly nations, as the NSA's actions are now being made out to be.

Ironically in the name of democracy, and in a perceived benign move to protect its citizens from US data collecting, the EU's lawmakers could now begin the breakup of the Internet as we know it. Even more alarming is that the EU's desire to ringfence the internet along national borders is playing well with China, who's gleeful words on the NSA story see them sticking the knife in:  "Washington has been accusing China of cyber espionage, but it turns out that the biggest threat to the pursuit of individual freedom and privacy in the US is the unbridled power of the government". 

This means that countries like Iceland who have said that they wanted to ban access to all pornography, or in the UK where Prime Minister David Cameron or Labour MP Diane Abbott have called for a block on access to pornography in an effort to protect the young, and who have previously been mocked for their naiveté in thinking that an internet block along national boundaries was unworkable, can now look forward to a future where bans could not only be workable, but be made to work. Indeed, the calls of UK politicians for the blocking of pornography are now being championed by the Daily Mail and the Sunday Times. Therefore the chance for the UK Government to create its own server will now be perceived by many on both sides of the political spectrum as a real vote winner. State control of the internet along national borders is coming, and coming fast, and ironically it will be championed not by China or Iran, but by the unelected and unaccountable law makers of the EU and I believe, by our own government.

The former CNN journalist and writer Rebecca Mackinnon said in her book, Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom (2012), that: "We cannot assume that the Internet will evolve automatically in a direction that is going to be compatible with democracy" and prophetically that "Ten years from now, we will look back on the free and open internet with nostalgia". Yet this will all be done in the name of Democracy, of protecting personal data, and of fighting the currents totems of evil like racism, pornography, Islamophobia, homophobia, fascism, incitement to hatred and so on. As once the government and their state authorised censors are unleashed on an internet with borders, they will be unstoppable. For like the doctor who sees a once wild and dangerous patient rendered quiet and placid by the effects his electro-convulsive therapy, the glorious digital and untrammelled Id that represents our collective self, warts and all, will be blasted into submission and left, safe and inert, cured and cared for, in our new world, where nice is the new nasty and all bad thoughts have been erased. 

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© Nigel Wingrove 2013

IN EUROPE NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM

Self-censorship is insidious, especially the kind of self-censorship that creeps into your consciousness unknowingly, unasked and unwelcome, like a disease that surreptitiously eats into your body and begins slowly to attack you from the inside. At first you probably ignore the early warning signs; the odd ache, tiredness, the occasional twinge or a general feeling of malaise, but then later there’s something more serious, bleeding perhaps or an excruciating pain, something that really shouldn’t be ignored but often is. Finally the disease can’t be resisted, its presence is in your face, in your gut and it’s going to hurt you and worse fighting it is going to be scary. It’s going to take all the courage you can muster, and more. Courage that you passed up on months earlier when it was easier just to be scared, when you could perhaps have dealt with it but still hoped it would go away, and now even worse the disease is so bad that you may lose the fight and the disease will destroy you. Yet often, knowing all that, knowing that you have just maybe one last shot at defeating it; when you can feel that lump, or see the blood in the toilet or just know that you really are unwell, you still sit there, scared, alone, waiting for the disease to slowly eat you away from the inside, in effect, to kill you... 

Well that’s what politically-correct self-censorship is slowly doing to the psyche of the European, it’s infecting our collective body-politick and slowly destroying it, bit by bit, until the host body is overcome. Of course that probably all sounds very melodramatic and body-snatchers-like and what after all is self-censorship? Isn’t it just correcting or altering what one says, does or writes before making ones thoughts public. Don’t we do that say with swearing? Most of us wouldn’t swear in front of children or in a church and so curb and moderate our language for the sake of decorum. Likewise we often think thoughts that are best left unspoken. Telling the world that you fancy your partner's best friend or that you secretly lust after your wife or husband’s brother, sister or other close relation is probably a thought best left unspoken. 

But there is another kind of self-censorship entering our thoughts now and that’s not a censorship born of manners, social settings or decorum but rather a censorship imposed on us by the state. A censorship, in fact, of values and beliefs conceived by a liberal, politically correct intelligentsia and driven by its supporters in the media, local government and vested interest groups relentlessly from the nineteen eighties onwards and which is making free thought, speech and expression increasingly restricted and at times dangerous. Why? 

Why? Because of the ruling elites obsessive pursuit of a, to use the approved vernacular, racially diverse, non racist, multicultural, sexually inclusive, gender equal, disability friendly, multi-religious inter-faith, non-discriminatory, culturally aware society, free of derogatory labeling and individual stereotyping. In actuality they are overseeing the destruction of Europe, its peoples, its culture and its Will, replacing it with a cowed collection of weak, bureaucratic semi-nation states bound to an unelected, unanswerable and all powerful European Union whose post WWII, post colonial, secular, guilt-driven policies have sold out their indigenous populations and sacrificed their freedoms and their cultural, religious, racial and national heritage on the alter of politically correct dogma and left Europe ill and vulnerable to assimilation by unchecked immigration with it adherent cultures, religious-political faiths like Islam and its associated adherents. The European Union is in actuality, slowly killing Europe, its nations and its peoples and at the same time gagging the sick lest they cry out and try to fight back against the disease that has infected them and their countries. 

The West, and Europe in particular, is losing its Will to live. It has embarked on a ludicrous social experiment, unasked for by its indigenous peoples, whereby on the back of the wider cultural liberalism that has so corrupted our societies, hundreds of thousands of immigrants have been allowed and encouraged to take up residency in their towns and cities with no thought as to their impact on the host nations. The figures are truly staggering: in Sweden of 9 million people currently 1.5 million are either immigrants or children of immigrants; in Holland out of a population of 16 million, 3 million are immigrants, though this figure is probably higher as it excludes Dutch born immigrants and their children. In the UK, even if immigration stopped today, there will be 7 million ‘newcomers’ by 2050 and 16 million if immigration continues at current rates. By the middle of this century between 20 and 30 per cent of European countries populations will be of foreign origin. 

On top of that, our indigenous populations are declining. We are quite simply breeding ourselves to extinction. The average sized family needed in order for a population to sustain itself is for a woman to have 2.1 children in a lifetime, below 1.7 children in fact populations tend to collapse rather than decline. Indigenous women in Italy, Spain, East Germany, and the Baltic nations are averaging 1.3 children and face the prospect of halving their populations by 2050. 

Coupled with our inability to procreate, it seems, is our inability to die. Europeans are living longer, working less and, whatever leisure time we have we’re certainly not spending it with Hella, Isabella or Chantal, rather we’re probably working out how to avoid offending Aalimah, Madeeha or Shumaila. Our multicultural, diverse and apparently impotent countries are being filled with immigrants, invited and uninvited and who, unlike us, are, it seems, only to ready to breed and procreate.

Our rulers currently see this as marvelous, as they can quell the indigenous population's fears of unchecked immigration and a clash of civilizations by the oft quoted nonsense that immigration creates diversity, that with new people come new ideas, energy and so on and of course these people will work, pay taxes and make our old age comfortable. This is hokum of course as immigration on this scale, and where assimilation is unachievable, is colonization pure and simple. 

It is colonization by birth, by religion and by numbers and we, by which I mean Europeans, lie back and take it. We say nothing, we do nothing and we accept everything. Our leaders, intellectuals, opinion formers and our media, in return, reinforce this European wide acquiescence by politically correct self-censorship which is increasingly dictated by laws and implemented by a politically driven police force. Criticism of this new European ideal is a crime. Race relations acts have begat disability acts, have begat lesbian and gay transgender nonsense, have begat discriminatory hysteria that sees people arrested every day for daring to say aloud what, privately, we all think and know is wrong.

The European is not only physically impotent but the state is rendering him mentally impotent as well. Now he is afraid to voice his disquiet at immigration or forced changes in laws relating to race, religion, disability, or sexual orientation for fear of ridicule or, increasingly, of arrest. Now, as the assimilation of Europe gathers pace, so does the zeal with which our leaders, and the faceless little men that back them up through the power of Europe’s legislative process, block dissent. The European is, in fact, damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t and soon the disease will win.

What began two to three decades ago as a social experiment by nation states and idealistic left wing dreamers and intellectuals who, appalled at the horrors of WWII and riddled with guilt at their nations role in colonialism, sought to create a better, more harmonious world is, ironically, sowing the seeds of a new European catastrophe. 

Never without conflict has a population and collective of nations the size of Europe allowed its people and land to be colonized by a people, religion and ideology of ideas so at odds with its own. Soon, in an effort to appease the growing Islamists in their midst, small token aspects of Sharia law will begin to be incorporated into European state laws and constitutions. More fundamental changes will follow, slowly and inextricably infecting and altering the host nations.

At some point, despite the gagging laws, despite the impotency, shame and our seeming inability to breed, despite the political correctness and utopian dreams of our leaders, I believe that the people of Europe are going to scream aloud and finally begin to fight the disease that is infecting their nations. When they do, the whole world will hear it.