Censorship literally kills. “I believe there should be more than one voice in a healthy society”, said Dr Li Wenliang. “I don’t agree with the use of public power to overly interfere.” Those are deathbed words. Dr Li was a 34 year old Wuhan medic who, in late 2019, tried to blow the whistle and warn the public about the outbreak in his city. He was, however, suppressed by the Chinese Communist Party and later died from the virus.
Dr. Ai Fen, the “whistle giver” who told Dr Li and others about the new virus, was similarly reprimanded. “If I had known what was to happen,” she said in an interview before mysteriously disappearing, “I would not have cared about the reprimand. I would have fucking talked about it to whoever, where ever I could”.
What if these heroic medics had not been silenced by the Chinese Communist Party and the world could have been warned earlier? How many lives could have been saved? Would the Chinese Communist Party still have been able to get away with lying to the demonstrably fallible and puppeteered WHO? The tweet above was posted more than two weeks after Dr Li was silenced.
Censorship literally kills. What went on in China in late 2019 and early 2020 lends bulletproof support to this statement. But censorial tyrants the world over have bloodied hands too. Myriad examples from the mismanagement of the Wuhan plague support this statement. Idiot lockdown and vaccine policies are prime examples that I have previously explored in Covid is Over, a December 2021 essay. And an Amnesty International report highlights the damage done to democratized problem-solving around the pandemic due to increased censorship:
“Restricting freedom of expression must not become the new normal. Restrictions to the right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds must be lifted as they are not only unnecessary and excessive, but also counterproductive in dealing with the pandemic. The solutions to the huge problems created by the pandemic are out there. Enabling the full enjoyment of freedom of expression is key in finding them.”
This key to solution seeking applies to most, if not all of our biggest problems. Hence, it would seem that the maximization of decentralized truth seeking is of central importance to securing humanity’s best possible future. I argued this case at length in Surety Brings Ruin, a recent essay for Heterodox STEM.
The most important illustration of the homicidal nature to censorship, however, relates to the origin of Covid itself. According to a Guardian piece from May 2021 about Facebook:
“Anyone posting claims that Covid-19 was “man-made or manufactured” could have seen their posts removed or restricted, and repeatedly sharing the allegation could have led to a ban from the site entirely.”
Despite recent statements by high profile US government agencies apparently coming as a surprise to certain people, the hypothesis that the current pandemic began due to a laboratory leak in Wuhan, had never once been discredited as a highly plausible possibility. Not even close. It was never “debunked” and could never have been plausibly dismissed as a mere “conspiracy theory”. Never. Work from the likes of Alina Chan, Yuri Deigin, Nicholson Baker, Norman Doidge, Josh Rogin, and Jamie Metzl demonstrated the plausibility of the lab leak hypothesis long before Facebook lifted its despicably anti-scientific ban.
That Facebook is at the centre of our global information commons, with billions of users, yet had the ability to impede decentralized truth seeking on this scale, is utterly insane.
‘But how’, you may be asking, ‘is censorship like this homicidal? Surely you’re exaggerating.’ I wish I was. Whether or not uncovering the pandemic’s origin was key to optimally addressing this particular virus, from a public health perspective, is irrelevant. Not only do the millions who suffered deserve answers, we must minimise the risk of future pandemics. It is, of course, not as if this would have been the first lab leak in history. Far from it. Further, it is especially important when we realize that a gain of function modified virus was brought into existence, in similarly leaky laboratories, with a 60% infection fatality rate. This could well be hundreds of times more lethal than Covid. Toby Ord of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, in his book, The Precipice, estimated that engineered pandemics have a 1 in 30 chance of causing an existential catastrophe—the permanent destruction of humanity’s future potential—within the next century (pg. 167). To put this 1 in 30 in context, he gave climate change a 1 in 1000 chance of doing the same thing.
But Big Tech censorship wasn’t the only way that discovering the truth of Covid origins was hindered. In Surety Brings Ruin, I also described how political correctness hindered investigations too. Therein I quoted Alina Chan, a researcher connected to MIT and Harvard, who was one of the earliest and loudest expert voices on the lab leak hypothesis, and a lead signatory on the May 2021 letter in the journal Sciencethat calledfor serious re-investigations into the origin of this virus. According to Chan, one of the major fears amongst scientists around discussing potential lab origins was a fear of being associated with racism: “At the time, it was scarier to be associated with Trump and to become a tool for racists, so people didn’t want to publicly call for an investigation into lab origins”
Such an intense fear of being associated with racism isn’t surprising though. Western society is in the grips of a deranged ideology involving aspirational victimhood and an obsession with worshipping identity characteristics; an ideology that, in the European Parliament, was recently described as “Maoism with American Characteristics”. Ireland epitomises this derangement; we are in the process of introducing utterly insane new “Hate Speech” laws that did not have wide public support. According to Ben Scallan: “A total of 73% of respondents to the government’s consultation – 2627 individuals total – did not support the government’s plan to ban hate speech.”
John McGuirk summarized the realities of the bill:
“As written, the law states that you can be prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned just for possessing material that could conceivably – in the mind of some functionary – be considered hateful if somebody else saw it. And if you don’t want to be convicted, you would need to prove that you did not intend to share it with anyone else.”
Yes, this bill looks set to punish ‘thought crime’.
This particularly despotic and hopelessly naïve sliver of totalitarian idiocy is something I first wrote about in July of 2021—well before details were ever solidified. While I know human hatred to be real, I knew this bill would be a disaster for freedom of speech and thought. I knew this not because I am wise, but because the legal concept of “hate speech” is simply a lie. Jacob Mchangama has described how “the introduction of hate-speech prohibitions into international law was championed in its heyday by the Soviet Union and allies. … The communist countries sought to exploit such laws to limit free speech.” Stalin’s former buddy Hitler might even call hate speech a “big lie”:
“in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.”
And even if our political leaders see sense, and Ireland somehow manages to stop this new bill before it enters law, technocrats in the EU have already introduced new censorship regulations for Big Tech. Michael Shellenberger writes:
“The European Union is now officially requiring expanded censorship by social media platforms, including Twitter, Google, and Facebook. On Tuesday, Europe’s top Internet regulator, Thierry Breton said “19 online platforms and search engines have become systematically relevant and have special responsibilities to make the internet safer.”
Across the Atlantic, things are scarcely better. What Shellenberger has called the “Censorship Industrial Complex” in the US is growing stronger by the day and “new information has come to light that the censorship activists are trying to spy on and censor even supposedly encrypted text messages through apps like What’s App, Signal, and Telegram.” Canada is even going so far as to introduce a Ministry of Truth for the Internet. On this latest bit of blatant Orwellianism from blackface Trudeau’s increasingly despotic outpost of the Rainbow Reich, Meghan Murphy writes:
“Canadians will soon be relieved of the stress of seeking out content they find interesting on social media. Instead they will be able to relax, while the government chooses it for them.”
Alas, none of this matters to Charlie Chaplin’s “unnatural men – machine men with machine minds and machine hearts!” People in the grip of the machine don’t seem to care if censorship literally kills—especially if Truth is among the victims. Nietzsche’s madman told us so:
“Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly, “I seek Truth! I seek Truth!” As many of those who do not believe in Truth were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. … The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with glances. … “Whither is Truth” he cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? … Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying Truth? Do we not smell anything yet of Truth’s decomposition? Truths too decompose. Truth is dead. Truth remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves? What was holiest and most powerful of all that the world has owned has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? … Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must not we ourselves become Truth simply to seem worthy of it?”
Ok, I cheated a little and replaced “God” or “gods” with “Truth”. But since Truth is dead, I’ll do what I want.
What began in the 1970s as a dream of liberalizing China with Western norms, has instead become a Chinafying of the West with authoritarian norms. What happened with doctors Li Wenliang and Ai Fen, and the horrid consequences of their censorship, is merely a sign of things to come for the West. Can we not yet see the blood on our knives? Nietzsche understood:
“Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke and went out. “I come too early,” he said to then; “my time is not come yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering—it has not yet reached the ears of man. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, deeds require time even after they are done, before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.””
Censorship literally kills.
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