Writer's Block: This material has been censored

[athelind]

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Do you think the government should have the right to censor the media? If you're generally against censorship, are there any circumstances under which you feel it might be warranted?

Unca Bob had this one down:

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything—you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.

—Robert Anson Heinlein, "If This Goes On—" (1940)

That, by the way, is from a short novel about a Fundamentalist takeover of the United States after a "backwoods preacher" is elected President in 2012.¹

Heinlein also said, "The whole principle is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak."

Now, Unca Bob, especially in the second quote, was talking about what Wikipedia calls moral censorship², the suppression of speech that some individuals might find offensive or immoral; that is, in my estimation, subtly different from military censorship.

It is the opinion of Your Obedient Serpent that both "moral" and "military" censorship are always wrong; however, there are instances when the latter might be less bad than the alternatives. A Fully Transparent Government would not have survived World War II, and the most likely replacement had even less regard to such niceties.

It's a key part of my ethical system, however, that being forced to do bad things to avoid worse consequences does not make them good things; when you allow yourself to frame the kind of secrecy and suppression practiced in WWII as "good", you take the first step on the slippery slope that justifies political censorship, and all the cover-ups and black projects that burden us today.

I also don't automatically equate industry ratings systems as "censorship", although the MPAA has certainly demonstrated that they can be arbitrary and putative, and big studios, finding that "General Audience" films are often ignored, often tack extra nude scenes or coarse language to get an otherwise-acceptable movie out of the "kiddie ghetto"—an ironic kind of anti-censorship. Marvel Comics has implemented an entirely functional ratings system for their comics, however; while most adult comic readers are wholly unaware that Marvel even has one, the discreet little letter codes in the UPC symbol box provide a useful guide to parents looking for suitable reading material for their children, and comic store workers attempting to assist them.

I could go on, but I expect these opinions to get thoroughly Disassembled in the comments. I haven't even touched on the idea of "hate crimes" yet.

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¹The same timeline has a well-established Lunar colony at this point; grumbling about only getting the crappy parts of future histories may now commence.

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²Wikipedia distinguishes between "moral" and "religious" censorship; please pardon me if I consider that to be hair-splitting.

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Comments

[galis.livejournal.com]

This is very ignorant of what actually happened in Vietnam. I don't mean to be harsh here, but that's flat out wrong. The /military/ itself was one of the biggest detractors of plans like Rolling Thunder, yet they carried them out anyway because they were ordered too. These plans were drafted /by civilians/ who were attempting to micromanage the military from the outside.

Generally, very few people will have anything meaningful to add to the process, because most people do not understand it in the slightest. This is not a knock to them, simply reality - having public debate guide a surgeon would not produce better surgeries, because most people are not qualified to be surgeons. In fact you'd kill a ton of people through indecisive waffling and arguing while crippling the ability of the person who KNOWS what to do - the surgeon - to act. THIS is what happened in Vietnam.

The same is true of military plans. The public is not going to have the training or knowledge to make useful decisions on deployments and the like. They need to know who we're at war with certainly - secret wars would be a horrible thing, but trying to publically manage every soldier is a huge mistake and just sets him up to be a human target.

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

That's incorrect. Johnson was pressured into Rolling Thunder by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Johnson initially opposed giant bombing programs as being liable to draw the Chinese and/or Russians into direct conflict with the US but the Joint Chiefs pressured him into it because the more targeted bombing campaigns weren't "working". Indeed, your are mischaracterizing Vietnam. Militarily? Uh, we won that. Of course we did. It was a one-sided fight. However, conquering a country always leaves the question of "what next?" The US was driven out of Vietnam because it was a nasty, imperialist war and they had been fighting for their freedom for eighty years and weren't going to stop unless we were willing to kill them all. Which, thankfully, we weren't. But the military did not lose in Vietnam. Indeed, we pulled out after we had conquered the whole country! All of it! Oh, sure, then the corrupt and stupid government that we supported instantly collapsed, because support for the communists were about eighty percent, which was the root of the problem - that the government that we wanted there was nothing like what the Vietnamese wanted. But militarily? They never had any chance to beat us, and they didn't. However, it's clear you're now arguing tangential points. You're saying that Vietnam was war by consensus and we "lost" it, when the truth is that Vietnam was a war badly managed by both the civilian and military administrations that we militarily won but lost because the conditions of victory had no relationship to the situation on the ground - that the US had no moral mandate to be fighting the war in the first place. Lots of people predicted what would happen in Vietnam and no one listened. What I'm saying is . . . maybe the military should start to listen and stop relying on impossible to judge secret information that seems to always get us cocked up big time. Which was definitely the case in Vietnam. The war was started on false pretenses and fought on false pretenses, so it's hardly surprising it was a disaster. Vietnam doesn't refute my point, it demonstrates it.

[galis.livejournal.com]

This is totally false. The JC's initial plan was not rolling thunder, that was JOHNSON's plan. You have it backwards ;) Even a quick wikipedia has that info, complete with source references: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Rolling_Thunder#Implementation

[galis.livejournal.com]

Actually I think I see how you came to that conclusion. 'Pressured into it' means he was pressured into letting them start under the constraints he put into place. Of course the operation was military conceived, because the president can't draw military plans, but it was done so under the list of guidelines Johnson pushed down on them that formed the framework of Rolling Thunder. Which is why I say it was Johson's plan (IE, if I tell you to go to the store to buy a soda, but you can't ride vehicles with wheels, must walk backwards and hop on one foot, but you can take any route you like, then if you're caught hopping backwards on one foot, you'd be quite fair to say that was my plan regardless of what road you were on ;) )