“Words are the most powerful weapon in today’s society. Words are more powerful than guns and bullets. They are more powerful because they allow us to spread ideas and concepts that can destroy and establish entire nations,” said James Thompson at Britain’s House of Lords Chamber Event. “This House Believes Freedom of Speech Should Have No Limit.”
We’ve also noticed that the crushing of dissent in America has grown steadily in recent times, though largely unnoticed by ordinary people, especially those who don’t read much. Otherwise, they might have noticed online what Jake Johnson said recently about our rarely questioned social media: “Facebook is using its enormous power to silence independent political perspectives that run counter to the corporate media’s dominant narratives.”
With its hidden but unparalleled historical control over the minds of millions of Americans, Facebook is being accused of joining forces with other controlling elites otherwise grouped together as the Establishment. One dissenting journalist has even “accused the company of attempting to suppress dissenting voices that refuse to toe the corporate line.”
Of course, search engines have been suppressing dissenting ideas on the political right for some time now. Try a quick check of articles on this blog site, for instance. Once they could be found, now they’re being censured. Moderate and centrist opinions, however narrowly-framed and insipid, are what’s left to choose from. Just turn on the television to see.
For most of us, high-sounding freedom of speech is a vague, feel-good notion that isn’t part of our own experience. However, the models that we actually know in our lives can be exemplified by the military and corporate sectors. These are top-down models where dissent isn’t allowed, though there are no policy statements to that effect.
It’s not just the extreme cases of well-publicized whistleblowers that know this. Every boss wants loyal, compliant, yes-saying subordinates. They are called “team players.” Governors, CEOs, and generals hate dissent.
“Our approach generally is to cover stories and angles that corporate media underreport or misreport,” says one dissenting voice in the Facebook article. The left and right see issues differently, however.
Citing the positive example of President Trump, the no limits to free speech argument espoused at the House of Lords offers a defense of “the real power of free speech, it allows anybody to come up with an idea and discuss it even when that idea is amoral or controversial. Words used can provoke responses that stir the human soul to its very core, often conjuring ideas and concepts which many may find uncompromising, disturbing, even abhorrent. However we need to hear these views in order to form our own opinion of them, to debate them and to explain to their proponents why they are wrong. And we can only do this in a society which allows free speech.”
Finally, it must be said that most people really don’t like freedom of speech, except as a meaningless abstraction, supporting ideas and opinions they already agree with.
