I often see censorship presented as an act of desperation, evidence of a government or other entity desperate to hold on to power that it is losing.
But I read an article today that argues that this view is foolish, and that censorship is effective and a sign that the people who wield it hold an effective and tyrannical level of power.
The article cited the fact that the Soviet Union lasted 68 years and was able to effectively wield censorship for most of that time (to the point that the word "gulag" wasn't known outside the Soviet Union until Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn escaped in the 1970s and wrote "The Gulag Archipelago"), and that Chinese censorship is so effective that almost no one in China knows that the Tiananmen Square Massacre happened.
In essence, the argument of the article was "censorship doesn't mean they're losing, it means that they won enough that they hold the power to shut you up".
What are your thoughts on this? Do you have any good arguments or examples to cite either for or against this view?
I think it works. We have to open our minds here. The battlefield is always 1 or 2 levels lower, deeper than we think.
For example, so many think the issue with public schools is the curriculum, “indoctrination”. That is the outside layer of the onion. You peel it back and realize that forcing children to school is programming them to accept being consumer-slaves.
With censorship, it’s not about news that does or does not make it to the masses. It’s about a dropper level of control.