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Censorship a Trojan Horse

posted by martyb on Tuesday October 02 2018, @09:26AM   
from the I-Disapprove-of-What-You-Say,-But-I-Will-Defend-to-the-Death-Your-Right-to-Say-It dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

From an editorial in the Otago Daily Times out of New Zealand, Censorship a Trojan Horse:

It's an oft-cited maxim that the news media is the "fourth estate" upon which a healthy democracy stands.

It ensures the three traditional powers of state — the legislature, executive and judiciary — can be critiqued, challenged and curbed from quietly drifting into the arms of corruption and authoritarianism.

A free, fair, open and uncensored media is an antidote to state power and, for all its failings (and there are many), should be treasured as such. There are many countries around the world whose people would give anything for such a freedom.

Yet calls for the banning of certain opinion pieces, cartoons and commentary have risen in recent months, especially from those using social media, a world where such talk is becoming a trend. It is a trend we must confront.

Censorship is to suppress the harmful, the unacceptable, the obscene and the threatening from the media and other forms of public communication. Like a virus attacking democracy from the inside out, it was traditionally the tool of the dictator, though it is one used by many in power.

[...] It pays to query what those demanding censorship — be they celebrities, social-media activists or anybody else — see their ultimate goal as being.

To reduce hurt? To make the world a better place? Possibly, and those motivations are laudable. But the method employed to achieve them is not.

While censorship may be meant as a figurative horse upon which a better future rides, inside the belly of that horse lurks an army of conformity, quite capable of unwitting oppression.

History shows what happens when the fourth estate is no longer free to table all opinions.

It is a bleak picture. Without the disinfectant of exposure, power and ideals tend to corrupt even the most seemingly incorruptible.

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Original Submission

• Re:Estates (Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday October 02 2018, @06:08PM

  by RamiK (1813) on Tuesday October 02 2018, @06:08PM (#742975)

  While the synonymous usage is incorrect, the political thinking behind this usage is consistent with historical political science:

  And notwithstanding tyranny was at last eradicated, by the ways and means abovementioned, yet those who had chiefly contributed to it, created two consuls to supply the place of royalty; by which it came to pass, that the name alone, and not the authority, of princes was extinguished: so that the supreme power being lodged only in the consuls and senate, the government consisted of no more than two of the three estates, which we have spoken of before, that is, of royalty and aristocracy: it remained, therefore, still necessary to admit the people into some share of the government: and the patricians growing so insolent in time (as I shall shew hereafter), that the plebeians could no longer endure it, the latter took arms, and obliged them to relinquish part of their authority, lest they should lose the whole: on the other hand, the consuls and senators still retained so much power in the commonwealth, as enabled them to support their rank and dignity with honour. This struggle gave birth to certain officers, called tribunes of the people; after the creation of whom, that state became more firm and compact, every one of the three degrees abovementioned having its proper share in the government; and so propitious was fortune to it, that although it was changed from a monarchy into an aristocracy, and afterwards into a democracy, by the steps and for the reasons already assigned, yet the royal power was never entirely abolished and given to the patricians, nor that of the patricians wholly to the plebeians: on the contrary, the authority of the three estates being duly proportioned and mixed together, gave it the highest degree of perfection that any commonwealth is capable of attaining to; — and this was owing in a great measure, if not altogether, to the dissentions that happened betwixt the patricians and plebeians, as shall be shewn more at large in the following chapters.

  ( Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy https://www.constitution.org/jadams/ja1_27.htm [constitution.org] )

  i.e. When modern Americans talk about check & balances and branches of government, their forefathers thought about the three estates and Machiavelli's Rome. Which brings us to Trump...

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