F**k Censorship
Censorship is a topic that has plagued (or served as some might say) the human race since Ancient Rome. Whether or not it is good is all in the eye of the beholder. In a free society, such as America, censorship is an unconstitutional act, and should therefore be banned. Banning censorship is a measure that must be taken to protect the rights, lifestyles, and ideals of the American people. This is shown by the First Amendment to the U.S. constitution, which reads as follows:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” (Madison 1).
The term (and practice of) censorship was started in 443 BC by the Cromitia Centuriata, one of the ruling bodies of Rome. The Cromitia Centuriata established the office of the Censor in this year. The original job of the Censor was to take censuses of all the citizens of Rome for the purposes of taxation, voting, and military service. As time went on, the power of the Censor grew until, eventually, the Censor became the official maven of Roman principles and etiquette. The Censor had the power to permanently relieve any citizen, rich or poor, of their civil rights if he deemed their actions unacceptable by Roman standards. Eventually, the Censor even had the power to penetrate even the Roman Senate. For this reason, with just a few words from the Censor (whose authority could not be checked by station or influence), many Senators were removed from office, publicly ostracized, and even banished (O’Neill 13-14).
If censorship were allowed to flourish abundantly in America, who knows how many important, historical pieces of literature, art, and music could have never been created? Books like Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman, Guerilla Warfare: Che Guevara by Ernesto Guevara, and countless other (more well-known) pieces of literature would have never even been able to be considered for publishing, let alone published. Millions upon millions of important pieces of art would never be shown for reasons such as nudity and unpopular political influence. Millions of musical masterpieces, such as “Kill All the White Man” by NOFX, “F**k Authority” by Pennywise, almost every song ever written by Rage Against the Machine, and countless other timeless classics, would be unheard of, possibly blotting out decades of musical evolution. In addition to all of these, the influences of many important people, maybe even as important as Martin Luther king Jr., would be completely extinguished. All of these discomforting possibilities would be the effects of an America with complete censorship.
Censorship keeps books like Dude, Where’s My Country? by Michael Moore out of the hands of politically uninformed “new-age zombie children”. This is the doing of the American government. They do this to keep present generations saying, “Oh yeah! We bombed those Iraqi bastards today!” instead of the cries of “Fight the power!”, “Down with Big Brother!”, and “Peace like a river” presented by past generations. The main problem with kids today, the fact that many of them only listen to the opinions of their parents and the press, is caused by the American government. The children of America must learn to be able to question information given to them by the government and the press as well as the government and the press themselves. When this happens, America will change for the better.
On the other hand, censorship keeps books such as Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler out of the hands of children. This is extremely important to American society. This prevents America from spawning a generation of Hitler-youth, preventing the reincarnation of the Nazi government. By preventing this, a second holocaust could be prevented, therefore saving the lives of millions of Jews, African-Americans, and homosexuals.
Censorship can also silence many political groups. These groups include neo-Nazis (which were spoken about in the previous paragraph), the KKK, and other potentially harmful organizations. This keeps the memberships of these organizations at a minimum because they are kept out of the public’s eyes. So, the violence caused by these groups is kept to a minimum as well.
There is only one problem with the point that was just made in the last paragraph. If these groups are silenced, what’s to stop the government from silencing other groups? If the KKK is silenced, then the government will zero in on the next unpopular group. Eventually, the government will try to silence every “unpopular” group. Some examples of the groups that were just talked about are hippies, punks, metal heads, socialists, anarchists, and even supporters of Ralph Nader. Eventually, the only free group would be mainstream-style, non-homosexual, white, Christian males. America would turn into Hitler’s definition of the ultimate “über-society”. In this case, the ideals and principles that America is based on would be as useless as a Torah in a temple of Shiva. Eventually revolution would break out and the fate of America would lie in the hands of society’s “rejects”.
Americans believe in “family values”. This means that they are anti-pornography. Pornography is a disgusting thing. It is probably the most common obscene thing in American society. It is also extremely frowned upon. It is branded as “pervert material”. It is foul, disgusting, and degrading towards women. The major problem with pornography is that if it gets into the wrong hands (i.e. the hands of a child) it can have drastic effects. Pornography (in the hands of a child) leads to masturbation, masturbation leads to sexual adulthood. So, children who look at pornography are prematurely thrown into sexual adulthood before they have even reached physical adulthood (or even puberty, for that matter).
“National surveys on public opinion have found that 72% of the American people demand a crackdown by the government on the problems of pornography. More than 92% want a crackdown on by the government on child pornography. With regard to some of the more severe types of “adult” pornography, as many as 73% of the American people would favor the extreme remedy of banning” (Sears 1).
There are a few things that are wrong with these ideas.
The problem with these statistics is that they leave out one thing. What they leave out is the number of people who support the First Amendment and the right to privacy in their own homes (which is most people). So, once again the average American can be thought of as a hypocrite. The people cannot support the First Amendment/ the right to privacy and favor banning pornography at the same time. By the First Amendment, the publishers and writers have the right to publish, write, and sell it. The people who view pornography have the right to do so within the privacy of their own home. So, by these Constitutional rights, both the viewers and the writers of pornography are free to do so.
For years the government has covered up scandals by censoring the media and certain individuals who try to speak the truth. An example of this would be the government’s attempt to cover up the truth about the JFK assassination. The government has also “neglected” to tell the public of any connections between California’s Antelope Valley and Groom Lake, Nevada (McGinnis 1). As George Bernard Shaw once said, “Assassination is the extreme form of censorship. We can accept neither”. If this is true, then the American government is one of the most unacceptable governments on Earth. Unbeknownst to its people, the American government has probably been involved in the assassinations of many political figures, both foreign and domestic. The fact is, the American media is one of the most censored medias in the “civilized” world.
In conclusion, censorship should be censored out of American society. Censorship has the power to stop cultural evolution dead in its tracks, therefore endangering not only the future of the culture, but the culture itself. Where would America be if it were controlled by the search for and destruction of that which it finds “obscene”? It would become an impoverished country. Not impoverished as in Africa or India, but impoverished as in the Great Depression (in America), craving not what was deemed “appropriate” by the government, but craving something new and “racy”. The government, no one for that matter, has the right to tell people who are under the protection of the First Amendment what they can and cannot publish, write, paint, sculpt, film, watch, or read. That is the beauty of American society, and it should stay that way.
This is a great essay I found randomly on teh interwebz and I thought it worth sharing, so it isn't my work or something...
I always hated censorship and oppression and that's why I like this essay so much but a lot of people think that it's needed in any healthy nation. I don't think so....
Another thing: in the movie
Enemy, Adam Bell, the history teacher holds a pretty good speech about this subject:
Control. It's all about control. Every dictatorship has one obsession, and that's it. So, in ancient Rome, they gave the people bread and circuses. They kept the populace busy with entertainment. But other dictatorships use other... other strategies to control ideas, the knowledge. How do they do that? They lower education, they limit culture, censor information. They censor any means of individual expression.And it's important to remember this, that this is a pattern that repeats itself throughout history.
And, in a way, I think that this is what's happening right now to our society: the culture level seems lower and lower as years pass by BUT we get A LOT of entertainment and no, I don't believe in conspiracy theories and other stuff like that, but I think that we are doing this to ourselves: we (as a mass, a society) are getting easier and easier to control because we avoid culture and we strive less for quality informations, and instead, we digest a lot of entertainment, we brainwash ourselves and we aren't even happy.....
