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Re: Gingrich raises alarm at event honoring those who stand up for freedom of speech (Can you spell "I N T E R N E T CENSORSHIP"
by John F. McMullen
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From MSNBC -- http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15976642/
Free speech and the delusion of grandeur
By Keith Olbermann
Here, as promised, a special comment about free speech, failed
speakers and the delusion of grandeur.
This is a serious long-term war, the man at the podium cried,
and it will inevitably lead us to want to know what is said in
every suspect place in the country.
Some in the audience must have thought they were hearing an
arsonist give the keynote address at a convention of
firefighters.
This was the annual Loeb First Amendment Dinner in Manchester,
N.H. a public cherishing of freedom of speech in the state
with the two-fisted motto Live Free Or Die.
And the arsonist at the microphone, the former speaker of the
House, Newt Gingrich, was insisting that we must attach an
on-off button to free speech.
He offered the time-tested excuse trotted out by our
demagogues since even before the Republic was founded:
widespread death, of Americans, in America, possibly at the
hands of Americans.
But updated, now, to include terrorists using the Internet for
recruitment. End result losing a city.
The colonial English defended their repression with words like
these.
And so did the slave states.
And so did the policemen who shot strikers.
And so did Lindberghs America First crowd.
And so did those who interned Japanese-Americans.
And so did those behind the Red Scare.
And so did Nixons plumbers.
The genuine proportion of the threat is always irrelevant.
The fear the threat is exploited to create becomes the only
reality.
We will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we
can find, Mr. Gingrich continued about terrorists, formerly
communists, formerly hippies, formerly Fifth Columnists,
formerly anarchists, formerly Redcoats, to break up their
capacity to use the Internet, to break up their capacity to
use free speech.
Mr. Gingrich, the British broke up our capacity to use free
speech in the 1770s.
The pro-slavery leaders broke up our capacity to use free
speech in the 1850s.
The FBI and CIA broke up our capacity to use free speech in
the 1960s.
It is in those groups where you would have found your kindred
spirits, Mr. Gingrich.
Those who had no faith in freedom, no faith in this country,
and, ultimately, no faith even in the strength of their own
ideas, to stand up on their own legs without having the
playing field tilted entirely to their benefit.
It will lead us to learn, Gingrich continued, how to close
down every Web site that is dangerous, and it will lead us to
a very severe approach to people who advocate the killing of
Americans and advocate the use of nuclear and biological
weapons.
That we have always had a very severe approach to these people
is insufficient for Mr. Gingrichs ends.
He wants to somehow ban the idea.
Even though everyone who has ever protested a movie or a piece
of music or a book has learned the same lesson:
Try to suppress it, and you only validate it.
Make it illegal, and you make it the subject of curiosity.
Say it cannot be said, and it will instead be screamed.
And on top of the thundering danger in his eagerness to sell
out freedom of speech, there is a sadder sound, still the
tinny crash of a garbage can lid on a sidewalk.
Whatever dreams of Internet censorship float like a miasma in
Mr. Gingrichs personal swamp, whatever hopes he has of an Iron
Firewall, the simple fact is, technically they wont work.
As of tomorrow they will have been defeated by a free computer
download.
Mere hours after Gingrichs speech in New Hampshire, the
University of Toronto announced it had come up with a program
called Psiphon to liberate those in countries in which the
Internet is regulated.
Places like China and Iran, where political ideas are so
barren, and political leaders so desperate that they put up
computer firewalls to keep thought and freedom out.
The Psiphon device is a relay of sorts that can
surreptitiously link a computer user in an imprisoned country
to another in a free one.
The Chinese think the wall works, yet the ideas good ideas,
bad ideas, indifferent ideas pass through anyway.
The same way the Soviet bloc was defeated by the images of
Western material bounty.
If your hopes of thought control can be defeated, Mr.
Gingrich, merely by one computer whiz staying up an extra half
hour and devising a new firewall hop, what is all this
apocalyptic hyperbole for?
I further think, you said in Manchester, we should propose a
Geneva convention for fighting terrorism, which makes very
clear that those who would fight outside the rules of law,
those who would use weapons of mass destruction, and those who
would target civilians are in fact subject to a totally
different set of rules, that allow us to protect civilization
by defeating barbarism
Well, Mr. Gingrich, what is more massively destructive than
trying to get us to give you our freedom?
And what is someone seeking to hamstring the First Amendment
doing, if not fighting outside the rules of law?
And what is the suppression of knowledge and freedom, if not
barbarism?
The explanation, of course, is in one last quote from Mr.
Gingrich from New Hampshire and another from last week.
I want to suggest to you, he said about these Internet
restrictions, that we right now should be impaneling people to
look seriously at a level of supervision that we would never
dream of if it werent for the scale of the threat.
And who should those impaneled people be?
Funny I should ask, isnt it, Mr. Gingrich?
I am not running for president, you told a reporter from
Fortune Magazine. I am seeking to create a movement to win the
future by offering a series of solutions so compelling that if
the American people say I have to be president, it will
happen.
Newt Gingrich sees in terrorism, not something to be
exterminated, but something to be exploited.
Its his golden opportunity, isnt it?
Rallying a nation, you might say, to hysteria, to sweep us up
into the White House with powers that will make martial law
seem like anarchy.
Thats from the original version of the movie The Manchurian
Candidate the chilling words of Angela Lansburys character,
as she first promises to sell her country to the Chinese and
Russians, then reveals shell double-cross them and keep all
the power herself, waving the flag every time she subjugates
another freedom.
Within the frame of our experience as a free and freely
argumentative people, it is almost impossible to conceive that
there are those among us who might approach the kind of animal
wildness of fiction like that those who would willingly
transform our beloved country into something false and
terrible.
Who among us can look to our own histories, or those of our
ancestors who struggled to get here, or who struggled to get
freedom after they were forced here, and not tear up when we
read Frederick Douglasss words from a century and a half ago?:
Freedom must take the day.
And who among us can look to our collective history and not
see its turning points like the Civil War, like Watergate,
like the Revolution itself in which the right idea defeated
the wrong idea on the battlefield that is the marketplace of
ideas?
But apparently there are some of us who cannot see that the
only future for America is one that cherishes the freedoms won
in the past, one in which we vanquish bad ideas with better
ones, and in which we fight for liberty by having more
liberty, not less.
I am seeking to create a movement to win the future by
offering a series of solutions so compelling that if the
American people say I have to be president, it will happen.
What a dark place your world must be, Mr. Gingrich, where the
way to save America is to destroy America.
I will awaken every day of my life thankful I am not with you
in that dark place.
And I will awaken every day of my life thankful that you are
entitled to tell me about it.
And that you are entitled to show me what an evil idea it
represents and what a cynical mind.
And that you are entitled to do all that, thanks to the very
freedoms you seek to suffocate.
2006 MSNBC Interactive
Copyright2006 MSNBC.com
"When you come to the fork in the road, take it" - L.P. Berra
"Always make new mistakes" -- Esther Dyson
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"
-- Sir Arthur C. Clarke
"You Gotta Believe" - Frank "Tug" McGraw (1944 - 2004 RIP)
"Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest"
-- Samuel Clemens
John F. McMullen
johnmac@... johnmac13@... johnmac@...
johnmac@panix johnmac@... johnmac13@...
jmcmullen@... johnmac@... john.mcmullen1@...
ICQ: 4368412 Skype, AIM, Yahoo Messenger & Google Talk: johnmac13
BLOGS: http://johnmacrants.blogspot.com/, http://johnmac13.multiply.com/
**********************************************************************
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Off-Topic threads: http://www.lawlists.net/mailman/listinfo/cyberia-ot
Need more help? Send mail to: Cyberia-L-Request@...
**********************************************************************
Free speech and the delusion of grandeur
By Keith Olbermann
Here, as promised, a special comment about free speech, failed
speakers and the delusion of grandeur.
This is a serious long-term war, the man at the podium cried,
and it will inevitably lead us to want to know what is said in
every suspect place in the country.
Some in the audience must have thought they were hearing an
arsonist give the keynote address at a convention of
firefighters.
This was the annual Loeb First Amendment Dinner in Manchester,
N.H. a public cherishing of freedom of speech in the state
with the two-fisted motto Live Free Or Die.
And the arsonist at the microphone, the former speaker of the
House, Newt Gingrich, was insisting that we must attach an
on-off button to free speech.
He offered the time-tested excuse trotted out by our
demagogues since even before the Republic was founded:
widespread death, of Americans, in America, possibly at the
hands of Americans.
But updated, now, to include terrorists using the Internet for
recruitment. End result losing a city.
The colonial English defended their repression with words like
these.
And so did the slave states.
And so did the policemen who shot strikers.
And so did Lindberghs America First crowd.
And so did those who interned Japanese-Americans.
And so did those behind the Red Scare.
And so did Nixons plumbers.
The genuine proportion of the threat is always irrelevant.
The fear the threat is exploited to create becomes the only
reality.
We will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we
can find, Mr. Gingrich continued about terrorists, formerly
communists, formerly hippies, formerly Fifth Columnists,
formerly anarchists, formerly Redcoats, to break up their
capacity to use the Internet, to break up their capacity to
use free speech.
Mr. Gingrich, the British broke up our capacity to use free
speech in the 1770s.
The pro-slavery leaders broke up our capacity to use free
speech in the 1850s.
The FBI and CIA broke up our capacity to use free speech in
the 1960s.
It is in those groups where you would have found your kindred
spirits, Mr. Gingrich.
Those who had no faith in freedom, no faith in this country,
and, ultimately, no faith even in the strength of their own
ideas, to stand up on their own legs without having the
playing field tilted entirely to their benefit.
It will lead us to learn, Gingrich continued, how to close
down every Web site that is dangerous, and it will lead us to
a very severe approach to people who advocate the killing of
Americans and advocate the use of nuclear and biological
weapons.
That we have always had a very severe approach to these people
is insufficient for Mr. Gingrichs ends.
He wants to somehow ban the idea.
Even though everyone who has ever protested a movie or a piece
of music or a book has learned the same lesson:
Try to suppress it, and you only validate it.
Make it illegal, and you make it the subject of curiosity.
Say it cannot be said, and it will instead be screamed.
And on top of the thundering danger in his eagerness to sell
out freedom of speech, there is a sadder sound, still the
tinny crash of a garbage can lid on a sidewalk.
Whatever dreams of Internet censorship float like a miasma in
Mr. Gingrichs personal swamp, whatever hopes he has of an Iron
Firewall, the simple fact is, technically they wont work.
As of tomorrow they will have been defeated by a free computer
download.
Mere hours after Gingrichs speech in New Hampshire, the
University of Toronto announced it had come up with a program
called Psiphon to liberate those in countries in which the
Internet is regulated.
Places like China and Iran, where political ideas are so
barren, and political leaders so desperate that they put up
computer firewalls to keep thought and freedom out.
The Psiphon device is a relay of sorts that can
surreptitiously link a computer user in an imprisoned country
to another in a free one.
The Chinese think the wall works, yet the ideas good ideas,
bad ideas, indifferent ideas pass through anyway.
The same way the Soviet bloc was defeated by the images of
Western material bounty.
If your hopes of thought control can be defeated, Mr.
Gingrich, merely by one computer whiz staying up an extra half
hour and devising a new firewall hop, what is all this
apocalyptic hyperbole for?
I further think, you said in Manchester, we should propose a
Geneva convention for fighting terrorism, which makes very
clear that those who would fight outside the rules of law,
those who would use weapons of mass destruction, and those who
would target civilians are in fact subject to a totally
different set of rules, that allow us to protect civilization
by defeating barbarism
Well, Mr. Gingrich, what is more massively destructive than
trying to get us to give you our freedom?
And what is someone seeking to hamstring the First Amendment
doing, if not fighting outside the rules of law?
And what is the suppression of knowledge and freedom, if not
barbarism?
The explanation, of course, is in one last quote from Mr.
Gingrich from New Hampshire and another from last week.
I want to suggest to you, he said about these Internet
restrictions, that we right now should be impaneling people to
look seriously at a level of supervision that we would never
dream of if it werent for the scale of the threat.
And who should those impaneled people be?
Funny I should ask, isnt it, Mr. Gingrich?
I am not running for president, you told a reporter from
Fortune Magazine. I am seeking to create a movement to win the
future by offering a series of solutions so compelling that if
the American people say I have to be president, it will
happen.
Newt Gingrich sees in terrorism, not something to be
exterminated, but something to be exploited.
Its his golden opportunity, isnt it?
Rallying a nation, you might say, to hysteria, to sweep us up
into the White House with powers that will make martial law
seem like anarchy.
Thats from the original version of the movie The Manchurian
Candidate the chilling words of Angela Lansburys character,
as she first promises to sell her country to the Chinese and
Russians, then reveals shell double-cross them and keep all
the power herself, waving the flag every time she subjugates
another freedom.
Within the frame of our experience as a free and freely
argumentative people, it is almost impossible to conceive that
there are those among us who might approach the kind of animal
wildness of fiction like that those who would willingly
transform our beloved country into something false and
terrible.
Who among us can look to our own histories, or those of our
ancestors who struggled to get here, or who struggled to get
freedom after they were forced here, and not tear up when we
read Frederick Douglasss words from a century and a half ago?:
Freedom must take the day.
And who among us can look to our collective history and not
see its turning points like the Civil War, like Watergate,
like the Revolution itself in which the right idea defeated
the wrong idea on the battlefield that is the marketplace of
ideas?
But apparently there are some of us who cannot see that the
only future for America is one that cherishes the freedoms won
in the past, one in which we vanquish bad ideas with better
ones, and in which we fight for liberty by having more
liberty, not less.
I am seeking to create a movement to win the future by
offering a series of solutions so compelling that if the
American people say I have to be president, it will happen.
What a dark place your world must be, Mr. Gingrich, where the
way to save America is to destroy America.
I will awaken every day of my life thankful I am not with you
in that dark place.
And I will awaken every day of my life thankful that you are
entitled to tell me about it.
And that you are entitled to show me what an evil idea it
represents and what a cynical mind.
And that you are entitled to do all that, thanks to the very
freedoms you seek to suffocate.
2006 MSNBC Interactive
Copyright2006 MSNBC.com
"When you come to the fork in the road, take it" - L.P. Berra
"Always make new mistakes" -- Esther Dyson
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"
-- Sir Arthur C. Clarke
"You Gotta Believe" - Frank "Tug" McGraw (1944 - 2004 RIP)
"Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest"
-- Samuel Clemens
John F. McMullen
johnmac@... johnmac13@... johnmac@...
johnmac@panix johnmac@... johnmac13@...
jmcmullen@... johnmac@... john.mcmullen1@...
ICQ: 4368412 Skype, AIM, Yahoo Messenger & Google Talk: johnmac13
BLOGS: http://johnmacrants.blogspot.com/, http://johnmac13.multiply.com/
**********************************************************************
For Listserv Instructions, see http://www.lawlists.net/cyberia
Off-Topic threads: http://www.lawlists.net/mailman/listinfo/cyberia-ot
Need more help? Send mail to: Cyberia-L-Request@...
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