Talking about producing work that we can be proud of and that enhances the experience of everyone else who comes across it led me to thinking about the creative urge in general and freedom of expression in particular.
Here in the West we like to think that we have true freedom of expression, but that is an illusion. We have had imposed on us restrictions on what we can say and write, at least in public. Years ago I wrote an article about this in New Law Journal called “Publish and Be Not Damned”, so I won’t go over this ground again.
But today we have fresh challenges to our freedom of speech, or expression. The culture of “political correctness” has frightened many people away from expressing their true opinions, in case they are immediately pounced on by politically motivated critics accusing them of various thought crimes in true Orwellian fashion.
The risk is extremely high when expressing opinions about equality, whether based on race, sex or age (unless, of course, your opinions accord with those who tend to occupy positions of power in publishing and the media). Also at high risk are opinions about crime and punishment (or the lack of it), various economic fallacies such as free trade, the desirability or otherwise of “multiculturalism”, and various events of recent history, all of which are surrounded by a virtual “electric wire”.
In many countries, for example, merely to question whether millions of Jews and others really were gassed in gas chambers by the Germans in the years 1941 to 1945 is a criminal offence, and there are many people serving prison sentences for transgressing this law. This is in spite of increasing evidence that much of the evidence used to support the “holocaust” story is in fact deeply flawed.
There is obviously something really wrong here, when just questioning orthodox history can bring such drastic results. The advent of the internet has initially been extremely beneficial for freedom of speech, because anyone can now publish their thoughts online at very little cost, without having to get their content past an editor.
But there are now well funded organisations working day and night to bring this to an end, to bring about the death of freedom of expression online. Certain organisations have the nerve to appoint themselves as self-styled “internet police”, and are pressing to have the power to issue “licences” to anyone who runs a web site or blog.
In other words, they want to restrict freedom of speech online, so that no opinions or research material that runs contrary to their own peculiar views escapes into the public domain.
This would be tyranny on a world-wide scale. We must all work to expose, whenever possible, those who would shackle freedom of expression on the internet.
Philip Gegan
