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Identifying the Real Free Speech Problem
by Birdman Bryant
13 January 2005
The world has always been hostile to free speech, and continues to be
hostile even in these supposedly-enlightened times. There is one place,
however, where free speech is appreciated and cultivated -- for the most
part anyway -- and while it is far from the world as many of us know it in
our daily lives, it is nevertheless easily accessible. That place, of
course, is cyberspace; and barring the collapse of our electronic
infrastructure or the emergence of State-sponsored censorship that can
outflank the warp-speed cyber-nerds and other geniuses of the Net Set, it
stands as the future of human communication.
As my altered ego JBR Yant is fond of saying, 'Free speech is offensive
speech'. What that means is that it is silly to say that conventional non-
controversial speech is 'free speech', because nobody cares about this
kind of speech. It is the offensive kind that people care about, and it is the
offensive kind that raises the hackles of others, and often lowers the
boom on the people who practice it.
But if free speech is offensive speech, it is also speech that comes in
numerous varieties, and these varieties make it possible to turn what
seems to be free speech into just conventional non-controversial speech. To
explain, consider the fact that a denunciation of blacks or Jews when
published in your Daily Birdcage Liner will raise a host of protests, but
when published in a racialist newsletter will probably not raise an
eyebrow. Thus what is supposedly free (and offensive) speech, when
adequately compartmentalized, will transmogrify into conventional speech
and thereby go unnoticed.
And that is precisely the formula by which our Founders expected free
speech to be tolerated -- a formula which might be rendered in a
paraphrase of the well-known Gestalt Prayer of Fritz Perls:
"I say my thing and you say your thing. I am not here to say my thing in
your ear, and you are not here to say your thing in mine. I am not here to
convert you, and you are not here to convert me. But if, by chance, I come
over to your corner to hear you, or you come over to my corner to hear me,
and in so doing we happen on a happy dialog and find one another, it's
wonderful."
In case it is not clear, what I am getting at is this. The Founders knew
that the principal bone of contention in matters of free speech was
religion, and the reason it was a bone of contention is that everybody
felt that he had to convert everybody else, or else the unconverted souls would
come to grief in Eternal Damnation. But the Founders realized that if they
could just get people to leave others alone to worship in their own way --
in short, if they could just get people to compartmentalize speech so that
it would become 'conventional' within each compartment and thus not risk
offending others by going outside the designated compartment, then no one
would be offended and everyone could live in peace. It was helpful, of
course, that the Founders were children of the Enlightenment -- the period
where religion had begun to significantly recede in the face of scientific
knowledge -- for this allowed them to see religion for what it really was:
Not a God-directed harvesting of souls to spare them Eternal Damnation,
but rather a human-directed effort by a variety of religious organizations
competing with each other for power and prestige.
The Founders' trick of compartmentalizing speech so it would not be
offensive has had a long and useful history, but the emergence of the mass
media striving for a universal market has decompartmentalized speech, with
the result that it has ceased to be free. There has, of course, been an
effort to keep speech free by means of specialized publications, but the
expense of mailing and advertising has made life difficult for the
purveyors of such attempts, to say nothing of the opposition of those who
find such newsletters 'offensive'.
All this has changed with the emergence of the Internet, however, where
the costs of communication and publication are virtually nil. The result is
that the Net is one big compartment of lots of little compartments which
is differentiated from the conventional media by being free (and offensive),
whereas the conventional media are not. And the upshot of this is that the
conventional media are dying. They still have the old fogies as an
audience because the old fogies aren't computer-savvy and aren't about to
become so; but the old fogies are dying off, and the youngsters, who are
being teethed on cyberware, will never go back to the conventional media
because they are discovering, thanks to the Net itself, that the
conventional media have woven a tapestry of lies and deceits that will not
bear serious scrutiny, no matter how many media talking heads grind their
gums in favor of it.
More particularly, what America is experiencing -- and to a certain
extent, the rest of the world as well -- is a bad case of split personality --
a sort of cognitive dissonance in which the lies of omission and commission
of the conventional media are being challenged by the Internet in a kind
of War of the Titans. The result can only be that the conventional media are
going to find themselves increasingly marginalized because of the
increasingly untenable positions which they embrace, and because of their
inability to achieve their desideratum of a universal audience in
competition with the compartmentalization of the Internet.
The way of the future, then -- other things being equal -- is that the
conventional media will either die or cease to be conventional, while the
Internet will grow. But the ceteris paribus condition may well
not hold if the censors have their way, for these folks want the Net to be a
universal medium whose message is theirs alone. It is not enuf for them to
choose the sites they wish to read -- they have to choose the sites for
everyone else as well. The excuses they make for their behavior are of course
the same as for all censorship -- perversion, immorality, treason, social
upheaval, political necessity, war, the sky is falling, you name it. Oh,
and always 'for the children'. (Spare us, O Lord.) The problem which the
censors are faced with, however, is that the peons have tasted freedom --
and in fact are now accustomed to freedom -- and are therefore
not likely to accept confinement in the conventional media straitjacket of
their own accord.
We have heard rumors that a 'new' Internet is being prepared -- one that
the Censors can control, and which they will force everyone else to use by
filling the current Net so full of viruses, worms and trojans that
electronic protection will become impossible. I myself have asked the
question of at what point will it become so time-consuming to download
virus definitions that there will be no time for anything else; but this
will perhaps be solved by such technical breakthrus as larger information
pipelines (as we are now seeing in cable), smarter software, and more
efficient algorithims for recognizing malware that has not yet been
identified. But however this struggle plays itself out, we can see that
this is a case of what JBR Yant was referring to when he noted that
civilization is in danger because technology has advanced faster than
morality.
Now one of the main reasons that free speech is in danger is because there
is no appreciation of the fact that, to again use the words of Yant,
"truth is a matter of opinion". Instead, everyone and his brother thinks that
HE has the Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth, and will be
damned if he lets anyone else's truth overwhelm his own without a fight.
It is, of course, quite simple to prove the truth of Yant's statement (or
is it just his opinion?), to wit, that if A and B have different opinions,
then there is simply no way to tell whose opinion is right -- or indeed,
to tell whether either is. We may of course be more willing to believe
a distinguished scientist than a country hick, but on the other hand our
readiness to believe is simply our opinion, and does nothing to prove
whose opinion is correct. Nor does it do to check for logical fallacies or
empirical falsehoods; for while exposure of same may prove persuasive to
many, such revelations can do nothing to prove -- in some Hegelian
Absolutist sense, at least -- that one opinion is right and another wrong;
for in spite of pounds of proof and liters of logic, opinions remain
opinions, and have not the least obligation to change no matter WHAT the
conditions, thank you.
But all this is really only half the problem, because even when people
realize that they don't possess quite the truth they thought they had --
if indeed they have the acuity to recognize such a condition -- they will
still fight others who question them because they have to protect the most
sensitive of all parts of their anatomy, the ego. Even those of us who are
the strongest and the most committed to truth have a distinct difficulty
in standing up and saying we were wrong, particularly where we have a heavy
emotional, intellectual or other investment in our (wrong) opinion.
But if we support free speech and despise censorship, we must nevertheless
admit that censorship has a point, and in fact that censorship is
something that all of us practice most of the time. To be specific, unless we
are thoroughly provoked, we do not tell people how ugly they look or how awful
they sound or smell, altho such thoughts go thru our minds all the time;
so in effect, we practice self-censorship of the most thoroughgoing sort.
What is more, we expect others to practice it, and if they do not, we are
not likely to seek or tolerate their company. Looking at things this way,
then, we can understand HL Mencken's remark to the effect that truth is
something so valuable that we are reluctant to share it with others.
The lesson to be drawn from the above observations is that free speech is
a luxury which we cannot often afford to practice. But is it necessary
beyond the purely emotional one of getting things off our chest? The
answer of course is that it is: Without free speech, we cannot as a rule
hope to know the truth, and particularly the ugly truth (as truth often
is); but without knowing the truth, there is little hope of correcting our
improper or maladptive behavior, and thus we are impeded in our efforts to
survive and prosper. From this, then, we see that free speech is something
to be practiced at the proper time and place, while censorship of one
degree or another is required the rest of the time. Free speech is
critical to our survival because it lets us know whether we are following
the right course; but censorship (and particularly SELF-censorship) is
also necessary in order that we do not unnecessarily hurt the feelings of
others, but instead help to insure that they remain friendly and
cooperative. Censorship, indeed, is at the root of good manners, and, as
JBR Yant has remarked, manners are the lubricant of social intercourse.
But if it is only common sense to recognize that free speech must be
tempered with censorship, it remains to answer how these two necessities
of human existence must be balanced. We have already pointed out that the
media, in attempting to achieve a universal audience, have slipped into
the abyss of near-complete censorship, anodynity and irrelevance, and to this
we must add the disheartening observation that the law has increasingly
embraced censorship for much the same reason as the media have. That
reason, more specifically, is the multicultural milieu in which we have
been increasingly forced to live by a world-gone-mad with liberal
sentiments which declare that all men are equal, and then enforce that
equality with police power when it turns out to be nonexistent. Free
speech advocates are here faced with a sort of double whammy: Not only
must they avoid hurting the feelings of the unequal equals, but they must also
avoid telling the Powers-That-Be that they are wrong in their seemingly-
well-meaning sentiments, and not merely wrong, but are leading the nations
of the West into a multicultural maelstrom from which there may be no
recovery because, once the population of the white West is mixed with that
of other (unequal) races and the white genome disappears, so will the
culture which white men have built, along with all the institutions,
traditions and amenities that white intelligence and white energy have
produced. More specifically, the West is not just advanced scientifically
and technically, but also socially: Western man has produced
not merely everything from superhighways to supercomputers, but a system of
democratic rule which has allowed the flourishing of individual achievement
and the growth of wealth beyond the dreams of even the grandest monarch of
only a century or so ago. But it is not just that this system has
been achieved by white men, but it has been sustained by them; and in
particular has shown no ability to be transferred to the black race, as the
lesson of post-Colonial Africa has shown; and only very limited ability to be
transferred to the brown or yellow races, with Japan the single possible
exception.
In noting that Western law has increasingly embraced censorship as a
response to multiculturalism, what we meant is that censorship is
necessary to keep the races from hurting one another's feelings. This is
especially important in the case of blacks, who have an amply-demonstrated
tendency to riot and burn down the town whenever they are upset, or for that
matter, whenver they are ebullient. This would of course not happen -- or at
least not nearly as much -- if blacks were 'compartmentalized' -- ie,
segregated into their own area or country where they would not be subjected to
the 'racist' comments and behavior of whites who can hardly be expected to
keep from remarking or acting upon the fact that blacks as a group are inferior
-- but multiculturalism is an act of decompartmentalization, and
decompartmentalization means conflict.
One of the most profound and shocking examples of censorship in recent
years first reared its ugly head during one of the so-called 'Human Rights
Tribunal' hearings of famous revisionist gadfly Ernst Zundel who for many
years has been persecuted and prosecuted in the Pimple Republik of Kanada
for his beliefs, and who was kidnapped more than a year ago from his new
home in Tennessee with the aid and connivance of American authorities and
transported back to to the PRK where, as of this writing, he has been held
in solitary confinement for more than a year as a 'security threat', the
object of his kidnapping being to deport him to Germany where his 'thought
crimes' will probably keep him in prison for the remainder of his life.
The censorship matter I refer to is the declaration by the Tribunal, in
response to one of Zundel's statements, that, when it comes to free
speech, truth is no defense. That's right, folks -- in the Pimple Republik
of Kanada -- and other places as well -- true statements are forbidden if
they hurt certain protected minorities' feelings. I call this shocking, but of
course it isn't really; for the act of decompartmentalizing people, as has
been done in creating multiculturalism (the multicultural cancer is at an
advanced stage in the PRK), means that people will more frequently
encounter offensive speech, and in order to make the multicult work (or
seem to work), the lid must be kept on offensive speech lest the melting
pot become a boiling one.
We have looked at free speech and found that it works best when
compartmentalized. We have also noted that the same thing is true for
people -- conflict is significantly reduced when they are compartmentalized
-- ie, segregated -- because (among other things) the free speech of one
group will tend to offend other groups, particularly in the case of
racial, ethnic and religious groups. In fact, the better part of the liberal
program -- integration, big government, opposition to states' rights,
opposition to gun ownership, anti-hate laws, affirmative action, welfare,
easy immigration, open borders, Turd-world out-sourcing, unilateral
disarmament, world government, and other things I have undoubtedly failed
to mention -- is in every case an attempt to decompartmentalize, and thus
constitutes a prescription for conflict and ultimately for totalitarian
control which will be the only way that the conflicts engendered by
decompartmentalization can be kept from rending asunder the social fabric.
Totalitarian world government is not exactly the liberal desideratum, but
the Power Elite have embraced liberalism because they know that this is
the quickest and most efficient way to create totalitarian world government
while appearing to want exactly the opposite; and this is why liberalism
-- altho despised and rejected by most of the population, has grown into an
800-pound gorilla that threatens the world with rape and rapine. This,
then, explains why our political masters have pushed multiculturalism upon
an unwilling population with a vigor that resembles religious zeal, and
with an inattention to its destructive effects that suggests willful
blindness.
And herein hangs a tale; for there are many of us who believe that
multiculturalism, the suppression of free speech, and most of the rest of
the liberal agenda which is increasingly being referred to as the New
World Order, derives not just from willful blindness, but from an actual
conspiracy intended to destroy the West and the race which produced it --
the white race. What is more, an important part of this conspiracy is an
effort to paint conspiracy theory itself as benighted and deluded, a
strategy clearly intended to ensure that no serious researcher will give
it the investigative attention that it deserves. And even worse, not only are
the media in unfriendly hands so that the opposition can never use them to
present its case (For a very thorough detailing of this matter, see "Who
Rules America" at www.NatVan.com), but the great mass of people have been
conditioned by those same media -- much after the fashion of Pavlov's dogs
-- to reject in knee-jerk fashion anything smacking of 'conspiracy
theory', 'racism', or any of the other politically-incorrect bugbears of the
NWO agenda.
And well they might, because if one makes a careful examination of the NWO
agenda, as I have done on my webpage (www.thebirdman.org), he will
discover that every important aspect of this conspiracy (or 'working
together', if you reject using the concept of conspiracy) is in the hands of
members of a single distinctive ethnic minority -- Jews. It shouldn't be
necessary to add that this does not mean that 'all Jews' are members of the
conspiracy, or even more than a few of them, but it does mean that the NWO
possesses a distinctively Jewish flavor. Furthermore, the Jewish involvement
in this conspiracy embraces virtually every important element of Organized
Jewry, so that -- even if 'the Jew in the street' is innocent of involvement --
it remains a fact that the organizations which claim to represent him are the
prime movers of the NWO.
It is, of course, hopeless to argue the case for all this here -- it is
far too complex for that. But the fact that such a powerful case can be made
for the existence of the NWO and 'Jewish conspiracy theory' is an
essential element in the matter of free speech, both on the Net and in society
at large. We see this especially clearly in the obviously-Jewish-inspired
laws to suppress Holocaust revisionism (it is illegal in most Western
countries to question the Orthodox Jewish Version of the Holocaust), but
also in the laws against 'hate' which have become fixtures of most Western
judicial systems in the last half-century, and which have also undoubtedly
come about as a result of Jewish pressure to suppress expressions of Jew-
hatred. Indeed, it seems hardly an accident that these laws -- along with
multiculturalism, political correctness, open borders and the numerous
other aspects of the NWO agenda which have pulled up by the roots so many
long-held traditions of race, family, sexuality and culture -- have all
quite suddenly grown up virtually everywhere in the Western world in the
half-century following the extinction of the last major political effort
to curb Jewish power (nazism); and this is a bold testament not merely to
Jewish power, but to Jewish conspiracy and control on an international
scale.
What all this means is that the free speech issue is largely a Net issue
(because that's the only place you will find it both practiced and
discussed), that the Net issue largely concerns controversial issues --
primarily government corruption, race and groups, and conspiracy theory --
which the Power Elite does not want seriously investigated, and that these
three issues themselves largely commingle into the single umbrella issue
of what is usually called the Jewish Question. The result is simply that
censorship cannot be intelligently addressed or usefully investigated
without viewing the issue thru the lens of the Jewish Question; so while
much purple prose may be generated by generalities about the desirability
and morality of free speech, there will be no advancement on this topic
until we start addressing the one question -- the Jewish Question -- which
underlies and informs all others. This of course is impossible in the
major media -- the Jews have made it so by both owning the media and
controlling it from within -- and it is impossible even in the
compartmentalized media -- mainly the Internet -- in virtually every
country of the world save America, where it nevertheless remains under
severe pressure. What is more, free speech is beset by two major ironies:
First, the issue of free speech cannot be addressed unless it can first be
achieved; and second, the real issue underlying free speech -- the Jewish
Question -- is almost unknown because the Jews have been so efficient in
seeing that free speech is suppressed.
BIRDMAN BRYANT
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If you want to know more about me or my 40
books, please visit my website at http://www.thebirdman.org.
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