Why I do not fear censorship

I talk to counterparts in China on a regular basis. We talk via mechanisms that are encrypted and unlikely to be monitored by the Chinese government, but I do not talk politics with them. I talk only about professional matters. I do not talk politics with them not because I fear getting them in trouble, or because of language barriers, or a lack of opinions. When I talk to my Chinese counterparts, I do not talk politics because, frankly, our own society is just as controlled as their society.

If we did talk politics, it would only be for me to condemn their government’s heavy-handedness as being counter-productive. The best form of control is the kind of control where the person being controlled has to look hard to know that he’s being controlled. The best form of control is where the person being controlled believes he is free. We are licensed, herded, numbered, and worked like slaves by our masters, we live in a nation where more of our citizenry is enslaved behind bars than in any other nation on the planet (with the exception perhaps of China), but like a toddler being given a choice between drinking his juice out of the red sippy cup or the blue sippy cup we are given various meaningless choices so we believe we are “free”. One of those meaningless choices is to have blogs like these. It is no threat to the Hegemony, but it allows us to cling to our precious delusion of freedom, so it is of more value to allow us to rant than to shut us down.

I have no doubt — zero doubt — that if any one of us were perceived to be any threat to the Hegemony, we would be splatted like a bug. The evening news the next day would have breathless prose about a “terrorist” who was arrested for “planning deadly attacks against XYZ” (pick your XYZ, it doesn’t really matter whether XYZ is the Brooklyn Bridge, an airport, or anything else). But the apathy and ignorance of the majority means that we pose as much a threat to the Hegemony as a mosquito buzzing at a window screen. As long as the majority believe they are free, as long as the majority believes that being given a choice between the red sippy cup and the blue sippy cup for eating their daily gruel means they're "free", there is no threat to the Hegemony. And as long as preserving our voices here in the wilderness helps foster that illusion of freedom, we will be allowed to buzz as much as we wish, free to buzz meaninglessly in ways that will never change a thing.

- Badtux the Orwellian Penguin