From The Wall Street Journal:
A typical account of free-speech history will begin with John Milton’s 1644 attack on censorship, “Areopagitica.” To those who feared the publication of false and dangerous doctrines, Milton said, in essence, buck up: “Who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?” A typical account will then note that Milton went on to write “Paradise Lost”: A great poet and a great defense of free speech make an appealing pair. What probably won’t be mentioned is that Milton, who wrote “Areopagitica” early in the English Civil War, served the victors as, among other things, a censor and propagandist. That’s not so appealing, particularly if we know that other, forgotten, champions of free speech, like the radical democrat John Lilburne, were imprisoned under the regime Milton supported.
In “Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media,” Jacob Mchangama delivers the bad news about Milton. Indeed, a recurring theme in this expansive, atypical history is “Milton’s Curse,” a disease that afflicts defenders of free speech when they are exposed to power. In his “Philosophical Dictionary” (1764), Voltaire advised: “Does a book displease you? Refute it.” But Voltaire, Mr. Mchangama observes, “tried to game the system of French censorship in order to advance his own writings and suppress those of his foes.” Robespierre, who launched the Terror in 1793, had been, in the early days of the French Revolution, among the “biggest advocates of free speech.”
Mr. Mchangama, who directs a Copenhagen-based human-rights think tank, is not out to cut free-speech warriors down. He is himself such a warrior, out to warn civilians about “free speech entropy,” of which Milton’s Curse is only one aspect. When free speech advances, as he shows, rulers and other elites often grow alarmed and conclude that it has gone “too far.” Long before governments and thinkers panicked about the spread of noxious ideas via social media, they panicked over the spread of noxious ideas via the printing press. Erasmus, who as a scholar had more reason than most to be grateful for the availability of books, lamented in 1508 the “foolish, ignorant, malignant, libellous, mad, impious and subversive ideas” disseminated by certain printers. Such “rascals,” he argued, should be “shown by the laws that a big stick awaits them.”
There will always be reasons to want to shut some people up, as Mr. Mchangama shows. The printing press in its early days “churned out a steady stream of virulent political and religious propaganda, hate speech, obscene cartoons, and treatises on witchcraft.” Social media are lighter on witchcraft but no less a godsend to dealers in poison and smut. “Free Speech” is addressed especially to the well-meaning among would-be censors. They should know how rarely censorship goes as planned. Consider Russia, which early in the 19th century organized more than a dozen censorship units that “placed almost comically strict limits on what could be published and imported.” A cookbook that referred to “free air” in an oven was deemed subversive, but Marx’s “Capital,” later in the century, slipped the czar’s net. Hardly anyone, the censors reasoned, would read such a “colossal mass of abstruse, somewhat obscure politico-economic argumentation.”
Mr. Mchangama allows us a good laugh at the beleaguered 16th-century censor who, crushed by “the sheer volume of printed material flooding Christendom,” moans: “What we need is a halt to printing.” But we don’t laugh for long, because Mr. Mchangama confronts us with chillingly effective censorship regimes, including the one that, in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s estimation, ensured that “there was no public opinion in the Soviet Union.” Of the gulags, he said, “no news could leak out,” and rumors couldn’t get far. Of course, long before the rise of the Soviet Union, autocrats in many countries had figured out how to run a high-volume censorship operation. They farmed out responsibility to publishers, printers and editors who “self-censored for fear of punishment.”
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal
In the Nineties in Saudi Arabia, every copy of every paper magazine that came into the country was edited with black tape over pictures or text. If you got a copy of Time, it was full of black tape. All liquor or beer ads were taped, pictures of women showing any skin other than face and hands, any mention of Israel, news stories critical of any Arab or Muslim country. I was removing tape one day, and found it covered a picture of Kermit the Frog. Never did figure that one out.
The tape was tough stuff. Pull too hard, and the paper separated. It took a steady, even hand pulling the tape across the page to reveal the scandalous content the Saudis wanted hidden from their citizens. With practice one could pull tape on the right hand page, while reading the left. I was removing tape one day, and found it covered a picture of Kermit the Frog. Never did figure that one out.
They had to be employing a zillion tapers to handle all the copies that entered the country. I had an image of a vast warehouse with thousands of Indians hunched over magazines taping over sin and misinformation.