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march 15, 2020
Doubt has kept me from moving forward, and if I start writing again, this is because the doubt has faded sufficiently. Not completely, however, and I am always ready to reconsider when faced with new information.
Since March 2020, censorship has swept over pretty much the whole world. It was both painful to bear and, for those who took a step back, very instructive:
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Censorship doesn’t just happen to others, even our democracies have shown their limits in terms of freedom of expression.
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Censorship is not necessarily for our own good, as I had hoped in relation to the Rohingya story.
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Most people simply don’t care, and don’t want to question. Doubt is an uncomfortable position (“but certainty is absurd” added Voltaire).
The hesitation expressed in the previous article assumed that censorship (of hate speech in this case) was acceptable for the purposes of protecting social cohesion, public order and saving lives. But when it is used to keep people in the dark, to silence alternative views, censorship loses all legitimacy.
It is when debate is lacking that there are real reasons to worry.