There’s something wonderful about finding like-minded souls
with whom to share our beliefs and concerns.
Totalitarian regimes grasp this, so they
make it difficult for their citizens to exchange ideas, however trivial those
ideas may appear to be. Censorship in Nazi Germany was extreme and strictly enforced. Stalin sent fellow Russians to the gulags
for up to 25 years simply for telling jokes about Communist Party officials. None of this was
original to Hitler or Stalin: the second century Romans had their own secret police equivalent called the Frumentarii that not only covertly gathered military intelligence throughout the empire but
even spied on the members of the emperor’s household.
If people can’t freely and comfortably exchange
ideas, they can’t form effective political opposition, or so goes the thinking.
Of course you don’t have to put everybody
in a prison camp to ensure that your totalitarianism goes unopposed. Simply making
unfortunate examples of a few well-known faces will generally do it. Your
citizens will quickly learn not to discuss certain subjects at all, saving you
all kinds of work and allowing the prevailing narratives
to ... prevail.
Xiao Qiang, editor-in-chief of China Digital Times, says:
“The best censorship is self-censorship, and China relies on solid work by the secret police to make people censor themselves and keep the Internet under control.”
Fortunately for governments in the West, if
they want to know what’s going on they are not obliged to
incur the expense or inefficiencies of putting boots on the ground to gather
domestic intelligence. Thanks to technology, Big Brother can eavesdrop
everywhere without drawing attention. For the sake of convenience and
entertainment, our citizenry has happily abandoned any expectation of privacy
without so much as a squeak. And why bother training squads of stormtroopers
when an entire generation has been college- or university-programmed to point
and shriek at any violation of the politically correct narrative?
The New “Secret Police”
The new “secret police” in the West inhabit
Facebook and Twitter. Any connection they may have to government is at several removes.
Even more effectively, hostile feedback
from social justice warriors on Reddit, Instagram and other platforms makes
expressing ‘unapproved’ opinions so intimidating and unpleasant that many users
simply opt to go elsewhere, effectively censoring themselves right off the platform
and handing it uncontested to the squeaky wheels.
Leaving works just fine until there’s nowhere else to go.
What does all this have to do with
Christians? Most Christians think … well, nothing. The Internet has made
us all very comfortable with expressing our opinions (even Christian ones), and
most of us are not big enough fish to draw the attention of the social media
censorship gang. Yet.
Christians and the Internet
Let’s not mistake this for a good thing, or
imagine it will continue forever. Today, Facebook employees are actively debating whether they should try to stop a Donald Trump presidency.
Since Trump is currently supported by 49% of Republicans, and since 23% of Americans self-identified as Republicans back in 2014, that means Facebook employees are contemplating
doing their best to disenfranchise well over 10% of their fellow American voters,
and potentially a much higher number. Apparently this does not trouble their
consciences a bit.
If average employees of a social media
corporate giant would be happy to put their finger on the scales of public opinion
over the policies of a presidential candidate they dislike, be assured they’d
be just as happy to try to influence issues about which they disagree with
Christians. No-platforming is perhaps the most well-established means of
wielding that influence.
That means instead of arguing with you,
they simply shut you down.
The
Ticking Clock
Our current freedom to exchange ideas about
God in public is a great and unprecedented blessing. In engaging online, we are
encouraged, stimulated to study, challenged about our own wrong notions and
given maximum opportunity to share our knowledge of God. We should not take
that freedom for granted or assume that our country’s laws will continue to
protect it indefinitely. I believe the clock is ticking on this privilege, and
that we should use it to the best of our abilities for whatever time remains
to us.
There’s something wonderful about finding like-minded souls
with whom to share our concerns. What happens when those connections are
no longer possible?
I trust you have a back-up plan. I know I do.
What is your backup plan - smoke signals :-)?
ReplyDeleteI was thinking of this wacky thing called the local church. Thankfully, since the church is the people and not the building, such an organism can survive all kinds of organized hostility, and historically has been known to do so.
DeleteNot that there's anything wrong with smoke signals in a pinch ...