CNET’s Declan McCullagh is in Greece to cover a U.N. summit on Internet governance and has this priceless report on how a Chinese official maintains his country does not engage in censorship, despite the fact that Chinese government control over and censorship of the Internet is extraordinarily well-documented.
Here’s one quote from the Chinese official:
In China, we don’t have software blocking Internet sites. Sometimes we have trouble accessing them. But that’s a different problem. I know that some colleagues listen to the BBC in their offices from the Webcast. And I’ve heard people say that the BBC is not available in China or that it’s blocked. I’m sure I don’t know why people say this kind of thing. We do not have restrictions at all.
And here’s another quote from the official regarding the well-documented imprisoning of journalists in China:
Some people say that there are journalists in China that have been arrested. We have hundreds of journalists in China, and some of them have legal problems. It has nothing to do with freedom of expression.
Although it’s kind of funny that this Chinese official is so obviously lying, these kinds of rationalizations — whether uttered by people or governments — are the worst kind because they simply deny reality and attempt to impose a distorted lens on other people’s realities. Lies like these have a way of turning into the truth, which causes no end of harm. At the risk of quoting an over-quoted source, this form of mind bending was a central theme in George Orwell’s 1984:
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.
Moreover, forcing people to believe in falsehoods is “crazy-making,” and making people feel crazy is one of the most painful things anybody — a government, a person — can do, far worse than even physical torture. Again, Orwell nailed this in 1984:
If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say this or that even, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death
That’s why it’s difficult to condone the cooperation of U.S. tech and Internet suppliers with the Chinese government’s censorship regime. As Declan also reports, represents from Cisco and Microsoft were lambasted at the summit for their willingness to do business with the Chinese government.
And, as Declan also reports, the notion of the U.S. turning Internet governance over to other countries is a scary one.
Human rights groups, however, have warned that many of the nations most critical of the current arrangement—Tunisia, Cuba, Iran, China—rank among the world’s most repressive. The worry: If those governments have their way, the current, virtually limitless amount of free expression on the Internet may come to an end.
The Paris-based advocacy group Reporters Without Borders last week called those reform proposals alarming and asked: “Do we really want the countries that censor the Internet and jail cyberdissidents to be in charge of the online flow of information?” (The group also noted that the United Nations Commission on Human Rights counted, as members, nations such as Libya and Sudan, no champions of human rights themselves.)
Cynthia Brumfield at 7:24 PM|Comments(0)
Blogs We Read
