by Mike Bee

 

Someone once said that any society that burns books will end up burning people. Book-burning is not widely practised today, and the focus of those who censor free speech has shifted to what takes place online. But the saying is nevertheless true, and we can extend it for our time by saying that whenever people’s ability to communicate ideas is destroyed, the results will be the same, so that:

Any society that destroys the ability to speak freely will end up destroying its people.

Our New Zealand government seems determined to go down the free speech destruction path, and, if they are allowed to continue unchallenged, the future does not look good. Last week the Department of Internal Affairs announced that they are proposing changes to censorship procedures. These “improvements” to our laws – no doubt done for the good of the community and the safety of all – were summed up by Guy Hatchard as follows:

The proposals include the appointment of a chief regulator who will be empowered to decide whether online content (including social media posts) is ‘harmful’. To do so, he will be empowered to make up his own ‘guidelines’ without the input of parliament. The proposals will also allow fines exceeding $200,000 to be levied on those who don’t comply with his ideas.

It is hardly surprizing that the New Zealand government has decided to go down this path. New Zealand has the misfortune to have produced one of the key destruction-of-free-speech advocates in the Western world, Jacinda Ardern. Jacinda is widely known for her, “We will be your single source of truth,” remark at the start of the pandemic. It was mocked by many national and international commentators, and Kiwis were made to look stupid over it, but it is actually a very apt summary of what those who believe in totalitarian governments want. No ideas other than theirs can be permitted. Totalitarian governments must control the people – that means controlling their movement, their spending, their sex-lives, their thoughts, and their ability to share their ideas with others.

You can put Jacinda’s single source of truth maxim beside that of another head of state, JFK, who famously said that:

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

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That says it all really. Our government – no longer a government of the people any more, but the board of a corporation – is afraid of us. It is afraid of the truth – afraid that the truth will be victorious and the lies by which it stays in power will be revealed. When ideas can be tested freely, the best ones will always win out in the end and the bad ones be revealed as falsehood. (Or as tech expert for Counterspin once remarked, “Free speech is fantastic! it helps to identify fuckwits more easily!”)

Free speech is like a safety valve for society. When there is censorship and state-sanctioned propaganda, anger and bitterness ferment, and there is more likelihood of extremism turning violent. A good government understands how this works and, as Kennedy expressed it, has trust that there is no need to use force to close down the marketplace of ideas. A bad government, with lies that it needs to hide, must make itself be regarded as the single source of truth.

Freedom of speech is guaranteed in New Zealand’s Bill of Rights so that we shouldn’t really have a problem with it. Article 13 guarantees freedom of thought, conscience and religion. No matter how wacky others might feel your religion to be, you have a right to believe it and ”to hold opinions without interference”. (It does not say that exceptions will be made for state interference!) And Article 14 guarantees our freedom of expression, and in this it is quite concise:

Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form.

New Zealand’s Bill of Rights is based on centuries-long traditions, going back to the Magna Carta and further. Freedom of speech is quite simply a God-given right. Although there are obvious limitations such as where harm results (the classic example being to shout fire in a crowded building when there is no fire), no human being may set themself up as a monarch over my sovereign and free right to communicate my ideas.

So, to keep things simple, why can’t we just lock up every would-be Jacinda-style dictator who is trying to violate that right? That would make many people happy, whether the authorities started with Klaus Schwab and worked their way down to the bottom or with Kate Hannah and worked their way up to the top!

However, we are being run by a global mafia criminal enterprise, intent on extending their power, and that is not going to happen so easily, though I do believe the prison cells are being made ready. The reason that free speech is under such attack is that we are in the middle of a war right now, and this is fifth generation warfare which means that it is being fought out in people’s minds. Control of what the people think is what this war is being fought over, and the people’s minds has become the battlefield.

Do you ever remember attending a debate on the rightfulness of lockdowns or the effectiveness of Ivermectin? Probably not, because such issues are extremely difficult to take one side of. All the facts show lockdowns did no good and a great deal of harm and that Ivermectin is both safe and effective as a first-line preventative against the version of the flu that was at the time called covid. Debates aren’t welcome when one side is trying to defend the indefensible. But lockdowns were a necessary part of the depopulation agenda, and Ivermectin was outlawed by illegal contracts between governments and drug companies, and so those policies had to be pushed through and debate on them stifled. That is the way the mafia criminals work – no debate, just force, and they will do whatever they think they can get away with.

So what is ahead? If wearing masks was unpopular, what will the hoi poloi make of eating bugs and not being allowed to drive their cars? At the moment they are not rebelling because these things are not visible, and if David Seymour is asked about them in a debate he gets away with saying, “That is a conspiracy theory.” Some of us know what is being planned, and we are slowly finding our voices. But from the criminals’ point of view, diverging voices need to be silenced at all cost. Kiwi censorship is holding back the incoming tide of rebellion at the moment, but will it continue to work when Bruce and Trevor have decided they do not like bug-burgers? That’s when real control measures will have to be brought in to stop the people from revolting. You can see those at the top looking nervously out of their Beehive windows, muttering spells and making preparations for the future that they see. What are they going to do?

We’ve just gone through a time in which tyranny was revealed as never before, and this has woken many people up to the fact that freedoms which we take for granted are actually under threat. What went on during the Plandemic was clear to see, and a lot of people did see the way the game was being played then:

The masks won’t work unless everyone wears them.
The shots won’t work unless everyone receives them.
The lies won’t work unless everyone believes them.

Did the majority understand? Taking the temperature of New Zealand right now, it feels as if many would very much like to put the Plandemic time behind them and forget it ever happened. But as long as the same guilty puppets and their overlords are in charge, the situation that was revealed then is not at all over. It will come back with a vengeance. Will Nazi-style hate speech laws be enough? When will they move from destroying our speech to destroying us?

 

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