Why Do Governments Want to Censor?

because you need censorship in wartime

Matt Taibbi, hero of the Twitter Files, gave a speech on the evils of censorship recently. And now he has a version of the speech up at The Free Press.

By the way. Thank you Elon Musk, current proprietor of Twitter / X.

But let us step back a bit. Why is it that governments are so into censorship?

It’s simple really. Once they have decided to do something — a glorious war or a comprehensive plan — they don’t want any backtalk.

Think about the great censorship flaps of recent memory. There was the horror of McCarthyism, where the late great senator from Wisconsin didn’t want Communists in the State Department retailing our state secrets to the Soviets. Hey! We were in a Cold War with the Soviets and could easily lose if lefty Commies were selling the sexual antics of J. Edgar Hoover to Stalin & Co.

Then there was the anti-war movement of the Sixties. We had good liberal students at Berkeley forming a Free Speech Movement and opposing the nefarious Vietnam War and the questionable Gulf of Tonkin incident. And then noble activists dug the Pentagon Papers out of the Military Industrial Complex. Down with censorship!

Then we had Iraq and the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction that were the casus belli of the invasion of Iraq after 9/11. All good people were shocked, shocked, that our intelligence community could have got it so wrong. What good was intelligence and censorship?

But now we have the late COVID unpleasantness and climate change. All of a sudden, we have far-right conspiracy theorists and climate deniers making trouble for good people like Dr. Fauci, John Kerry and Bill Gates. The government deployed the intelligence community to censor “misinformation” and “disinformation” about COVID and the pandemic lockdown and vaccine policies. This time our liberal friends were down for COVID and climate and censorship. So the Narrative was that you are a kook if you don’t go along. And at the vice-presidential debate on October 1 the girl moderators talked as though climate change was written on tablets of stone instead of being what Donald Trump calls the Green New Scam.

Have you noticed that women seem to be more down with the Narrative on COVID and climate than men? Or am I just a far-right racist-sexist-homophobe for suggesting it?

But I say: let’s ease up from the outrage a little and try to understand what is going on.

If you are a government fighting a war you have to have censorship. You need to let the enemy have as little information as possible; otherwise people will die. And you need to keep morale up on the battlefield and on the home front so people won’t lose heart. Of course the military leaders may make strategic errors that cost lives. And officers and NCOs may make tactical errors that cost lives. But, it seems to me, there is no alternative to secrecy and censorship. And, of course, time is of the essence. Decisions have to be made right now, right or wrong, without input from other people except those already in the loop.

But whatabout a government fighting a pandemic? We can recall from the late COVID unpleasantness that the same arguments were made. We needed to act now, or people would die. And so opinions contradicting the official narrative were censored. At the time, it seemed reasonable: two weeks to stop the spread. But in the aftermath I think that it is pretty clear that the pandemic and its perils did not rise to the level of a war. There should have been much more effort to obtain a range of expert opinion. It was inappropriate and harmful to censor non-conforming opinion, especially from scientsts. And it was clearly not necessary to lock the whole place down and force vaccinations on everyone. But clearly, in the case of pandemic, time is of the essence. Decisions have to be made rapidly, without a full and open discussion of the issues.

Whatabout a government fighting climate change? I think it is pretty clear that climate change is not like a war, and not like a pandemic. It is arguable that “two weeks to stop the spread” is a valid argument: maybe it’s true, maybe not. But with climate we always have the argument that we have “ten years to save the planet”; therefore we must act now. This is pretty clearly fake. I’d say that humans are programmed not to care about dangers that will take more than a decade to manifest. Therefore climate activists have to fake up an emergency; they have to have a ten year window in which to act. If we have more than ten years to save the planet then there is no need to panic; no need to stop the world. We also have time to sit all the scientists down to discuss the science. Moreover, there is another option: adapt. If the oceans are rising, then maybe we should get ready to move to higher land. If former deserts become green, and current cropland becomes desert then there is time to adapt. The fact is that climate has changed in the past and humans have adapted — even without modern science.

I’d say that it is pretty clear that unless we have an actual shooting war there is no need for censorship and replacement of the market economy with compulsion.

And we need to fully appreciate that every government, every ruling class, is always tempted to create a fake emergency and require everyone to follow orders. Fighting wars is what government does, so every government is tempted to escalate a problem into a war.

A century ago and more, our current ruling class came to power with the philosophy that the modern world needed organizing, that governments should not be staffed by the supporters of the rulers but by professional experts that would adminster the government’s business free from corruption, bias, and ignorance. Right away, the rising class adocated the idea of “the plan.” Instead of the chaos of the market we needed professional experts to guide us in the correct direction.

I’d say that the record of the last century is that “planning” never works. I’d say that the only time we need “the plan” is when we are actually going to war, a shooting war.

In the event, as if to drive home the point, in the first half-century of its rule the educated class and its planners got us into two world wars and a cold war. I don’t think this was an accident. I think that the instincts of any ruling class, whether aristocratic landowners or aristocratic educated elitists, is to go to war. Because that’s what governments do. And I suggest, it’s the only thing they do without Making Things Worse. Of course, very often their war makes things worse as well.

Curtis Yarvin says: “There is no politics without an enemy.” This means that any politician will instinctively be looking for an enemy. Otherwise he has nothing to do. The great challenge for humankind is to reimagine our cultural and economic institutions to shrink the political down to size so that it lacks the power and prestige to bully us and censor us into unnecessary wars.

As I say: humans used to live by defending their food-growing land from the “other.” But today we buy our food and spend our lives on other things. That means that it doesn’t matter who owns the food-growing land. That means we don’t need to defend our land against enemies. The farmer sells his crop and uses the money to buy stuff for day-to-day life and to prepare for next year’s crop.

But how to make the transition? Maybe the answer is to give every government nuclear weapons so that it doesn’t pay for anyone to attack them. I wonder what the experts think.