Truth is always subversive
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: November 16 2015 -
Frank Caso in his book Censorship traversed into distant historical paths between the reign of Qin Shi Huangdi in China and the 21st century cyber age.
Each period covered is enlivened by characters and events/cases with goaded plots. So what is common between Socrates, Giordano Bruno, Galileo, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Wole Soyinka and Salman Rushdie?
They have all faced censorships or some kind of censorship of their ideas and works.
In one of the works by legendary documentary filmmaker John Pilger in the 1970s, the late Czech novelist Zdenek Urbánek said: “Unlike you in the West, we’ve learned to look behind the propaganda and to read between the lines, and unlike you, we know that the real truth is always subversive.”
Urbánek was referring to how people in dictatorial regimes reacted to media propaganda of the state.
The people, he went on to say know exactly what to believe and what not to believe.
But more than the act of believing or not believing lies the conviction that “the real truth is always subversive.”
These few words of Urbánek make us think that the truth is always unpalatable and difficult to digest.
Truth can be not only a conviction but also a statement of what is correct or logically validated irrespective of whether a state is dictatorial or democratic.
Does censorship suppresses the truth or expression of the truth?
This is exactly what Frank Caso asks in his book and gives a clear verdict: Censorship suppresses human expression. It is worth noting here that all expressions may not be the truth.
Supposed to be prevalent only in authoritarian and dictatorial regimes throughout history, censorship still continues to haunt us even in the 21st century.
This includes states that have proclaimed liberal and social democracies as their core value. And here, it is not only the state that acts as the gate keeper of ideas and views.
Caso had focused on the role of the State in enforcing censorships though there are historical snippets of other non-state powers, mainly religious groups that have played stumbling blocks in free human expressions.
This is indeed food for thought for anyone who is looking for an in depth polemic on the merits and demerits of censorship or the subversive power of truth as distinct from political or social power.
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