Monthly Archives: February 2011

Free culture against arbitrary censorship

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I was browsing today, reading on the debate on whether or not censorship only occurs when it is performed by the government or some violent non-state actor. 

Then I happened upon this appeal issued by the EFF, calling for an end to censorship. It particularly hit home with the following:

Unfortunately, these values are only as strong as the will to support them. When individuals or companies choose to turn their backs on protected speech, we all lose.

 

Mike Linksvayer further expanded upon this idea, in the vein of copyright reform, by advocating free culture licenses as an altruistic rejection of one’s own privilege of censorship:

Not only does EFF fight censorship, they also retain almost no right to censor works they produce. They use a Creative Commons Attribution license, which only requires giving credit to make any use (well, any use that doesn’t imply endorsement). You should also join them is saying no to censorship in this way — no to your own ability to be a censor.

Finally, Freenet operates upon a principle of plausible deniability, whereby users of nodes are immediately saddled with a random, anonymous cache of block data on their corresponding hard drive disks, the result of which is that both everyone and no-one takes ownership of the hosting of prohibited content. This allows for Freenet to operate on an increasingly-absolute idea of "freedom of speech" – that no one within or outside can take down one iota of content or take exclusive ownership of said content from the ether of Freenet. 

 
So should there be a more tight-knit infrastructure for the non-coercive reduction of arbitrary censorship, and do the likes of Creative Commons, Freenet, the Freedom Box project headed by Eben Moglen, the much-discussed open alternative DNS system, and others contribute to such a realization?

The last 13 years of David Kato’s life

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While the world only began to find out about David Kato within the last three years of his life, much of what is traceable about him resides chronologically within the last 13 years of his life, from his return to Uganda in 1998 at the age of 34 to his murder in January at the age of 46.

Before 1998, he spent an indeterminate number of years as a teacher in South Africa. At the time of his return, Nelson Mandela was just about to complete his only term as the first black president of the country and turn the gavel over to his Deputy president Thabo Mbeki, and Uganda was just sending its troops into the Democratic Republic of Congo to back a rebel group in the deadliest conflict in Africa since World War II. Since 1994, the South African government was putting forth a series of measures decriminalizing many aspects of LGBT life in the country, including a 1998 measure for prohibition of labor discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Kato was cited by a few reports as having participated in anti-apartheid activities before it was dismantled, but the details are extremely murky because of a lack of available date placements for his participation in South African anti-apartheid activities.

So fining some more specific details on Kato’s life pre-1998 would help.

Anti-Judaism and racism in Egypt’s chaos

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 On one side, there are the caricatures of Mubarak with a Star of David on his forehead….and red fangs protruding from his mouth. One such picture was held by a man in a Getty Images photo that was uncontextually-placed in an article by english.aljazeera.net (by mistake, I assume).

On the other side, there are the verbal and physical assaults on foreign and domestic journalists (including Al Jazeera) by pro-Mubarak counter-protesters, many of whom shout "yehudi!" ("Jew!") at them after being told by Egyptian state television rumors about "Israeli spies" infiltrating the foreign media and taking advantage of the chaos.

If anything, the above incidents within the last few days are exemplary of the casual, provincial anti-Jewish bigotry being exhibited by many of the everyday Egyptians who protest both for and against the current, long-ruling government. It runs deep, and has been punctuated by decades, if not centuries, of both official and non-official solicitations to the scapegoating of the specter of evil, baby-killing, bloodthirsty Zionist monsters.

Furthermore, such public manifestations of bigotry lend credibility to those outside of Egypt who fear the influence of the proscribed Muslim Brotherhood party in the anti-Mubarak movement, but also hold the Mubarak government in a muted ill-regard for decades of authoritarian misrule. 

The last two weeks in Egypt, if not the last month in much of North Africa and Western Asia, have offered remote viewers outside of the regions a game-changing view into the desires and lives of the residents who have lived under similar regimes. However, in the midst of the chants for greater democracy, better governance and brighter economic prospects, it would be a grave mistake to ignore the existing religious and ethnic bigotries which run deep and hard in Egyptian society, bigotries which may or may not manifest in a post-Mubarak Egypt, or a post-kleptocratic North Africa and Western Asia.

Comments such as those offered by one anti-Mubarak protester to Agence France Presse – "The Israeli people are like the Egyptian people, we want peace and freedom" – or another who shouted into a camera in Tahrir Square for YouTube – "We will not be silenced! whether you are a Muslim, whether you’re a Christian, whether you’re an atheist, you will demand your goddamn rights!" – might yet offer the hope of cooler heads prevailing in the aftermath of these protests in regards to Egyptian-Israeli relations and the future of interfaith and intermoral relations in Egypt proper.
 
But these statements, these sentiments, can only go so far in showing the Egyptian people’s long-term collective capability in restraining or suppressing the casual bigotries which have been used in multiple generations in order to repress and suppress the quality of life and mind of themselves and their neighbors.