China is one of the world’s top censors.
The Chinazi regime bans all kinds of communication, even images of Winnie the Pooh (because of its use as a symbol of chubby Dictator Xi). It has imposed all manner of censorship on the Internet, often with the help of western technology companies. And it has imprisoned many of its critics.
China would like the whole world to be the same way. It would be easier to shut critics up if they had no place to escape to, no place where they could continue publicly rebuking the Chinese government.
And China has a new weapon with which to expand its censorship regime, the globally popular excuse for outlawing disagreement with official doctrines that consists of characterizing all contrary opinion as “misinformation” or “disinformation.”
The Chinese government wants nations to go much further than merely urging social media companies to ban posts or suspend users, the approach that U.S. officials have been following in recent years. At a recent United Nations meeting on cybercrime and in a related document (p. 18), China has urged that disseminating “false information that could result in serious social disorder” be everywhere established as “criminal offenses.”
Reclaim the Net observes that this proposal “is likely to be contested by Western countries, even though many of them have been copying parts of China’s playbook.”
Certainly, the governments of other countries would be in a better position to oppose China’s global censorship agenda if they relinquished their own censorship agendas.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Midjourney and DALL-E2
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5 replies on “Don’t Be China”
Here we come to an interesting aspect of US constitutional law.
The second paragraph of Article 6 of the US Constitution effectively allowed the President and Senate to amend the constitution at will, by negotiating and ratifying a treaty with an amending effect. In the dreams of the deep state and of the corporate left, the President and Senate fully retain that power.
However, the Amendments were ratified after the adoption of the Constitution, and so should be read as having curtailed the power of the President and Senate to use this device.
Still, we may be very sure that a time will come when the corporate left tells us that the First or Second Amendment has been ink-blotted by a treaty.
But such a treaty still requires two thirds vote in the senate. Even so, I would question whether a treaty that signs away the sovereign rights of Americans could ever be considered valid, as long as the Constitution itself remains in force.
Had never considered this issue of amending via treaty. Of course, I think it cannot be done — should not be allowed. But I suspect the day you predict will come and an argument ensue.
The Tech companies and the larger media companies are the major villains in this story. They are willing enablers of censorship around the globe. Companies like Apple and Google got into bed with China long ago. They sold out the West and the freedom that made it possible for them to build their tech empires. Freedom will die in the darkness they created for the sake of short term profits and global power.
The Constitution, before the Amendments, was unequivocal that no part of it could stand in the way of a treaty once ratified.
It is only by reading the Amendments as affecting the power of Article 6 that the potential force of treaties is limited.