There are always going to be people that want to control other people and have a deep seated need to do so, there will always be people that don’t like being told what to do. The causes change but the basic conflict between Control and Rebel remains, and of course if Rebel ever wins they become Control.
Honestly been debating myself. I find this cyclic view appealing on some level but… I don’t know. Something does feel different. In my most rational mind I just blame technology being like tabasco sauce to processes that had been already happened years before. Certainly, some stuff has a higher potential to be too be authoritarian but we really haven’t really crossed the rubicon into anything that was seen in pre Nazi Germany, pre Soviet Russia
Or even the United States
In one of the more high-profile examples of censorship during this time period, officials arrested famed labor organizer and socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs who criticized the war and the draft. Debs famously stated during his speech in Canton, Ohio: “You need at this time especially to know that you are fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder.”
Federal officials charged Debs with violating the Espionage Act of 1917. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld his conviction in Debs v. United States (1919).
Rose Pastor Stokes was prosecuted, in part, for writing to a newspaper: “I am for the people and the government is for the profiteers.”
Murphy details numerous examples of draconian restrictions on free speech during this time period, including:
Authorities in Pittsburgh banned music by the German composer Ludwig van Beethoven during the course of the war.
The Los Angeles Board of Education prohibited all discussions of peace.
An Ohio farmer, John White, was imprisoned for stating that soldiers in American camps were “dying off like flies” and that the “murder of innocent women and children by German soldiers was no worse than what the United States’ soldiers did in the Philippines.”
A Minnesota man was arrested under a state espionage law for criticizing women knitting socks for soldiers, saying: “No soldier ever sees these socks.”
Twenty-seven South Dakota farmers were convicted for sending a petition to the government objecting to the draft and calling the conflict a “capitalist war.” (Hudson, citing Murphy).
We have only seen whispers and a vague desire to carry it out to that without much reaching that level. The localized authoritarianism and rhetoric that has been increasingly deployed in some spaces however leaves me speechless and makes me wonder if something deeper is amiss. As if the libertine moment we currently live in is only the result of a power vacuum of moral systems as opposed to one that can last itself, as much as I would prefer everyone to get along and am not the “lets start a civil war right now!” type.
@Dex Stewart
Two points:
Anti-Isreali does not equal anti-semitism, even if the two often go together and I think that applies with a lot BLM, I don’t like seeing those two stances blended together so fully.
That picture:
It can be funny when figures and such have even the vaguest connections of politics ain’t it?
@Anonymous #372F\
Agreed.
