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Glenn Greenwald has written up a good Twitter thread on the EU's proposed new draconian censorship laws. The pretext is that Slovakia's recent election resulted in a guy who has promised to end all Ukraine aid to end up winning it. This is all apparently due to "misinformation". Clearly when the voters have the wrong viewpoints, they must be treated with extra doses of correct thinking and anyone who deviates from it should summarily be punished. The law itself moves the onus onto the social media companies.
So if you think the era of censorship is over, think again. It's not just the EU. The Canadian parliament is also preparing something similar.
The most banal observation is that a system that is confident in its own survival does not need repression. The obvious implication is that the people running the system are not confident in their grip on power and in Europe in particular the big structural trend will be ever-increasing illegal migration once the Ukraine war passes. I suspect this censorship law will be used vigorously to deplatform anyone critical of the loose border policies the EU is promoting.
It's funny because we've long read about people in repressive societies like Iran, Turkey or China using VPN services to get around censorship by the regime. Might we get something similar in Europe in the not-too-distant future? I should add that I am not too pessimistic. People have tasted (relative) freedom and will not go back to the old regime. The rise of alternatives like Rumble is directly linked to increasing political repression on YouTube. Even outright totalitarian systems like the Soviet Union did not succeed in brainwashing their population. I've always felt that Aldous Huxley's dystopian vision of cheap entertainment to distract the masses was a better analogy to the Western elite's preferred methods of control over the more stereotypical 1984 vision that Orwell laid out. But clearly there are limits to how much you can distract people and now the gloves are coming off.
Try the past and the present. If you're an activist for, among other things, curtailing immigration, you are very explicitly persecuted and hiding your identity online can help you keep a job, a normal life, and the right to travel. And if you're actually a racist you should do so to protect yourself from fines, imprisonment and violence from activists of the other side.
Don't get me wrong, this is quite different from straight up being disappeared and/or executed if you involve yourself with politics outside of the one allowed party, but this is a difference in tactics, not in goal or intensity. I've seen heretics bullied to misery and suicide on our own enlightened continent.
My growing cynicism has been floating the proposition that it was always so, that dissidents were always silenced, but memories of the 90s and actual evidence of how open and unafraid people were to speak their minds and have even deeply heterodox beliefs openly in those days make me reject it.
I do think you're right that there's a trend. You used to get ignored, scoffed at and mocked. Now there is an increasing move toward hard managerialism and actively destroying the lives of dissidents.
As I've discussed here previously with our resident blackpillers, I see this as a good sign, because it is a sign of weakness. Whilst they see this as a bad sign, because it is a sign that the regime no longer has to care about appearances. You be the judge. But I don't recommend staying in the EU if freedom is your most core value.
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