Getting The Message Out
On Thursday 13 October a man went onto a road bridge in Beijing and hung a banner calling for liberty and democracy:
We don’t want COVID tests. We want to eat.
We don’t want Cultural Revolution. We want reforms.
We don’t want lockdowns. We want freedom.
We don’t want leaders. We want votes.
We don’t want lies. We want dignity.
We aren’t slaves. We are citizens.
不要核酸要吃饭，不要文革要改革
不要封城要自由，不要领袖要选票
不要谎言要尊严，不做奴才做公民
Go on strike. Remove dictator and national traitor Xi Jinping.
罢课罢工罢免獨裁国贼习近平
This was ahead of the Party Congress that weekend. The man was quickly arrested and has disappeared. He probably anticipated what would happen to him, but he did it anyway. As the student cycling to Tienanmen Square in 1989 told the BBC, ‘It’s my duty.’
China erases all references to the 1989 protest and yet someone was able to quote that student’s statement when they were copying ‘Bannerman’s’ calls onto a toilet wall - one of the few places not under CCTV surveillance. As in ‘1984’, personal memory is potentially subversive.
‘Bannerman’s’ message got out, despite China’s huge system of phone and internet censorship. A pair of bloggers explain here that an Apple program called Airdrop allows users to broadcast images in the neighbourhood via an invitation to open. It bypasses the usual official monitoring and the banner picture spread rapidly.
This use of Airdrop has galvanised the authorities into constructing and offering an app to filter and report such communications. It’s even possible, say ‘China Fact Chasers,’ that the government will lean on Apple to make changes, which the latter has done before since the Chinese market is so important for them.
The battle goes on here in the West, too.
YouTube has 2.5 billion users monthly and vloggers are reporting (suspected) abusive algorithms. For example, ‘Demirep’ notes that last autumn her steadily rising numbers of subscribers daily began dropping off faster than they grew - until Elon Musk announced his intention to buy Twitter, after which normal progress for her channel resumed. Then when he looked to be backing away from the deal, the apparent interference started up again; and when he finally committed to the purchase her ‘pruning’ ceased once more.
‘Demirep’ is not the only one to see jiggery-pokery; for another, Russell Brand regularly warns his six million viewers to keep checking that their subscription hasn’t been surreptitiously cancelled. That’s on top of YouTube’s common practice of ‘demonetising’ videos or removing them or banning some vloggers altogether.
‘In every ban / The mind-forg'd manacles I hear,’ said Blake; subtler and more powerful than handcuffs on a single Chinese dissident. Our access to information is curated and our opinions manipulated on controversial subjects such as Covid vaccination or the war in Ukraine.
Youtube’s parent company is Google, whose search engine processes 8.5 billion searches daily - 92% of that market globally. Google is notorious for its interference, to the extent that sometimes we have to log into some other engine to find the material we want. One Blogger user even reports her work being remotely edited in real time!
This fight is not about truth, it’s about official truth, i.e. ‘narrative’; that is, power.
For instance, replying to the Russian allegation that the British blew up the Nordstream pipelines, Rear Admiral Chris Parry told Sky News ‘It's a straight lie and we all know the Russians did it.’ I don’t know enough to judge his devotion to the truth; all I can say is the ‘we all know’ argument is too bold an assertion given the lack of publicly disclosed evidence and the reluctance of the Swedes to divulge the conclusions of their investigation.
Similarly, where Covid and the vaccines are concerned, we’ve been beaten over the head with ‘The Science’, but the suppression of brave dissenters - including in some cases bullying in their professional careers - suggests that the Establishment is not so confident as it wishes to appear. Despite its best efforts, shreds of alternative argument are leaking out, as the cat-and-mouse game is played across the Internet.
Oppression creates its own resistance and can result in dangerous outbreaks. In 2016, days before the hotly contested Brexit vote, one Thomas Mair murdered Labour MP Jo Cox. Rightly or wrongly, the left-wing newspaper The Guardian connected the attack with his alleged racism and anti-EU feeling, which also happened to suit their Remainer narrative. I thought at the time that this dreadful incident and the way it was played in the news would swing public opinion against Brexit; who knows how much more decisive the result might have been if that hadn’t happened.
Again, in the US a couple of days ago the husband of the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was attacked with a hammer. The perpetrator, obviously a disturbed individual, is being used in some parts of the news media to tar Trump supporters with the same brush. [The truth may be more ‘complicated’ - see this video. Lefty nudist caught in underwear, known by name to victim who told police he was a friend…] The emotional reaction to such a dramatic crime is a convenient fog to obscure consideration of why the egregious Trump has any supporters at all.
The authoritarian approach to those who do not conform to its narrative is to destroy - think of the Taliban blowing up the giant statues of Buddha, or the Bible’s program to crush pagan religions:
Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones and cut down their Asherah poles.
Worse, in the Covid issue distorted information may result in avoidable injury and death; and the gung-ho drive to defeat Russia in Ukraine may end in mass nuclear annihilation.
Now more than ever we need to champion the free exchange of information and ideas.