End the Censorship in Egypt

The Internet is off in Egypt. Last week, President Mubarak decided that his citizens were getting a bit too uppity with their politics – Egyptians are protesting in the streets against a dictatorship that has oppressed them for the last 30 years.

To say they’re upset is a bit of an understatement. Of course, that’s all beside the point. The point is that the Internet is off in Egypt. President Mubarak turned it off so that all his angry people would be angry by themselves instead of telling all their friends on Facebook or Twitter.

This isn’t the first time an oppressive regime has used censorship to quiet opposition. Just a few weeks ago, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali blocked access to thousands of political websites in Tunisia as the country moved closer and closer to revolution. In 2009, Iran turned off the internet and cellular service for several hours during the elections and throttled the bandwidth to social networking sites where political opponents were gaining followers.

The Evils of Censorship

Here in the U.S., we get upset when a school bans a book or the FCC makes a band change their lyrics to get on the radio. Rightly so, I say – censorship of the truth, of reality, is never for the good of the people. But those are small potatoes compared to what’s happening right now in Egypt. This is a case of an administration attempting to quell a popular revolution.

I try to stay away from thinking in absolutes – it tends to steel my mind to foolish consistencies – but I find state-sponsored censorship to be one of the worst evils that a government can inflict on a society. Murder, torture, and detainment always come to mind as the most atrocious and, certainly, they deserve their spot on the list. The problem is that these are only the evils that we can see.

Censorship, when executed with skill, hides the truth from people in a way that prevents them from knowing it ever existed. When you listen to the radio and hear a curse word bleeped out of a song, you’re aware of exactly what’s going on. This type of masking is pointless because your mind is instantly aware of the censorship, and it fills in the blanks on it’s own as if it weren’t there in the first place. It’s more of a formality imposed to uphold “public decency” (don’t get me started).

True, oppressive censorship is applied totally. Rather than listening to a song with the curse words bleeped out, you’d never know that the song existed at all, or even the band for that matter. Take North Korea for instance. If you live there, there’s a good chance that you don’t even know what rock and roll is.

Whether or not you know about the latest band is mostly inconsequential to developing a just society, but when this type of censorship is applied systematically to completely silence the opposition to human suffering, it is the evilest of all acts. Censorship is what enables the murder, torture, and detainment to go mostly undetected.

The People, United

Oscar Olivera, famous for organizing Bolivians to take back their water rights from a foreign corporation, Bechtel, liked to say, “The people, united, will never be defeated.” In my opinion, few truer words have ever been spoken.

I have a feeling that President Mubarak knows this, and turning off the Internet is an attempt to remove “united” from the equation. What I think he may not know, though, is that turning off the Internet cannot stop the inevitable uprising of a repressed people.

The Internet is not what connects and unites us; our will, our spirit, and our common interest is. The Internet is but one tool, revolutionary as it may be, that helps facilitate that. You can take it away and buy yourself some time, but a few breaths is all you’ll get before a determined people come again for what they want.

The Internet is not who we are. Quite the opposite, in fact. We are the Internet, and we can’t be turned off.

Today, I, and hopefully you too, stand in solidarity with Egyptians to send a message to President Mubarak and other world leaders that we cannot be turned off. We cannot be put down. If you take away one of our tools, we will use another – there are a lot of them. You do not have a gun big enough or a weapon powerful enough to stop the will of the people.

The Nearness of a Far-Off Land

The protests taking place in Egypt right now probably feel very far away to most of us, but I urge you to look at them in the context of your own life. This really is a small world, and as long as the internet stays on, it’s getting smaller daily.

If you believe in something, then go after it with everything you can. If you lose one of your tools, do not be discouraged. Your will to succeed cannot be stopped by a mere inconvenience.

On the other side of the coin, if you find yourself in a leadership role, practice humility. You have a responsibility to your followers. This is why I hold surveys on Riskology.co (we’ll be having another one soon), and regularly check in with readers. The voice of your people cannot be extinguished. Ignore that truth for too long and it’ll be your head they’re calling for.

Good luck, Egypt.

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Image by: Mike Licht