Cliff Paul
5th May 2015, 17:48
Western Michigan University banned me from speaking.
The students, via Kalamazoo Peace Center and FIRE, sued and won. But, in the end, WMU will have paid out $35,000 so that I couldn't speak to a larger portion of their student body. A business expense.
We don't really have free speech here, only the illusion of it. Yeah, as long as I'm speaking on facebook to a small percentage of the people that already agree with me- it's all good. But actually being able to put out a persuasive, contextual, revolutionary message to millions of folks who have never heard it is something that is fought hard against.
Sometimes, we're lucky and these censorship stories get out there. Most times they happen in a way that we never find out about and end up not being considered censorship.
Understanding that I will face these censorship hurdles- both hidden and obvious- has been one of the things that has pushed me to be more and more creative- in aesthetic, genre, technical skill, and medium- to make my art reach more people. So, it both inspires and depresses me.
If this stuff is happening to me- a person who has committed their life to putting these ideas out there, think about the person who is expressing a small amount of radical ideas, and meets problems with management or other powerful entities in the community. They immediately adjust their message and ideas to fit acceptable parameters. This then gives the people around them a false idea of the scope of ideas in the community and a false perception of possibilities for campaigns and actions.
Sometimes liberals in the U.S. are simply would-be radicals with a false perception of what's immediately possible, due to a combination of this kind of censorship and a falsely taught history of change that erases radical mass struggle from it's pages and invents a fairytale narrative of change having come from electoral politics (the second part of that combination is what I was a WMU to speak about).
Because we are taught that we have "free speech" under capitalism, most of us are not aware of this shaping of thought and don't call it censorship. But, in fact, it's a willful editing of thought and expression by those in power.
The students, via Kalamazoo Peace Center and FIRE, sued and won. But, in the end, WMU will have paid out $35,000 so that I couldn't speak to a larger portion of their student body. A business expense.
We don't really have free speech here, only the illusion of it. Yeah, as long as I'm speaking on facebook to a small percentage of the people that already agree with me- it's all good. But actually being able to put out a persuasive, contextual, revolutionary message to millions of folks who have never heard it is something that is fought hard against.
Sometimes, we're lucky and these censorship stories get out there. Most times they happen in a way that we never find out about and end up not being considered censorship.
Understanding that I will face these censorship hurdles- both hidden and obvious- has been one of the things that has pushed me to be more and more creative- in aesthetic, genre, technical skill, and medium- to make my art reach more people. So, it both inspires and depresses me.
If this stuff is happening to me- a person who has committed their life to putting these ideas out there, think about the person who is expressing a small amount of radical ideas, and meets problems with management or other powerful entities in the community. They immediately adjust their message and ideas to fit acceptable parameters. This then gives the people around them a false idea of the scope of ideas in the community and a false perception of possibilities for campaigns and actions.
Sometimes liberals in the U.S. are simply would-be radicals with a false perception of what's immediately possible, due to a combination of this kind of censorship and a falsely taught history of change that erases radical mass struggle from it's pages and invents a fairytale narrative of change having come from electoral politics (the second part of that combination is what I was a WMU to speak about).
Because we are taught that we have "free speech" under capitalism, most of us are not aware of this shaping of thought and don't call it censorship. But, in fact, it's a willful editing of thought and expression by those in power.