by Thomas R. Eddlem
The Biden administration announced Friday it was continuing a long-term effort to attack and censor RT, formerly “Russia Today,” the Russian government-financed television network. Secretary of State Antony Blinken railed at a press conference that “Our most powerful antidote to Russia’s lies is the truth. It’s shining a bright light on what the Kremlin is trying to do under the cover of darkness,” he said, amidst efforts to ban RT outright globally.
But it wasn’t RT that told me Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
It wasn’t a Russian government propagandist that told me cloth masks stop COVID transmission, or that an experimental vaccine had no serious side effects, or that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a government fake.
It wasn’t Putin that blew up the Nordstream II pipeline in cahoots with Norway special forces, the worst environmental disaster of the decade.
It wasn’t the FSB that told me Wikileaks had leaked lies about Hillary Clinton’s efforts to steal the Democratic Party nomination from Bernie Sanders in the 2016 election, though the US government repeatedly accused the truthful and accurate Wikileaks reports as emenating from Russia.
You never need censorship to tell the truth; you only need censorship to push and cover up lies.
In the late 1980s, at the closing days of the Cold War, I went to work as a junior researcher at the John Birch Society’s headquarters in Belmont, Mass. after graduating from Stonehill College. I don’t think anyone would disagree in my labeling the John Birch Society as the most anti-communist, most anti-Soviet organization in the country, and perhaps in the world.
The JBS, despite getting a knock as being on the extreme fringes of American society, had a well-financed and sophisticated research department with tens of thousands of books and subscriptions to 125 periodicals. And to my surprise upon getting hired, they had purchased ongoing subscriptions to the English-language editions of Pravda and Izvestia, the Russian official newspapers named “truth” and “news,” respectively. Plus, they had subscriptions to all the local Communist Party USA periodicals, People’s World and Daily Worker, both of which were known to have been subsidized by Moscow for decades. So the latter were in many respects analogous to RT’s English language edition today.
Despite purchasing the full array of communist propaganda publications, nobody would ever suggest the JBS was sympathetic to communism or to the evil Soviet empire. Even though this was during the throes of the Cold War, there was never a thought that America would ban or de-platform the openly Russian propaganda organs; to the contrary, you could pick up a copy of Pravda or Izvestia at the Harvard Square newsstand just a few miles away in Cambridge at any time. The JBS thinking was that propaganda emanating from Soviet Russia was obvious, and it was important to know how the enemy thought.
This is emphatically not the worldview of the US State Department and the US government at large today; there’s no need for the plebes to think any more. We have the government to do that for us, they are essentially saying.
And that’s a problem when you have self-government, i.e., “democracy.” It means both that we’re losing our freedoms of press and speech, because freedom of the press and speech include the right to see foreign propaganda, hate literature and anything anyone wants to view. It also means we’re losing self-government, as if the people cannot be informed to make thoughtful distinctions, then they will be, as James Madison wrote two centuries ago, parties to “a farce or a tragedy; or perhaps both.”
Thomas R. Eddlem is Treasurer of the Massachusetts Libertarian Party, the William Norman Grigg fellow at the Libertarian Institute, a freelance writer and an economist. The views here are his own and do not necessarily represent the official view of the Massachusetts Libertarian Party.