Tsvi Bisk – Deplatforming Seditionists is Not Censorship
Twitter and Facebook (and others) are being accused of censorship by deplatforming Trump and his political apologists. Such an accusation is pure demagoguery. Deplatforming is not censorship, neither of the political right nor of conservatives in general; it is patriotic; it is self-defense against seditionists. It should be properly compared to removing Tokyo Rose or Lord Haw-Haw from the radio waves if that were possible during WWII. For those with insufficient history education, a reminder: Tokyo Rose was a generic name given by Allied troops in the South Pacific during WWII to the female English-speaking radio broadcasters of Japanese propaganda. Lord Haw-Haw refers to US-born Briton William Joyce, who broadcast Nazi propaganda to the UK from Germany during WWII. He was hung for treason soon after the war.
The Jan.6 insurrection was an act of war against the Republic. When at war you deprive your enemy of every weapon they have, which is what Twitter and Facebook did (the first time they have actually acted as responsible citizens). Enabling Trump and his fellow travelers to continue to inflame extremists around the country with constant repetitions of big lies and conspiracy theories would have bordered on criminal negligence.
Consider the facts of the case. On January 6, 2021 a seditious President, the head of the Executive Branch, enflamed a crowd composed of emotionally combustible extremists. He did this by repeating a big lie that would have made Goebbels blush; that the election was stolen by massive fraud. In repeating this big lie he demonstrated contempt for the Judicial Branch, which in over 60 court cases had dismissed claims of any such election fraud. He also demonstrated indifference to the safety of citizens who had worked diligently on the election, some of whom have had to go into hiding because of death threats from Trump disciples who actually swallowed the big lie.
He openly instructed the crowd to march on the Legislative Branch in order to intimidate duly elected representatives of the People from doing their constitutional duty. In other words, the head of the Executive Branch declared war on the Legislative Branch while showing contempt for the credibility of the Judicial Branch – something without precedent in the entire history of the American Republic. The extremist crowd predictably became a mob and stormed the Capital Building, threatening to kill individual representatives and senators – VP Pence and Speaker Pelosi especially. This was an incident more serious in its implications than either 9/11 or Pearl Harbor. I suggest a thought experiment to make my point.
What if Trump was a coherent thinker who knew how to take advantage of the military and police personnel in the mob (now estimated to have been 20%); people trained in chain of command and organized storming of targets? What if he had organized extreme portions of the mob around a core of these trained military and police? It wouldn’t have been too difficult as many in the mob had already come prepared to storm the capital. It is now evident that what happened was not spontaneous; the insurrectionists brought ladders and other apparatus to facilitate a break-in. They had done their homework, knew the internal layout of the building and where to look for who they intended to harm.
Furthermore, those carrying weapons might very well have penetrated the Senate killing dozens if not hundreds of representatives and senators, including the Vice President and Speaker of the House; given the evidence of the videos that was clearly the intention of many of those who actually broke in. Subsequent testimony of several elected representatives has shown that this slaughter was avoided by minutes only. Moreover, what if General Flynn – by all accounts a very capable officer – had not previously been exposed as a corrupt individual with authoritarian tendencies, and had become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff instead of the present, obviously constitutionalist, General Milley?
Is it inconceivable that on the heels of the above Trump would have declared martial law and Flynn would have occupied the Capitol Building with an elite corps of fighters previously indoctrinated for that purpose; consequently taking the entire Supreme Court and surviving members of the Senate and Congress into “protective custody”? I am told I exaggerate because none of the above actually happened. But consider the following analogy. North Korea launches an inter-ballistic missile with an atomic warhead; it lands on the mainland of the United States but it does not explode. Wouldn’t the United States still have reacted to this botched attack with extreme prejudice? This is what Trump did – he launched a nuclear warhead against the institutions of the United States, which thankfully did not explode but still requires the most severe response under the law.
Some want to turn the insurrection into a comparative numbers game. Some debased news media and morally corrupt politicians are comparing the property damage and the deaths of the Black Lives Matter protests to the attack on the Capitol Building. As if legitimate protests against police brutality and systemic injustice, admittedly exploited by violent thugs, is equivalent to the Executive Branch declaring war on the Legislative Branch while trampling the prerogatives of the Judicial Branch. Even the criminal thuggery of Antifa is nowhere equivalent.
I am told only six died as if that is an argument when considering an attack on the constitutionalist framework and institutions of the Republic. The simple truth is that this was an event constitutionally equivalent to the Civil War. The inability of many to appreciate this distinction is a disturbing reflection on the American Education system’s cultivation of ignorance as being truly patriotic. As Jefferson wrote, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” The ignorance of tens of millions of citizens playing into this deceitful comparative numbers game and not realizing the significance of what really happened is more of a threat to the long term health of the Republic than the Iranian bomb or the rise of China or the subterfuge of Putin.
And what of those, who in the name of unifying the country, want to give the entire issue a pass? Well the last time the United States gave a pass to treason in the name of unity it resulted in a dynamic that over the past 160 years has cost the country trillions of dollars, tens of thousands of lives and in point of fact resulted in ever greater disunity. Consider, what would have been American history if General Bedford Forest had been executed for treason and the KKK had never come into existence. Indeed, what if General Lee and other “great” southern “gentlemen” (traitors all) had been put to death or at least imprisoned for the rest of their lives; would the myth of the great “lost cause”, or the “War of Northern Aggression” come into being and sustained until this very day? Would there have been the annihilation of the Reconstruction Project by the KKK? Would Jim Crow have been institutionalized with all its attendant evils, including the mass flight of rural Blacks to Northern inner cities with all the social ills and economic costs that has entailed over the decades? Would we have even needed a civil rights movement in the 60s – something that birthed the Republican Party’s southern strategy which in turn greatly contributed to the Trump infection? Unity does not and cannot mean disregarding sedition; that will only cause more disunity and pain in the future.
Tsvi Bisk is an independent Israeli-American Futurist, with hundreds of articles, essays and books to his name. His most recent book is The Suicide of the Jews. Amongst his several life employments, he includes teaching American History for 15 years.
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