[benrbray]

Like the other poster, I'm curious to hear your perspective. You don't find it a bit strange that "only government-owned websites and specially approved political blogs...are allowed to post photos of top leaders."?

You also think it's better to cover up events like Tiananmen Square? It seems like it's almost entirely forgotten even though it happened only 30 years ago. My country (US) doesn't have a great human rights track record either, but at least we're allowed to talk about it.

[wybiral]

> My country (US) doesn't have a great human rights track record either, but at least we're allowed to talk about it.

Exactly. No country has a perfect history but by confronting past mistakes you have a chance to learn from them and hopefully support laws or norms that prevent them from happening again.

Perhaps this only applies in countries that practice democracy, where the people's awareness has a chance of translating into representation. Otherwise it's only likely to create discontent with the inability to change things (and thus unrest).

[stochastic_monk]

Discontent and unrest can lead to revolution and the chance to improve. Authoritarians simply bank on the cost of revolution being prohibitive.

[mc32]

When Mao felt threatened he unleashed the very impressionable and mouldable Hongweibings. Once he reaffirmed his power, the Hongweibings were disbanded. So, they have a few more options as laid out by Lennin.

[scottlocklin]

This perspective always cracks me up. The way the US does it is less brutal and obvious, but pretty much the same thing; old books are scrapped and forgotten. Formerly popular thinkers are memory holed or declared 'thought criminals' (pick your '-ist'). Their books are no longer taught in college, and the perspectives they represent are gone forever.

Present day thinkers and reporters are given the same silent treatment on mainstream media which is obviously controlled by the narrow oligarchy which controls everything else. Same treatment is happening on youtube as China is doing; non-conforming perspectives are actively sought out and removed by censorious apparatchiks. Oh yeah, and now they're also sometimes denounced as "russian agents" as well -a pack of absurd, paranoid and Orwellian nonsense which makes anything the ChiComs say look like objective common sense.

The US engages in ritual denunciation of itself for slavery and killing off the Indians. Somehow our most excellent international adventures, ridiculous military provocations, poisoning of the food chain, extractive slave economics of the native population and colonial control of half the population of the world is A-OK. For all I know, China engages in ritual denunciation of its pre-Maoist self as well. That doesn't mean they're not carefully controlling the narrative now.

[ajross]

> old books are scrapped and forgotten. Formerly popular thinkers are memory holed or declared 'thought criminals'

Name some, I'll get you copies on Amazon and you can yell about them here on HN.

You seem to be trying to conflate group think (which is a real thing) with censorship (also real, very different, and much worse). And that doesn't make much sense to me at all.

I mean, fine. Maybe "no one talks about" your particular favorite injustice. But you talk about it (you just did!) and can work to convince the rest of us about the truth of your opinions (like you're doing right now!).

In the PRC, you can't.

[quxbar]

My college education was pretty honest about the atrocities of the USA. I get to openly post about politics all day on facebook without any fear of reprisal. Pretty different from a country with a whole dictionary of secret codewords used to discuss politics and history. There is no 'both sides', there's just your self-pity - the people you call censorious apparatchiks are just people who don't respect your opinion. You mistake being unpopular for being persecuted, which is common for privileged engineering types like us.

[xfs]

The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be "free" because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free. In states like China, there is pervasive censorship, because speech still has power and power is scared of it. We should always look at censorship as an economic signal that reveals the potential power of speech in that jurisdiction. The attacks against us by the US point to a great hope, speech powerful enough to break the fiscal blockade. -Julian Assange

[benrbray]

Can you say anything to back up the claim that "speech still has power" in China? That seems to go against what the pro-censorship commenters are saying, which is that most people in China know all the bad stuff anyway and just don't care. If that's true, it seems like words have lost all power.

[MrTmp1]

Cool quote.

But it's not the same discussion . To make it relevant would be to ask :

Once China works the same way at the same scope (Somehow assuming they don't) Will they drop the censor ?

[scottlocklin]

You don't post political views which threaten the US regime. The fact that you don't fall under the eye of Sauron just means you're a good citizen, just like the Chinese guy in the article. For the love of god, Facebook employs former Stasi agents to police people's comments.

Again, US colleges definitely engage in ritual denunciations of the bad old days. So do the Chinese. US colleges engage in political indoctrination that talks about problematic issues in the modern US which the US regime wants changed. So do the Chinese.

The only real difference is the US doesn't have to be as brutal and obvious as the Chinese to police thought. It does occasionally look a lot like old Maoist struggle sessions, but somehow people never make that connection.

[wybiral]

I regularly support the idea impeaching our leader in public and participate in a democratic process of electing representatives to enact policies that I want to see change.

EDIT: As a matter of fact, we just had a Muslim congress-woman openly discuss goals to impeach our sitting president. Things work differently in a democracy with representatives than they do in an authoritarian dictatorship.

[scottlocklin]

The president isn't "our leader." And as I keep saying, yes, the US system isn't as brutal and obvious (in most cases; policing online content, it is) as China. As far as I know, they only attempt to kill American citizens who deviate from the party line when they live abroad.

Let me give you a bit of obvious propaganda by people who really do run the country:

https://twitter.com/Raytheon/status/1021446302515847168

Perfect embodiment of ruling caste self regard ... we blow up brown people ... but at least we are real smart and we ain't sexist!

[wybiral]

That's not apples-for-apples. Yes, history and society are subject to shifts and bias.

But do you think that there's a hidden branch of US government dictating which books are used or what words aren't allowed, carefully crafting this revised perception of our reality? Or is it just social effects that happen in all countries?

[paraditedc]

Luckily this was just recently discussed on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18816040

[wybiral]

Withholding information about military strategy or the operations of an intelligence agency to the press is one thing.

Meticulous and widespread censoring of phrases like "rubber duckies" just because it might remind people of Tiananmen Square or "Winnie the Pooh" just because people mocked Xi Jinping is another thing.

[caseymarquis]

The first law in the US outside of basic government structure: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

No matter how many mistakes are made in the US, we have that as a bedrock. There is a fundamental difference between the US and China in this regard.

[skookumchuck]

> killing off the Indians

There are about 6.6 million American Indians in the US today.

https://www.infoplease.com/american-indians-numbers-1

[stevenwoo]

Arguably the Espionage Act could be interpreted and used to prosecute any speech that is not supportive of the US government and lately for any federal whistleblowers, it seems pretty incongruous with the First Amendment but the law has been supported by the Supreme Court multiple times and here we are.

[i_am_nomad]

It’s true that Americans are pretty extremist about freedom of speech, but even they understand that speech in the service of actual espionage should be punished. Outside of that I’m unaware of how the Espionage Act has been used to suppress speech.

[dTal]

Let me enlighten you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espionage_Act_of_1917#History

[AzzieElbab]

"My country (US) doesn't have a great human rights track record either, but at least we're allowed to talk about it." You cannot possibly be serious when taken scale and timeframes into account

[benrbray]

About which part? The US has done some pretty terrible things (slavery, interment camps, destabilizing the middle east and south america). So you disagree that we're allowed to talk about it? Is there a government agency censoring HN comments?

[AzzieElbab]

The things you listed wouldn't even top my list of horrible things the US have done. You can talk about them all you want. But if you have half a brain you should be able to them in context of time and scale and take a look at what else was going on in the world at the same time and how many people were actually effected. Saying that todays US is somehow comparable to todays China because of slavery doesn't make any sense whatsoever

[dghughes]

I wouldn't be too quick to say that.

A quick Google came back with words and phrases banned by the US government. It's federal employee who are ordered not to use the words and phrases not individuals, but chilling nonetheless.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/cdc-g...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/07/usda-cli...

[wybiral]

> "Staff at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) have been told to avoid using the term climate change in their work, with the officials instructed to reference “weather extremes” instead."

That sounds more like a branding guideline for employees than censorship of a topic. But, as you said, this doesn't apply to normal citizens and presumably is done so that the spokespeople seem like they're on the same page.

[chris_mc]

No, that's clearly censorship. Climate change had a different contextual meaning than extreme weather. One indicates that the climate is on a path towards something different, the other indicates events outside the norm but no overall change. This is an attempt by the Trump administration to cover up the fact that humans are fucking ourselves, so that their corporate overlords may continue to reverse-Robinhood the masses.

[wybiral]

I'm not saying that I agree with it, but this is an agency with leaders who have a say in the wording that their employees use in public documents.

It's not censorship, it's just stupid leadership and it's from ephemeral positions that our democracy can be used to reverse by putting people with sane policies in place.