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The autumn edition of the Index on Censorship will be published in Great Britain today, Tuesday. Before the 26th UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow she is dealing with a very special climate, the climate of fear, which is spread wherever climate and environmental activists oppose overexploitation. For the time of this issue, lawyer Steven Donziger, known for his fight against chevron activities in Ecuador, will participate virtually. He appears virtually because he has been under strict house arrest in the United States for 800 days.

Ignored by the US press, Steven Donziger is an example of the people his first namesake Stephen Spender wanted to give a voice to: on October 15, 1971, his appeal With Concern For Those Not Free appeared in the Times. It led to the establishment of the Index on Censorship.

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Anyone who thinks of an index in the context of occidental history and not in the sense of database IT thinks of the first List of Prohibited Books, with which the Catholic Church banned numerous thinkers and their books. Writings by Galileo Galilei or by Johannes Kepler landed on this index. In modern times Immanuel Kant caught the Critique of Pure Reason, in very recent times it was the writings of the author couple Jean-Paul-Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. In 1968 it was a letter from the young Soviet Russian Alexander Daniel to the British writer Graham Greene, referring to the situation of his father July Daniel drew attention. Along with Andrei Sinjawski he was sentenced to hard camp work in a show trial. The trial showed that the Soviet leadership, after the thaw, took a tougher pace again because everything was fermenting in their entire sphere of influence.

In Great Britain a group of supporters was formed which, after Amnesty International, called itself Writers and Scholars International (WSI). On October 15, 1971, the Times published its founding manifesto With Concern For Those Not Free, written by the poet Stephen Spender. Spender announced the publication of a magazine called Index, which should make all persecuted writers, poets and artists in East and West heard. Critical voices were not only suppressed in the Soviet Union, dictators were also in power in Greece, Spain and Portugal, not to mention Latin America.

Fifteen British and American artists joined the call, including the poet WH Auden, the musician Yehudi Menuhin, the composer Igor Stravinsky and the sculptor Henry Moore. When the magazine first appeared in 1972 under the slightly crooked title Index on Censorship. A Voice for the Persecuted, it contained pieces by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, an account of the crackdown on student protests in Prague, and a text by Giorgios Mangakis on the Torture in Greek prisons.

In the 50 years of its existence the quarterly index published numerous important documents such as the translation of Charter 77, the Solzhenitsyn Nobel Prize speech, the story of the disappeared in Argentina, the declaration of hunger strike by the students from Tianmen Square, the declaration of supporters of Salman Rushdie and the reports by Anna Politkovskaya about the wars in Chechnya. The summer edition of 2021 was the Whistleblowern Dedicated to this world, with a focus on the case of Reality Winner, who is not allowed to speak publicly after serving her prison sentence.

Now appears under the sign of Glasgow Climate Change Conference the autumn edition Climate of Fear. The silencing of the planets indigenous peoples, which deals with the protest of indigenous peoples that is being stifled by governments and corporations around the world.

There is a small one to appear Online celebrationwho the lawyer Steven Donziger is switched on. He has been under house arrest in New York for 800 days and is being prosecuted by US judges for his lawsuits against the Chevron oil company. For example, they demand the surrender of all electronic devices belonging to the lawyer. Similar to the case of Julian Assange, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has found that the proceedings against Donziger violate current US law.

(mho)

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Pay please! No end to speaking bans - 50 years of the censorship index - Market Research Telecast

The Bates Student would like to address the petition released on Oct. 15 (and subsequent articles by News Center Maine and The Intercept) regarding censorship of The Bates Student by the Bates College administration.

The Bates Student was not coerced or censored by any member of the Bates administration, the Bates Communication Office, or any other member of the Bates community in the writing or republishing of Elizabeth LaCroixs article from Oct. 13.

Mary Pols, Bates media relation specialist, asked The Student to temporarily take down the original article, pointing to several misleading statements and reporting inaccuracies. The Student made the decision on its own accord to honor this query. Mary Pols handles all media relations for the college; therefore, The Bates Student, like all other media outlets, is unable to access school administrators in all departments without first communicating with Pols. However, Pols has no authority to require changes or read articles before publishing and did not attempt to exercise such authority.

Nearly all edits made to the originally published article were additions. Information regarding neutrality statements was reworded for clarity. Additionally, a quote provided by Francis Eanes was paraphrased, as it relayed second-hand information that could not be verified. Commentary provided by employees with first-hand experience was unaltered, or in Jon Michael Foleys case, expanded.

Every edit or change in the article was discussed between Elizabeth and myself and approved by me as editor-in-chief of The Bates Student. We corrected inaccuracies that were misleading or confusing, and we allowed additions to both the union and administration side of the story, as shown in the document outlining edits made to the original article linked in the petition.

The staff of The Bates Student takes immense pride in our editorial independence. We are given full autonomy on what is and is not published. In the interests of informing the Bates community, we stand by the edits we made.

If you have any questions regarding the events of the past week, please send us an email ([emailprotected]).

Jackson Elkins 22 and Elizabeth LaCroix 23

Editor-in-Chief and Managing News Editor at The Bates Student

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A Statement Regarding the Petition Against Censorship at Bates - The Bates Student

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922

TheBritish philosopher Wittgenstein wrote those words as a philosophical foundation for his larger belief in freedom of speech. His meaning: He who controls the language also controls reality, something that todays left understands brilliantly, even devilishly. America historically hasnt limited freedom of thought and speech, and the resulting clash of ideas has improved our national discourse. The language police make us weaker intellectually by limiting the world in which we live.

The language around climate change is one more area the left wants to control, especially given that trillions of dollars in spending are on the line. Big Tech is now doing its part to protect the Green New Deal and radical green ideology from dissenting views.

Googles and YouTubes recent announcement that they now prohibit climate deniers from monetizing their platforms would have caused Wittgenstein to ask: What is a climate denier?

This includes content referring to climate change as a hoax or a scam, the announcement answers. And surely there is no hoax about the climate: Data show that since the 1880s, the global temperature has risen 1 Fahrenheit.

But what else can we measure? In that same period, the world population jumped sevenfold, and food production increased even more. Remarkably, the number of people not living in extreme poverty increased at the same rate. The infant-mortality rate fell from 165 per 100,000 to seven. In 1880, more than 80 percent of the global population was illiterate. Today, that number is around 13 percent.

The question is: Why? The answer is simple: fossil fuels.

Inexpensive, abundant, reliable fossil fuels have turned 10,000 years of stagnant human existence into flourishing and prosperity. Illnesses that took the lives of kings and peasants alike are nearly eradicated thanks to medicine and refrigeration and electricity. All of this growth for 1 F of temperature increase. Thats quite the bargain.

Without fossil fuels, humanity would still be mired in misery and darkness. Do we really want to ban that miracle? Do we want to keep it in the ground, as the green movements cry? Thats a conversation we need to have.

It is thus curious that Google in its announcement calls denying the scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change reason enough to get de-platformed.

The evidence of the causes of climate change are far weaker than the evidence of fossil fuels causing the past 200 years of human flourishing, but neither is scientific fact. Could there be any intellectual framework less scientific than consensus?

This discussion now cant take place on the platforms of the Big Tech thought police, and we are all worse for it.

Google also says that claims denying that long-term trends show the global climate is warming will not be allowed. Who is making that claim? The data once again show that the earths temperature indeed warming, but Wittgenstein might ask for a clarification on long-term. One hundred years isnt a very long time. If you look at the last 500 million years, the current trend still has us in a very cool period. The earth spent millions of years 30 to 40 warmer than the current average temperature, and that doesnt come close to covering the earths entire 4.5 billion years of age.

So why did the earth heat and cool so dramatically when there were no humans to cause the warming? After all, the tech language police tell of unequivocal evidence showing that human emissions of greenhouse gases are causing global warming. The firms failure to answer that question shows it has no idea what the word unequivocal means.

Darn. Now Im the language police.

Stifling speech doesnt make us a better nation. It doesnt make any truths truer or any falsehoods falser. It does eliminate competing or unwanted ideas from the conversation, which is the real goal here.

Those afraid of language arent looking for a better world. Wittgenstein understood that. Lets hope America does, too.

Daniel Turner is founder and executive director of Power the Future, a nonprofit that advocates for American energy jobs.

Twitter: @DanielTurnerPTF

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Big Tech censorship on climate change only hurts the nation - New York Post

Professional networking site LinkedIn announced it will shut down its website in China because Chinas hefty compliance requirements have created a significantly more challenging operating environment. Its parent company, Microsoft, said it would replace LinkedIn China with a job listings website without a social media element later this year.

LinkedIns retreat from China sends a warning to all Western companies that there is no middle ground between Chinas authoritarian system and Western liberal democratic values. They must choose a side.

LinkedIn launched in China in 2014. It was the only Western social media site that operated openly in China, as Chinese authorities blocked other Western social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter. LinkedIn paid its admission price for the Chinese market by agreeing to adhere to the Chinese governments rules, including censorship requirements.

Like all Western companies doing business in China, LinkedIn claimed that to comply with Chinas law it had no choice but to censor content Chinese authorities object to. LinkedIn insisted the censorship was very light and in no way contradicted the company supporting free speech.

Still, LinkedIns censorship has caused great concern in the United States. In 2019, LinkedIn made headlines by blocking the profile of a U.S.-based Chinese dissident, Zhou Fengsuo. Zhou was one of the student leaders of the 1989 pro-democracy protest in Tiananmen Square.

After the Chinese government brutally cracked down on protestors, Zhou was forced into exile in the United States. He co-founded a nonprofit organization to aid human rights activists and organizations in China. On January 3, 2019, Zhou tweeted out a notice from LinkedIn, which stated that although the company strongly supports freedom of expression, Zhous profile and activities would not be viewable because of specific content on your profile.

Zhou demanded an answer in atweet, This is how censorship spread from Communist China to Silicon Valley in the age of globalization and digitalization. How does LinkedIn get the order from Beijing? After Zhous tweet received wide media attention, LinkedIn reversed its action and unblocked Zhous account,claiming his profile had been blocked in error.

As Chinas leader Xi Xinping seeks to return China to the Maoist socialist model and intensify his suppression of dissenting voices, he demands more censorship from Chinese and foreign companies. Early this year, Chinese regulators visited LinkedIns headquarters in China and gave the company 30 daysto clean up its content. The companydisclosedthat it had to stop new member sign-ups in China for weeks to ensure we remain in compliance with local law.

LinkedIn learned the hard way that capitulation to Beijing is not a one-time action but a process. Once you bend the knee, Beijing will soon demand a better attitude and posture. Surrender leads to more surrender because Beijing always wants more.

LinkedIns censorship on behalf of the Chinese government reached new heights in recent months. It used to only remove individual posts that Chinese censors did not like. But recently, LinkedIn blocked profiles and posts of foreign journalists, academics, researchers, and human rights activists from its China-based websites.

Well-known journalists affected includedAxios Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, Vice News Melissa Chan, and U.K.-based author Greg Bruno. All of them have written about Beijings human rights violations in the past. All received similar messages from LinkedIn, which claims their profiles were blocked in LinkedIn China due to prohibited content in the summary section of these journalists profiles.

Besides these well-known journalists, LinkedIn also banned academics and researchers. One of them is Eyck Freymann, a Ph.D. student at Oxford University. According to theWall Street Journal, Freymanns profile was probably blocked in China because he included the words Tiananmen Square massacre in an entry describing his job as a research assistant for a book in 2015.

To add insult to injury, LinkedIn offered suggestions to those affected: modifying their content to remove the ban. Greg Bruno, author of a bookon Chinas soft power on Tibet, disclosed in an interview with Verdict, LinkedIn suggests that my ban is not permanent, and that I am welcome to update the Publications section of my profile to minimize the impact of my offending content.

Bruno rejected LinkedIns offer. HetoldVerdict: While I am not surprised by the Chinese Communist Partys discomfort with the topic of my book, I am dismayed that an American tech company is caving to the demands of a foreign government intent on controlling access to information.

LinkedIn refused to explain whether its recent heightened censorship resulted from self-censorship by the company or was explicitly requested by the Chinese government. The companys actions and its silence received widespread backlash at home and drew attention from U.S. lawmakers. Rep. Jim Banks, R-Indiana, wrote to LinkedIn, demanding the company say which Chinese Communist Partys speech regulation it was enforcing on Americans and whether the company had handed over American users data to Beijing.

Senator Rick Scott, R-Florida, sent aletteraddressed to Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella and LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky. He said the companys censorship raised the serious questions of Microsofts intentions and its commitment to standing up against Communist Chinas horrific human rights abuses and repeated attacks against democracy. He criticized the companys action as a gross appeasement and an act of submission to Communist China.

Besides censorship, LinkedIn has been embroiled in another controversy. Chinese intelligence agents have used fake profiles on LinkedIn and disguised themselves as headhunters, consultants, and scholars to collect information and recruit potential spies. In 2017, Germanys intelligence agency disclosedthat Chinese agents targeted more than 10,000 German citizens, including senior diplomats and politicians.

A year later, William Evanina, the U.S. counterintelligence chief,warnedLinkedIn about Chinas super aggressive intelligence activities on the site. In 2020, a Singapore national wasconvictedin U.S. court as an illegal agent for a foreign power. He had set up a fake consulting company and used LinkedIn to recruit Americans to spy on behalf of China.

Eventually, both the pressure from China and from home has proven too much for LinkedIn. The company finally realized that Beijing would continue to demand more censorship while abusing its intelligence-gathering on the companys platform.

To please Beijing means to abandon the companys business model as a platform for the open and free exchange of ideas and to face more backlash from the public and more scrutiny from lawmakers at home. Eventually, LinkedIn chose to fold its China operation because it couldnt straddle two different political systems with opposing values and still be successful.

LinkedIns exit from China should serve as a warning for all Western businesses and organizations. For too long, Western companies and organizations, from Nike to the NBA, have operated by this one company, two systems model. They have acted as if they are the defenders of liberal democratic values in their home countries.

But they have instead overlooked the Chinese Communist Partys human rights abuses and insisted on abiding by the CCPs speech code, all for the sake of chasing profit they dont want to be shut out of potentially lucrative Chinese markets. They have damaged their reputations while finding out Beijings appetite for control and censorship cannot be satisfied.

LinkedIns experience in China has shown that the one company, two systems model is a failure. All Western companies and organizations must realize that Beijings authoritarian model is incompatible with Western liberal democratic values.

Trying to find a middle ground will please no one. Western companies and organizations have to choose a side.

They should remind themselves that the liberal democratic values such as freedom of expression they enjoy at home have not only fattened their bottom line, they have given birth to superb products, including music, movies, products, and sports teams with universal popularity. If Western companies and organizations want to maintain their success and achieve more, they should choose freedom and democracy over kowtowing to Beijing.

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LinkedIn's Retreat From China Is A Warning To All Western Businesses - The Federalist

Shilpa Gupta at the Barbican: social injustice, censorship and poetry

In the multipart showSun at Night at Londons Barbican, Mumbai-based artist Shilpa Gupta highlights the fragility of free expression and gives a voice to those silenced

The words of Azerbaijani poet Mikayil Mushfig (1908 1938), labelled an enemy of the state by the Soviets, hover in the air. From a canopy of 100 low-hung microphones, a chorus clusters and repeats the poets statement. There is heavy breathing. Hums dissolve into whispers. Fingers click and hands furiously clap. An unpredictable rhapsody of disembodied voices darts around a dimly lit room, creating a dense fog of sounds that lingers over a field of metal spikes.

Once your senses adjust, you can edge through these spines that comprise Shilpa Guptas sound installation, For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit (2017 2018). Rising up to waist height, the spears forge a constricted path. Each pierces a leaf of paper bearing fragments of the spoken verses, written by a poet incarcerated for their beliefs. It is a panoply of resistance spanning time and place, with the words of dissident writers such as Maung Saungkha from Myanmar, arrested in 2016 for his risqu claim that he had a tattoo of the president inked on his penis, melding with those of Ayat al-Qurmezi, jailed in 2011 for supposedly defaming Bahrains royalty.

The enveloping piece is part of Guptas poignant exhibition Sun at Night at the Barbican Curve. In a year when the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to two journalists, Maria Ressa of the Philippines and Dmitry Muratov of Russia, for their courageous advocacy and practice of press freedom, and when digital censorship is alarmingly on the rise, the show is a testament to the force of words and the fragility of our commitment to free speech.

Gupta, however, finds a refreshingly subtle way of rallying for free expression while keeping those poets at the fore. She treats their words preciously. She has preserved the verses of censored poems by speaking them into a collection of ostensibly empty medicine bottles that form the piece Untitled (Spoken Poem in a Bottle).

The thresholds of expression have long preoccupied Gupta. She once built a library of stainless steel books, each a replica of a title written anonymously or pseudonymously. And on the spine she explained the reasons why, capturing a range of societys neuroses and prejudices. Guptas practice is characterised by its delicate investigation of social injustices and finding pathways to empathy. As she tells me, the objective of her work is speaking with you and not at you and not against you. It maybe has to do with a sense of hope that a conversation might mean something.

Come November 2021, Gupta will continue this dialogue with her first solo show at Londons Frith Street Gallery. There will be spillover from the Barbican show,she explains, drawing a link between the genre of isolation that has been enforced throughout the world this last year. She has created a new flap-board the kind typically associated with airport and train arrivals that flickers through letters and settles to find our connective tissue. It spells out We are closer than you ever imagined.

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Shilpa Gupta at the Barbican: social injustice, censorship and poetry - Wallpaper*