My Take on Google vs.Great Wall

I’m going to use comments I left on a Vodka Pundit post by Will Collier.

In a perverse way, I think this might be very enlightening for the average Chinese citizen and a very good thing. If ~ as they have stated they intend to ~ Google notes what searches have been censored when the results appear, that’s a confirmation of the regime’s repressiveness that one reading a newspaper or watching state TV might have long suspected, but had no way to prove. “Results Censored” in their faces how many times a day may well be a big straw for the camel’s back.

As for comparing Google’s stiff-arming a crawl-up-your-butt justice department with kow-towing to the Chinese? That’s flamingos and pelicans in my book. We have a hard-fought freedom here that needs to be jealously safe-guarded against intrusions of the federal kind, and rightly so. Every attempt to errode that, no matter how well meaning, needs to be examined under a microscope ~ fought tooth and nail to be proven necessary ~ vice blindly acquiesced to. The Chinese have no such tradition, no such rights worth bloody brawls. But a little freedom light will shine from every computer screen when “Search/Results Censored” notifications tell the searcher that there was something out there for them to find, but they weren’t allowed to see it. Not allowed to read it and decide for themselves. The resentment will fester and grow and that’s a good thing. An in-your-face-every-day good thing. It reminds me of something I heard Lieutenant Viktor Belenko (who defected with a MIG-25 in 1976) say. Asked what had caused him to even consider taking the plane to the Americans, he replied it was watching outraged news reports about the persecution of Communist Party members in the U.S. . One day it dawned on him that the Americans had a Communist Party, persecuted or not. The reverse certainly couldn’t be said for the Soviets. How could a country that allowed an ‘enemy’ party to be part of the political process be as evil as they said it was?
And it’s a much smaller world now. Let a little light shine.

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