Political mass murder and genocide are as old as history. In the last century governments murdered over 100 million people. The majority of the victims of political mass murder in the last century were victims of a government that former president Bill Clinton calls "our strategic partner". That government is the government of China. The man who organized the greatest mass murder in history is honored by the government of China. There's a huge memorial in Beijing at the center of the city to commemorate Mao. So the starting point for the discussion of political mass murder and censorship needs to be a cold look at the state of global political hypocrisy and political mass murder.
It is our belief that the lesson of the 20th century is that mass murder is basically acceptable as long as it serves the interests of powerful political and economic forces. The ruling elites in America make tremendous profits from their business relationships with China. So the fact that this government murdered well over 50 million of its own citizens is considered to be a morally acceptable situation at the end of the day. Now let's look at some other issues relating to mass murder. In 2003 England and America attacked the state of Iraq. They unleashed a chamber of horrors on the Iraqi people that murdered 1 million Iraqi civilians, forced 2 million Iraqi civilians to flee their country and basically created a living hell for the Iraqi people. Did Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair get hauled before a Nuremberg trial? The sole surviving prosecutor on the Nuremberg trials stated very specifically that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair met every one of the criteria of being class A war criminals as defined by the Nuremberg trials but of course Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair have not been arrested and are indeed considered to be respectable citizens by a good part of the citizens and policymaking elites in England and the United States. So again mass murder is in the eye of the beholder in terms of today's international morality. That is a fact.
Now let us get to the issue of censorship, particularly the cries for censorship of political speech on YouTube. Some people are saying that allowing videos that glorify Nazi Germany and terrorists or anybody approving violent actions against the United States is wrong, and these points of view should be censored. It is our view from the study of history and the study of totalitarianism to take a different point of view. Every political system has its strengths and weaknesses. Democracy has a problem in terms of potentially getting paralyzed, potentially being bought off by big financial interests, which many people see is happening in today's America. Totalitarianism by contrast has a weakness that by the suppression of different ideas and the suppression of open discussion of ideas, the future decision-making power of the state can be seriously damaged and ultimately destroyed so that that state ends up either collapsing or destroying itself. These are asymmetrical conflicts.
Now should we save democracy by adopting the tactics of totalitarianism?
It is our view that this is not the case. We are disturbed that the reactions particularly of America to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 have been nothing short of a state of national hystaria. A really psychotic reaction if you were to put this in clinical psychological terms. Now let's take a big picture view of things. In the Cold War America confronted a nuclear superpower that could obliterate the United States of America in 30 to 40 minutes, literally reduce the entire country to a heap of radioactive rubble. At no time during that confrontation were there calls to set up a centralized secret police system such as the Department of Homeland Security. Particularly troubling to us is that Mr. Bush and his administration crossed over a line that really hasn't been crossed since the Middle Ages, which is to legitimize the institution of torture. This is something that neither Nazi Germany nor Stalin's Russia ever dared to do publicly. By contrast America's "strategic partner", China under Mao, openly glorified the institution of political mass murder.
What is different today has been the open American legitimization of torture, and a popular TV show, 24, shows the "good guy", Mr. Jack Bauer, as the guy who used torture and the "stupid idiots" were the people opposed to torture. So this is a very different point of view than the view of America throughout its history.
We believe that the open discussion of ideas is critical to the future of America and will get right down to the controversial aspects of this. There is a bitter difference of opinion particularly relating to the Middle East in our world. Now we are not getting into the details, and we're not going to get into trying to be a referee of who's right and who's wrong and who committed the most atrocities but let's just say that there's a big difference of opinion. The Western powers invaded the Middle East in our time - not the other way around. So at a minimum you can say that the Arab people have a legitimate grievance of Western war crimes committed against them. Unfortunately in America the judgment of these things is very warped. In 2006 one Israeli soldier was kidnapped by some people in Lebanon. Israel responded by carpet bombing the civilians of Lebanon, and in our view this was a war crime and we speak as people who strongly support Israel. We want to make that clear but this was wrong. Yet the American Congress heartily endorsed this. Now to be blunt this kind of "morality" isn't going to fly on an international level, and this kind of "morality" is not the basis of world peace.
World peace means an open discussion of ideas, and we shall take another very controversial issue, the existence of videos on YouTube glorifying Nazi Germany. Let's take a bigger picture of this whole thing. We need to understand history. When we analyze some of the plans for censorship, some of these plans for censorship want to even abolish newsreels of Nazi Germany, and this is just getting completely ridiculous. Let's let's get back to the biggest confrontation, the most dangerous confrontation in American history, America's confrontation with the nuclear superpower of the Soviet empire. Would the solution to that situation have been to have banned all books praising Marx? Should we have banned all books praising Lenin? Well of course not because the open discussion of communism and the open free discussion of ideas was one of our advantages. It was one of our strengths in overcoming that threat and once you start closing things down it there's basically no limit to this. We are particularly troubled because we have made long-term studies of totalitarianism going back to ancient China, going back to ancient India going back to the ancient world and moving forward. Once political censorship gets unleashed, there is really no limit to it because people at the top in government like the idea of being able to suppress information that could be damaging to themselves.
We are not absolute purists on the issue of censorship but we take a very firm line about the discussion of ideas. There should be in our view no limits on the discussion of ideas. There is still much to be learned about the phenomenon of totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and the heavy hand of censorship is the last thing that we need. Democracy's strength is its freedom of speech. If you are going to talk about destroying the freedom of speech to save democracy, what you're ultimately talking about is destroying democracy in order to save it. In other words you are talking about destroying democracy.
We cannot deal with all the aspects of hypocrisy that exists in American foreign policy. That would be a 300 hour lecture. What we can talk about is the need for America to defend its principles of freedom of speech as a means of defining political ideas for the future. You will not save democracy by destroying it. There's old parable - if you hate your enemy, you need to be careful that you don't become your enemy, and that relates to America today. There should not be ideological censorship on YouTube or other forms of the Internet. There should be an open discussion of ideas. This is the means to defend the system of individual liberties and democracy. It is the way to defend the means to create a viable future as citizens openly discuss different points of view. This is the conclusion of this lecture