OLBERMANN: And finally tonight, as promised,
a special comment about free speech, failed
speakers and the delusions of grandeur.
This is a serious, long-term war, the man
at the podium cried, and it will inevitably
lead to us to want to know what is said in
every suspect place in the country.
Some in the audience must have thought they
were hearing an arsonist give the keynote
address at a convention of firefighters.
This was the annual Lobe (ph) First Amendment
Dinner in Manchester, New Hampshire, a public
cherishing of freedom of speech in the state
with the two fisted motto, live free or die.
And the arsonist at the microphone, the former
Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, was insisting
that we must attach an on/off button to free
speech.
He offered the time-tested excuse, trotted
out by our demagogues since even before the
republic was founded, widespread death of
Americans, in America, possibly at the hands
of Americans, but updated now to include terrorists
using the Internet for recruitment and as
a result, quote, losing a city.
The colonial English defended their oppression
with words like those and so did the slave
states and so did the policeman who shot strikers
and so did Lindbergh's America first crowd,
and so did those who interned Japanese Americans
and so did those behind the Red Scare and
so did Nixon's plumbers.
The genuine proportion of the threat is always
irrelevant.
The fear of the threat is exploited to create
becomes the only reality.
We will adopt rules of engagement that use
every technology we can find, Mr. Gingrich
continued, about terrorists, formerly communists,
formerly hippies, formerly fifth columnists,
formerly anarchists, formerly Red Coats, to
break up their capacity to use the Internet,
to break up their capacity to use free speech.
Mr. Gingrich, the British broke up our capacity
to use free speech in the 1970's.
The pro-slavery leaders broke up our capacity
to use free speech in the 1850's.
The FBI and the CIA broke up our capacity
to use free speech in the 1960's.
It is within those groups where you would
have found your kindred spirits, Mr. Gingrich,
those who had no faith in freedom, no faith
in this country and ultimately no faith even
in the strength of their own ideas to stand
up on their own legs without having the playing
field tilted entirely to their benefit.
How convenient it is that we are told just
today that the government has warned the Stock
Markets and U.S. banks that it has learned
of an al Qaeda threat to penetrate and destroy
their web sites.
That learning followed immediately by a statement
from Homeland Security that there is no corroboration
of the threat.
It will lead us to learn, Gingrich continued
in New Hampshire, how to close down every
website that is dangerous, and it will lead
us to a very severe approach to people who
advocate the killing of Americans and advocate
the use of nuclear and biological weapons.
That we have always had a very severe approach
to these people is insufficient for Mr. Gingrich's
end.
He wants to somehow ban the idea, even though
every one who has ever protested a movie or
a piece of music or a book has learned the
same lesson, try to suppress it and you only
validate it.
Make it illegal and you make it the subject
of curiosity.
Say it can not be said and it will instead
be screamed.
And on top of the thundering danger and his
eagerness to sell out freedom of speech, there
is a sadder sound still, the tinny crash of
a garbage can lid on a sidewalk.
Whatever dreams of Internet censorship float
like a miasma in Mr. Gingrich's personal swamp,
whatever hopes he has ever an iron firewall,
the simple fact is technically they won't
work.
As of tomorrow they will have been defeated
by a free computer download.
Mere hours after Gingrich's speech in New
Hampshire, the University of Toronto announced
it had come up with a program called Siphon
to liberate those in countries in which the
Internet is regulated, places like China and
Iran, where political ideas are so barren
and political leaders so desperate that they
put up computer firewalls to keep thought
and freedom out.
The Siphon device is a relay of sorts that
can surreptitiously link a computer user in
an imprisoned country with another computer
user in a free country.
The Chinese think their wall still works,
yet the ideas, good ideas, bad ideas, indifferent
ideas, pass through that wall any way, the
same way the Soviet block was defeated by
the images of western material bounty.
If your hopes of thought control can be defeated,
Mr. Gingrich, merely by one computer whiz
staying up an extra half an hour and devising
a new firewall hop, what is all this apocalyptic
hyperbole for?
I further think, you said in Manchester, we
should propose a Geneva Convention for fighting
terrorism, which makes very clear that those
who would fight outside the rules of law,
those who would use weapons of mass destruction,
and those who would target civilians are,
in fact, subject to a totally different set
of rules, that allow us to protect civilization
by defeating barbarism.
Well, Mr. Gingrich, what is more massively
destructive than trying to get us to give
you our freedom and what is someone seeking
to hamstring the first amendment doing if
not fighting outside the rules of law?
And what is the suppression of knowledge and
freedom if not barbarism?
The explanation, of course, is in one last
quote from Mr. Gingrich from New Hampshire
and another quote from him from last week,
I want to suggest to you, he said about these
Internet restrictions, that we right now should
be impaneling people to look seriously at
a level of supervision that we would never
dream of it weren't for the scale of the threat.
And who should those impaneled people be?
Funny I should ask, isn't it Mr. Gingrich?
I am not running for president, you told the
reporter from Fortune Magazine, I am seeking
to create a movement to win the future by
offering a series of solutions so compelling
that if the American people say I have to
be president, it will happen.
Newt Gingrich sees in terrorism not something
to be exterminated, but something to be exploited.
It is his golden opportunity, isn't it, rallying
a nation, you might say, to hysteria, to sweep
us up into the White House with powers that
will make martial law seem like anarchy.
That, of course, is from the original version
of the movie the Manchurian Candidate, the
chilling words of Angela Lansbury's character
as she first promises to sell her country
out to the Chinese and Russians, then reveals
she will double cross them and keep all the
power to herself, waving the flag every time
she subjugates another freedom.
Within the frame of our experience as a free
and freely argumentative people, it is almost
impossible to concede that there are those
among us who might approach the kind of animal
wildness of fiction, like the Manchurian Candidate,
those who would willingly transform our beloved
country into something false and terrible.
Who among us can look into our own histories,
or those of our ancestors, who struggled to
get here, or who struggled to get freedom
after they were forced here, and not tear
up when we read Frederick Douglas' words from
a century and a half ago, freedom must take
the day.
Who among us can look to our collective history
and not see it's turning points, like the
Civil War, like Watergate, like the Revolution
itself, in which the right idea defeated the
wrong idea on the battlefield that is the
marketplace of ideas.
But apparently there are some of us who can
not see that the only future for America is
one that cherishes the freedoms we won in
the past, an America in which we vanquish
bad ideas with better ideas, in which we fight
for liberty by having more liberty and not
less.
"I am seeking to create a movement to win
the future by offering a series of solutions
so compelling that if the American people
say I have to be president, it will happen?"
What a dark place your world must be, Mr.
Gingrich, where the way to save America is
to destroy America.
I will awaken every day of my life thankful
I am not with you in that dark place and I
will awaken every day of my life thankful
that you are entitled to tell me about it
and that you are entitled to show me what
an evil idea lurks there and what a cynical
mind, and that you are entitled to do all
that thanks to the very freedoms you seek
to suffocate.
Good night and good luck.
