Censorship! Censorship?

Censorship! It’s a pretty common complaint from the Reactionaries whenever the rest of us point out that they’ve gone too far with their slurs, their spurious allegations, their lies, and then take the only action we can in the blogosphere, which is to delete the link to the offending blog. Censorship? I’ve got news for you, my Reactionary friends, that’s not censorship.

The case at hand is that a couple of Reactionary blogs in Virginia have tried to smear “The Left” as being somehow responsible for the actions of the deranged VT gunman Cho Seung-hui. No evidence is cited for these claims, but that never stops the Reactionaries. Other bloggers, both conservative and progressive, cried foul and some deleted links to the offending blogs. I would have done the same if I’d had links to them in the first place, but I don’t. Other Reactionary blogs, then, including some out here in the Shenandoah Valley, the SWAC Reactionaries, rose to the defense of their Right-wing comrades and not only claimed censorship, but also asserted the same baseless claims that Cho was a “liberal” with the clear inference that that’s why he did what he did.

Lets look at this. Was there censorship involved? First, “to censor” means to examine and expurgate. “To expurgate” means to remove erroneous, vulgar, obscene, or otherwise objectionable material before publication. That didn’t happen. The Reactionary blogs still exist, they’re still publishing the same trash they did. Nothing was removed from them. No censorship. Is removing a link to another blog a form of censorship? No. Am I entitled to have links to my blog on every other blog? No.

As for the supposed links between Cho and “The Left,” that claim would be irrelevent even if it weren't ridiculous. Cho was clearly disturbed, deeply so. And if you read the manifesto and listen to the audio he delivered to NBC, you’ll hear no political motivation for what he did. His motives were twisted and personal. But that won’t stop the Reactionaries from continuing their slander. One blogger says:

“After all, this rhetoric---anti-rich, anti-president, anti-, anti-, .... is the same spew you hear on most liberal blogs--especially the Daily Kos. when you start using the F-word in your comments, posts, web came videos...you take away from yourself.
What it boils down too, is if this dude ever went into the ballot box, he wasn't voting the conservative ticket....”

His conclusions are irrational nonsense. I saw nothing “anti-president” in what I read. There was a reference to Bush, but it wasn’t anti-Bush. You don’t “hear” “anti-rich” rhetoric on “liberal blogs,” or at least I’ve never seen any. Arguing that there is an unequal burden sharing in this country is not anti-rich, it's pointing out the truth. And the claim about the “F-word” is just plain stupid. Conservatives don’t use the “F-word”? Nonsense again, with Dick Cheney’s famous temper tantrum being Exhibit A. And so this particular irrational Reactionary concludes that Cho “wasn’t voting the conservative ticket”—i.e., he must be a liberal. Ridiculous, baseless nonsense. With no effort at all I could construct exactly the opposite argument from the same information: he saw himself as a Christian martyr, doing God’s work to punish the hedonists. That sounds like a Right-winger to me. He was pretty handy with his guns, maybe he was an NRA member—again, sounds like a Right-winger. He had a military-style haircut and dressed in a makeshift uniform. Right-winger. He’s from a country that until recently was dominated by Right-wing military regimes, so he must be a Right-winger too. And on and on.

And none of it matters. Cho Seung-hui was deranged. He was a mentally ill mass-murderer. For Reactionary bloggers to try to make the case that he had political motivations and that somehow “The Left” was responsible for his actions is just sick. It's probably too much to ask for, but they should be ashamed of themselves.