Writes Mary O’Grady at the Wall Street Journal, (bold emphasis mine) [hat tip Mark Perry]
'There's a reason the people in Cuba don't have access to the Internet. It is because the government [couldn't] survive it."
That was Florida Sen. Marco Rubio last week at a Washington conference titled "Cuba Needs a (Technological) Revolution: How the Internet Can Thaw an Island Frozen in Time." The event was sponsored by Google Ideas, a for-profit venture of the giant Internet search enterprise, and the nonprofit Heritage Foundation. I was asked to kick off things with a Rubio interview. So I began by asking him what he makes of the Cuban military's reference last year to technology that allows young people to exchange thoughts digitally as "the permanent battlefield."
Mr. Rubio responded that it isn't communication with the outside world that the regime fears the most, but Cuban-to-Cuban chatter. "I think Raúl Castro clearly understands that his regime cannot survive a Cuban reality where individual Cubans can communicate [with] each other in an unfettered manner." He called "unfiltered access to the Internet and social media" Cuba's "best hope" of avoiding "a stagnated dictatorship" for "the next 50 years that would survive even the death of Raul and Fidel."
The internet or the information age isn’t just about connectivity though. Rather the age of the internet is about the knowledge revolution or democratization of knowledge through “geographically noncontiguous communication” as author Jeffrey Tucker recently described.
The information age brings about unfettered opportunities to learn or to expand one’s horizon of wisdom. Say for instance anyone who wants to access literatures from libraries around the world may try openlibrary.org.
How about basic materials for self learning or home schooling? You may also try the revolutionary Khan Academy.
The political power of despots and their socialists supporters principally derives from ignorance. This is why the public has been vulnerable to fear and to mind manipulation—via indoctrination and propaganda.
People hardly realize that conventional education, for instance, has been surreptitiously designed for the worship of the state. The internet brought me to this reality and made me an apostate to the religion of the state.
The internet essentially provides the platform for the unceasing struggle to attain civil and economic liberties, through the effective neutralization of political manipulations of the people’s minds.
The chief proponent and inspiration of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience, the great philosopher anarchist Étienne de La Boétie once wrote,
Obviously there is no need of fighting to overcome this single tyrant, for he is automatically defeated if the country refuses consent to its own enslavement: it is not necessary to deprive him of anything, but simply to give him nothing; there is no need that the country make an effort to do anything for itself provided it does nothing against itself. It is therefore the inhabitants themselves who permit, or, rather, bring about, their own subjection, since by ceasing to submit they would put an end to their servitude. A people enslaves itself,
cuts its own throat, when, having a choice between being vassals and being free men, it deserts its liberties and takes on the yoke, gives consent to its own misery, or, rather, apparently welcomes it. If it cost the people anything to recover its freedom
Thus enslavement and freedom is a matter of people’s choice. And the state of knowledge or ignorance by every individual in a society determines that choice.
The more the diffusion of knowledge in a society, the balance of power shifts towards individual sovereignty at the expense of political entities.
And that’s why welfare warfare based governments have been averse to the internet, and that’s why political authorities will continue to wage an all out war of control of the internet.
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