Liberty Revealed

Welcome back to another episode of Liberty Revealed, the show dedicated to revealing personal liberty to all who listen. I am your host, Mike Mahony, and today I want to talk to you about censorship.What exactly is censorship? Defining this term properly will help you decide if it is ever a good thing. Censorship is the coercive silencing of dissenting views by political authorities generally in order to protect an official orthodoxy or to prevent the spread of ideas not authorized by the powers that be. As Alberto Manguel writes in A History of Reading, censorship “is the corollary of all power, and the history of reading is lit by a seemingly endless line of censors’ bonfires.”It should be noted that censorship has been and continues to be a common feature of oppressive regimes. John Milton, whose Areopagitica (written in protest of the censorship of his writings on divorce) remains the most eloquent defense of the free press written in English, provided a history of censorship from 411 B.C., when the works