In this article I will show you what communism did to millions of people and how censorship worked there. And I will describe three solutions how people were dealing with it. These same solutions can apply to any Crypto youtuber, whose channel got banned.
First of all, communism started in Russia, on November 7th, 1918. A lot of angry Russians decided to overthrow zar. Lenin started this movement. Since then a lot of censorship spread all over the Soviet Union. You can watch a lot of drama movies about histories from German concentration camps during WW2 but did you know that Russians actually invented them in 1920’s?
Did you know that Stalin – killed more people than Hitler himself? He killed between 20-60 million people, these are estimates, the people don’t still know the real number.
Now, I could continue about Russia but I will move to my homeland which I know better than Russia which is Czech Republic. Before 1992, we used to be Czechoslovakia and we split in two countries: Czechia and Slovakia peacefully.
Before WW2, Czechoslovakia was a democratic country that finished in 1938 after German occupation. After Russians came and released our country from Nazis, a lot of people voted for popular communist party. It doesn’t matter that they were majority, they didn’t know what they were doing but in fact it didn’t matter that much because the world has already been divided between West and East at Yalta’s conference where Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill met.
The communist dictatorship started in Czechoslovakia in 1948 and ended 41 years later in 1989. There were 2 hard dictatorwaves: one from 1948 to 1950’. In this part of communism a lot of people were sent to prisons or to concentration camps. There was also a monetary reform in 1950’s The communist government approved a reform where everybody who had 100 crowns, woke up the other day with only 2. So everybody lost 96% of their wealth just overnight. My grandfather who was a big farmer from over 2 million crowns he got only 40,000. It was really fucked up. (sorry there is no better word for this).
And the second was after Soviet invasion which took place on August 22nd, 1968.
At the beginning of 1968, there were communist leaders in Czechoslovakia who wanted socialism with human face that meant something like free socialism which has gained a lot of popular support back then. Leonid Brezhnev hated that idea and sent soviet army to stop that movement with other communist countries.
Now I will analyze the moment when Russian soldiers started to occupy the territory:
- Some people believed that this would get solved and the armies would leave in few days or weeks. It was a mistake, these guys stayed there for 22 years, until we negotiated in 1990 their removal.
If you believed so, you basically decided to stay there. So most of them did.
- There were second group of smarter people. They just didn’t like it. And almost a quarter of million of people decided to emigrate. They went to Austria and Germany. My aunt decided to go there and they were placed into temporary refugee camps. Then they were offered different options where to go: Germany, Austria, US, Canada, Australia, UK, France and Switzerland.
So my aunt decided to go to the city of freedom. Which one? New York City of course.
- There were people who decided to protest against it. There was one student Jan Palach, a very brave man, who publicly burned himself at a massive protest against Soviet occupation. It was in 1969.
Now if you summarize it, these were basically three solutions:
To stay and get used to the new regime and censorship
To walk away
To protest
I was born until 1976. I was 13 when communism fell apart in my country but I still remember how it was:
You couldn’t travel to capitalist countries without government permission. Most people were denied.
The newspapers were full of information only approved by communist party.
It was a rule of that dictatorship that no one could publicly criticize the government or the communist party. And if you decided to do so, you had to do it out of your house or apartment because there was a lot of secret police, mingled among the population. Around 5% of the population were servants of this police. If you were a parent you couldn’t criticize the government not even in front of your kids because you would run in the danger that the kids might have told to their teachers or adults. But believe it or not, kids weren’t stupid, they knew better than the adults.
Even the letters we were receiving from our aunt, were opened and censored.
My father went to US in 1977, he liked it there a lot. He met secretly my aunt, which was prohibited. He actually didn’t want to come back because he liked more America than communism but he did it just because of us. But he was very unhappy after he came back because it’s different to live in a freedom or in a communism.
After he came back, he wrote 8 pages which he perfectly memorized and he was interviewed around 5 times by secret police service. He couldn’t make any mistake. And he managed to do so.
So as you see all the communist regime was based on censorship, fear, torture, persecution and I was lucky that I lived only 13 years of it because my grandparents or parents lived most of their life in it.
What I have personally noticed in many countries, even in western countries is that there has been a lot of censorship in the last decade.
Now I described this situation because of the Youtube censorhip on crypto channels where a lot of crypto youtubers dedicate their life to spread information about cryptocurrency; who just dare to inform about the best investment of our times – Bitcoin and share that information and who inform us on every day basis about new crypto inventions. In my personal opinion they just inform and most of them they don’t even try to sell anything dangerous. I saw some of the latest videos where a lot of them have been accused that they are doing something dangerous or harmful.
This statement just reminded me the letter that my aunt grandmother received from the communist party, that her daughter has been considered as a traitor of the nation and therefore if she came back she would get a death penalty. But nobody was killed, because back then she was in the city of freedom – New York City.
Some people probably won’t like what I have written because of these comparisons. But for me censorship is equal to fear, persecution, loss of liberty or freedom, submission to dictatorship spheres of power and massive brain wash.
Now what are the solutions for the people who lost their videos or channels?
Stay on Youtube. You will eventually stay there, trying to transmit the message to some more people but under the risk that your channel will be shut down.
Protest against it. You won’t agree with it, and you will make your voice to be heard.
Walk away. If you have just seen that Chris Dunn’s channels, Chico’s channel and many others have been banned, you will move to the crypto social media where there is no censorship such as Uptrennd, Dtube, Library, Steemleo, Steemit, Publish0x and any others.
What I personally like about all of them is that even if we may have different opinions, at least on Uptrennd we respect each other point of views, we show our preference by upvote or downvote, comments. But we don’t censor anyone. Nobody is obligated to do, to agree with something if he doesn’t want to.
I personally wouldn’t engage to spread my posts over there because if I see these kind of censorship movements (whoever does it) they will likely continue, then just posting on Youtube has completely lost all the sense for me. Eventually they will get it there because it would imply mass outflow of Youtubers to other social media; remember it’s a capitalism and money talks.
I am also aware that the loss of these channels, restrictions are harming economies of many crypto tubers but there is something I’ve learned from soviet invasion, if you just see that the Russian army got there, you cannot be so naïve thinking that it would get fixed soon because it probably won’t.
It’s a change and all of us can get used to new ways of communication in this decentralized crypto social media.