Letter to editor of The Citizen (26 October 2022)

We couldn’t but take note of two publications in The Citizen’s ‘World’ section of Oct 19, 2022.

One of them, the AFP-authored piece tells the readership of yet another ‘blatant human rights violation’ by Russia – undermining internet freedom, putting up obstacles to internet access and limits on content users consume, and thus driving a overall decline in internet freedom.

Notably, on the same page, just four centimetres of text away from this article, there was another piece about a book fair in Frankfurt, ‘the world’s biggest publishing event,’ which was to host Ukraine’s Zelensky as a speaker via video link. And as it has recently become very common in the West, Russian state institutions have been banned from attending the fair to give the floor to opponents of President Putin.

To paraphrase a joke from a beloved Soviet movie, it was an ‘authoritarian power’ which restricted freedom in the former case, while in the latter case it was a ‘respectful democratic country’ which did the same. Can’t you feel the difference between a ‘democratic’ censorship and an ‘authoritarian’ one?