Force cannot silence thinking minds

Ban on Twitter in Turkey came to me as a real surprise. Things were still blurry at the time of writing this article, while some Turkish Twitter users are confirming that they are able to access the service using their mobile devices, others are claiming that reaching Twitter website is no longer possible. A message appears whenever someone is trying to reach the website citing court orders to justify the restriction. Of course, the message ends with the well-known phrase “… a protection measure.”
This phrase has been able to survive centuries of our history on earth, passing from one generation to another, always used to justify any attack on ideas, and always failing to stop those ideas from finding their way to people.
Whether good or bad, virtuous or evil, building barricades around ideas has always failed to contain them. What is truly surprising is that there are those who still believe that it might actually work.
When Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon on him) started to preach the teachings of Islam, his own people started to fight those new ideas using intimidation and blockage tactics. With each and every idea he was trying to deliver, they implanted fear, in each and every location he chose to preach, they blocked and interrupted. The result is never more obvious, the ideas he was trying to deliver passed on and lived through generations, and those trying to obstruct them, simply, lost.
In 1559, Pope Paul IV gave instructions to issue the first Index of Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Prohibited Books) which is a list of books and papers that should be banned and stopped from reaching the people because of their heretical or ideologically unsuitable contents in the eyes of the church. Enthusiasts took such a list as a justification to burn books and attack authors, of whom there is the famous Galileo in 1633, just because of their “different” ideas. Again, those ideas survived the flames of hatred and fires; they won, and those defying them, lost.
Classical novels and biographies were banned throughout history and for different reasons. The classical story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, was banned in China up to 1931 because someone in a position of power believed that in the story animals were depicted in the same level of complexity as human beings! That would lead children to regard human beings on the same level as they regard animals, and that would be disastrous! Also, there were calls to ban “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” the extraordinary human rights activist, on the basis that the book was “anti-white” and can be used as a “how-to-manual” for crimes. “Gone with the Wind” of Margret Mitchell, and “The Great Gatsby” of F. S. Fitzgerald were also faced by similar calls of ban because they got too close to their attackers’ lives, they pulled the cover of the unspoken, fetched suppressed fears and desires, and provided a deeper look into societies and people living in those societies. And once again, those works of art won and survived and turned into classics.
The conclusion does not even need to be emphasized; no one throughout history has ever been able to combat ideas, to fight wondering minds using banning and blocking as a weapon. It is like ideas are made of a heavenly substance that defies containment; an energy of sort, that is resistant to pressure and oppression. However, the only thing that is able to face an idea is … another idea!
The only way to color an idea with virtue or evil, with right or wrong, with fact or sorcery, is to face it with another idea. Being open, transparent, and critical is the only way a certain idea can be contained and counterattacked. With ideas … it is the fight of minds, not power and politics.

@ smaldosari