Censorship... does it even work?

Language problems: Oh sheesh

This link represents an interesting intersection between my Ihum class on sex, pleasure, and culture; and this class on Language and Society. That intersection focuses on the question of censorship and freedom of expression between Europe and America. In Ihum the thesis has been put forward that America is a much more reserved culture that shuns explicit content from its daily life relative to Europe which has nude beaches, naked statues everywhere, and what would be considered explicit content on regular cable television. This brief article about a woman who was screaming profanities while her toilet overflowed got me thinking about whether what was true in Ihum would be true for language too. Does America curtail language in ways other countries don't? My immediate reaction would be to note that there are many comparisons one could make that emphasize the freedom of expression in America, and do so with good reason. Freedom of speech, expression, and the press, while subjected to many tests over the course of American history, are still central concepts in American ideology and are essentially written into the central ideological document, The Constitution.

However, are there other ways that the United States curtails the use of language, or of certain language, and what really is the intention behind that curtailment? Are we subjected to political manipulation of language in order to keep us, the American public, deluded as in George Orwell's Animal Farm? Are there language-related trends that we don't consciously create, but exist nonetheless like condensation symbols from Murray Edelman's Symbolic Uses of Politics. Are there vast government conspiracies to control the way we think and behave? As to the last question, it wouldn't be a very good conspiracy if I'd heard about it, but I can't really be sure one way or the other...

This Article from CNN makes it clear that, at least relative to China, the US is a marketplace very open to ideas. In fact, we're so open about our ideas, and so firm in our belief that that's how things should be that we're trying to circumvent the Chinese government to provide the Chinese people with access to forbidden websites.

Not incredibly surprisingly, we didn't make the list of the ten most censored countries, (North Korea, Burma, Turkmenistan, Equatorial Guinea, Libya, Eritrea, Cuba, Uzbekistan, Syria, and Belarus). However, in the same article , Rue Freeman argues that the American obsession with "balance," or as he puts it "the truth must be watered down by equal space afforded the lies," then his conclusion that "we are living in a country where censorship is rife and growing" is certainly arguable.

But more applicably, what are the ramifications of language censorship on thought? If there are no words, as in 1984 by George Orwell, for negative things, for dissent, the question arises whether or not you block out those feelings or just the ability to express those feelings, and is there much of a difference? I don't believe it would block out feelings of dissent and rebellion. Think about it, one hears all the time about the inability to express a feeling or emotion in words, whether it be love or hatred that is "beyond words." So in this hypothetical society, negative feelings would still exist, but would the government have succeeded in ridding themselves of rebellion forever? I think they wouldn't. All around the world people have evolved thousands of different languages, and those languages are in constant flux and change. No matter how heroic the government's efforts, I don't think they could ever entirely squash human communication about any given topic unless every citizen were subject to solitary confinement. As long as two humans with working cognitive and sensory faculties are together, they will find a way to communicate about anything.