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An English nannyExpatriate Afrikaners living in the pleasant and prosperous southern English counties of Sussex and Hampshire are complaining about censorship on the internet. (If by any chance you read Afrikaans see here.) One young man tried to access various SA web-sites from his school in Hampshire, and then again from a library. But the response was a large STOP sign and below it the text:-
The words “restricted on the grounds of hate/prejudice” also appeared together with the tempting invitation, “if you have a question regarding our policy, please e-mail us at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)”
Accordingly, when an explanation was sought at the school the answer was that such things are decided not by school staff, but at a higher level. So I did some modest research to try to get a bit nearer the truth. A visit to the Hantsweb site of Hampshire County Council reveals the usual search facility. All you have to do is type in Edict and up come over seven pages of links. Most are concerned with now defunct issues of school software procurement. But one can learn that EdICTNet is:-
The new schools network has been given the name, The Hampshire Swan. Its services include:-
A visit to the website of Hampshire County Council’s software contractor, Synetrix provides a little more information. The page devoted to the Hampshire County Council contract leads to another on content management, and here we find the curious phrase: “a shibboleth road map”. More googling and we cross the Atlantic to learn that:-
So Hampshire County Council has upgraded its schools software to include this powerful identity management application, described by the British Educational Supplies Association as a policing system. But it is much more than that. And it turns out that Shibboleth is too costly and too important to be the preserve of a mere local authority. A search for Shibboleth at the website for The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, the “UK agency which supports all four UK education departments in their strategic ICT developments”, provides more pages of links, and suddenly we are looking at a system to be rolled out nationally and go live in September 2006. How all this fits together would take a systems specialist to determine. I am certainly not such a specialist, as you can see – just a very, very amateurish researcher. But, plainly, it does not look good if a complex system which is intended to deliver secure educational data into schools has already been abused for narrow political purposes. The following SA web-sites could not be accessed by my Afrikaner friends:- Praag: an organisation that wants autonomy for the Afrikaners, but that explicitly states that it rejects violence and armed struggle as a method to attain that goal. Mr. Dan Roodt is Praag’s main thinker and also its webmaster. To make things clear, I give you the link to an opinion piece he wrote recently in the major South African quality newspaper, Mail & Guardian. In the picture you see is a man waving the orange, blue, white Afrikaner independence flag, the so-called prince-flag from the 16th century Dutch/Flemish insurgency against the Spanish. Boerevryheid - The Majuba declaration: They want independence for the Afrikaners by 2010. They already sent the declaration to, among others, Nelson Mandela and president Mbeki (and they answered … but not in the they hoped-for way). Orania: a peaceful Afrikaner community of 600 families who bought a village of their own. Their radio station has recently been confiscated by the police under some official pretext. But in fact it was because they dare to broadcast in Afrikaans only - deeply suspect in the new South Africa. The Freedom Front (in English): a peaceful and moderate Afrikaner party with seats in the South African parliament. Somewhere in Britain somebody has drawn up the grounds for policing-out sites that could be harmful to children. No one disputes that there is no shortage of websites on the internet that should never be downloaded to a school computer. Because there are hate speech laws an official is duty-bound also to take a view on political sites. The law against hate, while it exists, must be obeyed. But there is not yet “Radical” speech legislation in Britain, which would be a different offence, if it existed, from hate speech or even prejudice. Even notwithstanding the fact that non-violent and moderate SA web-sites don’t fit any of these definitions, still the bureaucrats have no legal justification for extending the narrow category of hate speech via prejudice into radicalism. In effect, they are creating a special category of banned website - one they personally do not like. It is plain censorship, and is surely itself contaminated with “hate and prejudice”. Posted by Johan Van Vlaams on Wednesday, December 7, 2005 at 08:16 PM in Education Comments:2
Posted by The other guy on December 07, 2005, 10:55 PM | # “Government pays for both schools and libraries” And where does the government get the money that it pays for both schools and libraries? 3
Posted by Matra on December 07, 2005, 11:14 PM | #
That’s all well and good, but if it were black or Muslim sites do you think their parents would be reasonable and agree that the principle was more important than their kids getting access to the sites? Given the reported anti-European, anti-Christian bias in British state schools adhering to such lofty principles seems to put our side at a considerable disadvantage. 4
Posted by ben tillman on December 07, 2005, 11:38 PM | # Sorry chaps but I’m on the other side on this one. Government pays for both schools and libraries, and so has a right to censor internet material…. You’re articulating the principle of property, which is all well and good, unless the government’s “ownership” is illegitimate. Government’s “ownership” is legitimate only insofar as it is coextensive with the people’s ownership. Do the people have control over the government? Is such censorship what they want? And I do not mean that in a OMOV sense. 5
Posted by onetwothree on December 07, 2005, 11:45 PM | # It’s usually easy to get around such things: http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:www.praag.co.za/+&hl=en Just copy and paste the URL you want after cache: 6
Posted by Guessedworker on December 08, 2005, 03:31 AM | # Martin, Johan is not disputing the pornography issue. The point remains, though, that somebody has drawn up the political “attributes” for the Hampshire EdICTNet system, which I guess is shibboleth by another name, and effectively censored a strand of political thought lest students enncounter it. So which other sites of the political right cannot be accessed in Hampshire - and, by September ‘06 in the rest of the country? Amren and VDare? The BNP? Us? GNXP, even? 7
Posted by DA Admin on December 08, 2005, 06:46 AM | # “Government pays for both schools and libraries, and so has a right to censor internet material accessed from them in the same way it chooses which school books and library books to buy.” I must disagree with Martin Hutchinson. Whether government pays for the service or not is irrellevant, since they are in effect only using the tax payers’ money to do so. Government also have the responsibility to act in a way that does not limit the freedom of citizens (unless it is in the cause of national protection). These sites do not constitute a threat to national security nor to the moral fabric of society. So, in effect, the government is treading on our right to freedom of access to information. (And yes, I studied information ethics, it does exist). 8
Posted by john on December 08, 2005, 08:29 AM | # I had a similar problem at a library in Gloucester. I couldn’t access Matts, Irvings or the yaggs:http://home.ddc.net/ygg/new/clips.htm 9
Posted by Rebel on December 08, 2005, 08:34 AM | # Just a quick thank you to Johan Van Vlaams for this post. From a South African 10
Posted by Gawie Snyman on December 10, 2005, 07:30 PM | # Just to shed some further light on the issue - Nobody would complain if these institutions won’t allow access to any hate-related or racist websites. But the sites mentioned, aren’t like that at all! It all boils down to the British view that Boers are inherently racis and that all Afrikaner cultural or language movements must in essence be racist! Hogwash!!! 11
Posted by Marcel Bas on September 12, 2006, 01:20 PM | # Hi all, Baie dankie, Johan. This really surprises me. We obviously have a lot of work to do in order to rid the international community of prejudices against Afrikaners. I’m Dutch and whenever I go to South Africa I feel very proud when people treat me as if I’m Afrikaans. Playing Afrikaans music for me, addressing me in Afrikaans, etc. I happen to listen to Afrikaans radio stations and I read Afrikaans newspapers and books there. I strongly believe that being Dutch entails a special bond with the Afrikaans community. After all, our nations are closely related. But I would like to know if the Orania radio station was actually banned because it only broadcast in Afrikaans. How can that be? Doesn’t the official state-controlled SABC have an Afrikaans-only radiostation: RSG? Or is the South African one-party state a control freak? After all, of all traditionally Afrikaner radio stations only Radio Pretoria is allowed to continue its broadcasts, as long as it allows itself to be subject to state censorship. Best regards, Marcel Bas. 12
Posted by Orion Blue on January 11, 2007, 03:48 PM | # “Hate” speech and “Radical” speech are in the eye of the beholder in this instance. I suspect there are at least two reasons for this heavy-handed censorship. The first reason is that the government is using its control of education and knowledge infrastructure for party political, ideological advantage. It wants to decided what is considered too radical for public consumption, whilst imposing an anti-white indoctrination programme through its control of the BBC and the core content of the school curriculum. The second reason is that the British press tends to suppress most if not all news that reflects badly on South Africa’s current regime. If the truth got out about the fact that South Africa is going down the plug-hole, while people deserving of refugee status are being passed over (effectively punished for Apartheid), in favour of dubious claimants from the Third World, then people might start to ask questions. A possible third point is that the events in South Africa flatly contradict the blandishments and pablum that passes for ‘political discourse’ in the dominant press, so has to be suppressed “for the public good”. The final, possible fourth reason, is that the powers that be may not want us to see too much of the end-game before all plans have come to fruition. The asinine, smug self-congratulation of our political ‘elites’ will appear even more hollow when confronted with the evidence of Zimbabwe and South Africa. Next entry: Illegals not such a bad lot Previous entry: David Cameron |
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Posted by Martin Hutchinson on December 07, 2005, 09:32 PM | #
Sorry chaps but I’m on the other side on this one. Government pays for both schools and libraries, and so has a right to censor internet material accessed from them in the same way it chooses which school books and library books to buy. presumably you can’t access porn from your local public library either. The only problem would come if your private UK ISP were froced to censor your access, as happens in China, but I assume that is not (yet?) happening in the UK.
This could be a slippery slope, but the distinction between access that they own and access that they don’t seems pretty legally clear.
Theoretically one objects to state education and state library provision; in practice I’m in favour of vouchers for education and have to say I would close the public library only after I had closed or privatised every other local government service.