Australia’s Ministry of Truth

Book Burning, but make it Digital

This is really annoying, because I don't have any sort of answer or solution to an extremely big problem, an incredibly huge issue. I hate not having a solution, I hate not knowing what to do with something that is so obviously wrong, and I hate that we keep doing this every single time history gives us another warning.

A quick recap

In the last couple of days (and yes, this is happening right now as I’m writing it), the eSafety Commissioner has decided that she has the power to censor video content on the internet that goes against “Australia’s interests.” Video content. As in, the actual footage of the poor Ukrainian woman Iryna Zarutska being murdered in cold blood. God bless her.

It’s not even the first time she’s tried this, either; she must have a direct line to Musk’s servers or something, because last year (2024), she went after the church stabbing in Sydney, and that whole thing failed in court. Failed. But here we are again.

My personal problem

Now the problem I face in this current moment is a big one, personally. I’m extremely against censorship. Like violently allergic to it. I understand some things should be hidden, secrets should be kept, but active censorship of public information is on the very edge of totalitarian dictatorship, no matter what that content is. I understand terrorism, I understand mental health, I understand the concept of “protecting the public,” but when the solution to evil becomes deleting evidence of it, we are no longer protecting people; we are managing perception. Book burning used to be something fascists did with fire; now we do it with moderation tools and a cheerful blue “content removed for safety” banner. Digital book burning yields the same outcome, just fewer ashes.

How do we draw the line?

Now that’s where it gets tricky, because how do you draw a line here? Rape videos? Obviously not. Anything involving children? Hell no. But public videos of murder, yes, it’s horrific, yes, it’s traumatic, but it’s also the truth. It’s the reality of the world we built. We used to have war photographers who took pictures of the front lines, and journalists who risked their lives to show us what humanity was capable of when the masks came off. But now, the moment those images hit the internet in 4K, someone decides it’s “too unsafe for public viewing.” What changed? Did we get more moral or just more fragile?

I get it, though. I get how bad it can be for the mind, I get the doomscrolling, the trauma, the anxiety that comes from seeing too much. But that’s also the world we live in; we can choose to look or not look. I’d rather not see someone assassinated on X, but that doesn’t mean I want a government deciding that none of us can. We are supposed to have free will. We are supposed to be capable of making that choice ourselves.

And I understand why they try to draw that line; they probably think it’s for the greater good, protecting citizens from a world that’s already out of control, but going too far makes that an impossible task, because there is no clean line. You can’t just declare a boundary on morality and expect it to hold. It all leaks through anyway. The internet routes around control. Censor it here, and it pops up somewhere else. You can’t delete horror; you can only move it. And the more you ban, the more interesting it becomes. Nothing creates a black market faster than censorship. That’s the irony of it all, you end up romanticising the very thing you’re trying to stop. Book burning, but in the age of VPNs and Reddit threads.

Where do I even sit?

And here’s the other thing that drives me insane. I don’t even know where this sits politically anymore. I don’t want to sound far right, but apparently, anti-censorship now lives on that side of the doughnut. It’s funny, really, because free speech used to belong to the old left; defending dissenting voices, whistleblowers, journalists, minorities, activists, all of which I still agree with, making sure there is accountability (I just don’t agree with the violence).

The right used to be the one pushing for control, moral panic, and censorship in the name of decency. Now it’s flipped; the progressive left are the ones calling for regulation, moderation, and “safety.” I understand; misinformation is a real and dangerous phenomenon.

Both sides call it protection. Both sides call it virtue. But both are just the first step toward authoritarianism.

The spectrum isn’t a line anymore; it’s a cursed doughnut where the extremes meet, wave at each other, and both somehow agree that free speech is dangerous. I don’t even know where I sit anymore. Probably somewhere in the messy centre, anti-authoritarian, pro-reality, just begging that we don’t turn this country I love into a bureaucratic dictatorship dressed up as compassion.

Time to get added to an ASIO watch list.

And speaking of forbidden things, let’s talk about Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching. A banned book in Australia. A far-left eco-terrorism manual written by Dave Foreman. Do I agree with it? No. It’s basically a guide to vandalism and sabotage. Do I agree with banning it? Also no. Because what’s the point? It’s a book. It’s literally the second result on Google. Anyone who wants to find it will. And here’s the great irony: the act of banning it makes it even more appealing. Tell humans, “You can’t have this,” and watch them sprint to get it. We don’t stop danger by hiding it; we just create curiosity. Curiosity doesn’t care about your regulation.

The Christian viewpoint

Here’s the part that matters most, though: God gave us free will. Not government-approved safety. He gave us this world to look after, not to sterilise beyond recognition. He gave us the ability to discern, to make choices, to see both good and evil and choose which path to walk. He didn’t build us to be spoon-fed a filtered version of reality. We live in a broken, sin-filled world, yes, but that doesn’t mean we pretend it’s clean. If anything, that’s when truth matters most. God’s creation is beautiful and horrifying all at once, but it’s real, and that’s why it’s worth saving. Censorship doesn’t make the world less sinful; it just makes sin easier to ignore.

There is no winning

So why are we trying to hide the real world? Why are we letting governments and corporations decide what level of horror is “acceptable”? We can’t legislate morality. We can’t algorithmically cleanse evil. Evil isn’t in the video; it’s in us. Pretending otherwise is just vanity. Deleting videos doesn’t change hearts. You can’t rewrite reality with a takedown notice. And yet we keep trying, over and over again, as if the solution to human cruelty is better moderation guidelines. It’s delusional.

And that’s the problem, isn’t it? I don’t have a solution. I’ll still say no to censorship because I don’t believe in burning books, but somehow that means I’m the one on the wrong side now. There’s no winning here. No right answer. No clean ideology to cling to. Just the messy truth that freedom always costs something; sometimes sanity, sometimes safety. But it’s still worth more than the illusion of control.

We deserve the fundamental right to privacy. We deserve the right to speak, even if it offends. We deserve the right to be wrong, to change, to learn. We don’t need governments to protect us from information; we need governments to trust that we’re capable of handling it. Because the moment we start hiding from the real world, we stop being part of it. We stop learning. We stop growing.

Perhaps the point of freedom isn’t comfort, but rather courage. Maybe the point of truth isn’t safety, it’s salvation. Because if we start burning books and scrubbing evidence of evil, we don’t become better, we just become blind. And a blind society walking confidently in the dark is far more dangerous than one with its eyes open to the horror.

So no, I don’t have the answer. I just know that hiding from the truth has never made anyone safer. It just makes the next tragedy a surprise. And I don’t think God made us to live in a padded digital room pretending everything’s fine. We’re supposed to see, to feel, to wrestle with the mess, and to build something better out of it.

Because if we blindfold ourselves in the name of safety, we’re not protecting humanity, we’re just surrendering it.