Church push back against dictatorship style government
Recent statements by Prime Minister Andrew Holness to clamp down on mis-information and dis-information has caught the attention of some in the Christian community who believe it will help to create a totalitarian state where only the government determines what is true.
Holness warned last Saturday during a Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) youth conference, that legal actions will be explored in dealing with those who spread fake news. He said other governments have taken action against social media platform operators and Jamaica intends to do likewise.
“There are societies that we look on them and say, ‘These societies are the beacon of freedom’ and those societies have recognised the dangers of allowing this kind of unregulated free flow of misinformation to reign. In countries like Canada for example, even the United States, they have taken steps through their senate, through their congress, through their parliament, to call in the social media companies and said, ‘Listen, we see where your social media platforms have tried to influence our elections. You have to moderate’, because they realise it is creating a problem,” Holness said.
“It is an accelerant for conspiracies. It is being used to mislead and misinform, so I am saying to you the young people… you must use it wisely. You must use it with discernment. Not everything that is posted is true,” he said.
But chairman of the Jamaica Coalition for a Healthy Society, Dr Wayne West believes Jamaicans should be concerned about the Prime Minister’s recent pronouncements as it will impact democracy.
“There was a place called the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union was a totalitarian state whereby you couldn’t speak against what the authority say. This is just another backdoor to totalitarianism. They want to be able to say what is not true, and they don’t want anybody to counter by presenting the truth and they are calling it mis-information and dis-information,” he told the Freedom Come Rain newspaper.
“This is totalitarianism, we reject it out of hand, we are not communist, we are still a democracy and Jamaicans must fight to keep their democracy,” said Dr West ahead of the JCHS briefing with church leaders on current events last Tuesday.
Dr West said there is a global movement to silence citizens. Several of the church leaders shared their experiences and perspectives of what is happening in global societies where speaking against the LGBTQ agenda for example is considered hate speech. The truth about the Biblical view of gender is also increasingly being suppressed.
On June 24, two days following Holness’s announcement, the United Nation launched several recommendations for urgent action to curb harm from the spread of mis and dis-information and hate speech. The United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres noted that the world must respond to the harm caused by the spread of online hate and lies, while robustly upholding human rights.
“Misinformation, disinformation, hate speech and other risks to the information ecosystem are fueling conflict, threatening democracy and human rights, and undermining public health and climate action. Their proliferation is now being supercharged by the rapid rise of readily available Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, increasing the threat to groups often targeted in information spaces, including children,” the UN said.
Dr West says the global move towards censoring information is about power to a great extent.
“What it means is that the authorities want to control the narratives, and not have anybody give a perspective that is different from theirs and if you just look for example at the COVID-19 pandemic, we were told that the vaccines were safe and effective, when the fact of the matter is that they were neither safe nor effective,” he said.
Holness along with Health Minister Dr Christopher Tufton went across the island during the outbreak of COVID-19 to encourage persons to take the vaccine. Citizens were assured that it was safe to take based on the assessment of the World Health Organisation, a UN body. Those who spoke out against the vaccine internationally were muzzled and were labeled anti-vaxxers. In Jamaica, several persons had lost their jobs because of their refusal to take the vaccine. However, vaccine maker Astrazeneca has confessed that its vaccines do cause potentially fatal blood clots in some cases. The vaccine maker has been sued by several families, following the sudden deaths of love ones.
“There was a judge in America call judge Anthony Kennedy. He said that the remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true. If anybody is saying something that is false, you must say what is true. That is the ordinary recourse in a democracy. It is not to shut down speech, that is totalitarianism,” Dr West said.
The Prime Minister has been accused of being a dictator on multiple occasions. The accusation has been made by other politicians, entertainers and ordinary citizens. It has been fueled by the continued implementation of several states of emergencies islandwide and the arrest of those who spoke negatively against him during the COVID-19 pandemic when social restrictions were put in place. The Prime Minister has stated that he finds the inference offensive.