Honor the attempt, our small battles against censorship

About the book I have recently turned forty years old, and despite myself, I belong to those who look back more than they look forward. With frequent looking back, I have become aware of the stains of emptiness in our social memory and our political archive; of the truncated narratives and the flat stories, and of the manifestations of lazy binary thinking, where blatant alignments trample every day on the old face of the truth, and where regression into a climate of absolute certainties cuts off the way every day for those who dare to know. It is a world of creation of surveillance, which we often dared to reject on rights or political grounds, but we did not come close enough to its social and moral impact, nor did we speak enough about the distortions that afflict its nurturing society, otherwise how did most of us start to look at the world through the eyes of the censor and judge by its logic? In a society where surveillance exceeds its physical presence as an administrative apparatus, to form a dominant and oppressive culture in all details, it is difficult for a person to adopt a stance based on clear and named facts, to test or discover their convictions, and as Henry Steel Comager said: “Surveillance creates a society that cannot be mature,” and this is what we have become… a society of eternal minors; beings stuck in the “Limbus” of civil childhood, their right to transform into fully grown citizens confiscated, and condemned to live outside the laws of influence and impact of civilization, and thus outside history. Author's name: Buthaina Al Essa Number of pages: 152