I mentioned I was having accessing some sites from here in Beijing. Google.ie and google.com are out, as is the BBC. Wikipedia was out, then it came back. Various sites are reporting that it is back, but without any reference to the Tianamen square massacre in 1989. That may be true on the Chinese language one, but the English language site is still down.

I guess the Chinese language version is approved for viewing here as they had an article about it in the “China News”. This is the English language paper I get delivered to my room each morning. I have to say it’s a bit dull. All the stories are safe, and read like press releases. You get the impression that they were “approved” before they were published.

Another site that I have discovered I can’t access here is Blogspot. Like the ones mentioned above you type the URL and eventually the request times out. I had problems accessing the sites through the corporate VPN as well. But that I discovered was due to me using our Beijing node. When I connect to one in Western Europe suddenly all the web is visible again.

Living in a free country you don’t really think about how pernicious such censorship is. It means someone wants to control the what you think about, what goes on in your head. You can complain about the media bias in Ireland, but you can always go find another outlet for your information. Even if it is going to be somewhere odd like Indymedia which is as fair and balanced in it’s own way as Fox News.

As Granville Hicks said:

A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.

And no I don’t know who Mr Hicks is either. I can’t look him up on Wikipedia at the moment