Combating Censorship
I’m not a joiner, but I belong to three non-partisan organizations concerned with human rights and have combating censorship as part of their expressed goals. Their mission statements can be found on their websites.
Amnesty
International: http://www.amnesty.ca
Amnesty is one among several organization devoted to protecting
human rights, and among those rights is freedom of expression.
CCLA (Canadian Civil
Liberties Association): http://ccla.org
This is the Canadian counterpart to the American Civil Liberties
Union. They are quite willing to support freedom of expression, even when doing
so is unpopular or even when it is being exercised by organizations that are
clearly lunatic or are expressly devoted to suppressing human rights. An
example is defending the right of the Neo-Nazis to parade. They obviously have
taken to heart the dictum “I may hate what you have to say, but I will still
defend your right to say it.” They have guts—and principles.
PEN Canada: http://pencanada.ca/about/
This is the Canadian branch of PEN, committed to protecting the
rights of writers to publicly express themselves without persecution by
governments or anyone else. Such persecution, legal or illegal, ranging from
financial intimidation to imprisonment, is only too common.
Another way to combat censorship is not to self-censor when talking about it with others. However, it is a surprisingly (and dismayingly) way to make enemies—even among the well intentioned.
