Check It Out: Famous people were censored throughout history

By Joan Janzen
joanjanzen@yahoo.com

The caption under the photo of a dog peaking into his master’s bedroom said, “I’ve been barking for the past 20 minutes and you keep telling me to shut up. Anyway ... your car is gone.”

Unfortunately, dogs aren’t the only ones who are being silenced; censorship has been alive and well throughout history. Benjamin Franklin once said, “Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.”

His quote may be one reason why Dr. Suneel Dhand, an American, said censorship is not new to humanity, but has been going on for over 2,000 years. Dr. Dhand questioned who gets to decide what is designated as misinformation, on one of his latest videos.

“The people who consider themselves to have power will clamp down on anyone with alternative viewpoints,” Dr. Dhand said. “Some of the biggest perpetrators of this are supposedly the most educated in society. They want to keep their population uninformed and seek to silence anyone who disagrees with them.”

A good example of a historical figure who experienced censorship and ridicule was Ignacio Semmelweis, a doctor living in Vienna, Austria. As a specialist in childbirth In 1847, he observed up to a third of women giving birth in the hospital were dying. However he also observed that when doctors washed their hands before treating patients, the mortality rate for women giving birth was greatly reduced.

Dr. Semmelweis didn’t know about the existence of germs, therefore he couldn’t explain why hand washing worked. He only knew that patients no longer caught fevers and other diseases.

Unfortunately his work was rejected, causing the doctor to become severely depressed. As a result another doctor committed him into an insane asylum. Dr. Semmelweis realized he was placed there in order to be silenced, but when he tried to get out he was beaten by guards and placed in a straight jacket. Two weeks later he died from his injuries. Sadly, the doctors at the hospital no longer washed their hands after his death.

The Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison and many others whose inventions changed the world, were ridiculed and silenced because their viewpoints differed from that of the general public.

Winston Churchill once said, “Some people’s idea of free speech is they are free to say whatever they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.”

Dr. Dhand said once we stop allowing questions or debate, we are no longer in the realm of medicine, science or innovation; we are in the realm of extremism. “The fact that I’m even having to have this discussion is quite frankly a disgrace,” he concluded.

Don’t be surprised if those who are being ridiculed and censored are the next generation of world changers. After all, we have seen it happen throughout history over and over again.

You can contact me at joanjanzen@yahoo.com