“He who has no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down and without walls.”
That truth in Proverbs 25:28 is a picture of a lawless or law-insensitive or indeed law-unresponsive person.
In the field of counseling, such a person is known as an under-developed conscience. An under-developed conscience is unable to recognise wrongdoing and refrain from it; or to show remorse for doing wrong; or to see wrong as wrong in and of itself.
Nations too have a soul and a conscience.
Every nation needs a clear sense of moral values, a clear sense of right and wrong at all levels of governance, in commerce and industry, sports and entertainment, family and marriage — and all that sensitivity must necessarily salt and temper the Constitution and Vision of a Republic like ours.
And Constitution and National Vision are a matter of destiny, about which the people of a country must be enabled to become conscious with a sharp conscience.
The Constitution has to express that conscience, which is another reason why the Christian Nation Declaration is of importance. Franz Fanon, writing The Pitfalls of National Consciousness in 1961, said:
“The living expression of the nation is the moving consciousness of the whole of the people; it is the coherent, enlightened action of men and women. The collective building up of a destiny is the assumption of responsibility on the historical scale. Otherwise there is anarchy, repression and the resurgence of tribal parties and federalism. The national government, if it wants to be national, ought to govern by the people and for the people, for the outcasts and by the outcasts.”
Quite tragically, Zambia’s conscience is under bombardment through the uncontrolled Internet which rules and commands the very thoughts and feelings of millions of users.
All things opposed to keeping and nurturing a sound mind are blazing through the small screens of smartphones, ipads and various kinds of technologies. In the face of all this, the collective building up of a visible destiny must not be derailed by cyber wars seen as thrills, which actually come in form of moral and spiritual destruction.
The Web through social media now owns the minds and hearts of endless streams of users, making them victims of organised crime groups who today are defined as terrorists, drug traffickers, arms dealers, human traffickers, porn peddlers, sorcerers, false prophets and the rot.
Social media power goes way beyond the authority that governments wield, which is why the Spring Revolution in North Africa humbled the Arab nations that had prided themselves in being socio-politically stable: Nobody saw it coming.
The Arab Spring erupted on December 18, 2010 in Tunisia with the Tunisian Revolution, and spread throughout the countries of the Arab League and its surroundings, by end February 2012 ejecting rulers from power in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen.
Civil uprisings had erupted in Bahrain and Syria; major protests had broken out in Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco and Sudan; and minor protests had occurred in Mauritania, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, Western Sahara, and Palestine. Even in Mali, conflicts have been attributed to Tuareg fighters returning from the Libyan civil war which arose from the Arab Spring Revolution.
UNCONTROLLED
But should the Internet remain uncontrolled, as though it were completely uncontrollable?
One practical and necessary step to secure the values and standards of the Christian Nation Declaration and everything that relates to it is to protect Zambia’s Internet space. That idea raises questions: If free speech and access to information must remain unfettered, what laws shall penalise a Zambian user of porn beamed into our airspace from a source in Europe?
The national soul presently has no fence, no boundary and no protections around it, all because no comprehensive effort has been made to apprehend and control the whole cyberspace within our borders. We can learn from other countries.
Earlier this year, China took steps to secure national sovereignty. Reuters reported that the second draft of China’s national security law, announced by the country’s legislature in May, emphasises the need to protect Internet security, what it calls “sovereignty in the national Internet space” and to prevent the spread of “harmful moral standards” online.
China recognises ‘harmful moral standards’ online. Do we?
China’s new draft confirms predictions that China would put increased emphasis on controlling its own Internet infrastructure.
It also calls for strengthening China’s financial system and banking infrastructure, protecting core industries and areas of the economy, including guaranteeing grain security — and avoiding food safety scandals, which have caused much alarm in recent years.
The draft law, which could be passed within months, represents a significant expansion of China’s previous counterespionage law, which it replaces.
It has been seen by experts as reflecting the desire of President Xi Jinping to get a clear grip on both domestic and international security issues, with the government seeing a range of potential threats at home and abroad.
The wide-ranging draft not only talks about guaranteeing citizens’ welfare, and “sustainable and healthy” social and economic development, but also calls for protecting “core socialist values,” ensuring “cultural security” and combating the influence of “harmful moral standards.”
Such phrases are a reminder of the Chinese government’s growing anxiety about the influence of Western values and ideas on a fast-diversifying society. Are we as anxious?
Simultaneously, the Chinese authorities have launched a campaign to root out Western ideas from the country’s academic world. In a national security blue paper released last year, they also warned specifically against threats, including Western “cultural hegemony” and the “export of Western democracy.”
And to protect China’s interests further, Google was blocked alongside Twitter at a time when the home-grown Baidu was almost supplanting Google.
SOVEREIGNTY
American security expert Bruce Schneier in 2015 published a book with an all-revealing title: Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World.
As much as Internet platforms and social media applications permit people to spread ‘selfies’ of themselves posing in the nude, or doing all kinds of ‘liberated’ things, the truth is that all that data is being stored and the individual’s private world is being controlled, Schneier says.
Schneier has observed that many governments now want to exercise control over the Internet within their own borders — including matters of politics, economy, culture and technology.
Reports in 2013 of widespread surveillance by the US emboldened nations such as Russia, China and Saudi Arabia to embark on what is now called ‘cyber sovereignty.’
An important consideration is this: Individual citizens that cannot govern themselves cannot be governed. The offerings pouring out of the Internet by the second are rendering a generation of youths ungovernable; and this affects the strength of our sovereignty.
The suggestions on the Internet, gulped down all day and all night by youngsters who think the sponsored thoughts of the Web are:
•Consider incest, it is cool;
•Let’s commit suicide, it will fulfill life;
•Learn how to hex (cast spells and curses);
•Learn how to make love to an animal;
•Gay is best;
•Academic learning does not guarantee success;
•Hate your parents;
•Join ISIS and establish One Moslem Caliphate worldwide;
•Swindle somebody of big money online;
•Rape her;
•Rebel against your country; and
•There is no God.
No president can mobilise a people around one national rallying point if their heads are full of soot; if all they hear is that they are worthless and seriousness with life is needless. No president can count on a people obsessed with pornographic pictures to help resolve pressing developmental issues.
No president can motivate his people positively if the whole nation is ever half-asleep because cellular phone providers insist on keeping people awake from 20:00 hours to 0500hrs just surfing the net or getting into sex talk.
The point is not to lock out all social media and pretend that all shall be well in such a nation: the point is to minimize access to poisonous platforms that offer pipelines of bile, teaching youths raw evil. A young generation trained to hate authority and kill its parents will grow to infest the nights with crime tomorrow—who will be able to bear it?
A nation must have the capacity not to block the whole Internet, but to block certain routes for specifically purveying unacceptable morals. But even that is controversial.
Turkey banned access to Twitter and YouTube after images of a prosecutor held hostage by far-Left militants were published by media and users in April. The ban came a year after the same networks were blocked in the run-up to local elections in March 2014.
In the period leading up to the websites being blocked, recordings purportedly suggesting corruption among then-prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an’s circle were shared online.
Turkish media and Reuters said the ban was an order from the court after individuals had complained.
Iran, Yemen, China, North Korea, Turkey, and many other countries on the globe have at one point or another censored the Internet domestically. This either partially or greatly restricted the international freedom of speech of their citizens. They have been condemned for political muzzling of free speech.
CENSORSHIP
The site Debate.org presented a for-or-against tussle on the topic: Should governments install Internet filters to censor websites containing sexual or profane content? Below are only three of the 38 per cent responses in favour of such censorship:
•I do believe that governments should filter and censor sexually explicit or profane websites, since there is currently very little that prevents children from accessing these sites. Because sexually explicit and profane sites are so prolific online, and because most of these sites do little to prevent children from viewing their material, I do believe it is the government’s responsibility to apply some censorship to these sites. Posted by: ToughEfrain26
•Yes, governments should install filters that censor illegal activity that may be of a sexual or profane nature. I do not believe in government censorship with respect to matters of free speech, artistic freedom, or even poor taste. However, Internet material that breaks laws should be policed. Notably child pornography, prostitution, and other e-commerce related to illegal activities, including drug use, should not be tolerated—and should be filtered. Posted by: baltute
•Yes, Internet pornography should be censored. Children should not be easily exposed to such graphic content; it could cause a rise in early sexual encounters which would lead to a higher rate of sexually transmitted diseases. Children are innocent beings; therefore, their innocence should be embraced for as long as possible. Also, this censorship could lower the amount of rapes that young teenagers commit.
Below are only three of the 62 per cent responses not in favour of such censorship:
•No, the government should never install filters to block websites. First of all, in the United States, the Constitution guarantees the right to free speech. This same right is guaranteed in many other first-world and westernized countries. In countries where this right is not guaranteed, and the government has placed blocks on Internet usage, such as China and North Korea, the government is viewed as fascist and dictatorial. Posted by: VoicelessEmil67
•There is absolutely no reason that the government should censor our Internet. If you are worried about children going to inappropriate websites, that is their parent’s problem not the governments. If you let the government censor the Internet you are giving them almost unlimited power. The world today as we know it runs on the Internet and if the government runs that they run your life.
•No matter what argument comes from a distasteful act, it is always going to be in our minds somewhere. The obvious effect that those inclined are looking for, is to reform all of humanity. To make our minds acceptable for the modern age, it’s just another Liberal vs. Conservative argument. Posted by: Jacobs0469
WALLS
The days of city walls are long gone, but the symbolism is still relevant. Without cyber walls, a developing nation like Zambia lies open to harmful, unfathomable and uncontrollable influences which are moulding and defining tomorrow’s leaders’ mindsets.
We must take practical steps towards cyber sovereignty at the very basic moral and spiritual level to secure ourselves a clear line of sight if we desire a sane, Christian Nation in reality. Email: all.information@ymail