Appeal to the Citizens of the World
Free Speech and the Price of Freedom
If you have just arrived at this unique space on the World Wide Web, welcome to the Speir News and Entertainment Platform. To our many friends and viewers, welcome back. What Speir is intended to be is a safe place for truth seekers, who are looking not for the slop and outright propaganda that pollutes the media, including social media, but for thought-provoking coverage of current history that tries to give people a glimpse of what might be going on "Beneath the Floorboards," where policies are made that determine our present and future lives, without our knowledge and certainly without our consent. We present this in the English language, but with our unique, "We Speak Your Language" translation app, it is available to you in almost any language and dialect in the world, for you to read and share.
One of the essential principles of individual freedom is the right to free, uncensored speech—the right to express one's ideas without fear of repression or penalty, and without some government or other authority, such as a social media platform, to determine what can and cannot be said, or tell someone what is true or false. Free speech carries with it the responsibility to not knowingly lie or seek to mislead. But even in those cases, speech should not be repressed or censored, but instead confronted by the truth, as all lies must be so confronted.
This principle is embedded in the founding documents of the American Republic, but as the great American President understood, it must equally apply to everyone in the world, and he so declared in his famous 1941 Four Freedoms speech, which defined free speech as the right of everyone, everywhere in the world. It is also essential to another principle of the American republic, the right to the "pursuit of happiness," by which is meant the pursuit of truth and new knowledge--the felicity that comes from the discovery of truth. Happiness is derived from the knowledge that men and women are far from perfect, but that our Creator has given each of us the ability to seek a greater perfection; this quality, the ability to perfect ones greater knowledge of ourselves and the universe we live in, is what fundamentally distinguishes us from all animal species.
These principles are what we at Speir believe and will go to our death fighting for, against all who seek to repress them.
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Right now, the right to free, uncensored speech is under attack around the world, as governments and corporate powers that control global media platforms, conspire to limit what people can know and discover. We have been reporting on the attack on Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and more recently on NATO critics Scott Ritter and Dimitri Simes and on many other efforts to restrict free speech by Facebook, Google, and other media platforms. The Speir platform has come under enormous attack by those forces centered around Global NATO and its assets, like the current government of Israel, who have launched repeated, sophisticated, coordinated attacks on our servers from thousands of points across the globe, to try to shut down our servers. Thus far, we have been able to defeat them, and we continue to provide you with our content. But the cost to Speir has been high, both in the deployment of our internal resources and the cost of defensive systems. This cost, over the last few weeks, has run into the several score thousands, and we only expect that number to rise, as the enemies of uncensored, free speech increase their attack on us.
Our news platform will remain free to all who come here seeking knowledge. But we could use some help! What each of you can do is subscribe to Speir, which will give you access to many other programs and privileges on the Speir platforms. You can click on the link below to see what these are. The price for the simple monthly subscription is just $5.00. Join the fight for uncensored free speech and your right to know what others don't want you to know. $5.00 is a modest price to help us strike a blow against those who would deny you perhaps your most important freedom. And stay tuned to Speir, as we will be announcing some important initiatives in this fight in the coming days.
Below we excerpt a speech given by President John F. Kennedy on April 27, 1961, before the American Newspaper Publishers Association on the question of censorship, which is as relevant today as it was when he gave it.
President John F. Kennedy 1961
“The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in ensuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is a very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control. And no official of my Administration, whether his rank is high or low, civilian or military, should interpret my words here tonight as an excuse to censor the news, to stifle dissent, to cover up our mistakes, or to withhold from the press and the public the facts they deserve to know.
“For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence—on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific, and political operations.
“It’s preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match.
“I not only could not stifle controversy among your readers—I welcome it. This Administration intends to be candid about its errors; for as a wise man once said: ‘An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.’ We intend to accept full responsibility for our errors; and we expect you to point them out when we miss them.
“Without debate, without criticism, no Administration and no country can succeed—and no republic can survive. That is why the Athenian lawmaker Solon decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment—the only business in America specifically protected by the Constitution—not primarily to amuse and entertain, not to emphasize the trivial and the sentimental, not to simply ‘give the public what it wants’—but to inform, to arouse, to reflect, to state our dangers and our opportunities, to indicate our crises and our choices, to lead, mold, educate and sometimes even anger public opinion.
“This means greater coverage and analysis of international news—for it is no longer far away and foreign but close at hand and local. It means greater attention to improved understanding of the news as well as improved transmission. And it means, finally, that government at all levels, must meet its obligation to provide you with the fullest possible information outside the narrowest limits of national security….
“And so it is to the printing press—to the recorder of man’s deeds, the keeper of his conscience, the courier of his news—that we look for strength and assistance, confident that with your help man will be what he was born to be: free and independent.”
