Sedition (Noun):
Language or behaviour that is intended to persuade other people to oppose their government.
Devised as a tool to suppress freedom of the press, The Sedition Act of 1661 imposed punishment on anyone who wrote, printed, or preached any words against the crown, government, or the justice system, so as to avoid, what they dubbed, a ‘breach of peace’ in society…
One of the most famous examples of sedition can be seen in the case of Gandhi who was arrested in 1922 by British officials in India, and subsequently sentenced to six years in prison, for his involvement in protesting the British colonial government.
Gandhi’s statement read:
Section 124 A under which I am charged is perhaps the prince among the political sections designed to suppress the liberty of the citizen.
While the above case is a historical example, unfortunately, people are still being wrongly persecuted for ‘sedition’ around the world today, with governments using it as a weapon to violate our right to freedom of expression…
Sedition: A means to limit political debate and restrict freedom.
A staggeringly high volume of people, in the 21st century, are still living under oppressive regimes that place limits on some of our most basic human rights: the right to free speech…
Although in the UK, laws that restrict our freedom of speech, notably blasphemy and sedition have been scrapped (deemed to be having a ‘chilling effect on freedom of speech’, the last person to be sent to prison for Blasphemy in the UK was in 1922, in the case of William Gott who compared Jesus to a ‘circus clown’, and the last person jailed for sedition being in 1972), such laws are still in place in far too many countries around the world today…
Alas, despite our progress in the UK, we cannot overlook the blatant human rights violations that are still going on around the world.
Where are these countries?
Any country that is run under dictatorship still has sedition in place, whether it goes by that name or not…
In North Korea, for example, as I wrote about here, people who speak out against the government can be on the receiving end of the death penalty. And the same is true of Russia, where a law was introduced in 2022 which criminalises independent war reporting, anti-war protests, and all criticism of Russian government actions abroad…
While officially the law in Russia can ‘only’ see those convicted being issued with a large fine and/or up to five years imprisonment, under the corruption of Vladimir Putin, people who have been publically seen to discredit the government, such as Alexey Navalny, would not be an anomaly in their ‘disappearance’ (Putin is thought to have had Navalny killed in jail for his opposing stance against the Kremlin)…
And the US, while it’s not run under a dictatorship, also has sedition laws in place for which, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the first trial for sedition in over a decade in the US, the first guilty verdict since 1995, arose in 2023 whilst under the leadership of Donald Trump…
Sedition charges in the US, in the 21st century??
Sedition, unlike in the UK where it was decriminalised in 2009, is still a criminal offence in the US…
Following the insurrection of Jan 6th, 2021, where a mob of Republican (Trump) supporters stormed the United States Capitol, a charge for what prosecutors say was ‘not a suddenly ignited riot but a coordinated plot to stop the transfer of presidential power’, people are being tried for sedition for the first time in over a decade. One of these people is Steward Rhodes, founder of far-right anti-government militia, the ‘Oath Keepers.’ Rhodes was found guilty of Sedition last year and sentenced to 18 years in prison as a result.
As well as Rhodes, more than 350 members of the Oath Keepers group have also been charged under sedition for the events that took place on Jan 6th…
Founded in 2009, the Oath Keepers group promotes the belief that the federal government is ‘out to strip citizens of their civil liberties and wills.’
Yet, by blindly going along with Donald Trump’s beliefs regarding the election results being ‘rigged’, was their storming of the capitol really an exercise of free will?…
In a speech following the announcement of Joe Biden becoming president, Trump claimed that the results were ‘fraudulent’, and directly called for his supporters to fight.
We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.
And so that’s what the Oath Keepers did. They fought.
‘Trump told us to fight, so we fight.’
They didn’t storm the capitol because their own conscience told them to, but because Donald Trump told them to.
It’s giving… cult.
During the insurrection, even when rioters were armed and publically calling for Trump’s own vice-president, Mr Pence, to be hanged, Trump continued to post Tweets that only served to add fuel to the fire… Why? Because Mr. Pence refused to go along with Trump’s delusional spiel (election denial) regarding the supposed ‘need for the election to be overturned’…
Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country, giving states a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!
Trump tweeted the above at 2:24 pm on January 6th, just 11 minutes after armed rioters were calling for Mr. Pence to be hanged (which Mr. Trump, upon being told this said, and I quote, ‘Mike deserves it. Those rioters are not doing anything wrong.’
Following Trump’s tweet, rioters began to spread throughout the buildings, with yet more breaking in from outside.
The irony is that where sedition, by definition, is ‘to rebel against the established order/against established authority’, the mob who stormed the White House, in their unwavering beliefs of Trump’s lies were, like puppets on a string, rebelling, not ‘against’ established authority, but FOR it.
Like a cult, in which Trump supporters find a sense of identity in ‘making America great again’, I’d argue that the violence on Jan 6th wasn’t ‘sedition’ at all, but CORRUPTION, for which Trump holds the blame.
Refusing to accept that he’d lost a democratic election, Trump was demanding the overturning of results, something which would essentially turn America into a dictatorship-led country rather than a democratic-led country…
The president says the results are fixed so we’ll let him stay president.
Throwing his dummy out of the pram, Trump refused to accept his defeat and incited his followers to take drastic action to take back what he claimed was ‘rightfully’ his…
The ‘Oath Keepers’ group then, who stormed the capitol on Jan 6th are not ‘anarchists’, they are not fighting for, despite what they say, ‘freedom’, but for precisely the opposite, for dictatorship.
The likes of Trump, a narcissistic power-hungry fool, cannot be compared to the likes of Gandhi who was arrested for sedition in 1922. Gandhi was arrested for demanding change in his calling to free India from British rule, whereas Rhodes and his group were arrested for demanding no change, and this is the difference…
One was about freedom and liberation, the other about lack of freedom and dictatorship.
Calls for freedom VS calls to join a cult.
While I don’t condone using violence as a means of protest, context is everything.
‘Domestic terrorism’ is a more accurate term of phrase for The Oath Keepers group and the insurrection of Jan 6th- ‘Crimes of violence that are intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or government policy’, NOT sedition…
The US is so quick to brandish Hamas, the government of Gaza, as a ‘terrorist organisation’, but maybe they should look closer to home…
There can’t be one rule for some, and another for everyone else…
As we saw in the tragic Charlie Hebdo attack in 2015, a violent reaction by Islamic fundamentalists in response to Charlie Hebdo’s publications of cartoons depicting the Muslim Prophet Muhammad, and in the attack on author Salman Rushdie in 2022 in response to his controversial book, ‘The Satanic Verses’, where freedom of speech is criminalised in ‘some’ countries, freedom of speech is at risk everywhere.
As stated in the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights:
‘Freedom of opinion and freedom of expression constitute the foundation stone for every free and democratic society.‘
Only when every country around the world has its human rights granted, will we be truly free…
Until then, we must all keep fighting for equal rights. Because, regardless of where you happen to have been born, no one, in 2024, should be arrested for using their voice.
To end with a quote from the great 19th-century activist, Charles Bradlaugh:
Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people and entombs the hopes of the race.
Portfolio of Hope 