This is not about the suppression of First-Amendment free-speech rights and, as far as the pandemic itself is concerned, this is not about how many people got infected, nor how sick they got, nor whether they died or recovered. This is about the governmental, institutional, and the individual responses manifested in the campaign to limit the spread and the severity of the disease itself. Censorship undeniably stifled the voices advocating reasonableness, calm, and yes, resistance to the measures proposed and enforced in response to the emergence of the virus.

If the pandemic had been the atomic bombing of Hiroshima of 1945, this article would not be about who dropped the bomb, or how, or why. It would not be about the persistent radiation and its horrific effects on millions of innocent people in the generation alive and on the scene and their descendants on into the unknown reaches of time. It would, rather, be about the fireball that ensued upon detonation and the shock wave that spread out from that awful instant. It would be about the people vaporized and the others fatally burnt over their entire bodies, towers and walls knocked over by the rampaging shock wave, roofs and fences set ablaze by the blast of temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun. The immediate and short-term effects—the kind that are, automatically it sometimes seems—remedied and effaced with the passage of time. The dead are buried, and gradually forgotten as living individuals; the rubble is cleared, then hauled away to make room for new offices, factories, shops and homes, such that eventually, remnants of the ruination are marked out and carefully preserved here and there as reminders of The Event.

If censorship were an iceberg, the eighth of the berg showing above water would be the actual attempts to express censored points of view. These attempts might have been suppressed before the fact with injunctions, threats of legal action, takedowns, demotions and other measures and/or after the fact by the fulfillment of any of the threats just listed. The 7/8 of the berg below water would represent expressions of censored viewpoints abandoned or never even attempted by three types of parties holding or considering censored points of view: (a) those who witnessed the experiences of colleagues or others who attempted to express similar views and decided to keep quiet for reasons of safety and self-preservation; (b) those who, observing the apparent universality of contrary (uncensored) points of view, hesitated to “get out of line” with dominant, unchallenged, thought; and (c) those who discounted their own analyses on the score that it appeared to have received no support or even mention from anyone else in popular discourse (the Bandwagon Effect, but in reverse).

Like propaganda, censorship is a measure to influence public sentiment. Propaganda potentially reaches everyone, but it is susceptible to detection and attack as propaganda, and its assertions are susceptible to being disproved (debunked). Censorship, which also can affect everyone, if only indirectly as just described, is potentially invisible except for those cases where it includes public punishment (e.g., burning at the stake, imprisonment, discharge from employment, cancellation of tenure) intended to intimidate those tempted to support or echo the offense(s) committed by the censored party. When executed covertly (site demotion, delisting, etc.) or even semi-covertly (embargo, labeling as disinformation), it can and does affect parties not in a position to be aware of the absence of the censored material.

Opponents, for example, of Holocaust “denial” (revisionism), are forever denigrating their targets as “obscure,” “fringe,” or “extremist” the while ignoring the fact that their targets may be so described only because they are so relentlessly and pervasively censored and literally persecuted for voicing such points of view, and have been for so long. There are many other such taboo subjects, including most notably in the recent past those pertaining to the pandemic and the many measures undertaken and imposed for the ostensible purposes of slowing or stopping its spread and not overwhelming medical resources used in detecting and treating persons who may have contracted the disease at its center.

Censorship and the fear it promotes can and do become a vicious circle. While censorship at the governmental and institutional level is often the result of cold calculation and/or the drive for power, at the individual level, social censorship of oneself and others can be driven by a panicky fear, which fear also contributes to toleration and approval of censorship imposed from “above.”

What, then, of the effects of this years-long, massive program of preventing people from, as it were, talking to each other freely about these subjects? This is a contemplation of something that happened because something didn’t happen because something did happen—counterfact within counterfact—a veritable “onion” of layered speculation. What happened was the pandemic and the governmental, institutional, and social responses to both it and what it appeared it might become (the decimation of the human race).

What didn’t happen, mostly, is that people—regular people, you and I—could publicly say or write (and so, hear) certain things to and from each other about said pandemic. And what did happen, again, was this censorship, vigorous and pervasive, of the expression of those certain things, chiefly in the social and mainstream media, about the pandemic—a cause, I hold, of the two effects listed before it. This is not about who the censors were, what motivated them to censor, nor how they went about choosing what to censor nor where, in what media nor on what platforms. It is not about their techniques nor their authority nor the truth or falsity of what they censored. It attempts to ascertain the effects their censorship had, on whom, and when, especially considering “knock-on” effects at the whole-society scale. It also hopes to ascertain what might have happened, or not happened, had their censorship not been imposed.

Among the things, besides COVID itself, that did happen were incalculable depression of productive activities, suppression of social interconnection and interactions of all kinds, education, travel, even the ability of families to assemble and live together. Most tragically, urgent medical care for others not suffering from COVID was delayed or denied, the difference between the two often being moot by the end. The US Dollar was debased through the frantic creation of trillions of dollars to fund economic stimulus loans and handouts—fighting a feared wave of infection with a tsunami of money. The populaces of the United States and many other countries are correctly said to have panicked in a number of different ways and occasions. Individuals, and societies as a whole, are often blamed for these panics, but the blamed are always victims of having been informationally blinkered by the fog of censorship in which they were forced—unknowingly—to grope. The panic was enabled—no, created—by the censors, whether the censors knew it or didn’t. Or cared.

No ossuary, or retrospective compendium, can ever be created, or recovered, of what was suppressed or prevented by the censors and their fear-addled victims, much less of the effects it might have had on the course of events had it not been suppressed. Some dauntless archivist somewhere might someday undertake to glean odd bits of frustrated, discarded bits of communicative detritus from the inchoate wreckage of the censorial project, but even such a Quixotic enterprise would necessarily fail to recover articles never written, posts never posted, comments never essayed—the vast panoply of what never quite was, but for censorship and its insidious, wide-rippling effects on the evanescent sapling of the expression of human thought. It would be little less than to catalog the deaths of the Hiroshima holocaust, to project each snuffed life into whole lives never lived, and from that to infer the effects (beneficial, on balance, as with lives in general) these would have had on humanity as a whole.

But short of such encompassing Herculean tasks, might there be some other way of calculating, reverse-engineering, projecting, or merely imagining what different world might have emerged from a miasma magically freed of the blanket of censorship that so blinkered, so maddened, the world in which we have lived since 2020? The mind, lured down this rabbit-hole of momentous speculation, soon boggles and turns back, to seek simpler, briefer proxies of manageable scale to suffice for understanding.

There are, indeed, court cases afoot, such as the lawsuit by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri against President Joseph Biden claiming violations of First Amendment bars against government censorship. But this case and others like it merely concern actions of the censors and their colors as agents of the government, barely touching the contents, much less the potential impacts of, material barred from the public discourse. Recourse to such subjects yields nothing of what effects were thereby obviated. Binding and healing such a wound can never recover the blood lost while it was open. Rushing oxygen to a dead brain will never revive it.

It is a question of cosmic proportions. A Christian might similarly wonder, what if Jesus had not been martyred at 33, but lived out his entire threescore and ten? To the Christian’s lights, at least, the world might have become a far better place than it became, and sooner. And that, at last, is what censorship really is: a killing. As much a crucifixion as was Hiroshima. A killing of the Public Mind through the stopping of the Public Mouth, and Ears.

Certain agents have again, as they so often have in the past, found ways of stifling our intercourse with one another, and some have profited greatly in doing so. If we, the victims of their muzzling, do not somehow manage, again as the authors of the First Amendment tried to enable us to do, to stay their pernicious enterprise, then our bodies shall literally end up lying in the dust raised by the passage of their juggernauts. It will take courage, not to mention vigilance, such as we have not mustered in the past, to our everlasting detriment.