UK Column

The Free Press may have been written some ninety odd years ago, but the observations and comments made by its visionary English author Hilaire Belloc provide a guide as to the nature of so-called free speech within a so-called free and democratic nation.
It’s also useful as a primer for anyone involved with extending the reach of The Column. In fact, Belloc would have been most comfortable with the internet and blogging. He could easily have been writing about the role of The Column when he states at the beginning -

“I PROPOSE to discuss in what follows the evil of the great modern Capitalist Press, its function in vitiating and misinforming opinion and in putting power into ignoble hands; its correction by the formation of small independent organs, and the probably increasing effect of these last.”

'A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gate is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banners openly against the city. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their garments, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared.'-- Cicero, 45 BC

http://www.ukcolumn.org/home/

Well worth a visit to help keep your mind free.