Anatomy of Censorship in the COVID-19 Era

At the beginning of the COVID-19 era, security agents forcefully picked up those found to be infected and took them to isolation centres. The police also enforced mask mandates, curfews and travel bans to areas declared to be hotspots in the spread of the virus. Thus, on 22 April 2020, Al Jazeera reported that according to Human Rights Watch, six people had been killed by Kenyan police enforcing the COVID-19 Curfew. As Victor Kapiyo observed in September 2020, “The government also required all broadcasters to air the health ministry’s Public Service Announcements (PSA) at no cost.” At the heart of all these measures was the securitisation of public health. This is to say that COVID-19 was treated as an enemy of the state to be combatted through the police, and if necessary, the military.

The violation of the freedom of expression in the name of combatting COVID-19 was particularly striking. For example, on 19 March 2020, Citizen Digital reported that Kenya’s cabinet had directed that law enforcement agencies pursue and arrest individuals spreading false information on the coronavirus situation in Kenya “in accordance with established laws”. Regarding the Kenyan government’s attempts to limit the right of citizens to speak freely about COVID-19, Kapiyo wrote:

“While there have not been reports of government efforts to block or filter content or to shut down websites to fight the spread of COVID-19 misinformation, it has used other means, including legal threats and arrests. In a public statement, the Cabinet Secretary for Health, Mutahi Kagwe, issued a warning, stating that “these rumours must stop… but because I know empty appeals will not work, we will proceed and arrest a number of them to prove our point”.

Consequently, the government has abused the Computer Misuse and Cyber Crimes Act, 2018 to intimidate, arrest, and detain persons, including whistleblowers and critics, in order to censor what it has deemed false information in relation to COVID-19.

Following these threats, the government has since arrested four individuals, with two bloggers charged under section 23 of the Act for publishing false information, which carries a penalty of five million shillings or imprisonment not exceeding 10 years, or both.”

Further afield, on 24 March 2020, Dario Milo, reporting about the South African situation, wrote an article titled “Fake News about Covid-19 Now a Criminal Offence”. The censorship even clothed itself in academic garb, as in the case of the journal article by Ngozika A. Obi-Ani, Chinenye Anikwenze and Mathias Chukwudi Isiani, titled, “Social media and the Covid-19 pandemic: Observations from Nigeria”, in which they presumed that any information that was contrary to the position of the WHO and other “official” institutions constituted “misinformation”.

Perhaps most significant is the fact that the WHO supported such overt and covert censorship. On 23 July 2021, it published an article titled “Countering COVID-19 Misinformation in Africa” in which it proclaimed: “On a continent of 1.3 billion people, WHO and partners are working to reduce social media-driven health myths.” Besides, in an earlier article here, I pointed out that in the draft Pandemic Treaty tabled at the WHO’s 2024 World Health Assembly, the WHO even included its crafted term “infodemic” which it describes as “too much information, false or misleading information in digital and physical environments during a disease outbreak. It causes confusion and risk-taking behaviors that can harm health. It also leads to mistrust in health authorities and undermines public health and social measures.” Thus, as I observed in that earlier article, if the WHO has its way with the Pandemic Treaty, under its supervision following WHO Director-General’s declaration of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), countries would allow only the dissemination of information that it deems safe. That would be censorship grounded in paternalism – the treating of adults as though they were children.

What, exactly, is censorship?

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “censorship” is “the changing or the suppression or prohibition of speech or writing that is deemed subversive of the common good. It occurs in all manifestations of authority to some degree, but in modern times it has been of special importance in its relation to government and the rule of law.” The Encyclopedia Britannica goes on to point out that “Censorship, as a term in English, goes back to the office of censor established in Rome in 443 bce. That officer, who conducted the census, regulated the morals of the citizens counted and classified. But, however honourable the origins of its name, censorship itself is today generally regarded as a relic of an unenlightened and much more oppressive age.”

Thus at the heart of censorship is the attempt to achieve two related objectives: Restrain members of the public from accessing certain views and limit the ability of members of the public to disseminate such views in cases where they have had access to them.

Governments often pass legislation to enforce censorship, much as they would prefer that such legislation be perceived in a better light. For example, at the height of the COVID-19 drama, the European Union (EU) hastily drafted and enacted the Digital Services Act (DSA) which compels “very large online platforms”, such as X and Facebook, to check facts and filter out “fake news”. Wolfgang Munchau has published an enlightening article titled “Why Europe Fears Free Speech: A War of Repression Is Under Way”. Besides, in early October 2024, the former US First Lady, Hillary Clinton, declared that social media companies must fact-check, or else “we lose total control”. The “we” in her statement most probably referred to the Democratic Party’s Kamala Harris struggling to gain an upper hand over the Republican Party’s Donald Trump in that year’s presidential race. In other cases, governments deploy measures such as forced disappearances, detentions without trial, and even state-sponsored murders. Their aim in deploying such measures is to cause paralysing fear in their subjects so that they (the subjects) become accomplices in the censorship by urging each other to keep quiet in order to stay out of trouble.

Nevertheless, as scholars of critical discourse analysis (CDA) have demonstrated, censorship can be conducted in ways that are difficult to recognise. CDA is an interdisciplinary field which mainly emerged at the end of the so-called Cold War with the aim of challenging the post-Cold War version of capitalism, namely, neoliberalism. More specifically, CDA lays emphasis on the fact that language is a tool with which the ruling elite subtly controls the people by influencing how they perceive reality. For example, newspapers will often write: “Five Demonstrators Shot Dead”. Note here that they do not mention who shot them, and in fact almost suggest that it was the demonstrators’ fault, since if they had not demonstrated they would not have been shot. All this has the effect of giving the impression that the police cannot possibly be blamed for the shootings. Thus, scholars of CDA are emphatic that the media highlight certain facts and ideas while downplaying others in the interest of their owners who benefit from the status quo.

Perhaps most sobering is the fact that, as the Encyclopedia Britannica observes, “…, a government may need neither previous restraints nor postpublication sanctions when it can shape public opinion simply by regulating the flow of vital information as it pleases”. This is the most outstanding way in which governments are exercising censorship in the COVID-19 era. For example, as I indicated in my “Medical Ethics in the Era of COVID-19”, medical doctors are now required to only prescribe COVID-19 vaccines and therapies approved by the WHO and adopted by domestic health authorities, thereby turning them into mere underlings of such organisations, and wiping out the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship characterised by privacy and informed consent. The banning of therapies such as hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin and Azithromycin to manage COVID-19 are cases in point.

Intimidation through distortion of science

The public has been told repeatedly that health authorities are strictly “following the science” in the interventions that they are prescribing to combat COVID-19. However, the phrase “Follow the science”, popularised since the onset of COVID-19, gives the impression that science is a fixed body of knowledge. Yet the history of science attests to the fact that science is never cast in stone because human knowledge is grossly limited and therefore always expanding and self-correcting.

Yet at the height of the COVID-19 drama, the phrase “the science” was used to smother the true spirit of science characterised by humility and an open mind. Thus Hannes Sarv reports that “… Anthony Fauci, the influential White House COVID policy coordinator, who became the COVID-era ‘science figure’ in the US, said in an interview in 2021 that to criticise him was in fact to criticise science.” Hannes Sarv explains that, “This situation meant that any scientist or doctor who criticised or doubted the effectiveness of the coercive measures or CoOVID vaccines was cancelled and could potentially end up losing his or her job. … So many remained silent, fearing for their careers.” Besides, there was “The Disinformation Dozen” – a list of the 12 “leading online anti-vaxxers”, authored by the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

Furthermore, universities, hospitals and professional organisations engaged in censoring their members despite their vast experience in medical scholarship and practice, as illustrated by the following instances: Stanford University’s Faculty Senate condemned Dr Scott Atlas for questioning the effectiveness of the COVID-19 protocols; the Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine suspended Dr Meryl Nass’ medical license and ordered her to undergo a neuropsychological evaluation by a board-selected psychologist for questioning the US government’s COVID-19 protocols; a group of UK medical doctors filed a legal suit against the country’s General Medical Council for allegedly neglecting to investigate the world-renowned UK-based cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra for allegedly spreading “vaccine misinformation”.

The silencing of dissent on social media

Touted as the online agora (“meeting place” where citizens freely debate any issue of concern to them), social media platforms have become sites where users, like confined birds, fly as vigorously as they wish, but within the confines of the online discursive cages created by the social media owners and the government agencies that puppeteer them. Thus, such platforms have deactivated the accounts of many users, including many highly qualified scholars and practitioners of medical care and public health. In other instances, they have instructed the authors of such posts to pull them down themselves and to refrain from posting any similar posts. With the aid of algorithms and an army of censoring personnel, they have also deleted many posts deemed to be “misinformation” or “disinformation”.

According to Elon Musk, the present owner of X (formerly Twitter), the Twitter Files reveal the massive government-driven censorship under the former Twitter management. Thus, in an earlier article here, I highlighted instances in which social media platforms censored highly qualified scholars and practitioners of medical care and public health who questioned the dominant WHO line on COVID-19. Among the instances of such silencing were: Harvard’s Prof. Martin Kulldorff, whose March 2021 tweet to the effect that those who had been once infected and children did not need the COVID-19 vaccine was labelled as “misleading” by Twitter. Twitter also made it impossible for the tweet to be “liked” or retweeted. Twitter blacklisted Stanford University’s Prof. Jay Bhattacharya for posting a link to an article he had written, which asserted, among other things, that “Mass testing is an insidious form of lockdown by stealth“. Meta deactivated the accounts of numerous health professionals and health freedom advocacy organisations, including groups formed by people who had been injured by the COVID-19 vaccines. For example, in August 2022, it deplatformed Children’s Health Defense (CHD) from Facebook and Instagram.

Surveillance

Censorship is often enhanced by surveillance, which the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines as “close watch kept over someone or something (as by a detective)”. George Orwell’s 1984 is set in a society in which a politico-economic elite uses sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) technology to conduct detailed surveillance of its subjects’ thoughts and actions. The “telescreen” “hears” and “sees” everything they do, and all of it is recorded to be used against them at an appropriate time. In my article on “The Fourth Industrial Revolution”, I illustrate how Orwell’s purported fiction is fast turning into fact, with the smart phone largely serving as the “telescreen”.

In late 2020, the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) launched the Virality Project, which it introduced as “a global study aimed at understanding the disinformation dynamics specific to the COVID-19 crisis”. The SIO presents the project as one whose goal is “to help inform the global public debate on the proper role of government and private actors in our information ecosystem”. Nevertheless, the tenor of its introduction is that those who question official COVID-19 policy and official COVID-19 messaging are engaging in “misinformation” or “disinformation”. Indeed, the SIO states that its mission is “to study the misuse of the internet to cause harm, and to help create policy and technical mitigations to those harms”. In short, the SIO believes that censorship is justified on the grounds of protecting individuals from harm. Yet by suppressing free debate among members of society, it denies individuals the opportunity to sharpen their ability to reason by engaging in the processing of contrary opinions, and this is actually harmful to both the individual and to society at large.

At the end of 2024, Dr Aaron Kheriaty, himself a medical doctor and university lecturer who lost his job for speaking out against the dominant COVID-19 narrative, reported that newly obtained documents indicate that, in the US at least, “Government Censorship on Covid Began Before Lockdowns”. Regarding surveillance to enhance the censorship, he explained, “The government tracked public sentiment to ensure compliance with Covid restrictions.” As he correctly observes, “While the monitoring of social media narratives may seem innocent, it is the crucial first step in the process of demanding censorship.”

Propaganda

Perpetrators of censorship further enhance their anti-social efforts with propaganda, which the Encyclopedia Britannica defines as the deliberate dissemination of facts, arguments, rumours, half-truths, or lies to influence public opinion. The labelling of people who questioned the dominant COVID-19 narrative as “conspiracy theorists”, “killers of grandmother”, “anti-science”, “anti-vaxxers”, and people having “vaccine hesitancy” was part of the intense COVID-19 propaganda campaign. Thus, on 11 November 2021, NBC reported that Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, had stated that people who circulated COVID-19 “vaccine misinformation” were “criminals”. Besides, reporting on an interview with Aaron Kheriaty, Hannes Sarv writes regarding the deployment of propaganda:

“… Kheriaty says the impact of propaganda and censorship cannot be underestimated …. All the major media outlets and television broadcasts talked about the highly dangerous virus, the need for lockdown policies and mask mandates, the safety and efficacy of vaccines, the need to achieve herd immunity through vaccination, etc. While all of this and more was constantly propagated, there were numbers always running in the background showing how many people were dying every day from the disease. But in all honesty, Covid-19 was not as deadly a disease as it was portrayed to be – a comprehensive study by John P. A. Ioannidis et al., a renowned Stanford University professor of medicine, found in October 2022 that the pre-vaccine infection fatality rate (IFR, indicating deaths among all infected) in the 0–69 age group was 0.095%. In the 0–59 age group, it was 0.035% and, of course, in the still younger age group, still lower. ‘Fear was deliberately weaponised. There were revelations in the UK and Canada about government agencies and government actors that were deliberately trying to increase the level of fear in the population in order to get an increased level of compliance with the government’s dictates,’ Kheriaty comments.”

James Corbett views the current unprecedented propaganda blitz as a crucial part of the Fifth Generation Warfare (5GW). According to Al Jazeera, “The basic idea behind this term [fifth-generation warfare] is that in the modern era, wars are not fought by armies or guerrillas, but in the minds of common citizens.” Recall the droves of “influencers” who were used to encourage people to take the COVID-19 “shots”?

Indeed, a sizeable proportion of the propaganda has to do with claims that the COVID-19 vaccines are “safe and effective”. At first the public was given the impression that one dose of the vaccines would provide enduring protection against the virus. Then the public was told that a second dose was needed, then a third, and even a fourth. It was particularly striking that the pharmaceutical companies that produced the vaccines frequently issued media releases purportedly giving “guidance” to the public on the necessity of their products. They did not seem to mind the conflict of interests that this entailed. For example, if I were selling cakes, I would most likely advise the public to buy as many of them as possible.

The use of COVID-19 propaganda to enhance censorship was graphically illustrated by the debate on the so-called lab leak theory. Most readers will probably recall how governments and mainstream media told the public that anyone who suggested that COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak was a “conspiracy theorist”. However, as Robert E. Moffit and Mary McCloskey explain, compelling evidence has now emerged that most leading virologists consulted by Anthony Fauci, then Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), initially thought that the novel coronavirus had an unnatural origin.

On 1 February 2020, Fauci held an online meeting with a group of top virologists to discuss the origins of the virus. Moffit and McCloskey point out that in his email that day (delivered at 11:58 p.m.) to Department of Health and Human Services officials Garrett Grigsby and Brian Harrison (with copies to other HHS officials, as well as to NIH Director Francis Collins), Fauci writes of the virologists:

“They were concerned about the fact that upon viewing the sequences of several isolates of the nCoV [the virus that causes COVID-19], there were mutations in the virus that would be most unusual to have evolved naturally in the bats and that there was a suspicion that this mutation was intentionally inserted. The suspicion was heightened by the fact that scientists in [China’s] Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain of function experiments to determine the molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection, and the outbreak originated in Wuhan.”

Indeed, Moffit and McCloskey report that on 31 January 2020, the day before the call, Dr Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research Institute emailed Fauci about the novel coronavirus, stating in part:

“Some of the features (potentially) look engineered… I should mention that after discussions earlier today, Eddie [Holmes], Bob [Garry], Mike [Ferguson], and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”

Moffit and McCloskey also report that on 2 February 2020, the day after Fauci’s crucial meeting with the virologists to discuss the origin of the COVID-19 virus, Dr Robert Garry of Tulane University, who was part of that meeting, wrote an email to Fauci, which stated in part:

“I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario where you get from the bat virus or one very similar to it to nCoV where you insert exactly 4 amino acids 12 nucleotides that all have to be added at the exact same time to gain this function – that and you don’t change any other amino acid in S2? I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature. Do the alignment of the spikes at the amino acid level – it’s stunning.”

However, many of the virologists later “changed their minds”, and two of them, Drs Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry, even joined other persons to co-author the now infamous contrived journal article titled “Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” in the journal Nature Medicine, which purported to conclude that “SARS-CoV-2 [the virus that causes COVID-19] is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” The Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Francis Collins, and the mainstream media, then vigorously popularised the article. As Moffit and McCloskey correctly observe, “Enthusiastic acceptance of a ‘natural origin’ for the pandemic, particularly among the media and the political class, is itself a curiosity. Since Communist China shut down access to COVID-19 information in January 2020, the authors of the paper published by Nature Medicine neither had nor could have had access to Chinese hard data.” They go on to point out that “What has intrigued congressional investigators is that Andersen and Garry seemed to have abandoned overnight their support of the lab-leak theory in favor of a natural viral origin for COVID-19.”

Besides, through leaked emails obtained recently via the Freedom of Information Act by the American Institute for Economic Research, we now know that Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins discussed plans for a “devastating published take down” of the Great Barrington Declaration, an anti-lockdown open letter authored by Profs. Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford), Martin Kulldorff (Harvard), and Sunetra Gupta (Oxford).

Lawsuits against censorship

At the height of the COVID-19 protocols, convincing people that the narrative they had embraced was fabricated through the manipulation of both mainstream and social media was an uphill task, what with Big Tech, Big Pharma and Big Government engaging in a coordinated, massive messaging blitz. However, the truth is now coming out. On 7 January 2025, CNN reluctantly reported that Mark Zuckerberg, owner of Facebook and related platforms under his company, Meta, had announced that it would get rid of “fact-checkers” and replace them with Community Notes similar to those in X. Aaron Kheriatty explains that “Community Notes” is “a crowdsourced open system that works remarkably well for sceptics to challenge posted claims, without blocking people from seeing those posts”. In his press release video, Zuckerberg said, “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram.” He also declared, “We’ve reached a point where there are too many mistakes and too much censorship.” He admitted that “… the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they have created, especially in the U.S.” Said Zuckerberg:

“We’re going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse. What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far. So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.”

Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that Zuckerberg lists immigration and gender as topics that will now be open for free debate on Meta’s platforms, but does not mention vaccines.

Besides, the timing of Zuckerberg’s announcement may be significant, as it came less than 24 hours after the Children’s Health Defense asked the US Supreme Court to hear its censorship case against Meta. CHD sued Meta in November 2020 over its censorship practices. CHD’s lawsuit against Facebook’s parent company, Meta, and its founder and CEO, Zuckerberg, alleges that government actors colluded with Facebook to censor CHD’s speech, and particularly speech related to vaccines and COVID-19 – that are constitutionally protected under the First Amendment which states:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

According to CHD, its suit also named “fact-checking” firms Science Feedback, and the Poynter Institute and its PolitiFact website. On 9 August 2024, the 9th Circuit US Court of Appeals ruled against CHD, necessitating the organisation’s move to the Supreme Court. CHD’s CEO Mary Holland told The Defender, “It’s clear that Mark Zuckerberg is worried about new anti-censorship policies of the incoming [Trump] administration – as he should be. The record in CHD v. Meta clearly shows Facebook’s close collaboration with the White House to censor vaccine-related speech, even pre-COVID.” She went on:

“Zuckerberg may imagine that by making this announcement he is mooting this case, or making it no longer significant. That’s not the situation – the country needs closure that this kind of fusion of state and industry to censor unwanted information will never happen again.”

Then in an interview on “The Joe Rogan Experience” on 10 January 2025, Zuckerberg said, “[The Biden administration] basically pushed us and said… anything that says that vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down.” He said that the Biden administration officials were “calling up the guys on our team and yelling at them and cursing and threatening repercussions if we don’t take down things that are true”. He asserted that Meta has documents containing these threats.

Furthermore, Murthy versus Missouri (formerly Missouri Versus Biden was filed in May 2022 by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, along with a number of private plaintiffs. According to the plaintiffs, federal officials specifically targeted conservative-leaning speech across a range of topics, including the origin of the COVID-19 virus, as well as the efficacy of masks and vaccines. Similarly, Dr Meryl Nass filed a legal complaint against the Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine and its board members for violating her First Amendment rights.

The case against censorship

In his On Liberty, the nineteenth century English philosopher, John Stuart Mill, emphasised that no opinion ought to be silenced, whether it is held by the majority or by the minority. He was emphatic that the minority opinion, which is usually more vulnerable in a liberal democracy with its majoritarian orientation, ought to be protected for at least three reasons. 

The minority might hold the true opinion, while the majority holds the false one. In that case, suppressing the minority would result in the majority missing the opportunity to embrace the true opinion. 

The minority might hold the false opinion, while the majority holds the true one. In such a case, the minority opinion ought to be allowed free expression, as the majority would thereby be given an opportunity to explain its true opinion to the minority, resulting in the majority itself gaining deeper insight into their true opinion as they explain it to the minority. The majority would consequently hold their true opinion as an enlightened view instead of holding it as a dogma. Here one thinks of how many students have gained deeper insights into problems in mathematics as they have sought to help fellow students to understand how to solve them.

Both the minority and the majority may hold opinions that are partially true. Consequently, if the majority silences the minority, the majority would thereby have robbed itself of the opportunity to acquire the half-truth held by the minority. The majority would then hold their own half-truth as the full truth, yet a half-truth is a falsity.

At one point in On Liberty, Mill makes his famous statement:

“If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one man were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified to silence that one man than he, if he had the power, would be justified to silence mankind.”

Yet censorship on matters pertaining to global public health is far from dead. Governments, big pharmaceutical corporations and social media platforms are still working to limit what the public discusses with regard to this topic. For example, on 10 January 2025, Dr Meryl Nass reported:

“My twitter account was deactivated December 18 but remains up to view. This is the second time Twitter has taken my account @NassMeryl away, but this time the account remains visible while my access to it has been denied.

…. The sudden switch from one account to another – without me changing any tab or window – happened right after I tried to post 2 tweets that would not upload, (about bird flu) which usually means to me that someone at X didn’t like them. Someone who is acting for the Blob and does not want my bird flu messages getting either ‘speech’ nor ‘reach.’ (X’s CEO Linda Yaccarino came up with that quip to justify throttling posts.)”

Yet, ultimately, censorship is flourishing in the name of public health mitigation because the citizenry complies with it. In yet another of my previous articles, I pointed out that the basic assumption of nonviolent civil disobedience is that governments, however tyrannical, are ultimately dependent on the fearful obedience and compliance of their subjects. The sixteenth-century French jurist and political philosopher, Étienne de La Boétie, succinctly stated this truth in his seminal essay, Discours de la Servitude Volontaire (“The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude”):

“He who (…) domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite numbers dwelling in your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you. Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you? What could he do to you if you yourselves did not connive with the thief who plunders you, if you were not accomplices of the murderer who kills you, if you were not traitors to yourselves? (…) Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.”