In Discourse on the logic of language, it says that the slave owners should try to keep their slaves from communicating with each others, so that they can’t plot against the slave owners together. This idea is also shown in Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass: “if you teach that nigger how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master.” 

Johnson O’Connor once said, “Words are the instruments of thought by which men and women grasp the thoughts of others, and with which they do most of their thinking.” Frederick Douglass learned how to read and write by himself through variegated endeavors, and that certainly gave him the power to strive for what he wanted.

The very same idea was manifested in China thousand years ago too. The first emperor in China, YingZheng, burned numerous books, buried hundred of scholars alive after he conquered all the lands in order to create a united, big China. The idea was “if you can control their languages, you can control their thoughts .” Unfortunately, it worked, many people were enslaved, and we have the Great Wall built. Many died building it. This strategy is so effective that China is still using it thousand years later. Government censorship has been an interesting topic in China for many years. Now I think of it, it’s kind of funny for me to talk about this in my father tongue.