"When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say."

Apparently George RR Martin, from A Clash of Kings.

Edit: Apologies, should have been in response to the sibling, rather than the parent.

Wow I’ve not heard this one before? Who said this? I love it.

This does not apply to Holocaust revisionism, before anyone even suggests it.

Sure it applies. In that case, there's just maybe some legitimate reason to fear it.

Imagine there’s an FBI raid on, or congressional investigation into, whatever American news outlet attacks your political beliefs, and I think you’ll find yourself believing not that the government must be scared of the truth, but that these guys didn’t deserve their tongues.

It’s easy to stand outside a regime’s borders and say it can’t change your reality, and comforting to believe that the truth always comes out in the end, but I think reality is more harsh: “History is written by the winners.”

Absolute Streisand-Effect here.

Barbra Streisand faces an unclear tradeoff between publicizing the pictures of her home that already exist and encouraging the future taking of unwanted photographs of her home.

Modi has much, much, much more reason to fear that tolerating one scandal-raising documentary will lead to further scandal-raising documentaries, and much less reason to believe that ignoring the problem he already has will make it go away.

I don't think the Streisand Effect is a good analogy to try to draw here.

The Streisand effect isn't about a 1:1 comparison of the two cases.

It's just about calling attention to something few people would have noticed by being really heavy-handed in trying to take it down.

Is a BBC documentary about one of the world's most prominent politicians "something few people would have noticed"?

Yeah, I'd never heard of it until it was blocked on YouTube.

It's totally on the map now.

This makes as much sense as the infamous perspective "Nixon can't be president; nobody I know voted for him".

I really think that outside of the UK very few people would have heard of it if it wasn't for all this.

The likely reason that he isn't still barred from entry to the US is that he became India's prime minister:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-narendra-modi-was-banned-fr... https://archive.ph/Kf95r