Adamantine

[Strangerous]

The benchmark of tyranny

is censorship:

once the use of force

rises above the mark,

then even the censor

must drown in the flood

of ****.

[dukealien]

The benchmark of tyranny

is censorship:

once the use of force

rises above the mark,

then even the censor

must drown in the flood

of ****.

In mild to moderate critique... not being a coastal dweller, I was thrown off at first by the reference to a "benchmark" - to a landsman, a benchmark (leaving aside its usage as a maker's mark on goods or a standard for evaluating interest rates, etc.) is a position reference like those placed by the Geological Survey.  Which includes height, but... perhaps an alternative is the Plimsoll mark on ships which shows the deepest they can be loaded before endangering the crew.

As for censorship, it was once a good thing... back in the Roman Republic, where forbidding distribution of written works was a minor part of the job.  Then, the Censor was responsible for keeping the lists of citizens, patricians, and senators.  If one misbehaved, he was struck from the list.  Now *that* is power, and when the Republic failed the office of Censor was corrupted like all the others - Dictator, Tribune, Consul, all assigned to the Emperor or his cronies (or his horse).

But for modern meanings of "censor," the poem has it right.  In the old sense, we lack a proper Censor to eject the immoral and vicious - and harness the rest to their proper duties, no shirking.  In the new sense, all the forces converging to censor - mob cancellation, doxxing, SWATting, malicious boycotts, denial of service attacks and collusive handshakes between government agencies and social media oligarchs - do have the goal of tyranny much as they try to hide it from everyone including themselves.

  Back to the poem.  The metaphor seems plausible:  abuse of power is the ****.  In the States we have a First Amendment which at least served as a sea wall which has taken centuries to undermine.  In Blighty, the  unwritten constitution shows its weakness today as pursuivants fan out to censor (in the worst sense) true speech which annoys the self-defined tyrant.  (Stay anonymous, @Strangerous, if you're a Blighter!  Speaking truth to power hasn't been this dangerous since the days of Cromwell.)

Final note:   the title could, perhaps, be improved - Adamantine is strong, but your images within the poem are all fluid.  There needs to be a connection between the hard spirit of resistance and overtopping the mark - which triggers it.

[JamesG]

You should check out what Karl Popper said about paradox of tolerance, might be informative.

[dukealien]

You should check out what Karl Popper said about paradox of tolerance, might be informative.

Exactly.  The ancient Censor defended against excessive tolerance and didn't have to make excuses for existing standards.

[Strangerous]

Thanks Duke and James for your valuable insights. I wasn't even aware of the historical role of the censor, but am glad the metaphor survives in context. I also will definitely check out what Karl Popper had to say. And yes, even in the States, I feel the chill and am horrified by the legal developments in Britain. Finally, the idea of the title is that something immutable or adamantine might be a suitable substance for a physical benchmark subject to the ravages of a flood, and also hopefully a plausible metaphor for what I suggest is an immutable natural law holding that censorship is always self-defeating.

[Strangerous]

Popper's "paradox of tolerance" is that "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance.... We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal" (Popper 1947, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1, p. 226). In this formulation, the censor is "the intolerant," and censorship (among other acts of intolerance and persecution) is the crime. I agree 100%. Thanks again.