Censorship, real censorship

A friend of ours (since deceased) spearheaded an effort to construct an elaborate display that traveled around, including at the public library in Bozeman, Montana of “banned” books. I only recall two of them: Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, and Fools Crow by James Welch, which was banned in the Laurel, Montana school district. (I can only think that calling attention to that book by banning it made it a very popular item to have for school kids.)

I tried to recall some of the other books on that display – there may have been as many as twenty. The Brave search engine lists Howl, by Alan Ginsberg, Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Animal Farm (in Canada), by George Orwell, so maybe they were part of the display.

The problem is that none of these books were banned. How do I know this? The group that made the display had copies on hand! That means the books were published, had a press run, were distributed and sold. If that is banning, it’s a very lousy job of banning.

I’ve got a book here that was banned, sort of, back in the day when the State of Montana was pretty much owned by the Anaconda Copper Company. It’s called Montana High Wide and Handsome, by Joseph Kinsey Howard. The tale that was told about this very popular and well-written book was that it could only be sold under the counter in book stores. That may be a form of shadow banning, I suppose, but again, not very effective.

I think book banning is a foolish enterprise. It’s a form of censorship that calls attention to the subject matter being censored.

The United States of America is a highly censorious country, and has been from the beginning. But the censorship is the effective kind – books that do not get written, or if written, do not get published. Shall I name some of them? I can’t because I do not know their names because they were censored, for real.

Here’s a famous episode of censorship in American history: The Pentagon Papers, or as I called it, The True Art of Lying. The object was to rewrite the history of the Vietnam War.  This job was assigned to a CIA front called RAND Corporation. But how to sell it? Daniel Ellsberg (1931-2023) supposedly stole a complete copy of the papers, the idea to get them published. He employed two other spooks, Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, to run around the East Coast attempting to make copies of the Papers during a time when photocopying was a primitive art. Finally, excerpts of the Papers were indeed published by the New York Times. Ellsberg was (supposedly) arrested, and faced life in prison for his brave act of thievery.

Here’s how the Paper Caper ended: The White House Plumbers did a very clumsy break-in of the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in Los Angeles, almost as if they wanted to be caught. The judge presiding over the Ellsberg case, based on this illegal act, threw the case out and Daniel was set free.

The result of the Paper Caper? Here’s what I wrote in the link above:

• The Papers would seal the reputation of a high-level spook-controlled agency as a champion of press freedom… The New York Times. It was never the intention of the agencies who assembled the Papers that they be kept secret, but having a controlled opposition newspaper publish them “in defiance” of the law sealed that issue too – we have an adversarial media. It reinforced the New York Times’ in its bona fides, used to this day to sell its lies. 
• And finally, given that no one was ever going to actually read the Pentagon Papers except those doing such reading for livelihood, the Papers, full of false history, are now used by historians as primary source. The controversy sealed the reputation of the Papers as the real truth behind the lies of Vietnam. Thus do lies about lies become mainstream history.

That’s how censorship – real censorship – is done.

The reason I sat down to write this is due to some censorship of an organization I support, the Heartland Institute (Heartland.org). In case you are not aware, climate alarmists are spreading lies about temperatures as they push their climate propaganda movement. Heartland published an editorial arguing that government data does not support the lies about temperatures. Google stepped in and demonetized the Heartland piece, claiming that it contained “unreliable and harmful claims.” Odd to make the claim, as the editorial was based on government data, meaning that Google now claims that the government produces unreliable and harmful information. (It does, but that’s not the point.)

We now rely on private entities (at least assumed so) to do our censorship for us. I am banned for life from Facebook. I cannot get a book review published on Amazon. Facebook and YouTube hamfistedly (not a word you say?) managed the lies told during the pandemic, censoring everything right and left that ran contrary to official truth. The period 2020-2022 had to be the most censorious in United States history, and I say that knowing full well what it means. During that period, and I fact-checked this, Stalin spoke from the grave to Google and YouTube and Facebook, and said “Hey guys … don’t you want to tone it back a little?” Chairman Mao chimed in as well, saying “Guys, cool it a bit, OK? You’re embarrassing yourselves.”

Speaking of Chairman Mao, I get the sense that most Americans think that our country is a land of the free while China is a gulag. I have never been to China, but suspect that life over there is a lot like life here – censorious. Americans have always pointed to the enemy du jour as being unspeakably evil, thereby polishing our image. I imagine that most Chinese people live normal lives and don’t much get bothered by authorities, like us. I imagine that the Chinese government, if smart like ours, paints the United States as an evil place, where everyone is completely censored all the time. (We are, but we mostly don’t know it.)  By the way, does anyone think that lying, by itself, is cause for censorship? I don’t. People with brains can figure things out without overlords.

Conclusion: The United States has a heavily censored population, but censorship (up until 2020) was done the right way, that is, hardly anyone knew it was going on. That made it extremely effective. Facebook, YouTube and Google have taken the whole operation public. Now it’s right out there in our faces.