Years ago, I had a friend who got into trouble for wearing a Fuck Censorship button to class. The irony, of course, was that the teacher had an objection to the word fuck, and also had no idea that what they were doing was censorship.

I've been thinking about censorship a lot lately, based in part on a seminar I attended. This was part of the International Human Rights Seminar here, and was on State-sponsored Terrorism. The speaker was a former US Army captain who was basically working for the CIA his entire time in the military. As part of his presentation, he gave some books that we could look at for confirmation of some of the things he was saying, but did so with the proviso that one of the books was banned in the US (by the federal government) and the other had pretty much been banned worldwide by the US government. I also found out at the same time that the book on the King assasination written by the convenor of the seminar had been de facto banned.

The first book, banned in the US is Trail of The Octopus. The one banned worldwide is The Secret Team, and can be found online, complete with the circumstances around its disappearance. Both of those deal with the CIA. The third book is Orders To Kill, which can still be found but has more or less been buried by the government.

This was a bit of a shocker to me (and I'm not sure why). I'd always assumed that such censorship as exists in the US is along the lines of the school board that banned The Rabbit's Wedding, a children's book, because a black rabbit marries a white rabbit. Obviously we're all going to hell if we see books depicting interracial other-species relationships.

And yet I digress. I assumed that it was done on the local level, and was done by people who are afraid that they may be wrong. In other words, if you ban a book (or anything else), you're doing so because it may force you to re-evaluate what you think, or, worse, may come to sway more of the population than your opinion does. In the example above, of The Rabbit's Wedding, if enough people do interpret the colors of the rabbit as saying something about the colors of people, and then fall into a licentious orgy of interracial dating, marriage, and procreation, your rigidly-segregated world is pretty quickly going to be outnumbered by people who don't see anything wrong with equality.

In other words, censorship is, ultimately, a contest for control of ideas. It's quite obvious that any censorship represents fear of the idea expressed. But even more than that, on the social-censorship side, it means to me that someone is afraid to be wrong. The idea per se is not the scary thing, but rather the fact that the person against the idea may be wrong. Censorship is the attempt to generate conformity with one's own ideas precisely because it's lonely in the cold, and some people are so weak that they can't stand to be the only one believing something.

Getting back to governmental censorship, however, it's obvious that the government wants to protect its interests, even while appearing to be totally open - this is how it is possible, as Christopher Hitchens found out in his writing on The Trial of Henry Kissinger - to request all government paperwork on a specific individual, under the Freedom of Information Act and get back X number of documents with every single word blacked out, except the name of the person on whom the information has been requested.

Channon