Censorship And War Quotes

Books can not be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory... In this war, we know, books are weapons. And it is a part of your dedication always to make them weapons for man's freedom.

If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be impossible to embrace the myth of war. If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan and listen to the wails of their parents, we would not be able to repeat clichés we use to justify war. This is why war is carefully sanitized. This is why we are given war's perverse and dark thrill but are spared from seeing war's consequences. The mythic visions of war keep it heroic and entertaining… The wounded, the crippled, and the dead are, in this great charade, swiftly carted offstage. They are war's refuse. We do not see them. We do not hear them. They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float around the edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled. The message they tell is too painful for us to hear. We prefer to celebrate ourselves and our nation by imbibing the myths of glory, honor, patriotism, and heroism, words that in combat become empty and meaningless.

Pick a leader who will make their citizens proud. One who will stir the hearts of the people, so that the sons and daughters of a given nation strive to emulate their leader's greatness. Only then will a nation be truly great, when a leader inspires and produces citizens worthy of becoming future leaders, honorable decision makers and peacemakers. And in these times, a great leader must be extremely brave. Their leadership must be steered only by their conscience, not a bribe.

I can tell you that banning books, burning books, blocking books is often used as a way to erase people, a belief system, or culture.

A NATION'S GREATNESS DEPENDS ON ITS LEADER To vastly improve your country and truly make it great again, start by choosing a better leader. Do not let the media or the establishment make you pick from the people they choose, but instead choose from those they do not pick. Pick a leader from among the people who is heart-driven, one who identifies with the common man on the street and understands what the country needs on every level. Do not pick a leader who is only money-driven and does not understand or identify with the common man, but only what corporations need on every level. Pick a peacemaker. One who unites, not divides. A cultured leader who supports the arts and true freedom of speech, not censorship. Pick a leader who will not only bail out banks and airlines, but also families from losing their homes -- or jobs due to their companies moving to other countries. Pick a leader who will fund schools, not limit spending on education and allow libraries to close. Pick a leader who chooses diplomacy over war. An honest broker in foreign relations. A leader with integrity, one who says what they mean, keeps their word and does not lie to their people. Pick a leader who is strong and confident, yet humble. Intelligent, but not sly. A leader who encourages diversity, not racism. One who understands the needs of the farmer, the teacher, the doctor, and the environmentalist -- not only the banker, the oil tycoon, the weapons developer, or the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyist. Pick a leader who will keep jobs in your country by offering companies incentives to hire only within their borders, not one who allows corporations to outsource jobs for cheaper labor when there is a national employment crisis. Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons. Morality, not corruption. Intellectualism and wisdom, not ignorance. Stability, not fear and terror. Peace, not chaos. Love, not hate. Convergence, not segregation. Tolerance, not discrimination. Fairness, not hypocrisy. Substance, not superficiality. Character, not immaturity. Transparency, not secrecy. Justice, not lawlessness. Environmental improvement and preservation, not destruction. Truth, not lies. Most importantly, a great leader must serve the best interests of the people first, not those of multinational corporations. Human life should never be sacrificed for monetary profit. There are no exceptions. In addition, a leader should always be open to criticism, not silencing dissent. Any leader who does not tolerate criticism from the public is afraid of their dirty hands to be revealed under heavy light. And such a leader is dangerous, because they only feel secure in the darkness. Only a leader who is free from corruption welcomes scrutiny; for scrutiny allows a good leader to be an even greater leader. And lastly, pick a leader who will make their citizens proud. One who will stir the hearts of the people, so that the sons and daughters of a given nation strive to emulate their leader's greatness. Only then will a nation be truly great, when a leader inspires and produces citizens worthy of becoming future leaders, honorable decision makers and peacemakers. And in these times, a great leader must be extremely brave. Their leadership must be steered only by their conscience, not a bribe.

The first casualty of war is truth, and the war on drugs is no different

In Japan censorship is practiced not only by the government when it tampers with textbooks but by the media, which police themselves.

People are dying because of ignorance. They are dying because unremitting propaganda is denying them essential safety information. They are dying because legislators and the media are censoring the science, and are ruthlessly pushing an ideological agenda instead. They are dying because the first casualty of war is truth, and the war on drugs is no different.

Truth is the first casualty of war and the war on drugs is no different. Every day both the print and broadcast media bombard the public with a perspective and narrative which has proved to be devastating. This diet of cultural influence and propaganda is unremitting.

In fact, Wilson tried to strengthen the Espionage Act with a provision giving broad censorship powers directly to the president. Moreover, with Wilson’s approval, his postmaster general used his new censorship powers to suppress all mail that was socialist, anti-British, pro-Irish, or that in any other way might, in his view, have threatened the war effort.

The Spanish Influenza did not originate in Spain. In fact the first recorded case was in the United States, in Kansas, on March 9th, 1918. Beware the Ides of March. But because Spain was neutral in World War I, it did not sensor reports of the disease to the public. To tell the truth then, is to risk being remembered by its fiction. Countless countries laid blame to one another. What the US called the Spanish Influenza, Spain called the French Flu, or the Naples Soldier. What Germans dubbed the Russian Pest, the Russians called Chinese Flu.

Under ordinary circumstances, bad art naturally gets sorted out and disappears. That is how history works when it is left alone to do its job. The paradox of the culture wars is that they have made celebrities out of some artists who would otherwise vanish. Censorship has become a growth industry. This may be the best argument, in the end, for unfettered freedom of expression.

The Procrustean bed. . .suggests itself with dispiriting aptness as a metaphor for the Culture Wars, right down to the blandishments with which Procrustes must have lured his guests over the threshold. (I picture him as a handsome fellow with a large vocabulary and an oleaginous tongue, not unlike the chairmen of many English departments.) There's just one crucial difference. Sometimes Procrustes lopped off his victims, and sometimes he stretched them, but the Culture Wars always lop. I have never seen cultural politics enlarge a work of literature, only diminish it.

In Europe, nobody will bleep you, if you want to say a "bad" word on TV. The idea that some self-righteous little old lady at the FCC gets to tell other people which words they may or may not use, seems like a pretty strange concept in the rest of the civilized world. Media censorship is a prohibition of words and pictures. The War on Drugs is a complete failure, and so is the American War on Words. When you forbid a word, you give it power. Self-proclaimed rebels will use words like shit or fuck, simply to shock and sound cool.

Complex scientific and moral problems are not resolved through censorship of dissenting opinions, deleting content from the Internet, or defaming scientists and authors who present information challenging to those in power. Censorship leads instead to greater distrust of both government institutions and large corporations.

He and thousands of others like him, if they had any sense, would go to Mars. See if they wouldn’t! To get away from wars and censorship and statism and conscription and government control of this and that, of art and science!

Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate oneself within astronomy. On the day that I was born, 13 April 1949, nineteen senior Nazi officials were convicted at Nuremberg, including Hitler's former envoy to the Vatican, Baron Ernst von Weizsacker, who was found guilty of planning aggression against Czechoslovakia and committing atrocities against the Jewish people. On the same day, the State of Israel celebrated its first Passover seder and the United Nations, still meeting in those days at Flushing Meadow in Queens, voted to consider the Jewish state's application for membership. In Damascus, eleven newspapers were closed by the regime of General Hosni Zayim. In America, the National Committee on Alcoholism announced an upcoming 'A-Day' under the non-uplifting slogan: 'You can drink—help the alcoholic who can't.' ('Can't'?) The International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled in favor of Britain in the Corfu Channel dispute with Albania. At the UN, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko denounced the newly formed NATO alliance as a tool for aggression against the USSR. The rising Chinese Communists, under a man then known to Western readership as Mao Tze-Tung, announced a limited willingness to bargain with the still-existing Chinese government in a city then known to the outside world as 'Peiping.' All this was unknown to me as I nuzzled my mother's breast for the first time, and would certainly have happened in just the same way if I had not been born at all, or even conceived. One of the newspaper astrologists for that day addressed those whose birthday it was: There are powerful rays from the planet Mars, the war god, in your horoscope for your coming year, and this always means a chance to battle if you want to take it up. Try to avoid such disturbances where women relatives or friends are concerned, because the outlook for victory upon your part in such circumstances is rather dark. If you must fight, pick a man! Sage counsel no doubt, which I wish I had imbibed with that same maternal lactation, but impartially offered also to the many people born on that day who were also destined to die on it.

If all information is seen as part of a war, out go any dreams of a global information space where ideas flow freely, bolstering deliberative democracy. Instead, the best future one can hope for is an ‘information peace’, in which each side respects the other’s ‘information sovereignty’: a favoured concept of both Beijing and Moscow, and essentially a cover for enforcing censorship.

Once when I felt a little bruised by censorship I sent through Herodotus’s account of the battle of Salamis fought between the Greeks and Persians in 480 B.C., and since there were place names involved, albeit classical ones, the Navy censors killed the whole story.

The very Internet companies that snookered us all with the promise of democratizing communications made it impermissible for Americans to criticize their government or question the safety of pharmaceutical products; these companies propped up all official pronouncements while scrubbing all dissent. The same Tech/Data and Telecom robber barons, gorging themselves on the corpses of our obliterated middle class, rapidly transformed America’s once-proud democracy into a censorship and surveillance police state from which they profit at every turn.

In 2023, as I write this, librarians in America are on the front lines of the culture war. Censorship is at an all-time high. According to the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, “a record 2,571 unique titles were targeted for censorship in 2022, a 38% increase from the 1,858 unique titles targeted for censorship in 2021.” This is the highest number of attempted book bans since ALA began compiling data about censorship in libraries more than twenty years ago.

Nonsense! Nonsense!” snorted Tasbrough. “That couldn’t happen here in America, not possibly! We’re a country of freemen.” “The answer to that,” suggested Doremus Jessup, “if Mr. Falck will forgive me, is ‘the hell it can’t!’ Why, there’s no country in the world that can get more hysterical—yes, or more obsequious!—than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio—divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding’s appointees? Could Hitler’s bunch, or Windrip’s, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage’ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles’? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the—well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy?. . .Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?. . .Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor—no, that couldn’t happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! We’re ready to start on a Children’s Crusade—only of adults—right now, and the Right Reverend Abbots Windrip and Prang are all ready to lead it!” “Well, what if they are?

Censorship was never about morality; it was about fear.

I am for peace, not for war; for truth, not for lies; for equality, not for injustice; for transparency, not for insincerity, for justice, not for oppression; for enlightenment, not for ignorance; for freedom, not for tyranny; for liberty, not for censorship; for democracy, not for dictatorship; for sovereignty, not for colonisation; and for prosperity, not for poverty.

Why, there’s no country in the world that can get more hysterical—yes, or more obsequious!—than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio—divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding’s appointees? Could Hitler’s bunch, or Windrip’s, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage’ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles’? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia!

Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage’ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles’? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia!

The censors were so far gone as to find the following sentence obscene: 'The factory gate waited for the student workers, thrown open in longing.' What can I say? This obscenity verdict was handed down by a censor in response to my script for my 1944 film about a girls' volunteer corps, Ichiban utsukushiku (The Most Beautiful). I could not fathom what it was he found to be obscene about this sentence. Probably none of you can either. But for the mentally disturbed censor this sentence was unquestionably obscene. He explained that the word 'gate' very vividly suggested to him the vagina! For these people suffering from sexual manias, anything and everything made them feel carnal desire. Because they were obscene themselves, everything seen through their obscene eyes naturally became obscene. Nothing more or less than a case of sexual pathology.

No society in the present age is so self-critical, so ready to embrace foreign ideas, or so transparent and merit-based as the United States. Far more lethal to the U.S. military than a new form of IED would be censorship of ideas back home in the United States, or religious restrictions on research, or politically guided rules of investigation and publication, or government-run monopolies on labor, management, and production.

Totalitarian rule thrives on its subjects’ ignorance of the extent to which the surveillance system is monitoring their lives. The possibility, rather than the fact, of surveillance is enough to generate fear, anxiety, and informal pressures to conform, to downplay dissenting opinions, to declare one’s absolute loyalty. Thus an enforced culture of self-censorship emerges in communities that used to express their political opinions freely.

Conspiracy theories have long been used to maintain power: the Soviet leadership saw capitalist and counter-revolutionary conspiracies everywhere; the Nazis, Jewish ones. But those conspiracies were ultimately there to buttress an ideology, whether class warfare for Communists or race for Nazis. With today’s regimes, which struggle to formulate a single ideology – indeed, which can’t if they want to maintain power by sending different messages to different people – the idea that one lives in a world full of conspiracies becomes the world view itself. Conspiracy does not support the ideology; it replaces it. In Russia this is captured in the catchphrase of the country’s most important current affairs presenter: ‘A coincidence? I don’t think so!’ says Dmitry Kiselev as he twirls between tall tales that dip into history, literature, oil prices and colour revolutions, which all return to the theme of how the world has it in for Russia. And as a world view it grants those who subscribe to it certain pleasures: if all the world is a conspiracy, then your own failures are no longer all your fault. The fact that you achieved less than you hoped for, that your life is a mess – it’s all the fault of the conspiracy. More importantly, conspiracy is a way to maintain control. In a world where even the most authoritarian regimes struggle to impose censorship, one has to surround audiences with so much cynicism about anybody’s motives, persuade them that behind every seemingly benign motivation is a nefarious, if impossible-to-prove, plot, that they lose faith in the possibility of an alternative, a tactic a renowned Russian media analyst called Vasily Gatov calls ‘white jamming’. And the end effect of this endless pile-up of conspiracies is that you, the little guy, can never change anything. For if you are living in a world where shadowy forces control everything, then what possible chance do you have of turning it around? In this murk it becomes best to rely on a strong hand to guide you. ‘Trump is our last chance to save America,’ is the message of his media hounds. Only Putin can ‘raise Russia from its knees’. ‘The problem we are facing today is less oppression, more lack of identity, apathy, division, no trust,’ sighs Srdja. ‘There are more tools to change things than before, but there’s less will to do so.

Media censorship is a prohibition of words and pictures. The war on drugs is a complete failure, and so is the American war on words. When you forbid a word, you give it power. Self-proclaimed rebels will use words like shit or fuck, simply to shock and sound cool.

Draconian censorship was soon imposed, with correspondents advised that no dispatches would be allowed that made people at home feel unhappy. Equally rigorous censorship of letters home inspired one soldier to write his parents: After leaving where we were before we left for here, not knowing we were coming here from there, we couldn’t tell whether we had arrived here or not. Nevertheless, we now are here and not there. The weather here is just as it always is at this season. The people here are just like they look. On this page a censor scribbled simply, “Amen.

In all conflicts between groups, there are three elements. One: the certitude that our group is morally superior, possibly even chosen by God. All others should follow our example or be at our service. In order to bring peace to the world, we have to impose our set of beliefs upon others, through manipulation, force, and fear, if necessary. Two: a refusal or incapacity to see or admit to any possible errors or faults in our group. The undeniable nature of our own goodness makes us think we are infallible; there can be no wrong in us. Three: a refusal to believe that any other group possesses truth or can contribute anything of value. At best, others may be regarded as ignorant, unenlightened, and possessing only half—truths; at worst, they are seen as destructive, dangerous, and possessed by evil spirits: they need to be overpowered for the good of humanity. Society and cultures are, then, divided into the “good” and the “bad”; the good attributing to themselves the mission to save, to heal, to bring peace to a wicked world, according to their own terms and under their controlling power. Such is the story of all civilizations through the ages as they spread over the earth by invading and colonizing. Differences must be suppressed; “savages” must be civilized. We must prove by all possible means that our culture, our power, our knowledge, and our technology are the best, that our gods are the only gods! This is not just the story of civilizations but also of all wars of religion, inquisitions, censorships, dictatorships; all things, in short, that are ideologies. An ideology is a set of ideas translated into a set of values. Because they are held to be absolutely true, these ideas and values need to be imposed on others if they are not readily accepted. A political system, a school of psychology, and a philosophy of economics can all be ideologies. Even a place of work can be an ideology. Religious sub—groups, sects, are based upon ideological principles. Religions themselves can become ideologies. And ideologues, by their nature, are not open to new ideas or even to debate; they refuse to accept or listen to anyone else’s reality. They refuse to admit any possibility of error or even criticism of their system; they are closed up in their set of ideas, theories, and values. We human beings have a great facility for living illusions, for protecting our self—image with power, for justifying it all by thinking we are the favoured ones of God.

I have often been asked why I maintained such a non-compromising antagonism to government and in what way I have found myself oppressed by it. In my opinion every individual is hampered by it. It exacts taxes from production. It creates tariffs, which prevent free exchange. It stands ever for the status quo and traditional conduct and belief. It comes into private lives and into most intimate personal relations, enabling the superstitious, puritanical, and distorted ones to impose their ignorant prejudice and moral servitudes upon the sensitive, the imaginative, and the free spirits. Government does this by its divorce laws, its moral censorships, and by a thousand petty persecutions of those who are too honest to wear the moral mask of respectability. In addition, government protects the strong at the expense of the weak, provides courts and laws which the rich may scorn and the poor must obey. It enables the predatory rich to make wars to provide foreign markets for the favored ones, with prosperity for the rulers and wholesale death for the ruled. However, it is not only government in the sense of the state which is destructive of every individual value and quality. It is the whole complex of authority and institutional domination which strangles life. It is the superstition, myth, pretense, evasions, and subservience which support authority and institutional domination. It is the reverence for these institutions instilled in the school, the church and the home in order that man may believe and obey without protest. Such a process of devitalizing and distorting personalities of the individual and of whole communities may have been a part of historical evolution; but it should be strenuously combated by every honest and independent mind in an age which has any pretense to enlightenment.

Music brought the war in Vietnam right into our bedrooms. Songs we heard from America made us interested in politics; they were history lessons in a palatable, exciting form. We demonstrated against the Vietnam and Korean wars, discussed sexual liberation, censorship and pornography and read books by Timothy Leary, Hubert Selby Jr (Last Exit to Brooklyn) and Marshall McLuhan because we'd heard all these people referred to in songs or interviews with musicians. [...] Music, politics, literature, art all crossed over and fed into each other. There were some great magazines around too [...] Even though we couldn’t afford to travel, we felt connected to other countries because ideas and events from those places reached us through music and magazines.

Some had said that they could not write because of military censorship, but the fact was that, war or no war, they had not the slightest idea how to write honestly on any subject. Truth or real feeling in writing had nothing to do with censorship. In whatever period these gentry had happened to live, their personalities would have been bound to display the same emptiness. They changed in accordance with the prevailing fashion and took for their models expression culled from popular novels of the day.

Anything that squarely challenges The American Way or western civilization is suspect. After the War of 1914-1918, censorship, secret police and ‘voluntary discipline in the public interest’ took over. Step by step, year by year, war by war, the interests of big business were synchronized with the public interests until big business made the policy decisions which determined what was good for the people to hear, see and read – therefore good for the best interests of the United States Oligarchy and the American Empire.

As the world watched, Tony Fauci dictated a series of policies that resulted in by far the most deaths, and one of the highest percentage COVID-19 body counts of any nation on the planet. Only relentless propaganda and wall-to-wall censorship could conceal his disastrous mismanagement during COVID-19’s first year. The US, with 4 percent of the world’s population, suffered 14.5 percent of total COVID deaths. By September 30, 2021, mortality rates in the US had climbed to 2,107/1,000,000, compared to 139/1,000,000 in Japan.

The Book of Sand ("El libro de arena"), the character Eudoro Acevedo asks, "What happened to governments? "Tradition says they gradually fell into disuse. They would call elections, declare war, set tariffs, confiscate fortunes, order arrests and seek to impose censorship, but nobody on the planet obeyed them. "The press stopped publishing their contributions and pictures. Politicians had to look for an honest job; some found their talent in comedy or as witch doctors. The reality was very likely fuller than this brief account.

Suicide prohibitions have not succeeded in preventing suicides but have succeeded in preventing people from having an honest, private conversation about life and death. Those persons who trust mental health professionals with their innermost thoughts may quickly find themselves punished with a “seventy-two-hour hold” or worse. Suicidal persons and their would-be helpers alike are paralyzed by prohibitionist censorship, deception, and legislation requiring the betrayal of trust. The first and major victim of the war on suicide, as in all wars, is loss of liberty.

1990 was a totally political time. George Bush was president, people were dying of AIDS, a lot of our friends, and there was no money being spent by the government either on AIDS or art. So a lot of extreme sexual and political work was made at that time. It was in response to the situation. But that kind of "edgy" political work wasn't exactly what I was doing. I felt a little like my mother. I just wasn't surprised that the government wouldn't support this work. What would you expect. I had personally grown up in a world of total censorship so I wasn't surprised to see politicians wanting to take money away from the art that was explicitly talking about this entire reality of ours. It seemed like the real desire from them (the politicians) was to have no description. That's what they would have paid for. ...Doing their business, wars or whatever, behind the scenes and meanwhile propagating a giant nothing which has become a something the government and the media have only perfected since. To a very large extent people don't even know. I mean it's kind of the great product of this country. The American Way. A big nothing. A cataclysmic unawareness in the face of evil.

participation in the political process or lack thereof—and the principles we employ—greatly affect our neighbors. Politics can be a matter of freedom or imprisonment, free speech or censorship, housing or homelessness, life or death. Politics is an essential aspect of modern life. It is how we govern ourselves, and it plays a major role in how we organize ourselves as a society. Political actions have started wars and defined certain people as property, but they’ve also fed the hungry and provided care for the sick. Christians must be faithful and thoughtful in how we choose to wield our influence and political power.

Groups have powerful self-reinforcing mechanisms at work. These can lead to group polarization—a tendency for members of the group to end up in a more extreme position than they started in because they have heard the views repeated frequently. At the extreme limit of group behavior is groupthink. This occurs when a group makes faulty decisions because group pressures lead to a deterioration of “mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment.” The original work was conducted with reference to the Vietnam War and the Bay of Pigs fiasco. However, it rears its head again and again, whether it is in connection with the Challenger space shuttle disaster or the CIA intelligence failure over the WMD of Saddam Hussein. Groupthink tends to have eight symptoms: 1 . An illusion of invulnerability. This creates excessive optimism that encourages taking extreme risks. [...] 2. Collective rationalization. Members of the group discount warnings and do not reconsider their assumptions. [...] 3. Belief in inherent morality. Members believe in the rightness of their cause and therefore ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their decisions. 4. Stereotyped views of out-groups. Negative views of “enemy” make effective responses to conflict seem unnecessary. Remember how those who wouldn't go along with the dot-com bubble were dismissed as simply not getting it. 5. Direct pressure on dissenters. Members are under pressure not to express arguments against any of the group’s views. 6. Self-censorship. Doubts and deviations from the perceived group consensus are not expressed. 7. Illusion of unanimity. The majority view and judgments are assumed to be unanimous. 8. "Mind guards" are appointed. Members protect the group and the leader from information that is problematic or contradictory to the group's cohesiveness, view, and/or decisions. This is confirmatory bias writ large.

Dr. Fauci’s business closures pulverized America’s middle class and engineered the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history. In 2020, workers lost $3.7 trillion while billionaires gained $3.9 trillion.46 Some 493 individuals became new billionaires,47 and an additional 8 million Americans dropped below the poverty line.48 The biggest winners were the robber barons—the very companies that were cheerleading Dr. Fauci’s lockdown and censoring his critics: Big Technology, Big Data, Big Telecom, Big Finance, Big Media behemoths (Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, Viacom, and Disney), and Silicon Valley Internet titans like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Larry Ellison, and Jack Dorsey. The very Internet companies that snookered us all with the promise of democratizing communications made it impermissible for Americans to criticize their government or question the safety of pharmaceutical products; these companies propped up all official pronouncements while scrubbing all dissent. The same Tech/Data and Telecom robber barons, gorging themselves on the corpses of our obliterated middle class, rapidly transformed America’s once-proud democracy into a censorship and surveillance police state from which they profit at every turn.

Pakistani media coverage of the military should also be read within the context of the army’s management of knowledge about the institution and its role in managing security and domestic affairs of the state. While in recent years many commentators have praised Pakistan’s press for its relative freedom, self-censorship is still very common, as is deference to the army’s preferred narratives. The intelligence agencies’ willingness to use lethal methods against intransigent journalists and other domestic critics has repeatedly earned Pakistan the dubious distinction of being one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists (Committee to Protect Journalists 2011).

Roosevelt fought hard for the United States to host the opening session [of the United Nations]; it seemed a magnanimous gesture to most of the delegates. But the real reason was to better enable the United States to eavesdrop on its guests. Coded messages between the foreign delegations and their distant capitals passed through U.S. telegraph lines in San Francisco. With wartime censorship laws still in effect, Western Union and the other commercial telegraph companies were required to pass on both coded and uncoded telegrams to U.S. Army codebreakers. Once the signals were captured, a specially designed time-delay device activated to allow recorders to be switched on. Devices were also developed to divert a single signal to several receivers. The intercepts were then forwarded to Arlington Hall, headquarters of the Army codebreakers, over forty-six special secure teletype lines. By the summer of 1945 the average number of daily messages had grown to 289,802, from only 46,865 in February 1943. The same soldiers who only a few weeks earlier had been deciphering German battle plans were now unraveling the codes and ciphers wound tightly around Argentine negotiating points. During the San Francisco Conference, for example, American codebreakers were reading messages sent to and from the French delegation, which was using the Hagelin M-209, a complex six-wheel cipher machine broken by the Army Security Agency during the war. The decrypts revealed how desperate France had become to maintain its image as a major world power after the war. On April 29, for example, Fouques Duparc, the secretary general of the French delegation, complained in an encrypted note to General Charles de Gaulle in Paris that France was not chosen to be one of the "inviting powers" to the conference. "Our inclusion among the sponsoring powers," he wrote, "would have signified, in the eyes of all, our return to our traditional place in the world." In charge of the San Francisco eavesdropping and codebreaking operation was Lieutenant Colonel Frank B. Rowlett, the protégé of William F. Friedman. Rowlett was relieved when the conference finally ended, and he considered it a great success. "Pressure of work due to the San Francisco Conference has at last abated," he wrote, "and the 24-hour day has been shortened. The feeling in the Branch is that the success of the Conference may owe a great deal to its contribution." The San Francisco Conference served as an important demonstration of the usefulness of peacetime signals intelligence. Impressive was not just the volume of messages intercepted but also the wide range of countries whose secrets could be read. Messages from Colombia provided details on quiet disagreements between Russia and its satellite nations as well as on "Russia's prejudice toward the Latin American countries." Spanish decrypts indicated that their diplomats in San Francisco were warned to oppose a number of Russian moves: "Red maneuver . . . must be stopped at once," said one. A Czechoslovakian message indicated that nation's opposition to the admission of Argentina to the UN. From the very moment of its birth, the United Nations was a microcosm of East-West spying. Just as with the founding conference, the United States pushed hard to locate the organization on American soil, largely to accommodate the eavesdroppers and codebreakers of NSA and its predecessors.

Such is Fascist planning-the planning of those who reject the ideal postulates of Christian civilization and of the older Asiatic civilization which preceded ti and from which it derived-the planning of men whose intentions are avowedly bad. Let us now consider examples of planning by political leaders who accept the ideal postulates, whose intentions are good. The first thing to notice is that none of these men accepts the ideal postulates whole-heartedly. All believe that desirable ends can be achieved by undesirable means. Aiming to reach goals diametrically opposed to those of Fascism, they yet persist in taking the same roads as are taken by the Duces and Fuehrers. They are pacifists, but pacifists who act on the theory that peace can be achieved by means of war; they are reformers and revolutionaries, but reformers who imagine that unfair and arbitrary acts can produce social justice, revolutionaries who persuade themselves that the centralization of power and the enslavement of the masses can result in liberty for all. Revolutionary Russia has the largest army in the world; a secret police, that for ruthless efficiency rivals the German or the Italian; a rigid press censorship; a system of education that, since Stalin "reformed" it, is as authoritarian as Hitler's; an all-embracing system of military training that is applied to women and children as well as men; a dictator as slavishly adored as the man-gods of Rome and Berlin; a bureaucracy, solidly entrenched as the new ruling class and employing the powers of the state to preserve its privileges and protect its vested interests; an oligarchical party which dominates the entire country and within which there is no freedom even for faithful members. (Most ruling castes are democracies so far as their own members are concerned. Not so the Russian Communist Party, in which the Central Executive Committee acting through the Political Department, can override or altogether liquidate any district organization whatsoever.) No opposition is permitted in Russia. But where opposition is made illegal, it automatically goes underground and becomes conspiracy. Hence the treason trials and purges of 1936 and 1937. Large-scale manipulations of the social structure are pushed through against the wishes of the people concerned and with the utmost ruthlessness. (Several million peasants were deliberately starved to death in 1933 by the Soviet planners.) Ruthlessness begets resentment; resentment must be kept down by force. As usual the chief result of violence is the necessity to use more violence. Such then is Soviet planning-well-intentioned, but making use of evil means that are producing results utterly unlike those which the original makers of the revolution intended to produce.

WITH THE EMBERS STILL BURNING: The scientific community has done a pronounced amount of hand-wringing about its involvement in the atomic bomb’s creation, and a disproportionately absent amount of the soul-searching with respects to its creation of the science of eugenics. The 450,000 deaths due to the bomb are relatively small in the shadow of the many millions dead as a result of National Socialism’s eugenic campaign. The casualties of The Holocaust are the casualties of the science of eugenics, which so many scientists had actively campaigned for leading up to World War II. Yet, the scientific community has confronted its complicity with collective silence and sometimes outright censorship.

In the elaborate con that is American electoral politics, the Republican voter has long been the easiest mark in the game, the biggest dope in the room. Everyone inside the Beltway knows this. The Republican voters themselves are the only ones who never saw it. Elections are about a lot of things, but at the highest level, they’re about money. The people who sponsor election campaigns, who pay the hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the candidates’ charter jets and TV ads and 25-piece marching bands, those people have concrete needs. They want tax breaks, federal contracts, regulatory relief, cheap financing, free security for shipping lanes, antitrust waivers and dozens of other things. They mostly don’t care about abortion or gay marriage or school vouchers or any of the social issues the rest of us spend our time arguing about. It’s about money for them, and as far as that goes, the CEO class has had a brilliantly winning electoral strategy for a generation. They donate heavily to both parties, essentially hiring two different sets of politicians to market their needs to the population. The Republicans give them everything that they want, while the Democrats only give them mostly everything. They get everything from the Republicans because you don’t have to make a single concession to a Republican voter. All you have to do to secure a Republican vote is show lots of pictures of gay people kissing or black kids with their pants pulled down or Mexican babies at an emergency room. Then you push forward some dingbat like Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin to reassure everyone that the Republican Party knows who the real Americans are. Call it the “Rove 1-2.” That’s literally all it’s taken to secure decades of Republican votes, a few patriotic words and a little over-the-pants rubbing. Policywise, a typical Republican voter never even asks a politician to go to second base. While we always got free trade agreements and wars and bailouts and mass deregulation of industry and lots of other stuff the donors definitely wanted, we didn’t get Roe v. Wade overturned or prayer in schools or balanced budgets or censorship of movies and video games or any of a dozen other things Republican voters said they wanted.

the Spanish press doesn’t have the same censorship that the French, German, and British governments have imposed on their newspapers.” “Correct again, Lilly,” said Noble. “You can add American government censorship of the press, also. As far as I can see, in A.I. Office communications regarding The War, there is no Spanish press censorship at all. There was even wide press coverage in the last week of Spanish King Alphonse XIII and his family’s serious illnesses with the grippe.” “Both the Allies and the Central Powers don’t want to let on there has been any reduction in fighting capacity. So, very little appears in their respective newspapers. The Spanish, however, are free to report all the various details of the influenza epidemic. It would be simple wrong to conclude the epidemic is ‘Spanish’ in origin.

Bobby wrote, “the Big Tech, Big Data, Big Pharma, Big Carbon and Chemical-Industrial Food plutocrats and their allies in the Military Industrial Complex and Intelligence Apparatus now control our government. These plutocrats have twisted the language of democracy, equity and free markets to transform our exemplary democracy into a corrupt system of corporate crony capitalism. The tragic outcome for America has been a cushy socialism for the rich and a savage and bloody free market for the poor. America has devolved into a corporate kleptocracy addicted to a war economy abroad and a security and surveillance state at home. The upper echelons of the Democratic Party are now pro-censorship, pro-war neocons who wear woke bobbleheads to disguise and soften their belligerent totalitarian agendas for our country and the world.

And hold onto one thought: You’re not important. You’re not anything. Some day the load we’re carrying with us may help someone. But even when we had the books on hand, a long time ago, we didn’t use what we got out of them. We went right on insulting the dead. We went right on spitting in the graves of all the poor ones who died before us. We’re going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we’re doing, you can say, We’re remembering. That’s where we’ll win out in the long run. And some day, we’ll remember so much that we’ll build the biggest goddamn steam shovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in and cover it up. Come on now, we’re going to go build a mirror factory first and put out nothing but mirrors for the next year and take a long look in them.

People are as blinded by emotion as you were a few minutes ago. There are very few people these days who have eyes-to-see and ears-to-hear truth. Social engineering through cover-up, censorship, and contrived news keeps the public fearful and emotionally arguing over ancient issues like abortion, cloning, gun control, and song lyrics. People hopelessly rely on government to tell them what to do, then blindly blame and fight each other in drug and race wars designed to separate them from the truth and each other.” “People are so easily led, it’s no wonder the criminals I knew in DC refer to them as sheeple. Byrd even said that 95% of the people want to be led by the ruling 5%.” “That is a widely known fact,” Mark said, “that gives folks like me hope. We only need the majority of that 5% to know and live truth in order to have leaders like Von Raab in power.

The tens of thousands of books, the remnants of the greatest library in the world, were all lost, never to reappear. Perhaps they were burned. As the modern scholar, Luciano Canfora, observed: ‘the burning of books was part of the advent and imposition of Christianity’. A war against pagan temples was also a war against the books that had all too often been stored inside them for safekeeping – a concept that from now on could only be recalled with irony. If they were burned then this was a significant moment in what Canfora has called ‘the melancholy experiences of the war waged by Christianity against the old culture and its sanctuaries: which meant, against the libraries’. Over a thousand years later, Edward Gibbon raged at the waste: ‘The appearance of the empty shelves excited the regret and indignation of every spectator, whose mind was not wholly darkened with religious prejudice.

Across Western nations, shell-shocked citizens experienced all the well-worn tactics of rising totalitarianism—mass propaganda and censorship, the orchestrated promotion of terror, the manipulation of science, the suppression of debate, the vilification of dissent, and use of force to prevent protest. Conscientious objectors who resisted these unwanted, experimental, zero-liability medical interventions faced orchestrated gaslighting, marginalization, and scapegoating. American lives and livelihoods were shattered by a bewildering array of draconian diktats imposed without legislative approval or judicial review, risk assessment, or scientific citation. So-called Emergency Orders closed our businesses, schools and churches, made unprecedented intrusions into privacy, and disrupted our most treasured social and family relationships. Citizens the world over were ordered to stay in their homes.

The idea that we should campaign against hurtful speech among adults arises from a failure to understand that free speech is our chosen method of resolving disagreements, using words rather than weapons. Open debate is our enlightened means of determining nothing less than how we order our society, what is true and what is false, what wars we should fight, what policies we should pass, whom we should put behind bars for the rest of their lives, and who gets to control our government. This is a deadly serous business. While protecting children from abuse is a noble goal, an overly expansive definition of bullying cannot be allowed to hobble the gravely important exchange of ideas among adults upon which our nation depends. The new emphasis on collegiate "bullying" treats adults like kindergarteners and forgets entirely the gravity of the issues we face in our democracy every single day and the rightful passions they ignite.

The idea that we should campaign against hurtful speech among adults arises from a failure to understand that free speech is our chosen method of resolving disagreements, using words rather than weapons. Open debate is our enlightenend means of determining nothing less than how we order our society, what is true and what is false, what wars we should fight, what policies we should pass, whom we should put behind bars for the rest of their lives, and who gets to control our government. This is a deadly serous business. While protecting children from abuse is a noble goal, an overly expansive definition of bullying cannot be allowed to hobble the gravely important exchange of ideas among adults upon which our nation depends. The new emphasis on collegiate "bullying" treats adults like kindergarteners and forgets entirely the gravity of the issues we face in our democracy every single day and the rightful passions they ignite.

Wait till Buzz takes charge of us. A real Fascist dictatorship!" "Nonsense! Nonsense!" snorted Tasbrough. "That couldn't happen here in America, not possibly! We're a country of freemen." "The answer to that," suggested Doremus Jessup, "if Mr. Falck will forgive me, is 'the hell it can't!' Why, there's no country in the world that can get more hysterical—yes, or more obsequious!—than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio—divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding's appointees? Could Hitler's bunch, or Windrip's, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut 'Liberty cabbage' and somebody actually proposed calling German measles 'Liberty measles'? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the—well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy?... Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?... Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor—no, that couldn't happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours!

A writer toils to combat the insufficiency plaguing his or her life. Every writer seeks to ward off the corrosive obliteration wrought by the passage of time upon memory by capturing on paper his or her present day thoughts on life. For these intrepid souls, writing not only entails a lifetime of work it also represents their very lifeblood spilled out onto sheets of virgin white paper. Writers’ inkblot of words forms a pictograph for present and future generations to view; their thoughtful elucidations speak to us from the grave. Writers’ words transcend time by creating indelible images that survive wars, famines, epidemics, and censorship. Thanks to great writers, every man, woman, or child can escape the confines of their own cloistered environment and converse with other people of every occupation and lifestyle whose communal heartbeats form the bloodstream of every city. Thanks to literary figures, each reader can peer into the depths of past generations whose eclectic filament forms the ever-evolving equitable eye in humankinds’ collective consciousness, or colloquially what we refer to as humanity.

Races are roughly represented by the states they form and these states by the governments which guide them. The individual citizen can prove with dismay in this war what occasionally thrust itself upon him already in times of peace, namely, that the state forbids him to do wrong not because it wishes to do away with wrongdoing but because it wishes to monopolize it, like salt and tobacco. A state at war makes free use of every injustice, every act of violence, that would dishonor the individual. It employs not only permissible cunning but conscious lies and intentional deception against the enemy, and this to a degree which apparently outdoes what was customary in previous wars. The state demands the utmost obedience and sacrifice of its citizens, but at the same time it treats them as children through an excess of secrecy and a censorship of news and expression of opinion which render the minds of those who are thus intellectually repressed defenseless against every unfavorable situation and every wild rumor. It absolves itself from guarantees and treaties by which it was bound to other states, makes unabashed confession of its greed and aspiration to power, which the individual is then supposed to sanction out of patriotism.

Senator Lieberman took it as a call to arms. "After watching these society. violent video games," he said, "I personally believe it is irresponsible for some in the video game industry to produce them. I wish we could ban them." This wasn't the first time that America's political and moral estab lishment had tried to save youth from their own burgeoning culture. Shortly after the Civil War, religious leaders assailed pulp novels as "Satan's efficient agents to advance his kingdom by destroying the young. rupter "In the twenties, motion pictures were viewed as the new cors/ of children, inspiring sensational media-effects research that would be cited for decades. In the fifties, Elvis was shown only from the waist up on television; AD magazine's publisher, William Gaines. was brought before Congress. In the seventies, Dungeons and Dragons with all its demons and sorcery, became associated with Satanist particularly after a player enacting the game disappeared under the steam tunnels of a Michigan university. In the eighties, heavy metal artists like Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne were sued for allegedly invoking young listeners to commit suicide. In the nineties, video games were the new rock 'n' roll-dangerous and uncontrolled.

Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding’s appointees? Could Hitler’s bunch, or Windrip’s, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage’ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles’? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the—well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy? … Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution? … Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor—no, that couldn’t happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! We’re ready to start on a Children’s Crusade—only of adults—right now, and the Right Reverend Abbots Windrip and Prang are all ready to lead it!

there’s no country in the world that can get more hysterical—yes, or more obsequious!—than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio—divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding’s appointees? Could Hitler’s bunch, or Windrip’s, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage’ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles’? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the—well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy?. . .Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?. . .Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people

We live in a time I did not think I would see in my lifetime, a time when freedom—and in particular freedom of expression, without which the world of books could not exist—is everywhere under attack from reactionary, authoritarian, populist, demagogic, narcissistic, careless voices; when places of education and libraries are subject to hostility and censorship; and when extremist religion and bigoted ideologies have begun to intrude in areas of life in which they do not belong. And there are also progressive voices being raised in favor of a new kind of bien-pensant censorship, one which appears virtuous, and which many people have begun to see as a virtue. So freedom is under pressure from the left as well as the right, the young as well as the old. This is something new, and made more complicated by our new tool of communication, the Internet, on which well-designed pages of malevolent lies sit side by side with the truth, and it is difficult for many people to tell which is which; and our social media, where the idea of freedom is every day abused to permit, very often, a kind of online mob rule, which the billionaire owners of these platforms seem increasingly willing to encourage—and to profit by. What do we do about free speech when it is so widely abused? We should still do, with renewed vigor, what we have always needed to do: to answer bad speech with better speech, to counter false narratives with better narratives, to answer hate with love, and to believe that the truth can still succeed even in an age of lies. We must defend it fiercely and define it as broadly as possible, so, yes, we should of course defend speech that offends us; otherwise we are not defending free expression at all. Let a thousand and one voices speak in a thousand and one different ways. To quote Cavafy, “the barbarians are coming today,” and what I do know is that the answer to philistinism is art, the answer to barbarianism is civilization, and in any war it may be that artists of all sorts—filmmakers, actors, singers, and, yes, those who practice the ancient art of the book—can still, together, turn the barbarians away from the gates.

All of a sudden (in 1938 I think), in order to extend its autarchy to the domain of cinema, Italy decreed an embargo on American films. It wasn’t a question of censorship: as usual the censors granted or denied permission to individual films, and nobody saw the ones that didn’t get it and that was it. In spite of the awkward anti-Hollywood propaganda campaign that accompanied the measure (right around that time the regime began to conform to Hitler’s racism), the true reason for the embargo was supposed to be commercial protectionism, in order to make room in the market for Italian (and German) productions. For this reason the four largest American production and distribution companies—Metro, Fox, Paramount, Warner—(I’m still relying on memory, trusting the accuracy of the registration of my trauma), whereas films by other American companies like RKO, Columbia, Universal, United Artists (which had also been distributed before then by Italian companies) continued to arrive until 1941, that is until Italy found itself at war with the United States. I was still granted some sporadic satisfaction (in fact, one of the greatest: Stagecoach [John Ford, 1939]) but my collector’s voracity suffered a fatal blow. Compared to all of the prohibitions and obligations that fascism had imposed on us, and to the even more severe ones that it continued to enforce in those years before and then during the war, the veto on American films was certainly a minor or small loss, and I wasn’t foolish enough not to know it. Yet it was the first to affect me directly, and I hadn’t known any years other than those of fascism nor had I felt any needs other than those that the environment in which I lived could suggest and satisfy. It was the first time a right I enjoyed had been taken from me: more than a right, a dimension, a world, a space in my mind; and I felt this loss as cruel oppression which embodied all the forms of oppression that I’d heard about or seen other people suffer. If I can still talk about it today like a lost privilege it’s because something disappeared like that from my life, never to return again. So many things had changed after the war was over: I’d changed, cinema had become something else, something different in itself and in relation to me. My biography as a spectator resumed, but it was that of another spectator who wasn’t just a spectator anymore.

In the real world, however, the claim that censorship or enforced orthodoxy protects minorities and the marginalized has been comprehensively disproved, again and again and again. “Censorship has always been on the side of authoritarianism, conformity, ignorance, and the status quo,” write Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman in their book Free Speech on Campus, “and advocates for free speech have always been on the side of making societies more democratic, more diverse, more tolerant, more educated, and more open to progress.”30 They and former American Civil Liberties Union president Nadine Strossen, in her powerful book Hate: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship, list the horrors and oppressions which have befallen minorities in the name of making society safe from dangerous ideas. “Laws censoring ‘hate speech’ have predictably been enforced against those who lack political power,” writes Strossen.31 In America, under the Alien and Sedition Acts, authorities censored and imprisoned sympathizers of the opposition party (including members of Congress) and shut down opposition newspapers; under the Comstock laws, they censored works by Aristophanes, Balzac, Oscar Wilde, and James Joyce (among others); under the World War I anti-sedition laws, they convicted more than a thousand peace activists, including the Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, who ran for president in 1920 from a prison cell.32 In more recent times, when the University of Michigan adopted one of the first college speech codes in 1988, the code was seized upon to charge Blacks with racist speech at least twenty times.33 When the United Kingdom passed a hate-speech law, the first person to be convicted was a Black man who cursed a white police officer.34 When Canadian courts agreed with feminists that pornography could be legally restricted, authorities in Toronto promptly charged Canada’s oldest gay bookstore with obscenity and seized copies of the lesbian magazine Bad Attitude.35 All around the world, authorities quite uncoincidentally find that “hateful” and “unsafe” speech is speech which is critical of them—not least in the United States, where, in 1954, the U.S. Postal Service used obscenity laws to censor ONE, a gay magazine whose cover article (“You Can’t Print It!”) just happened to criticize the censorship policies of the U.S. Postal Service.

Western democracies managed to fight without imposing restrictions on freedom of speech. Instead of Orwell’s ‘war atmosphere’, there was an anti-war atmosphere.

The music on the radio--pop, rock, rap, and country songs which promote class war and celebrate idiocy, sociopathy, immoral wealth accumulation, discrimination, and stultifying social roles--is the thrown voice of Wall Street. All of the broker's values are exemplified in this music. ...The elite seek to program, dupe, hypnotize, control you--who they regard as their property, their 'bitch'--through these proxy singers. ...Don't let them talk to you that way.

Hairlessness is an aggressive stance, and implies a lack of vanity and disdain for luxury. It implies a state of war. A French-style waxing job or pubic 'landing strip' is like the so-called mohawk haircut favored by the Pawnee tribe and used in times of war by Cossacks, airborne troops, and the like. The 'Brazilian' wax job is the full skinhead.

in the 80-plus years since the end of World War I, Congress has not been able to summon the will to permanently abolish the mohair subsidies that were enacted to ensure fabric availability for World War I military uniforms.25 It hardly seems likely, then, that Congress would have the wherewithal to abolish entrenched censorship rules.

Just as the Nazis said that the Germans were the victims of supernatural Jewish plots or the communists said that the proletariat was the target of the machinations of the treacherous bourgeoisie, so the Islamists told the faithful that they were being persecuted by a conspiracy of global reach and occult power. Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, declared that the West had been engaged in a cultural war from colonialism on to ‘undermine the people’s genuine Islamic morals’.

Muslim feminist reformers try a third and braver tactic when they confront Koranic justifications for sexism or the endorsement of child marriage. They tell believers ‘to reject literal reads of the Koran and recognise that these verses were communicated during specific moments of war, and they aren’t edicts for all time. We, as Muslims, must reject the notion that we read these words literally.’ The reformers want to persuade the faithful that not every verse is true. Again, they do not wish away the difficulties of the enterprise by talking as if there is no conflict between modernity and tradition.

Compared to the millions killed in wars and genocides in the years that followed the fatwa, the pain the enemies of the novel inflicted was small. But it was sufficient. The threats against Rushdie produced a fear that suffused Western culture and paralysed its best instincts.

President-elect Lincoln to his confidants: "The people of the South do not know us. They are not allowed to receive Republican papers down there.

The German army appeared today to have taken its greatest gamble of the war, staking everything on a single desperate offensive to halt the allied march on Berlin now. Decisive failure in this big push, observers believed, might lead to a German military collapse and the final defeat of the Wehrmacht west of the Rhine. The full scope and purpose of the enemy’s winter offensive is still obscured by military censorship on both sides of the front, but field dispatches hinted strongly that the battle now swirling along the Belgian border may prove to be the last great action of the western war … All accounts indicated the Nazis have finally committed the cream of their armored reserves to this offensive, and the German home radio service boasted that the long-silent Adolf Hitler personally planned and ordered the attack.

Proslavery southerners were highly suspicious of Douai’s plan to establish a forum for public debate in their own backyard, presuming that this was simply a strategy for camouflaging abolitionist intentions. The climate of fear and self-censorship created by antebellum southerners around the slavery issue ran counter to Douai’s notion of free enlightened discourse. Moreover, it reminded him of the repressive Old World structures that he and his fellow emigrants had left behind. The harsh, occasionally even violent attacks of the proslavery majority smacked very much of the police states they had vehemently opposed in Germany. “You had rather be off or we shall make [you] go,” infuriated southerners told the foreign-born agitators. In this situation, slavery had ceased to be an abstract ideological problem. Invoking the right to free speech and using slavery as a metaphor to illustrate his own condition...Though the Texas free-soil activists wrote extensively about the economic dimensions of slavery, it was their own intellectual enslavement they feared most. For them, slavery was morally and politically wrong, but it was also useful as a yardstick for measuring their own degree of freedom.

unfolding events, and since censorship and suppression of information is underway, it’s best to approach this book as a living document. When new information emerges that can add to or improve the thousands of references and citations in this book, updates, additional notes, and new references will be provided via the QR code below, and the QR codes that appear throughout the book.

and authors who present information challenging to those in power. Censorship leads instead to greater distrust of both government institutions and large corporations. There is no ideology or politics in pointing out the obvious: scientific errors and public policy errors do occur—and can have devastating consequences. Errors might result from flawed analysis, haste, arrogance, and sometimes, corruption. Whatever the cause, the solutions come from open-minded exploration,

we got a hint of how the Espionage Act would be used as a club against people with anti-war beliefs

Literature has sometimes flourished under despotic regimes, but, as has often been pointed out, the despotisms of the past were not totalitarian. Their repressive apparatus was always inefficient, their ruling classes were usually either corrupt or apathetic or half-liberal in outlook, and the prevailing religious doctrines usually worked against perfectionism and the notion of human infallibility. Even so it is broadly true that prose literature has reached its highest levels in periods of democracy and free speculation. What is new in totalitarianism is that its doctrines are not only unchallengeable but also unstable. They have to be accepted on pain of damnation, but on the other hand, they are always liable to be altered on a moment’s notice. Consider, for example, the various attitudes, completely incompatible with one another, which an English Communist or ‘fellow-traveler’ has had to adopt toward the war between Britain and Germany. For years before September, 1939, he was expected to be in a continuous stew about ‘the horrors of Nazism’ and to twist everything he wrote into a denunciation of Hitler: after September, 1939, for twenty months, he had to believe that Germany was more sinned against than sinning, and the word ‘Nazi’, at least as far as print went, had to drop right out of his vocabulary. Immediately after hearing the 8 o’clock news bulletin on the morning of June 22, 1941, he had to start believing once again that Nazism was the most hideous evil the world had ever seen. Now, it is easy for the politician to make such changes: for a writer the case is somewhat different. If he is to switch his allegiance at exactly the right moment, he must either tell lies about his subjective feelings, or else suppress them altogether. In either case he has destroyed his dynamo. Not only will ideas refuse to come to him, but the very words he uses will seem to stiffen under his touch. Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child’s Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox. Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia…to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy…good writing stops.

The only ones hoarding HCQ were Dr. Fauci and Rick Bright, who had padlocked 63 million doses in the Strategic National Stockpile79—more than enough to supply virtually every gerontology-ward patient in America. Despite such efforts to create a shortage, none existed. HCQ is cheap, quick, and easy to manufacture, and since its patent is expired, dozens of manufacturers around the world can quickly ramp up production to meet escalating demand. In July, Gates endorsed censorship of HCQ recommendations after a video touting its efficacy against coronavirus accumulated tens of millions of views.80 Gates called the video “outrageous,” and praised Facebook and YouTube for hastily removing it.

For three months after the United States declared war on Germany the Masses kept on assailing the jingoists, the profiteers, and the capitalists who caused the beating and deportation of strikers, the Post Office censorship, and other evils which had been loosed in the campaign to silence all critics of the war administration.

It’s immensely complex to try to talk about online attack and the “callout culture” wars, and it makes me tired even thinking about trying to talk about it. To some folks, any voiced anger online plays into “disposability culture”; to some, any request that they take it down a notch is censorship.

After the Code, crime films, adventures, gangster films, war movies, and comedies all continued to get produced, with some adjustments. But the social dramas that took a woman's point of view, that remained on the woman's side from start to finish, requiring of her no last-minute conversion, apology, or reversion to happy subservience, all but disappeared. One can infer the intent of censorship by seeing what exactly got censored.

The population was angered by the ever-present censorship, hunger was looming due to the economic blockade, and industries were suffering due to coal, iron, wool, cotton, and people shortages. The government printed currency to cover its massive losses, but this only made inflation rapidly rise. By 1918, the cost of living in Austria rose more than tenfold in just four years. Bread rations were introduced for both the army and the civilians, and the overall consumption of meat dropped to half of what it was before the war.

Anyone middle-aged or older could remember the repressive censorship regime imposed during the First World War. The “dignity” of President Woodrow Wilson had been held inviolable, and any criticism of the president or his policies, no matter how mild or well-meaning, had been grounds to prosecute or shut down an offending newspaper.

Building on the Pentagon’s anthrax simulation (1999) and the intelligence agency’s “Dark Winter” (2001), Atlantic Storm (2003, 2005), Global Mercury (2003), Schwartz’s “Lockstep” Scenario Document (2010), and MARS (2017), the Gates-funded SPARS scenario war-gamed a bioterrorist attack that precipitated a global coronavirus epidemic lasting from 2025 to 2028, culminating in coercive mass vaccination of the global population. And, as Gates had promised, the preparations were analogous to “preparing for war.”191 Under the code name “SPARS Pandemic,” Gates presided over a sinister summer school for globalists, spooks, and technocrats in Baltimore. The panelists role-played strategies for co-opting the world’s most influential political institutions, subverting democratic governance, and positioning themselves as unelected rulers of the emerging authoritarian regime. They practiced techniques for ruthlessly controlling dissent, expression, and movement, and degrading civil rights, autonomy, and sovereignty. The Gates simulation focused on deploying the usual psyops retinue of propaganda, surveillance, censorship, isolation, and political and social control to manage the pandemic. The official eighty-nine-page summary is a miracle of fortune-telling—an uncannily precise month-by-month prediction of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic as it actually unfolded.192 Looked at another way, when it erupted five years later, the 2020 COVID-19 contagion faithfully followed the SPARS blueprint. Practically the only thing Gates and his planners got wrong was the year. Gates’s simulation instructs public health officials and other collaborators in the global vaccine cartel exactly what to expect and how to behave during the upcoming plague. Reading through the eighty-nine pages, it’s difficult not to interpret this stunningly prescient document as a planning, signaling, and training exercise for replacing democracy with a new regimen of militarized global medical tyranny. The scenario directs participants to deploy fear-driven propaganda narratives to induce mass psychosis and to direct the public toward unquestioning obedience to the emerging social and economic order. According to the scenario narrative, a so-called “SPARS” coronavirus ignites in the United States in January 2025 (the COVID-19 pandemic began in January 2020). As the WHO declares a global emergency, the federal government contracts a fictional firm that resembles Moderna. Consistent with Gates’s seeming preference for diabolical cognomens, the firm is dubbed “CynBio” (Sin-Bio) to develop an innovative vaccine using new “plug-and-play” technology. In the scenario, and now in real life, Federal health officials invoke the PREP Act to provide vaccine makers liability protection.

Though Gates’s simulation highlighted the need for masks and respirators, Gates, Dr. Fauci, and Kadlec ignored stockpiling these items, and the same for any antiviral drugs that might successfully treat sick people.230 Instead, they were laser-focused on next-gen vaccines, on compulsory administration to healthy uninfected populations, on censorship and other coercive devices, on constructing and controlling global health agencies, and on surveillance technologies.

Letters circulated without censorship, with a freedom that astonishes the twentieth-century mind.… The subjects of two warring nations talked to each other if they met, and when they could not meet, corresponded, not as enemies but as friends.

Books When Books Went to War, Molly Guptill Manning Books as Weapons, John B. Hench The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe’s Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance, Anders Rydell The Berlin Stories, Christopher Isherwood The Rise and the Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer The Death of Democracy, Benjamin Carter Hett In the Garden of Beasts, Erik Larson Gay Berlin, Robert Beachy Articles Leary, William M. “Books, Soldiers and Censorship during the Second World War.” American Quarterly Von Merveldt, Nikola. “Books Cannot Be Killed by Fire: The German Freedom Library and the American Library of Nazi-Banned Books As Agents of Cultural Memory.” John Hopkins University Press Appelbaum, Yoni. “Publishers Gave Away 122,951,031 Books During World War II.” The Atlantic “Paris Opens Library of Books Burnt by Nazis.” The Guardian Archives Whisnant, Clayton J. “A Peek Inside Berlin’s Queer Club Scene Before Hitler Destroyed It.” The Advocate “Between World Wars, Gay Culture Flourished in Berlin.” NPR’s Fresh Air More The Great Courses: A History of Hitler’s Empire, Thomas Childers “Hitler: YA Fiction Fan Girl,” Robert Evans, Behind the Bastards Podcast Magnus Hirschfeld, Leigh Pfeffer and Gretchen Jones, History Is Gay Podcast “Das Lila Lied,” composed by Mischa Spoliansky, lyrics by Kurt Schwabach

Senator Joseph McCarthy, who used the Cold War fear of communist subversion to promote blacklisting, censorship, and book banning, enjoyed wide backing among the American public. At the height of McCarthy’s political power, polls showed that nearly half of all Americans approved of him. Even after the Senate’s 1954 censure of him, McCarthy enjoyed 40 percent support in Gallup polls.

Is Israel really the biggest, baddest wolf on the block? Heck no. Even if you put every single one of Israel’s mistakes under a microscope, they still wouldn’t come close to those of many other countries around the world. In Saudi Arabia, Chop Square is literally a place for weekly public decapitations. In Dubai, the working class are literal slaves. In China, disappearances are normal and Muslims are being tracked and put into camps. In Turkey, journalists and activists are imprisoned and killed. In Iran, LGBTQ+ people are executed. In Syria, the government uses chemical weapons against its own people. In Russia, there is arbitrary detention, and worse. In Myanmar, the army is massacring the Rohingya Muslim population. In Brunei, Sharia law was just enacted. In North Korea—no description needed. All over the world, millions of people are dying because of tyrannical leaders, civil wars, and unimaginable atrocities. But you don’t see passionate picket lines against Dubai or Turkey or even Russia. The one country that’s consistently singled out is… Israel. The UN has stated values of human dignity, equal rights, and economic and social advancement that are indeed fantastic, and they are the values upon which Israel was established and is operating. The sting is it that countries that certainly do not adhere to some or any of these values are often the ones who criticize Israel while keeping a straight face. “Look over there!” those leaders say, so the world will not look at their backyards and see their own gross human rights violations. All this led to a disproportionate number of UN resolutions against the only Jewish state and the only democracy in the Middle East. Israel is an easy punching bag, but this obsession over one country only is being used to deflect time and energy away from any real discussion of human rights in the world’s actual murderous regimes. And Israelis aren’t the only ones who have noticed this disproportionate censorship. The United States uses its veto power to shut down almost every Security Council resolution against Israel, and it does this not because of “powerful lobbies” (sorry to burst your bubble). The reason the US shuts down most of these resolutions is because the US gets it. In a closed-door meeting of the Security Council in 2002, former US ambassador to the UN John Negroponte is said to have stated that the US will oppose every UN resolution against Israel that does not also include: condemnation of terrorism and incitement to terrorism, condemnation of various terrorist groups such as Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, and a demand for improvement of security for Israel as a condition for Israeli withdrawal from territories. If a resolution doesn’t include this basic and rational language, the US will veto it. And it did and it does, thank the good Lord, in what we know today as the Negroponte Doctrine.

Burroughs Wellcome holds the 1942 patent on the popper container and remained one of the largest manufacturers of poppers during the 1980s and ’90s. As early as 1977, a New York Daily News article described Burroughs Wellcome strategies for dodging criticism of widespread health injuries from its booming popper sales. As we shall presently see, Burroughs Wellcome and other popper manufacturers were the principal sources of advertising revenues to the gay press during that epoch, and they used that leverage to force censorship of any journalist attempting to link amyl nitrite to immune system collapse. If Duesberg and others are correct about that association, it means that Burroughs Wellcome was profiting from both causing the AIDS epidemic and then from poisoning a generation of gay men with the AZT “Cure.

Only relentless propaganda and wall-to-wall censorship could conceal his disastrous mismanagement during COVID-19’s first year.

The same Tech/Data and Telecom robber barons, gorging themselves on the corpses of our obliterated middle class, rapidly transformed America’s once-proud democracy into a censorship and surveillance police state from which they profit at every turn.

None of them engaged in soul-searching about how to preserve constitutional rights during a global pandemic. Instead, the simulations war-gamed how to use police powers to detain and quarantine citizens, how to impose martial law, how to control messaging by deploying propaganda, how to employ censorship to silence dissent, and how to mandate masks, lockdowns, and coercive vaccinations and conduct track-and-trace surveillance among potentially reluctant populations.

Burroughs Wellcome and other popper manufacturers were the principal sources of advertising revenues to the gay press during that epoch, and they used that leverage to force censorship of any journalist attempting to link amyl nitrite to immune system collapse.

Instead of responding to critics by answering common-sense inquiries, Dr. Fauci has cultivated a theology that denounces questioning of his orthodoxy as irresponsible, uninformed, and dangerous heresy. It’s axiomatic that American democracy thrives on the free flow of information and abhors censorship, so Dr. Fauci’s extraordinary capacity to ruthlessly silence, censor, ridicule, defund, and ruin prominent dissidents seems more congruent with the Spanish Inquisition

They practiced techniques for ruthlessly controlling dissent, expression, and movement, and degrading civil rights, autonomy, and sovereignty. The Gates simulation focused on deploying the usual psyops retinue of propaganda, surveillance, censorship, isolation, and political and social control to manage the pandemic.

The Book of Sand ("El libro de arena"), the character Eudoro Acevedo asks, "What happened to governments? Tradition says they gradually fell into disuse. "They would call elections, declare war, set tariffs, confiscate fortunes, order arrests and seek to impose censorship, but nobody on the planet obeyed them. The press stopped publishing their contributions and pictures. "Politicians had to look for an honest job; some found their talent in comedy or as witch doctors. The reality was very likely fuller than this brief account.