Written by Bob Whitaker. Originally posted November 28, 2004 – http://www.whitakeronline.org/blog/2004/11/28/what-censorship-is/
The first rule of REAL censorship is that you don’t read about it.
Where would you read about it?
If you ask the average person about censorship, he will talk about the suppression he reads about a lot. He will ask you if you are talking about Michael Moore or the Federal Government refusing to sponsor pornographic “art.”
Those incidents of “censorship” are well-known because people read about them all the time.
When the Canadian authorities seized Why Johnny Can’t Think: America’s Professor-Priesthood I was not “outraged.” This is standard practice. I have dealt with it all my life.
Some people said, “Bob, you should take this to the press.”
Yea, right.
How?
This is not Michael Moore-type national press discussions of “censorship.”
This is the real thing.
You can join the mob and scream about “censorship” when prayers are banned in public school and the fact is trumpeted nation-wide. This is what I call “famous censorship.”
Famous censorship is not real censorship. The whole point of real censorship is to keep things from becoming famous.
Making a big thing about students’ right to pray in school is easy and it makes the people who do it feel brave. You have a billion-dollar evangelical compex to trumpet that call. Those evangelicals have bought their right to media access by pushing third-world adoptions.
Those protestors of students not being allowed to pray in school wouldn’t touch the suppression of a book like mine. They could lose their respectability that way.
Let me repeat: real censorship is what you DON’T hear about.
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