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April 22, 2005
What Censorship Is
The Right Coast, talking about happenings in North Korea, prints the following aside:
"n one of his books, Arkady Vaksberg tells a story of his mother going to the Central Post Office in Moscow in the early 1950s and seeing a patch of walpaper where Lavrenti Beria's framed photograph had been: she understood immediately that Beria had fallen from power. (Khrushchev and Co. had arranged for Beria to be arrested, "tried", and -- in very short order -- shot.) Subscribers to the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia soon afterward received a package with a covering letter instructing the recipient to cut out pages such-and-such from the Encyclopaedia, and to paste in the enclosed new pages instead. It turned out that the pages to be excised were the Encyclopaedia's fawning entry on Beria; the substitute pages were photographs of the Bering Sea..."
Folks, this is what censorship really is. Too many people cry censorship because publishers refuse to spend money to publish their views. They cry censorship when others criticize what they say. The Soviet Union was masterful at censorship. They had, and used, the power to wipe the records clean of ideas, and people, that they didn't like. You can tell how free our country is by the triviality of the actions that get called censorship.
Posted by Lockjaw at April 22, 2005 12:42 PM
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