From: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books,alt.censorship
Subject: Re: Censorship in the USA
Date: 26 Jan 93 20:21:07 GMT
Reply-To: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Followup-To: alt.censorship
Organization: COMANDOS Project, Glesga Yoonie

br105@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Jeffrey A. Del Col) wrote:
> The recent thread on censorship in the USA is based on the paranoid
> assumption that there is a conspiratorial form of government in this
> country and what seems to be a nearly perfect ignorance of this country's
> legal system.  If you think that the US as a whole is in a straitjacket of 
> covert official censorship, you are sadly misinformed, as a visit to the 
> bookstores in large cities or near universitys would demonstrate.

The discussion is based on no such thing, as you would know damn well if
you had ever bothered to read any of what Roger or I have posted over the
last 8 years or so (I assume it's one of our articles you're responding
to).  Roger presently lives in the US and I have done.


> It was especially ironic in that a number of the participants live in the
> land of the Official Secrets Act,  where it is still possible to be
> prosecuted for heresy by word.

You are presumably misremembering the case of James Kirkup, who in ~1981,
together with "Gay News" magazine, was convicted of "blasphemous libel" (a
charge dragged out of the distant past and not previously invoked for over
a century) over a poem in which a Roman centurion fantasizes about giving
Jesus a blowjob.  I don't believe "heresy" has been a crime anywhere in
Britain since the Reformation.

The chances of anyone trying that charge on again, given what happened in
the Kirkup case (a middling fine and the poem reprinted in umpteen magazines
with no comeback) are virtually zero.


> Marchetti's troubles with his book stem from his having signed the standard
> CIA employee's agreement to allow the agency to read and censor his work.

Which is the same stunt the British state tried to pull on Peter Wright and
Anthony Cavendish and the author of "One Girl's War", with the result being
total failure (I am not sure exactly what precedent got set in the end).
Is the censorship precedent set by the Marchetti case still on the books
over there?


> I wouldn't think it necessary to remind the indignant complainers from
> the UK of Nigel West's troubles in publishing his books about British
> intelligence services...

Nigel West is a publicist for MI6 who wouldn't fart without their say-so.
What the hell are you talking about?


This nationalist crap completely misses the point.  The governments of
Britain and the US will happily collude in using whichever legal machine
they find appropriate when it comes to dealing with their common enemies.
Look at what happened to Agee and Hosenball.  Or look at the way US and
British immigration regulations both operate to keep each other's dissidents
from travelling to the other country to speak or perform.


Fetishizing book censorship, and in particular the official, state-level,
legally codified part of it, is looking at a pretty trivial part of the
censorship issue either side of the Atlantic.  What counts is how much
information *actually* gets into the public sphere where the average
citizen can get hold of it.  And that is decreasing rapidly everywhere,
thanks to the self-censorship pervading all TV networks on the globe.
The official watchdog bodies of the UK may have more explicitly granted
powers to control content than the FCC does over there, but that's mainly
because the papmongers of CBS/NBC/CNN are such obedient little doggies
they don't *need* formal orders any more.  And British TV producers are
rapidly lobotomizing themselves to match.

-- 
--  Jack Campin    room G092, Computing Science Department, Glasgow University,
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