(Smoke from Embers in the Burn-Barrel of My Late Career)
A
WORDS-AND-PICTURES JOURNALIST since 1956 -- variously a stringer;
newspaper staff-member; city editor; news editor; picture editor;
editor-in-chief; freelancer; unpaid volunteer editor-in-chief; blogger;
etc. -- I have witnessed the initial success and the eventual failure
of every humanitarian movement that has arisen in this nation since the
New Deal began our tragically short-lived socioeconomic restoration
eight years before I was born.
And
having seen what I have seen, I cannot but acknowledge what to many is
an unpalatable -- literally unspeakable -- truth: that the USian Left is
-- sadly -- at least as prone to vindictive, malicious, ultimately
self-destructive censorship as is the USian Right.
It's an old and troublesome story.
The U.S. Right, especially its now-dominant Christian faction, has always demanded censorship: note how the teaching of evolution remains under attack even today,
with the advent of Trump/Pence theocracy further encouraging those who
would ban it as heretical. No surprise here, not now nor any other
time.
But
my first encounter with censorship by the Left was indeed surprising.
It was quite nastily imposed by two (white/bourgeois) representatives of
the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in the aftermath of the 1963
civil-rights atrocity and international incident described here.
A
sheriff's deputy had attacked and arrested a Latin American diplomat, a
person (theoretically) protected by diplomatic immunity -- the racist
language accompanying his victimization therefore a vital illustration
of the hatefulness that underlay the entire episode. But the deputy's
self-damning words -- a snarl my mind's ear still hears plainly -- were
suppressed by the two CORE activists.
(To read more, go here.)
