{"id":53670,"date":"2016-04-08T07:36:25","date_gmt":"2016-04-08T14:36:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=53670"},"modified":"2016-04-08T07:36:25","modified_gmt":"2016-04-08T14:36:25","slug":"trump-and-clinton-censoring-the-unpalatable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2016\/04\/08\/trump-and-clinton-censoring-the-unpalatable\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump and Clinton: Censoring the Unpalatable"},"content":{"rendered":"

by<\/span> JOHN PILGER<\/a><\/span><\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

A virulent if familiar censorship is about to descend on the US election campaign. As the cartoon brute, Donald Trump, seems almost certain to win the Republican Party\u2019s nomination, Hillary Clinton is being ordained both as the women\u2019s candidate\u201d and the champion of American liberalism in its heroic struggle with the Evil One.<\/p>\n

This is drivel, of course; Hillary Clinton leaves a trail of blood and suffering around the world and a clear record of exploitation and greed in her own country. To say so, however, is becoming intolerable in the land of free speech.<\/p>\n

The 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama should have alerted even the most dewy-eyed. Obama based his hope\u201d campaign almost entirely on the fact of an African-American aspiring to lead the land of slavery. He was also antiwar\u201d.<\/p>\n

Obama was never antiwar. On the contrary, like all American presidents, he was pro-war. He had voted for George W. Bush\u2019s funding of the slaughter in Iraq and he was planning to escalate the invasion of Afghanistan. In the weeks before he took the presidential oath, he secretly approved an Israeli assault on Gaza, the massacre known as Operation Cast Lead. He promised to close the concentration camp at Guantanamo and did not. He pledged to help make the world free from nuclear weapons\u201d and did the opposite.<\/p>\n

As a new kind of marketing manager for the status quo, the unctuous Obama was an inspired choice. Even at the end of his blood-spattered presidency, with his signature drones spreading infinitely more terror and death around the world than that ignited by jihadists in Paris and Brussels, Obama is fawned on as cool\u201d (the Guardian<\/em>).<\/p>\n

On March 23, CounterPunch<\/em> published my article, A World War has Begun: Break the Silence\u201d. \u00a0As has been my practice for years, I then syndicated the piece across an international network, includingTruthout.com<\/a>, the liberal American website. \u00a0Truthout publishes some important journalism, not least Dahr Jamail\u2019s outstanding corporate exposes.<\/p>\n

Truthout rejected the piece because, said an editor, it had appeared onCounterPunch<\/em> and had broken guidelines\u201d.\u00a0 I replied that this had never been a problem over many years and I knew of no guidelines.<\/p>\n

My recalcitrance was then given another meaning. The article was reprieved provided I submitted to a review\u201d and agreed to changes and deletions made by Truthout\u2019s editorial committee\u201d. The result was the softening and censoring of my criticism of Hillary Clinton, and the distancing of her from Trump. The following was cut:<\/p>\n

Trump is a media hate figure. That alone should arouse\u00a0our scepticism. Trump\u2019s views on migration are grotesque, but\u00a0no more grotesque than David Cameron. It is not Trump who\u00a0is the Great Deporter from the United States, but the Nobel\u00a0Peace Prize winner Barack Obama \u2026 The danger to the rest of\u00a0us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton. She is no maverick. She\u00a0embodies the resilience and violence of a system \u2026 As\u00a0presidential election day draws near, Clinton will be hailed as\u00a0the first female president, regardless of her crimes and lies\u2013 just as Barack Obama was lauded as the first black president\u00a0and liberals swallowed his nonsense about hope\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The editorial committee\u201d clearly wanted me to water down my argument that Clinton represented a proven <\/em>extreme danger to the world.\u00a0 Like all censorship, this was unacceptable. Maya Schenwar, who runs Truthout, wrote to me that my unwillingness to submit my work to a process of revision\u201d meant she had to take it off her publication docket\u201d.\u00a0 Such is the gatekeeper\u2019s way with words.<\/p>\n

At the root of this episode is an enduring unsayable. This is the need, the compulsion, of many liberals in the United States to embrace a leader from within a system that is demonstrably imperial and violent. Like Obama\u2019s hope\u201d, Clinton\u2019s gender is no more than a suitable facade.<\/p>\n

This is an historical urge. In his 1859 essay On Liberty,\u201d to which modern liberals seem to pay unflagging homage, John Stuart Mill described the power of empire. Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians,\u201d he wrote, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.\u201d The barbarians\u201d were large sections of humanity of whom implicit obedience\u201d was required.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a nice and convenient myth that liberals are the peacemakers and conservatives the\u00a0warmongers,\u201d wrote the British historian Hywel Williams in 2001, but the imperialism of the liberal way may be more dangerous because of its open ended nature \u2013 its conviction that it represents a superior form of life [while denying its] self righteous fanaticism.\u201d He had in mind a speech by Tony Blair in the aftermath of the 9\/11 attacks, in which Blair promised to reorder this world around us\u201d according to his moral values\u201d. The carnage of a million dead in Iraq was the result.<\/p>\n

Blair\u2019s crimes are not unusual. Since 1945, some 69 countries \u2014 more than a third of the membership of the United Nations \u2013 have suffered some or all of the following. They have been invaded, their governments overthrown, their popular movements suppressed, their elections subverted and their people bombed. The historian Mark Curtis estimates the death toll in the millions. With the demise of the European empires, this has been the project of the liberal flame carrier, the exceptional\u201d United States, whose celebrated progressive\u201d president, John F Kennedy, according to new research, authorised the bombing of Moscow during the Cuban crisis in 1962.<\/p>\n

If we have to use force,\u201d said Madeleine Albright, US secretary of state in the liberal administration of Bill Clinton and today a passionate campaigner for his wife, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of Hillary Clinton\u2019s most searing crimes was the destruction of Libya in 2011. At her urging, and with American logistical support, NATO, launched 9,700 strike sorties\u201d against Libya, according to its own records, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. They included missiles with uranium warheads. See the photographs of the rubble of Misurata and Sirte, and the mass graves identified by the Red Cross. Read the UNICEF report on the children killed, most [of them] under the age of ten\u201d.<\/p>\n

In Anglo-American scholarship, followed slavishly by the liberal media on both sides of the Atlantic, influential theorists known as liberal realists\u201d have long taught that liberal imperialists \u2013 a term they never use \u2013 are the world\u2019s peace brokers and crisis managers, rather than the cause of a crisis. They have taken the humanity out of the study of nations and congealed it with a jargon that serves warmongering power. Laying out whole nations for autopsy, they have identified failed states\u201d (nations difficult to exploit) and rogue states\u201d (nations resistant to western dominance).<\/p>\n

Whether or not the targeted regime is a democracy or dictatorship is irrelevant. In the Middle East, western liberalism\u2019s collaborators have long been extremist Islamists, lately al-Qaeda, while cynical notions of democracy and human rights serve as rhetorical cover for conquest and mayhem \u2014 as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Haiti, Honduras. See the record of those good liberals Bill and Hillary Clinton. Theirs is a standard to which Trump can only aspire.<\/p>\n

A Response from Truthout and a Letter from Truthout\u2019s publisher.<\/strong><\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.truth-out.org\/speakout\/item\/35422-on-regrettable-and-false-accusations-of-censorship<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Dear Jeffrey,<\/p>\n

I\u2019m writing in response to Counterpunch\u2019s publication of a highly misleading and factually inaccurate article by John Pilger today regarding Truthout and our editor-in-chief Maya Schenwar, Trump and Clinton: Censoring the Unpalatable<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The idea that Truthout is stifling criticism of Hillary Clinton holds no water, and this takes very little time to verify \u2013 I\u2019ve appended below a few of the many uncompromisingly critical articles we\u2019ve published about her.<\/p>\n

John Pilger\u2019s history of excellent journalism is without question. However, the reality of this situation is that each and every writer who submits work to Truthout for publication or republication need to work with our editors, and treat them with some basic professional courtesy. That did not happen in this case.<\/p>\n

It has long been Truthout\u2019s policy that for articles to be featured as Truthout originals, they need to either be exclusive content or to be very substantially revised and rewritten versions of content that has appeared elsewhere. This was communicated to John Pilger, and his refusal to acknowledge this or to engage in civil discussion with our editors led to our decision not to republish this piece.<\/p>\n

As Pilger states, the article had already been published elsewhere.\u00a0Calling the decision not to run it again censorship is inaccurate \u2013 Truthout makes judgment calls as to what to republish every day, and a decision not to republish an article does not mean we are damning that piece by implication, let alone censoring it. Calling the decision politically-motivated censorship stemming from a desire to protect Hillary Clinton is wildly, maliciously inaccurate and easily demonstrable as false.<\/p>\n

This article is a misrepresentation of Truthout, a misrepresentation of\u00a0Maya Schenwar, and a misrepresentation of what censorship\u201d entails that does a disservice to the concept. It calls Counterpunch\u2019s credibility into question for as long as this story remains on your site in its current form.<\/p>\n

With thanks for your prompt attention to this matter,<\/p>\n

Joe Macar\u00e9<\/p>\n

Publisher, Truthout<\/p>\n

www.truthout.org<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n
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jmacare@truthout.org<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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<\/div>\n
Appendix:<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
http:\/\/www.truth-out.org\/news\/item\/35011-hillary-the-hawk<\/a><\/div>\n
http:\/\/www.truth-out.org\/opinion\/item\/35006-hillary-clinton-s-faux-feminism<\/a><\/div>\n
http:\/\/www.truth-out.org\/opinion\/item\/34941-secretary-of-state-hillary-clinton-enabled-the-coup-in-honduras<\/a><\/div>\n
http:\/\/www.truth-out.org\/opinion\/item\/34913-with-hillary-clinton-corporate-america-defines-the-limits-of-acceptable-opinion<\/a><\/div>\n
http:\/\/www.truth-out.org\/buzzflash\/commentary\/hillary-clinton-used-henry-kissinger-war-criminal-to-burnish-her-foreign-policy-credentials<\/a><\/div>\n
http:\/\/www.truth-out.org\/news\/item\/33868-what-we-can-expect-from-hillary-clinton-on-israel-palestine<\/a><\/div>\n
http:\/\/www.truth-out.org\/news\/item\/33869-hillary-clinton-s-ghosts-a-legacy-of-pushing-the-democratic-party-to-the-right<\/a><\/div>\n
http:\/\/www.truth-out.org\/opinion\/item\/33686-hillary-clinton-goes-bush-league<\/a><\/div>\n
http:\/\/www.truth-out.org\/news\/item\/32754-clinton-proposes-campaign-finance-reform-while-raking-in-millions-from-wall-street<\/a><\/div>\n
http:\/\/www.truth-out.org\/news\/item\/34499-hillary-clinton-declares-war-on-single-payer-health-care<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n