When people are not free to speak they are not free to think. From Todd Hayen at off-guardian.org:
There has always been a hunger for new discoveries and revelations of the truth, but often, in the past, it took great effort to get past the “agenda”—there has always been one.
Think of the Daniel Ellsberg exposure of The Pentagon Papers as well as many pieces coming out of Viet Nam during the ‘60s by a group of idealist journalists covering the war there. None of these were popular publications with the editors (or the powers that be), and had their difficulty getting published, but they were not altogether censored.
Then jump a few decades ahead and think of Julian Assange, still being held against his will for his revealing publications in WikiLeaks on war crimes committed by the United States. And we certainly must not forget the courageous work of Edward Snowden who exposed illegal CIA surveillance in the summer of 2013 having The Guardian, in the UK, and The Washington Post, in the US, publish his story.
Again, although unusual considering today’s climate that his story was published in two particularly prominent instruments of the state, Snowden himself was declared an alleged traitor by the US and has dodged extradition to this day. The screws tightened as the years rolled by—now so tight practically nothing gets through.
There is a lot more than this, of course. And today the censoring of highly qualified professionals and journalists who have pertinent and quite important information to share with the public has become so blatant it brings to mind the Nazi book burnings of the 1930’s and Soviet censorship during Stalin’s reign as General Secretary of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1953.
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 