The Censors have been busy.

The Library of Alexandria smokes. Update on "Worth killing half a million children"

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I see that I hadn’t kept up to date with the latest extent of censorship in my first post (What’s Wrong with “The Greater Good”). It was true - I checked - when I started writing it some weeks ago that you could look up “Madeleine Albright” and “worth it” or “60 Minutes” on YouTube, and watch and listen to her saying that for her it was worth killing half a million innocent children so that she and her pals could get their way politically.

But now the censors have caught up: now the first things you get if you search on YouTube are the red herrings they put in to fool people who are looking for that video, having heard of it. This technique - putting in “Distractors” - is effective for them even if they don’t actually delete the video that they don’t want people to see. Fixing the search algorithm so that the result you are looking for doesn’t come up is another well-known technique (to some of us)! It’s rather like a digital version of censoring Caroll Quigley’s “Tragedy and Hope” or Anthony Sutton’s books by buying up all the hard copies in bookshops, and systematically stealing the copies in libraries, rather than actually burning or banning them.

I hope you have come across the “Forbidden Bookshelf” series of books. I quote their introduction at the bottom of this page, in which Mark Crispin Miller explains the rationale for their various choices, and why such a series is needed, including the different methods of making books disappear that we are all up against.

The Two YouTube Red Herrings

Suppose someone tells you that you should really watch this very revealing edition of “60 Minutes” (called “Punishing Saddam” from 1996) in which Madeleine Albright is interviewed (US ambassador to the UN at the time; later Secretary of State). They tell you that this video makes abundantly clear the venal nature of the sociopaths in power, and the appalling suffering they inflicted on another country with their “economic sanctions”. And it makes clear that “economic sanctions” (it turns out) doesn’t mean “avoiding trading with them” as the man in the street might imagine from this phrase - but “bombing their infrastructure, including factories making baby formula”. The result was the death by starvation or malnutrition of half a million babies and children.

I said - “The result was the death by starvation or malnutrition of half a million babies and children.”

If you do a search on YouTube for the full programme, because you want to see the whole context, instead of the original all that now appears that looks like a 60 Minutes programme, is one from 1997 (the following year) in which Madeleine Albright is set upon by the famously iconoclastic investigative team. They hound her in the same way that you might be set upon by blind doberman pinscher puppies, rather that the full-grown dogs.

An obsequious inquisitor spends the whole episode finding alternative ways to ask “please tell us how wonderful you are”. Clearly it’s a repair job for the disaster of the year before.

Someone who has been recommended to look for the evidence that she is clearly a sociopath, might be fobbed off with that, if they aren’t too diligent. And let’s face it - most people aren’t: they are busy with the rest of their life.

Instead of the infamous clip from that programme you get …

Madeleine Albright on Sanctions This looks like the right clip: it starts with the interviewer asking question, and so has the correct thumbnail, but it has different answers spliced in.

If, instead of Google or YouTube, you search on“Duckduckgo” though, you find the extract (at time of writing):

You can get a longer clip (3:30 minutes) and better in several ways clip here, where it wins a journalist award, which will surely highlight to the modern listener just who was telling lies. The tragedy is even more poignant, perhaps, knowing that there were no “weapons of mass destruction”, just lies about them from the administration. This well may be the whole segment, I don’t know. Although it is only three and a half minutes long, there were (I think) 7 segments in the whole 60 minutes, on a variety of topical subjects of the day, so that is possible.

I’ve had a long look through YouTube, Odysee, Rumble, Bitchute, and video results on Duckduckgo, and I can’t find the complete “60 Minutes” programme any more, although it may still be there, if you know its address.

• Does anyone have the full edition of “60 Minutes” edition “Punishing Saddam”, or know its http address on YouTube? If so, please load it up to Odysee, Rumble, Bitchute, YouTube (yes YouTube), and let me know.

• I see Rumble is being bought out. Is that correct?

• Have you come across any other examples of obvious red herrings in Search results that have been posted to reduce traffic to another informative web-site? Please give any examples in the comments. I feel that I’ve come across loads in recent years. If only I had a memory. [Ahah! Found 1: see Comments]

That’s it from me on this page. There follows the introduction to the “Forbidden Bookshelf” series, explaining different methods of making books disappear, and hence the need for republishing the revealing ones of this series. They publish a long list of books about important things for you to be aware of. They are pretty cheap too, and available for download as e-books.

Introduction

I

We the people seem to have the freest book trade in the world. Certainly we have the biggest. Cruise the mighty Amazon, and you will see so many books for sale in the United States today as would require more than four hundred miles of shelving to display them—a bookshelf that would stretch from Boston’s Old North Church to Fort McHenry in South Baltimore. Surely that huge catalog is proof of our extraordinary freedom of expression: The US government does not ban books, because the First Amendment won’t allow it. While books are widely banned in states like China and Iran, no book may be forbidden by the US government at any level (although the CIA censors books by former officers). Where books are banned in the United States, the censors tend to be private organizations—church groups, school boards, and other local (busy)bodies roused to purify the public schools or libraries nearby. Despite such local prohibitions, we can surely find any book we want. After all, it’s easy to locate those hot works that once were banned by the government as too “obscene” to sell, or mail, until the courts ruled otherwise on First Amendment grounds—Fanny Hill, Howl, Naked Lunch. We also have no trouble finding books banned here and there as “antifamily,” “Satanic,” “racist,” and/or “filthy,” from Huckleberry Finn to Heather Has Two Mommies to the Harry Potter series, just to name a few.

II

And yet, the fact that those bold books are all in print, and widely read, does not mean that we have the freest book trade in the world. On the contrary: For over half a century, America’s vast literary culture has been disparately policed, and imperceptibly contained, by state and corporate entities well placed and perfectly equipped to wipe out wayward writings. Their ad hoc suppressions through the years have been far more effectual than those quixotic bans imposed on classics like The Catcher in the Rye and Fahrenheit 451. For every one of those bestsellers scandalously purged from some provincial school curriculum, there are many others (we can’t know how many) that have been so thoroughly erased that few of us, if any, can remember them, or have ever heard of them. How have all those books (to quote George Orwell) “dropped into the memory hole” in these United States? As America does not ban books, other means—less evident, and so less controversial—have been deployed to vaporize them. Some almost never made it into print, as publishers were privately warned off them from on high, either on the grounds of “national security” or with blunt threats of endless corporate litigation. Other books were signed enthusiastically—then “dumped,” as their own publishers mysteriously failed to market them, or even properly distribute them. But it has mainly been the press that stamps out inconvenient books, either by ignoring them, or—most often—laughing them off as “conspiracy theory,” despite their soundness (or because of it). Once out of print, those books are gone. Even if some few of us have not forgotten them, and one might find used copies here and there, these books have disappeared. Missing from the shelves and never mentioned in the press (and seldom mentioned even in our schools), each book thus neutralized might just as well have been destroyed en masse—or never written in the first place, for all their contribution to the public good.

III

The purpose of this series is to bring such vanished books to life—first life for those that never saw the light of day, or barely did, and second life for those that got some notice, or even made a splash, then slipped too quickly out of print, and out of mind. These books, by and large, were made to disappear, or were hastily forgotten, not because they were too lewd, heretical, or unpatriotic for some touchy group of citizens. These books sank without a trace, or faded fast, because they tell the sort of truths that Madison and Jefferson believed our Constitution should protect—truths that the people have the right to know, and needs to know, about our government and other powers that keep us in the dark. Thus the works on our Forbidden Bookshelf shed new light—for most of us, it’s still new light—on the most troubling trends and episodes in US history, especially since World War II: America’s broad use of former Nazis and ex-Fascists in the Cold War; the Kennedy assassinations, and the murders of Martin Luther King Jr., Orlando Letelier, George Polk, and Paul Wellstone; Ronald Reagan’s Mafia connections, Richard Nixon’s close relationship with Jimmy Hoffa, and the mob’s grip on the NFL; America’s terroristic Phoenix Program in Vietnam, US support for South America’s most brutal tyrannies, and CIA involvement in the Middle East; the secret histories of DuPont, ITT, and other giant US corporations; and the long war waged by Wall Street and its allies in real estate on New York City’s poor and middle class. The many vanished books on these forbidden subjects (among others) altogether constitute a shadow history of America—a history that We the People need to know at last, our country having now become a land with billionaires in charge, and millions not allowed to vote, and everybody under full surveillance. Through this series, we intend to pull that necessary history from the shadows at long last—to shed some light on how America got here, and how we might now take it somewhere else.

Mark Crispin Miller

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