Word: censorships
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When John Fox fired one of his red-baiting broadsides at the Boston Public Library, he raised the question of censorship. The Library's Board of Trustees thought it had an answer to Mr. Fox in its "no book-banning, no book-burning" resolution, but unfortunately, it has merely sidestepped the issue...
...bare three to two majority, the Trustees disclaimed the right of library authorities to "exercise censorship that their individual or collective points of view shall prescribe what the public shall read and what shall be banned...
...sitting on the tail of the "no censorship" clause is a paragraph stating the Library's intention "to take all legitimate precautions to make sure that the facilities of the Library shall not be abused for the planned infiltration of Communist propaganda." The second statement completely emasculates the first. It makes the Library's decision more than a merely ambiguous one, which so many newspapers have labelled it. It makes the decision thoroughly feeble...
...long as all pro-Red literature is not available to any person requesting it, the majority principle is a hollow one. Watered-down and bound by conditions, it is identical with the minority stand, and the question of censorship is no closer to solution...
...reason, as I.P.I, points out, is that Soviet censorship has been steadily tightened until it is now absolute. Until the Iron Curtain closed in 1946, reporters could still talk with Soviet citizens, still telephone the outside world, still argue with censors, occasionally even evade them by sly phrasing (e.g., "In Moscow the sexes are equal. This morning, women were out chipping the ice off the streets just like the men"). Now, says I.P.I., no one will talk to correspondents who is not "officially authorized" to do so. Furthermore, free-world correspondents may not argue with the censors because the Russians...