To build and maintain reputation, one suggestion is to align with clerks and public relations practitioners, professionals who will be conscious and considerate of your concerns. The bourgeois and older corporations know this. The newly wealthy should figure it out. By purchasing loyal messaging with writers and other spokespeople, threats from a more objective reality, potentially a disorderly nightmare, are tamped down.² They come to see what’s preferred.

It can feel as though the last days of the Western “democratic” machine are approaching. Political discourse itself is called out as theatre and puppetry, belonging to large capital interests. But keep going. The techniques are old school. Hope and pray that whatever new decision-making economizes the inefficient modus operandi becomes an improvement behind the puppet’s happy manicured face. Quick, no unnecessary pain.

In spite of my Circular 14 criticism for being repeatedly offside of Canadian and international Freedom of Information (FOI) law, the bureaucracy was efficient in its reach and otherwise. I estimate “approximately 600 censored books over three decades,” only because of the destruction of files. Evaluations of texts also didn’t survive. The subject tables in CANADIAN MOCKINGBIRD are exceptions, primarily listing textbooks with accessible panel evaluations intact.³

Elsewhere books were mentioned as rejected without me locating the evaluations. The bureaucracy abruptly and regularly rejected panel decisions in their need to control troublesome messages. Some of these publications wound up in Circular 15, a brief additional publication listing reference books.

Internal communications existed listing texts rejected as “not suitable” that weren’t given a review. One such file listed texts removed from consideration between October 1972 and December 1973 on an internal ministry communication.⁴

Beyond Repair
The Second Century Anthologies of Verse, Books 1 and 2
A Short History of the Canadian Constitution
Water: Canadian Needs and Resources
Canada’s Water: For Sale
Canadian Parks in Perspective
The Pollution Reader
The Indian Tribes of Canada
The Quebec Revolution
Quebec: A Chronicle 1968-1972
Bureaucracy in Canadian Government
Our Nature – Our Voices
The History of Quebec, A Patriote’s Handbook
The Indian Identity Crisis
Thinking About Inquiry
There is No Finality…A Story of The Group of Seven

Sometimes the Minister’s office would become involved, such as in 1972 when Thomas Well’s administrative officer commented on another group of undesirable but panel recommended texts.

I have some very real reservations about putting publications such as these on Circular 14. In my own assessment, I realize things have changed since I was a student or teacher and I think that the books should be restricted to the senior division, if in fact, they are to be used at all.⁵

That’s executive efficiency, even if backed by strategic thinking amounting to “I don’t like how things have changed.”

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange recently arrived home to Australia and his crusading wife Stella after obtaining asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London from 2012 to 2019, then suffering incarceration in Prison Belmarsh for another five plus years without having been guilty of crimes. The United States charged Assange with “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.” That legalese means this innovator creating a forum that habitually reveals how power really operates, away from the mainstream cameras when there’s a need for executive efficiency.

“@wikileaks was producing things that people ought to know about those in power. People in power don’t like that.’ — Noam Chomsky on @wikileaks and Julian Assange pic.twitter.com/o9XxEz5wWI

— DiEM25 (@DiEM_25) June 25, 2024

Julian Assange, and Cryptome founders, made revelation of hard-to-locate knowledge accessible with an online archive. Wikileaks’ publishing overcame the censor.

Censorship keeps an author without due compensation and their audience deprived of the information they would otherwise possess. Yet power grows when it concentrates resources. Even information resources. Like the Federal Government of Canada’s 4,600 spokespeople available to help manage public thinking, its bloated sponsorship of media. 

Within puppetry, the actor-leaders assist their bosses with distraction and division. Censorship shrinks the public view. There’s entertainment, and studied technics millennia old.

In Routledge’s 2017 edition of Julien Benda’s The Treason of the Intellectuals (orig. 1927), Roger Kimball’s intro remembers the Greek Callicles’ contempt for Socrates’ philosophy, claiming that intemperance was virtuous. “…the cynicism will always be with us.” Benda has censorship as a central policing activity. In Napoleon’s 19th century France, the Minister of Police was to ensure a history written favourable to his rule and specificity. He ordered that the “good classical” Abridged Chronology of the President Henault “…point out the perpetual disorganization of the national finances, the chaos of the provincial assembles, the claims of the Parlements, the lack of regulation and resort in the administration.”⁶

Notes
1. Featured image is H. Roger-Viollet’s photograph of Julien Benda on blue background.
2. An image could be labelled “artificial” or “fake” where a “cover is blown” and the significant efforts in the image’s maintenance become understood. Opposition can emerge, and efforts to “decolonize the media” spread.
3. Approximately seventy with the chosen methodology.
4. File B145066, “English Language Books, Oct. 1972 to Rejected Dec. 1973…not suitable for c14, suggest possibly c15,” The dept note claims Oxford U’s The Second Century Anthologies and Burns & MacEachern’s There is No Finality were withheld because of policies of not listing either anthologies or art guidelines.
5. File B145067, [Name withheld], Memo re: “Canadian Critical Issues Series”. 1972, Ministry of Education.
6. Benda, J. (2006, orig. 1927). The Treason of the Intellectuals. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Pg xi-xii; 159.