counterpunch | Obama was never antiwar. On the contrary, like all American
presidents, he was pro-war. He had voted for George W. Bush’s 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” and did the opposite.
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” (the Guardian).
On March 23, CounterPunch published my article, “A World War
has Begun: Break the Silence”. As has been my practice for years, I
then syndicated the piece across an international network, including Truthout.com,
the liberal American website. Truthout publishes some important
journalism, not least Dahr Jamail’s outstanding corporate exposes.
Truthout rejected the piece because, said an editor, it had appeared on CounterPunch and had broken “guidelines”. I replied that this had never been a problem over many years and I knew of no guidelines.
My recalcitrance was then given another meaning. The article was
reprieved provided I submitted to a “review” and agreed to changes and
deletions made by Truthout’s “editorial committee”. The result was the
softening and censoring of my criticism of Hillary Clinton, and the
distancing of her from Trump. The following was cut:
Trump is a media hate figure. That alone should arouse our scepticism. Trump’s views on migration are grotesque, but no more grotesque than David Cameron. It is not Trump who is the Great Deporter from the United States, but the Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama … The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton. She is no maverick. She embodies the resilience and violence of a system … As presidential election day draws near, Clinton will be hailed as the first female president, regardless of her crimes and lies– just as Barack Obama was lauded as the first black president and liberals swallowed his nonsense about “hope”.
The “editorial committee” clearly wanted me to water down my argument that Clinton represented a proven extreme
danger to the world. 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” meant she had to take it off her
“publication docket”. Such is the gatekeeper’s way with words.
