donn@utah-cs.UUCP (Donn Seeley) (10/02/84)
The Deseret News in Salt Lake City is proud to be able to continue to carry Doonesbury as it has since the strip was first syndicated, except of course the first three daily strips won't be published because they are so offensive. Far be it for me to accuse a church-owned newspaper of hypocrisy... but if they find the strip offensive, why don't they let some other local paper run it? Is the revenue generated by Doonesbury so great that the publishers can't afford not to print it (most of the time)? The Indonesian government has a system of repression that is remarkable in its subtlety, and I wonder if a variation is being applied here... The technique is to allow dissident groups to publish and organize, and merely arrest and confine demonstrators for a few months when trouble brews up. The guiding principle is that it is better for dissidents to be public, where they can be controlled, than underground, where they can be dangerous. (Really dangerous people are arrested and not heard from again; this is less often murder than it is abuse and internal exile. Internal exile is a wonderful thing -- one wonders whether the Indonesians used the Gulag as a model, or were simply imitating the hated Dutch.) Perhaps the publishers of the Deseret News consider it more useful to publish Doonesbury themselves so they can censor it when the necessity arises, rather than let it run wild in some secular newspaper... Have other folks seen this censorship? PO'ed, Donn Seeley University of Utah CS Dept donn@utah-cs.arpa 40 46' 6"N 111 50' 34"W (801) 581-5668 decvax!utah-cs!donn PS -- There is an obvious place for messages like this, but of course we don't get net.flame in Utah...