The policy of censoring the existence of censorship itself cast a taint of hypocrisy on the Americans and compared poorly with the old system of the militarists and ultranationalists, who until the late 1930s had allowed excised portions of texts to be marked in publications with Xs and Os. At least prewar readers knew that something had been excised; they could even count the Xs and Os and try to guess what. It is not surprising, then, that some writers who experienced censorship under both systems were cynical in their appraisals of SCAP’s version of free expression. One evoked an old
...more
