The following is the unedited version of an interview Saab Lofton gave to Florida's Trajan Magazine in the summer of 2008 (the edited version inexplicably went off line right after the 2008 election) ...

Trajan: Do you think the national news stations are highly censored?

Lofton: Definitely. The most glaring example is Green Party Senatorial candidate Aaron Dixon. In the fall of 2006, Seattle's NBC affiliate, KING-5 anally insisted that every Senatorial candidate participating in its televised debate on October 17th, 2006 be able to raise ONE MILLION DOLLARS. Like most people, Dixon couldn't afford such an amount, and as a result, he was CENSORED and even ARRESTED when he tried to attend anyway! That's not supposed to happen in "the land of the free"!

Now, in the aforementioned example, The State didn't get involved until/unless Dixon tried to attend. The censorship took the form of him being priced out of the running. In other words, Big Business Equals Big Brother; we don't have free speech, we have expensive speech, and grasping that is the key to understanding the American style of censorship -- as opposed to the Stalinistic stereotype of censorship everyone has been inundated with since the Cold War ...

Another example of corporate censorship would be the "Health Care Olympics" Michael Moore held on an episode of "TV Nation," in which the care of a broken limb was timed and tracked just as any other Olympic event would. Between Cuba, Canada and America, Cuba came in first and Canada second -- but the American-owned NBC gave Moore the following Faustian choice: Censor the fact that Cuba won or run the risk of the episode never airing. In the episode that DID air, Canada won. I love the sick irony: Supposedly, America is so superior to Cuba, and yet an American station acted as Stalinistic as Castro did when it came to the Health Care Olympics.

Trajan: Why do you think people censor each other?

Lofton: Fear. They're afraid of the consequences and ramifications of the masses being privy to something indicting. Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist, once said that poets and kings can't be friends, because a poet's job is to say things a king wouldn't want publicly known.

Trajan: Is there such a thing as good censorship?

Lofton: Self-censorship is the only, barely tolerable/acceptable kind -- and even then ...

Trajan: Can a truly democratic society abide censorship?

Lofton: Not really, certainly not in the long term ...

Trajan: Should parents shield their children?

Lofton: It depends on the situation: Children see their parents drive cars all the time, but they ought to know better than to get behind the wheel themselves. Children hear grown ups say curse words on occasion, but they know better than to repeat those words out loud. I'm not a parent, but if I was, I'd probably take a "do as I say, not as I do" approach. Does that make sense?

Trajan: Should TV stations alter or delete content they believe to be dangerous to children?

Lofton: That's a grey area. What's considered dangerous? As a feminist, I personally find it very dangerous that bread and circuses such as Britney Spears and Hanna Montana are far more famous than Xena, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Captain Janeway from Star Trek: Voyager, and so on.

I know where you're going with this and here's my official policy: The Terminator films and video games like Grand Theft Auto should be as off limits to anyone under the age of 18 as any love scene. Ban them both.

To quote Larry Flint: "Murder is illegal, but you take a picture of somebody committing the act of murder they'll put you on the cover of Newsweek. You might even win a Pulitzer Prize. And yet, sex is legal -- everybody's doin' it or wants to be. Yet, you take a picture of two people in the act of sex or of just a woman's naked body and they'll put you in jail. Now, I have a message for all you good, moral, Christian people who are complaining that breasts and vaginas are obscene: Don't complain to me. Complain to the manufacturer ... I think the real obscenity comes from raising our youth to believe that sex is bad and ugly and dirty and yet it is heroic to go spill guts and blood in the most ghastly manner in the name of Humanity. With all the taboos attached to sex, it's no wonder we have the problems we have; that we're angry and violent and genocidal. But ask yourself the question: What is more obscene, sex or war?"

Trajan: Why do Americans care so much about curse words?

Lofton: Chalk it up to America's Puritanical, witch burning beginnings. I think the operative word is "curse," as in being cursed and damned to Hell (the most powerful fear there is). Except to my knowledge, the Bible doesn't say anything about curse words one way or the other. "Don't take the Lord's name in vain," is about the close as you're going to get insofar as language goes.

In The Empire Strikes Back, Yoda said the Dark Side is quicker, easier and more seductive. Likewise, it's quicker, easier and more seductive for today's so-called Christians to be petty and pick on something ultimately trivial like a curse word -- as opposed to taking on a REAL threat like poverty (as Jesus Himself did), which kills tens of thousands of people every DAY.

Trajan: Are you big in the anti-war movement?

Lofton: I wish I was bigger! Cindy Sheehan quit (after only a few years in the field) and yet she's an icon. I've been at this for over two decades and yet I'm still obscure! Goes to show white women are more powerful than black men. But this ain't ego talking: If I were to somehow circumvent all this corporate censorship (which has plagued my career for years) and became a really successful author, I'd give three-fourths of how much ever I made to charity (I swore an oath to God to this effect). My role model insofar as this goes is the late, great Marlon Brando. According to the Maoist Internationalist Movement's eulogy of Brando, "In the famous, Wounded Knee incidents, Brando again donated money and sided with the First Nations. Marlon Brando donated large sums of money to the Black Panther Party." And the only way Brando could AFFORD to do that is because he was FAMOUS -- famous as a certain suburban housewife who's sole claim to fame is that her naive son died in Iraq. Let's face it, Sheehan can't draw comics (I can), she can't write novels (I can) and she has yet to host talk shows (I have) or win awards in newspaper journalism (I have). Again, white women are more powerful than black men.

Trajan: Why do you object to the war?

Lofton: There have only been three conflicts worth fighting and dying for in the past hundred years: The Spanish Civil War (late 1930s), the Cuban Revolution (late 1950s) and the battle of Cuito Cuanavale (late 1980s). It turns out a key battle was fought in 1988 at Cuito Cuanavale in southeast Angola so the South African apartheid system could be weakened enough for Mandela's movement to thrive. Castro provided assistance, even though it was risky for Cuba to send military forces overseas. After he was freed, Mandela traveled to Cuba and paid tribute: "Without the defeat of Cuito Cuanavale our organizations would not have been unbanned. The defeat of the racist army at Cuito Cuanavale has made it possible for me to be here today." Check out a book called How Far We Slaves Have Come! Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro tag-teamed in order to write it and they also appear on its front cover side by side.

That having been said, the Iraqi invasion/occupation is a complete LiE ...

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0211-02.htm
"... huddled with aides at the White House, President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were not sure there was enough evidence to convince the Security Council. Without the council's explicit authorization, their plans for an invasion to depose Saddam Hussein could be difficult to defend under international law. Bush proposed an alternative: paint a U.S. spy plane in United Nations colors and see if that didn't tempt Hussein's forces to shoot at it. In any case, he said, the war was 'penciled in' for March 10 and the United States would go ahead with or without a second U.N. resolution. Blair replied that he was 'solidly with' the president."

... with the intent to STEAL Iraq's oil ...

http://www.counterpunch.org/cohn07302003.html
"Now that the rationale provided by Bush & Co. for attacking Iraq is unraveling, it's time to ask what the true motivation was for the rush to war. Many dismissed the signs of antiwar protestors, which read 'No blood for oil.' But if we connect the oily fingerprints, beginning with Vice President Dick Cheney's, it appears those protestors were right."

... and then, of course, there's Abu Ghraib and the use of white phosphorus on civilians in Falluja. The list of sins go on and on and on ...

Trajan: How would you resolve the situation in Iraq? Withdraw or stay?

Lofton: Immediately withdraw all military personnel and especially the contractors like Halliburton. Maintain NO permanent bases. Replace soliders with volunteers -- pacifists whose sole function would be to do Humanitarian work (imagine thousands of Mother Teresa clones scouring the countryside looking for good deeds to do). Pay reparations by allowing the Iraqi people (and ONLY the Iraqi people) to own their own oil to do as they see fit with it under the condition that they unite as a single, nationalistic entity in order to claim said oil -- no splitting up into Shiite vs. Sunni/Blood vs. Crip separate territories. Author Mark Zepezauer said it best ...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Zepezauer_Mark/Afterword_Boomerang.html
"Ultimately, there is no military solution to the problem of terrorism. We can defend ourselves best by working to eliminate the root causes of terrorism: hunger, disease, lack of education, repression. It's true that bin Laden himself is neither poor nor uneducated, but millions support him because they perceive him as standing up to the forces that subsidize their oppression. We can combat that perception by showing our willingness to right past wrongs and to work for a more just world order. The al-Qaida network has never once said that they attack us because they envy our freedom. They have said time and again that they oppose our support for the occupation of Palestine, our deadly sanctions against the people of Iraq, and our military alliance with the corrupt monarchy that holds sovereignty over Muslim holy lands."

Trajan: How long have you been a writer?

Lofton: All my lonely, geeky, nerdy life.

Trajan: What do you write about?

Lofton: A wide variety of genres and disciplines, but a better question would be WHY I write. I write because I'm too wimpy and cowardly to follow the path of John Brown, Che Guevara and the Black Panthers. I come across the way I do because I'm overcompensating since I seriously doubt the pen is mightier than the sword. I suspect that when I die, Che will be waiting for me outside the gates of Paradise lookin' ta beat my ass silly like a bully on the playground for deluding myself into "thinking" that cartoons and science fiction could ever take the place of revolution ...