When Western intellectuals like Chomsky say they have been "censored", they mean that that their publishing house asked them to leave out or add stuff because they felt that such changes would help the book sell better, as their goal was to make money off authors they published. That's quite a bit different from the threats of jail time that Eastern Bloc intellectuals faced.
A modern westerner doesn't really get how it was in the Soviet block.
"Wasn't much better than USSR" is such bullshit on so many levels that it's hard to even to begin. In the US:
- you didn't have quotas to write "correct literature"
- you wouldn't disappear in a gulag for 10 years
- you didn't have to worry about standing in a queue for 1-2h to get fresh bread and sausage (it's easier to contemplate stupid shit when you don't have to worry about food)
- you didn't get assigned to a specific workplace where you HAD to work
- the books you read didn't have ideological crap (due to quotas) like "and children stopped starving because country X is a part of a friendly USSR"
I skipped not relevant bits but probably I still missed quite a few because I can only relay what my parents and others told me (I was born in the late 80s so I didn't get to experience the full glory of USSR).
EDIT: I forgot to mention a well-known practice of labelling people physically ill[1], getting them into physical wards, and pumping them with drugs until they are no longer "a thread". There is no need for a trial, and you can be held there indefinitely.
All true, and yet a lot of people in USSR and many other East block countries miss those times nowadays, as there were also good things about it, mainly a sense of financial and social security and also "equality" between people (yes, equality in being poor compared to West, but still very little differences in life styles for 99% of people - all kids in your school would wear the same kind of shoes and same kind of cloths, living in the same kind of apartments - there was no rich kids singling out poor ones and all that shit that you have now)
Let's not forget "stukach". Your friend or relative might be the one who meets a curator from KGB and reporting everything "interesting" you have said. Each big enough organization had a permanent curator assigned to monitor sentiments. And repercussions were real enough.
For the record, I very much disagree with Chomsky, but he was writing when the events you are writing about were contemporary, and he knew about them. I do think you may have an overly rosy view of Cold War USA. Lots of people didn't have a choice of where to work, there was and still is some hunger and malnutrition, there was a lot of jingoistic ideological propaganda, involuntary commitment and even lobotomy was used against dissidents (especially feminists and gay men), and for example the Comics Code explicitly required the jingoistic propaganda, as did the DoD for films made with their cooperation (which included almost anything touching on military topics).
There was a lot more freedom than in the USSR, but the same shitty phenomena occurred, just less so.
Not many people know of the worst cases. Take the case of Chomsky's "Counter-Revolutionary Violence", which caused angry executives to literally shut down the publisher[1]:
"Sarnoff(chief of book operation, Warner communications) complained that too many of Warner Modular's(small publishing company under Warner communications) works were written by left-wing writers. McCaleb replied that conservative writers were also represented, and that Warner Modular had planned to publish works by Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek.
Sarnoff then canceled the ads for CRV, ordered the destruction of the first printing of CRV, as well as the Warner Modular catalog that listed them, and announced that he would not release one copy of CRV to anybody. When McCaleb replied that such an outrageous move would shatter Warner Modular's staff and shock the publishing world, Sarnoff replied that he did not "give a damn what I, my staff, the authors, or the academic community thought and ended by saying that we should destroy the entire inventory of CRV".
Warner Publishing decided to shut down Warner Modular before CRV could be published. The print run was not initially destroyed because of contractual obligations, but the book was passed on to MSS Information Corporation for promotion and distribution after Warner Publishing shut down Warner Modular. However, MSS engaged in no promotion, as it was not a commercial publishing company and had no distribution facilities. Only 500 copies of the 20,000-copy printing survived. Radical America obtained and distributed some copies, because its staff already knew of CRV's existence.[6] According to Chomsky, the rest were "pulped," not burned. Despite its suppression in the United States, it was translated into several European languages, had two printings in France by the time that The Washington Connection was printed, and CRV's suppression became a "minor cause celebre" in France."
Not to mention that Chomsky was on the verge of being put in prison for protesting Vietnam, while journalists and activists who have either gone to prison or forced to accept terrible plea deals thrown upon them for minor offences. Barrett Brown and Aaron Swartz comes to mind.
The FBI assassination of Black Panther leaders being another.
I wouldn't forget the time the Philadelphia Police dropped a bomb on the Black liberation group MOVE, killing several of the members and destroying three blocks of a dense residential part of the city:
> The black liberation group MOVE was founded in 1972 [...] members of MOVE all [...] preached [...] revolution and a return to nature.
Preach revolution and pose as a victim of police brutality ...
> when police tried to evict them from their house. A firefight erupted, killing one police officer and injuring several more on both sides.
Oh right, they were just cop killers
> MOVE members boarded up the windows, built a fortified rooftop bunker and broadcasted profanity-laced political lectures with bullhorns at all hours, drawing complaints from neighbors. Members continued to rack up violations from contempt of court to illegal possession of firearms, to the point where they were considered a terrorist organization by the mayor and police commissioner.
> Arriving with arrest warrants for four residents of the house, the police ordered them to come out peacefully. Before long, shooting began.
How exactly was that story supposed to end ?
> The Mayor's failure to call a halt to the operation on May 12, when he knew that children were in the house, was grossly negligent and clearly risked the lives of those children.
What kind of person does this kind of things with their children in the house ?
If I were to transform a house into an armed bunker I would most definitely not take my children there.
Exposing children to such violence ... How is there on earth an excuse for that ?
> "Sarnoff(chief of book operation, Warner communications) complained that too many of Warner Modular's(small publishing company under Warner communications) works were written by left-wing writers.
For example in that speach he clearly states that USSR was a a flawed totalitarian system from the start https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06-XcAiswY4
(he has in fact also stated many times that his political views were indeed censored in the US)