> Book banning seems like a strange red line to have forgotten
Has book banning ever been a red line? Many Western countries, from Canada to France through US and New Zealand have banned many books for most of their existence.
Until relatively recently in the US, "banning books" was widely considered one of those morally reprehensible things that only authoritarian governments did, and people were outraged that the US did it at all.
It is legitimately weird how quickly that seems to have changed within the culture in the light of the moral panic over transgender "groomers" and the antiwoke movement. That, and the sentiment that the government should regulate or nationalize social media, or even make it illegal... and half the country seems to be in a competition to see how fascist they can become before the Supreme Court actually calls them out. It's like someone flipped a switch and suddenly all this dystopian shit was just ok with everyone.
> Until relatively recently in the US, "banning books" was widely considered one of those morally reprehensible things that only authoritarian governments did, and people were outraged that the US did it at all.
I’m so confused. Book bans in authoritarian nations mean that you can’t purchase the book because the government prohibits it. Is that happening anywhere in the US today?
> Until relatively recently in the US, "banning books" was widely considered one of those morally reprehensible things that only authoritarian governments did, and people were outraged that the US did it at all.
This is why I loathe the “book banning” activists, because their entire goal is to confuse people by using deliberately misleading language.
The fact of the matter is that nowhere in the US has any book been successfully banned by any government in recent memory, in the dystopian, authoritarian sense understanding of the term “book banning”. Activists simply decided to call removing books from school libraries “book banning” to deliberately induce misapprehension that this sort of dystopian, authoritarian shit is reality, when it simply is not the case.
Calls to remove books from libraries on the basis of ideology driven by a political party are a form of book banning, the distinction between it and a "ban by government" is one without a difference.
Reformed Protestant schools in The Netherlands have banned books with curse words, heavy language, sex, occultism and magic. You are not going to find any Harry Potter books there.
School books, the ones you learn from during the curriculum, are also heavily edited so that Christian school still buy them. Bikinis, short skirts, tattoos, female pastors, dinosaurs, astrology, everything is left out of the books out of fear that Christian schools will not buy them. Publishers are very careful with what they put in their books.
It is legitimately weird how quickly that seems to have changed within the culture in the light of the moral panic over transgender "groomers" and the antiwoke movement. That, and the sentiment that the government should regulate or nationalize social media, or even make it illegal... and half the country seems to be in a competition to see how fascist they can become before the Supreme Court actually calls them out. It's like someone flipped a switch and suddenly all this dystopian shit was just ok with everyone.