September 27, 2021 by Maggie McNeill
Censorship, once condemned by all ethical people, has now become almost universally popular. - " The Convergence of Censors "
The last week of September is " Banned Books Week"; over the 11 years I've been writing this blog, my columns on the topic have changed as threats to intellectual freedom have dramatically increased worldwide. As I said last year,
When I was a librarian, [this] Week was little more than an academic exercise; censorship was an intermittent and generally impotent threat proceeding from small numbers of narrow-minded busybodies, which was easily defeated by librarians and other guardians of our shared cultural heritage. But that was a generation ago, and would-be censors have become numerous, aggressive, well-organized and (most concerningly) popular. Few of those under 30 even understand what free speech is or why it's important, and the majority or those over that age imagine all sorts of exceptions that they believe should be reasons to violently suppress speech...the censor-morons ...are...multiplying like bacteria and have already infested all the centers of power...
The links are all there for your perusal, but just in case you've been asleep for the past three or four years, here are a few stories from the past six months so you can see for yourself that I'm not exaggerating. There's still plenty of old-fashioned, bluenosed, school-based censorship conducted in the name of THE CHIIIIIIIIILDREEEEEEN!!!™, but now they've learned to pretend ideas they don't like constitute a "crime" so as to threaten their enemies with police violence. Furthermore, institutions writers could once count on to defend them, including libraries and publishers, now race to see who can kowtow most obsequiously to the censor-morons, sometimes even volunteering to act as censors themselves, and institutions which need free speech the most are lobotomizing themselves by peddling pro-censorship sophistry and even conducting literal book burnings. Governments are increasingly claiming the "right" to declare which facts are "correct" and to suppress ideas they declare "disinformation" or "fake news", and in our increasingly-connected world governments are increasingly able to cause trouble for people who say things they dislike far beyond their own borders ( China is the worst offender, but is far from alone). Soon, ideas the mob, the government, or other violent simian gangs dislike may become impossible to acquire outside of caches of virtual samizdat, at which point the censor-morons will pivot to criminalizing avenues of access to such caches while "intellectuals" cheer and pen screeds about how obedience and conformity are far better for "society" than imagination and critical thinking.
