Monday, April 23, 2012

Nanny Bastards

Censorship is wrong. In all forms.

Civilized cultures will self-censor, and purge their societies of offensive material and opinions on their own. From the ground upwards. All attempts to impose values from the top downward fail-and are the road to totalitarianism.

Ditto for democracy. Democratic values do not take root in a community because of elections. It is the culture of respect for individual rights and property and the rule of law that ensure that democracies can thrive. Without those elements, elections mean nothing.

Hamas was "elected" in the Gaza strip. Does that mean that the Gaza strip is democratic? Not in the least. It is a thug-run, terrorist hell hole. But there are Hamas fan-club groupies who insist that because Hamas was "democratically elected" that it is a legitimate governing force. How naive, how evil. 

Here is a troubling story from the UK, where "offensive" books are being pulled from the public library.

A real disgrace. Societies that censor and ban books think nothing of censoring and banning speech. This means that thought police are determining what you may or may not read and think. Your opinions are subject to external control and validation. Your thoughts can be criminalized.

No book should be banned. No speech should be banned. Nobody should have the right to take books away from children.

Interestingly, there is very little outcry from the left about this kind of censorship.

Here is an example. 

The woman in question came from an ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect and was forbidden to read books. She left Orthodoxy, and the very insular world of the Satmar community. The take-away from this story is that the religious are the bad guys for not letting her access the world of literature.

But when left-leaning censors decide which books should be taken off library shelves "for your own good" or "for the children" and because they are "offensive", that's OK.

Being a free-speech absolutist naturally entails being a free-reading absolutist. No word, no book off bounds. 

Limiting access to any book or text is a vile action that desensitizes people against even more heinous actions.  It's an incremental, barely perceptible dissolution of freedom.

It's not a very long walk from censorship and burning of books, to similar violations of humans-burning and murder of real people.