All ethical people need to resist the book-burners and website-wreckers, loudly and defiantly, in the hopes that at least some of our fellow-humans will come back to their senses before it’s too late. – “Banned Books Week 2023”
Censorship, correctly viewed in the more enlightened times of the 20th century as the province of tyrants, bluenoses, humorless scolds, and other closed-minded nitwits, has in the 21st achieved a level of worldwide popularity unseen since the Index Librorum Prohibitorum went out of fashion. Governments around the globe threaten individuals and groups with violence for daring to speak or write words, or share images, that the rulers of those countries have declared off-limits, often for the most childish, disgusting, or even absurd reasons. And while in the past the educated could be counted upon to oppose such repression, nowadays they are more often at the forefront of censorship efforts, demanding harsh penalties for wrongthink and groveling in the most grotesque manner before idiots who, unsatisfied with merely being subjected to such thought control by their masters, demand the power to lobotomize themselves and everyone else within their reach.
In the year since the last Banned Books Week, we’ve seen innumerable efforts to sterilize libraries of anything offensive to the State or the most rigid and tiny-minded fundamentalist, complete with siccing the cops on librarians; the imprisonment of a respected journalist for disagreeing with the government; a “monkey see, monkey do” parade of attempts to either directly censor the internet, or to intimidate websites into censoring themselves; and many people harassed or even arrested by cops and spooks merely for expressing opinions the government dislikes, and that’s just in the so-called “liberal democracies” of the West. Where will it stop? There’s no way of knowing, unfortunately; censorship is extremely popular in dark ages, which of course is a large part of what makes them dark ages in the first place. When belief trumps facts, feelings trump reason, and violent psychopaths declare themselves the only legitimate arbiters of Truth, darkness can be the only result. The only variables are how widespread the Night will be, and how long it will be before Enlightenment comes again.
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