This morning, I stumbled upon an article in The Walrus, a Canadian newsmagazine, about book bannings… in Canada. It appears to be a robust, well-informed piece. It tells us, among other things, that book banning in libraries is popular on all sides of the political front. “Think of the children!” seems to be a common theme, whether it is conservatives trying to protect young readers from what they perceive as “grooming” or progressives trying to weed out works that they find “offensive”.
The CBC also had a recent report about the banning of books, but their reporting appears to be more concerned about bans specifically targeting “2SLGBTQ+” literature. (Frankly, I find this ever growing acronym itself a painfully transparent exercise in virtue signaling — the CBC demonstrated my concern when they failed to use the acronym consistently themselves, writing “2SLGBTQ” later in the same article, only to switch to “LGBTQIA+” when quoting another report.)
Meanwhile, The Walrus points out that censorship often has the opposite effect: E.g., when an attempt was made on Salman Rushdie’s life, sales of The Satanic Verses soared on Amazon. (Speaking from personal experience: I’d not have obtained, and read, a copy of Orwell’s 1984 in, well, 1984, had it not been on the list of unwelcome literature by communist authorities in my native Hungary.)
And of course one also has to wonder, as The Walrus does, if books are still relevant in the Internet era, when much of the written word we consume these days comes in forms other than traditional books or even electronic editions.
