The ability to read is probably one of the greatest skills a human can learn. If you require evidence of this, just consider the continuing censorship that governments from every corner of the earth apply to the publishing industry.
To understand where I am coming from, one should consider what reading is as an activity in itself. Putting it simply, reading is decoding a series of agreed marks into abstract ideas. (Agreed marks = letters). Of course, the nature of the abstract ideas will differ according to the experience of the reader. Hence, censorships go in and out of fashion. What was banned by the Victorians may not be under that cosh in the 21st century.
The whole idea of someone banning a book you may have written, really depends the values of a culture at any given time. When Salman Rushdie published The Satanic Verses, I'm pretty sure he wasn't expecting to need to go into hiding for ten years, and that the Iranian government had issued a 'fatwah' a kill order. Similarly, Lady Chatterley's Lover was the source of much giggling in the playground of my junior school in 1960. This is no longer banned.
Then some regimes ban books because of their idealistic nature. Currently, in the United States, there are suggestions of which books should be removed from school and college libraries, quite often on the basis that they support diversity.
After WWII, Mein Kampf was banned around the world because it incited antisemitism. It wasn't banned in the US because of the free speech part of the Constitution. No longer the case with diversity.
In fact, censorship tends to be at the whim of a regime dependent on how it sees threats to its existence.
So if reading is such a boring activity consider the question - why are books ever banned?
God Bless
No comments:
Post a Comment