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Comment by DudeOpotomus | Hacker News Reader

At no time in human history have the people who banned books been on the good side.

You might want to look up how denazification efforts worked post ww2.

Although I hate to get political on HN, barely 20 years ago Democrats were the ones banning books in school for being too "culturally insensitive", while republicans were the ones who opposed book banning in schools. One would argue at least banning (often recently written) books with adult content/porn makes sense, saying a classic is "culturally insensitive" and banning it is just another word for political indoctrination

Banning should be an extreme measure only applied in some extremely limited form for the shortest duration possible, if ever. For instance when the book is directly being used to institute violence or hate. While porn should be restricted, it should be in the hands of parents, not the state. Same with abortion, a deeply personal matter, not in the hands of the state or whatever some church things, just because they think they are right. Justice should be blind, not carry a bible or creed.

It should appear evident, and a pretty apolitical stance, but here we are.

Political parties seem irrelevant here. Let educators rather than politicians decide which books should be in a school library.

Which laws did Democrats pass calling for books to be removed from schools? I admit I'm not always paying attention, but I don't remember any.

> Let educators rather than politicians decide which books should be in a school library

We already don't do this though, between state laws, federal laws, and the department of education. I am fine getting rid of the department of education though since it seems you're opposed to it too.

And it was 20 years ago, you'd have to look up the specific policies. The point is acting like this is the first time people have tried banning books from young children in school is ignorant of all recent history

Making a claim and supporting it by effectively saying "go look it up yourself" is hardly compelling. It might be accurate, or perhaps not incorrect but misleading.

This smells a lot like the old "both sides do bad stuff" argument, which often gets over applied to pretend there is no difference in magnitude of the egregiousness when two sides do similar bad stuff.

>We already don't do this though

And even if we did it would still go to shit because "educators" is not an representative cross section of the population and their choices would be ideologically skewed and/or subject to industry circle jerks and fads.

Educators are people that are trained in educating children. I'm not sure why they should be a representative cross section of anything.

Generally institutions have more Democrats serving in them (I suppose it’s a culture fit thing) so it’s less needed for them to pass explicit laws vs just issuing organisational memos or other internal orders.

> it’s less needed for them to pass explicit laws vs just issuing organisational memos or other internal orders.

But issuing organizational memos is not illegal, whereas passing explicit laws is banned by the Constitution. Probably because one is a really bad idea that chills free speech for the whole nation, while the other is just how any community organization operates.

Can you be more specific? What books were being banned on the state level for being culturally insensitive?

Associating good vs evil with politics and perhaps worse, political party's themselves is a problem.

Why do people associate these disparate things? Because they've been trained to...

Sadly, this tribalism is at the root of most of our civil disagreements these days.

> Although I hate to get political on HN, barely 20 years ago Democrats were the ones banning books in school for being too "culturally insensitive"

And it was rightfully opposed by the majority and by folks who understand the tenability of our rights to the whims of authoritarians, as many, many, many of the actions of the current administration should be.

I mean you're comparing the color purple and fucking mein Kampf or the literary equivalent of song of the south.

Come on man. These aren't the same thing. Not everything is the same as everything else because you can torture the principle to vaguely fit both.

>Although I hate to get political on HN, barely 20 years ago Democrats were the ones banning books in school for being too "culturally insensitive", while republicans were the ones who opposed book banning in schools

Source? I was an adult alive 20 years ago, that wasn't a thing.

It seems like every side wants to ban content nowadays. It’s really quite sad. One side wants to ban books with two men kissing and the other books that use the wrong pronouns.

Although if that’s what you meant then I agree.

> One side wants to ban books with two men kissing and the other books that use the wrong pronouns.

One of these things is happening and the other is not (no one is banning or endeavors to ban anyone from using the wrong pronouns).

"Wrong" pronouns -- what does this even mean?

I feel like there are a lot of conservatives who are unaware about what sex and gender actually are, and rather than looking for understanding they prefer to mock because they are lazy and chose the easy route rather than understanding other people.

Real rough to have a society when one side just wants to openly mock the other.

You're making the same sort of mistake I make in situations like this. You assume they're good people because you're a decent person. You project that onto them. You don't consider they actually are bigots, and lacking curiosity :)

With these "both sides" arguments why is it always "heres thing one, which is definitely happening and has been for decades. And here's thing two, which could hypothetically happen but never has and almost certainly never will"

I mean, it's absurd. It feels like a psyop. Is this a targeted propaganda campaign?

Stop trying to both sides. I see crazed MAGAs banning books here and I would bet if we look at numbers the crazies censor at least an order of magnitude more than whatever you're referencing. I can't think of an example of books being banned by non rightwingers, but will look into it now to learn.

Apparently, recently this is new and exclusively Republican policy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_banning_in_the_United_Sta...

Republicans are seeking to ban thousands of books nationwide.

I mean, if there really was a book that was too harmful to allow at all and it was successfully banned, we likely wouldn't know about it at this point.

I am extremely against book banning, but the possibility of some time in history where they really needed to disallow access to a book seems at least _possible_.

Banning Mein Kampf was not on the bad side of history. It's rarely black and white.

Which books on the list covered in this article are equivalents of Mein Kampf in mid-century Germany? I'll save you the effort. The answer is "none of them." That makes it pretty black and white for me. There's not some massive overlap here that makes it all shades of gray. The two situations and the works of literature are entirely different and the Germany case is an abberation, an exception, and hardly a good basis for drawing global conclusions. It is black and white. Either you're for or against the wholesale banning of books or you're for it. Countering with "but this one time in this one place" is hardly convincing.

It's not actually banned in Germany. Though I think the only edition you can buy here is annotated, which does seem like a good idea.

It was essentially banned via copyright for a long time. The only reason that it is available now is that 70 years have passed since the authors death.

It actually was forbidden in other countries. But that's not the point. I do not consider banning this particular book bad, nor on the wrong side of history. Do you?

Being German I think it's important to point out that possession of Mein Kampf or reading it was never banned, the idea wasn't to hide some evil esoteric secret knowledge from the German people, to a large extent it was a pragmatic decision because the state did not want Neo-Nazis to benefit financially from the sales of Hitlers legacy, so they just held on to the copyright and didn't print it. There are now since 2016 annotated academic versions of it.

Also you have to have a very cartoonish view of people think we're like the Hulk and turn green the moment you come across a copy of Mein Kampf, denazification was a broad cultural project, not a binary thing about one text.

The primary struggle with that book is actually reading it because it's simply horrid. If you wanted to prevent Germans from turning to nationalism you'd probably have taken Thomas Mann's political writings off the shelves.

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