Censorship & Rebecca Dittman

June 20, 2008

Rebecca Dittman – Staff Writer
HI-RISER
P.O. Box 1189
Deerfield Beach, Florida 33441

RE: “Banned Books” – Why “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing…”

Ms. Dittman,

Is the Kennedy family “conservative”? Are they “usually religious”? These seem to be the traits that you find most common in those who would ban books. Whatever adjectives you can attach to this family “conservative” and “religious” would not come first to mind. Yet this didn’t stop them from threatening William Manchester with a law suit set to rival Jarndyce v Jarndyce unless he made substantial changes in the book he was writing on President Kennedy.

He did.

Short of stopping the publication isn’t making the author dance to your tune just as good? Perhaps better?

You mention that “Animal Farm” was “confiscated in Germany by Allied troops”. If this is so I learned something new today. Turnabout is fair play.

The three books for which Orwell is most famous for were all subject to being blackballed or subjectively reviewed [if at all]

“Homage to Catalonia” was deemed to be slightly Fascist because it wasn’t anti-Franco enough. Also, since he was an eye witness participant, when he wrote that anti-Franco forces, AKA “The Good Guys”, were just as brutal as “The Bad Guys”, he was condemned by the London literary Left as a traitor. When he reported that the Communists looted all the gold in the Spanish Treasury and shipped it to Moscow their rage knew no limits.

The “non-conservative, non-religious” Left has a long memory.

The publication of “Animal Farm” was much delayed because loon laden London literary Left thought it to be an attack on Stalin.

The publication of “1984”, a book whose working title was “The Last Free Man in Europe”, was delayed because Orwell made no distinction between bad totalitarianism [German] and good totalitarianism [Russian]

Around the time of its publication the United States was prosecuting Alger Hiss for perjury. Around the same time Kremlin surrogates were defenestrating Jan Masaryk and jailing Cardinal Mindszenty. Meanwhile, and you may want to become more familiar with Solzhenitsyn, Stalin was busy filling up his gulags. I search in vain for the moral equivalency.

Congressional Republicans sent some Hollywood types to jail for contempt because they refused to testify before Congress.

Funny how some things repeat themselves.

Congressional Democrats want to do the same thing to Karl Rove.

One last example of “book banning” backfiring.

A 1944 book, “The Road to Serfdom”, could not get any of the regular publishing houses to touch it. You’ll be surprised to know that nobody wanted to offend Stalin, by then a war time ally. The great Lord Keynes was an enthusiastic supporter

The book was published by the University of Chicago. Its author, Friedrich Hayek, won a Nobel Prize in 1973.

As to Dr,Seuss/Theodore Gesiel, I mean he has a stamp so what could he have done? From August 22, 1939 to June 21, 1941 his considerable talents were used to defend the German-Russian Non-Aggression Treaty. That meant that all his characters were used to tell what a nice guy Hitler was. Look it up.

“Quaff deeply or taste not of the Pierian spring