ShieldWife
Marchioness
Let me start with these meme I saw on Facebook recently:
When I first saw this, I didn't know what particular book(s) that King was referring to. My immediately thought was "Yes, if people are censoring something, the best thing to do is to seek out what they are trying to censor." But I got a sense that Steven King was referring to a specific case and he was.
Recently a school in Tennessee decided not use the comic book Maus as a book to teach the Holocaust to students. Maus is a graphic novel about the Holocaust where Jews are portrayed as mice and Nazis as cats. I haven't read it, but I gather that it has fairly adult material in it including violence, nudity, and objectionable language. The people at the school cite the nudity and bad language as the reason they aren't going to use Maus.
This incident is not censorship in any way, shape, or form. Maus is not being outlawed, book stores are not refusing to sell it. It's just not being used as an official book in a particular school. There are over 100 million unique books in the world and almost all of them are not being used by this school. Is the school censoring 99.999% of books in the world because it doesn't include them as part of their curriculum? The school is paid for with limited tax payer money and it forces children to read certain books. So if a school is going to force the community to buy books and force the children to read books, then it seems entirely reasonable to not include a book based on objections of people in the community who will be forced to pay and whose kids will be forced to read.
Are the objections based on nudity and language valid? I don't care, it's none of my business.
Though let me get to the more important point here. Currently, and over the past several years especially, there is a massive push to censor certain opinions from the public space. This push has come from governments and from the huge corporations which control the majority of information in the world. If you express the wrong opinion, the one that goes against the opinions of people in power, you could be banned from Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Spotify, or various other forms of social media. You could have websites taken down, Amazon could refuse to carry your book, you or members of your family could lose their jobs. If you take to the streets to make your opinions heard, you could be assaulted and terrorized while the police stand by as armed escorts for your attackers.
While not happening in the USA yet, many people in some Western nations are put in jail for expressing opinions contrary to those of the people in power.
All of this is increasingly happening, it is coordinated across multiple governments and multiple mega-corporations, and the censorship all has the same leftist anti-conservative bias. This is real censorship, not what happened with Maus in this one Tennessee school. To leftists, refusing to pay for their books or force your kids to read them is censorship. To leftists, people expressing opinions that they don't like losing their jobs or being put in prison isn't censorship at all. It's just protecting people from "dangerous misinformation."
So Stephen King's statements below, while seemingly good, are in fact outrageously hypocritical. He's exactly the sort of guy who would want viewpoints he opposes censored and has remained silent for years as it has happened.
But, I would still follow his recommendation on its face: if there is some book that the people in power don't want you to read, some opinion that they don't want you to hear, some bit of information that they are willing to punish people for conveying - then those are the things you should seek out to read, to hear, to learn.
As Stephen King says: "Read whatever they're trying to keep out of your eyes and your brain, because that's exactly what you need to know."
When I first saw this, I didn't know what particular book(s) that King was referring to. My immediately thought was "Yes, if people are censoring something, the best thing to do is to seek out what they are trying to censor." But I got a sense that Steven King was referring to a specific case and he was.
Recently a school in Tennessee decided not use the comic book Maus as a book to teach the Holocaust to students. Maus is a graphic novel about the Holocaust where Jews are portrayed as mice and Nazis as cats. I haven't read it, but I gather that it has fairly adult material in it including violence, nudity, and objectionable language. The people at the school cite the nudity and bad language as the reason they aren't going to use Maus.
This incident is not censorship in any way, shape, or form. Maus is not being outlawed, book stores are not refusing to sell it. It's just not being used as an official book in a particular school. There are over 100 million unique books in the world and almost all of them are not being used by this school. Is the school censoring 99.999% of books in the world because it doesn't include them as part of their curriculum? The school is paid for with limited tax payer money and it forces children to read certain books. So if a school is going to force the community to buy books and force the children to read books, then it seems entirely reasonable to not include a book based on objections of people in the community who will be forced to pay and whose kids will be forced to read.
Are the objections based on nudity and language valid? I don't care, it's none of my business.
Though let me get to the more important point here. Currently, and over the past several years especially, there is a massive push to censor certain opinions from the public space. This push has come from governments and from the huge corporations which control the majority of information in the world. If you express the wrong opinion, the one that goes against the opinions of people in power, you could be banned from Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Spotify, or various other forms of social media. You could have websites taken down, Amazon could refuse to carry your book, you or members of your family could lose their jobs. If you take to the streets to make your opinions heard, you could be assaulted and terrorized while the police stand by as armed escorts for your attackers.
While not happening in the USA yet, many people in some Western nations are put in jail for expressing opinions contrary to those of the people in power.
All of this is increasingly happening, it is coordinated across multiple governments and multiple mega-corporations, and the censorship all has the same leftist anti-conservative bias. This is real censorship, not what happened with Maus in this one Tennessee school. To leftists, refusing to pay for their books or force your kids to read them is censorship. To leftists, people expressing opinions that they don't like losing their jobs or being put in prison isn't censorship at all. It's just protecting people from "dangerous misinformation."
So Stephen King's statements below, while seemingly good, are in fact outrageously hypocritical. He's exactly the sort of guy who would want viewpoints he opposes censored and has remained silent for years as it has happened.
But, I would still follow his recommendation on its face: if there is some book that the people in power don't want you to read, some opinion that they don't want you to hear, some bit of information that they are willing to punish people for conveying - then those are the things you should seek out to read, to hear, to learn.
As Stephen King says: "Read whatever they're trying to keep out of your eyes and your brain, because that's exactly what you need to know."