Tag Archives: Book Burning

Amazon.com is BURNING BOOKS.

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That’s right. Amazon, the world’s largest online bookseller, is effectively BURNING BOOKS by making them unfindable. Whether you consider Amazon.com a monopoly or not, they are regarded as the go-to source for everything online. If it exists, Amazon has it. This is especially true of books. You can find books cheaper or better elsewhere, but as a rule, if it’s in print or out-of-print, it’s on Amazon. Except when Amazon doesn’t want to carry it. Then it doesn’t exist. It won’t come up while browsing categories, and it won’t generate a note of explanation for why it’s not on their shelf. The title simply fails to register. How is that unlike the burning of books which institutions of authority consider unacceptable?

Banned books: the subversive dystopia

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Eugene Zamiatin, We; Jack London, The Iron Heel; Ambrose Bierce, Can Such Things Be?; Aldous Huxley, Brave New World; Ayn Rand, Anthem; Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here; George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four; Norbert Weiner, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society; David Karp, One; Frederick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants; Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, Player Piano; Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451; Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange; Harlan Ellison, The Glass Teat; Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale.Banned Books, p.2–
I put a lot of faith in an internet resilient enough to remain an unrestricted archive of crowd-sourced human knowledge, even more I hope public data will eventually permeate the proprietary, but continued access to subversive literature I have little doubt will meet the full brunt of digital book burners. If there’s any text not to download unto your Kindle, as an easily vaporized or expurgate-able file, it’s one of these classic oft-censored, perpetually-offense-giving titles. These are the dystopian novels and science fictions which paint a bleak picture of the society we are engineering.

As pictured, here are some notoriously subversive dystopian novels, (as differentiated from commercial drivel which reinforces mainstream dogma, such as Lord of the Flies, or Hunger Games)

Atwood, Margaret, THE HANDMAID’S TALE
Bierce, Ambrose, CAN SUCH THINGS BE?
Bradbury, Ray, FAHRENHEIT 451
Burgess, Anthony, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
Ellison, Harlan, THE GLASS TEAT
Huxley, Aldous, BRAVE NEW WORLD
Karp, David, ONE
Lewis, Sinclair, IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE
London, Jack, THE IRON HEEL
Orwell, George, NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR
Pohl, Frederick, & C.M. Kornbluth, THE SPACE MERCHANTS
Rand, Ayn, ANTHEM
Vonnegut, Kurt, PLAYER PIANO
Wiener, Norbert, THE HUMAN USE OF OTHER BEINGS
Zamiatin, Eugene, WE

Haven’t heard of many of these? Curious, don’t you think?

You read banned books, but by whom?

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The Ginger Man, J P Donleavy; Howl, Allen Ginsberg; Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov; Ulysses, James Joyce; Lady Chatterley's Lover, D H Lawrence, Fanny Hill, John Cleland; The Arabian Nights, Richard Burton; Candide, Voltaire; Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman; Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe; The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio; The Canterbury Tales, Chancer; Lysistrata, AristophanesBy which I mean: BANNED by whom? Looking online for a definitive listing of most-often banned or censored books yields a panoply of titles not necessarily candidates for a pantheon. At right I’ve stacked the heavyweights most often resisted for being obscene, here a quality strangely inseparable from being subversive. Many of these titles have been intercepted through the ages by the US Post Office for being indecent under the Comstock Law, but how does that really inform readers of today?

These days the issue of censorship conjures images of Nazi bonfires, and petty bureaucrats like Sarah Palin calling her public library to inquire about pulling objectionable material from public circulation. The ACLU helps celebrate an annual Banned Books Week, and there’s even a t-shirt popular in elementary school circles which declaims “I read banned book.”

Sexual themes aside, isn’t good literature by definition subversive? “Banned books” of note show themselves by who’s trying to limit their circulation. Solzhenitsyn for example, was silenced by the USSR, not by authorities fretting over you. On the other hand, what the Nazis burned shared themes the US has sought to censor before and since, but the big whoop we make about banned books instead obsesses on lascivious or politically incorrect vocabulary. While literary publicists revel in the notoriety of inconsequential attacks on the ilk of Harry Potters, the digital and mass media age has meant sophisticated advancements in real book burning. I’d like to present an illustrated series about literary works which have threatened authoritarian rule in the past, your access to which is quietly receding.

Our Phine Phreaky Phriend Pastor Phred Phelps Praises AZ shooting

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Just when you thought that ALL the roaches had crawled out of their cracks in the wall on this…
 
Now, what do you suppose would happen if another group, say a more left-leaning group, wanted to give the American Child the Right Wing murdered an Honor Guard? Showed up to give like Military Honors to Christina Green, age 9, in a non-intrusive ceremony, with a 21-gun salute (actually, 7 rifles fired simultaneously three times) And let’s then say that one of the Honor Guard became so Unhinged at the massive hatred spewing from the Godless Lips of Pastor Phred? And, as soldiers often do, takes aim….

Would Pastor Phred accept his death as being God’s Wrath upon HIM for inciting bloodshed in the world and particularly in America?

His hate-rallies were just one more “point of light” to use the Fascist GHW Bush campaign slogan, in the sparkling array of bonfires, burning effigies, burning books, burning churches, burning Heretics, that have erupted across America and partly on the the direction of GHW and his Retarded Sons, and partly on the direction of Sarah Palin, and the rest of the DumFox morons, and… on the direction of Pastor Phred.

They want to light America on fire, well, they might just have done it this time.

Their assumption, as always, was that Liberals are pussies, weaklings, Easy Targets.

If they believed for an instant that there would be any resistance, any return fire, they would cower in their bunkers alternately reading Mein Kampf and the Bible, listening to Propaganda Radio waiting for Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh telling them it’s safe to come out.

I don’t know the protocol for State Funerals if a Federal Judge was murdered. I don’t know, either, if he was ever in the military. That would guarantee an Honor Guard at his goodbye-party.

Blaming 9/11 on the Qu’ran is like blaming the Civil War on Slaves

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Or blaming the Crucifixion on Judaism. In other words, bullshit.
But I do know people who are Southern, Christian, White… like the Pastor in Florida… who actually DO blame Judaism for the Passion and who blame the Civil War not on Slavery, but on the slaves themselves.
So go ahead, Pastor, get your Ignorant Damn Bigoted Ku Klux TeaTard “christian warrior” MORONS all frothing at the mouth, burning books, maybe you’ll convince some of the stupid bastards to lynch people for you. AMERICANS whether you or your IDIOT Party have enough courage to allow us the title, or even admit that we and all your other HATE SPEECH targets are Human Beings.
Tell the Bloodthirsty Mob that GOD, Himself, Ordained you to tell them to go out and Burn, destroy and above all KILL in His name. You’ve already gotten your Demented Disciples to burn a community center in Murfreesboro Tennessee, your Rabid Leaders Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck have incited at least one Racist Bigotry Inspired Murder in the past two weeks. A cab driver who didn’t grovel to the Haters and beg their forgiveness for something done by somebody else.
YOU, Pastor, and your Hate Speech Comrades like Palin, Beck, Limbaugh, Malkin, Geller, Ollie North, Gunny Bob Newman, are guilty by your own standard of judgment.
YOU condemn a Billion people on the basis that they shared the same religion with people accused of murder. People, who unlike YOU and YOUR Killer Koward Komrades on FOX and Hate-Speech Radio, did NOT actively incite or inflame or even support the bombing of the idolatrous Temple of Monetary Imperialism.

If I were to judge on YOUR retarded standards, I’d go around murdering anybody displaying the Confederate Hate-Flag or any indication of being TeaBags, burning their homes and churches the way YOU and YOUR Retarded Comrades have urged your followers to do.

Further, somebody could justify by YOUR Retarded judgment of guilt, slaughter anybody with a light complexion or a Stupid Smirk on his Piggy Face like the portrait you posed for.

Every bit the haughty Arrogant Racist Klansman, aren’t you, Pastor? The PEOPLE you’re so presumptuously sending your Followers to murder are AMERICANS and that, sir, makes YOU and all of your Ku Klux Komrades Anti-American Terrorists.

Book burning is old hat for Kindle

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The Amazon KindleAwww, the “Gift of Reading.” Wasn’t that something we gave ourselves for free in public school? And look at the e-book with which Amazon expects to separate readers from viewers –the latest movie.
 
Holy Schnikies Amazon picked a whopper of a name for its e-book reader! Is the “Kindle” supposed to inflame our gone-digital hearts to the warm fuzzies of reading? Because kindle wood and books have always been combustible dance partners. Firelight was something man used to have to read by, but kindling was also indispensable for book burnings. Which role most likely foreshadows this Kindle’s potential?

I think the answer lies not too far from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezo’s celebrated promise to never again remotely tamper with their readers’ Kindle libraries. Earlier this year, online customers bought digital books to which Amazon then discovered its merchant partner didn’t have the intellectual rights. Amazon refunded the purchases and erased the already downloaded files, revealing what technology experts already suspected, that the Kindle’s software permitted more than a hands-on eavesdropping capability.

In response to the outcry, Bezos promised never to do it again. Fine. His assurance is good enough for me. The truth is, Amazon won’t have to.

The burning of e-books will not be about destroying your and my electronic files. It will happen at the file’s creation or un-creation. And I suspect the censorship will be a lot more clever than a publisher conspicuously sitting on its exclusive rights to release or not release a title. All that need happen to disenfranchise a public from a familiar inflammatory tome is to buy the publishing right and excise the offensive material. Why not– it will be their right. And Jeff Bezos will probably be able to justify amending already sold copies under the guise of issuing corrections, or redistributing free updates to the original editions.

Can you imagine a world void of its disturbing literature? That’s the vision which has guided book burners. The only thing standing between mankind and the more equitable distribution of knowledge are the revolutionary armadas launched by Gutenberg. At which the Kindle is aiming its broadsides.