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April 10 - May 4, 2025
As the twentieth-century Chinese writer Lu Xun observed: The statesman hates the writer because the writer sows the seeds of dissent. What the statesman dreams of is to be able to prevent people from thinking; and thus he always accuses the artists and writers of upsetting his orderly state.
When a regime’s power rests on force rather than consent, its legitimacy requires constant manhandling of the past—in effect, making history an instrument of ideology and power.
history is a matter of urgent necessity: to make their presence appear inevitable and welcome, to legitimate their actions, and to undermine their adversaries.
Indeed, one of the more odious forms of censorship is the destruction of the people and texts that give a culture cohesion and collective memory.
To freeze history into one acceptable narrative, the court reasoned, would repeat the errors of the Nazi and Communist regimes, as well as the racist slanders regarding Native Canadians and African Americans that were once taught
Many in the Judeo-Christian tradition believe that the world was created with words and that words can also cause its destruction.
Even in countries where free expression is cherished, we often forget that forgoing censorship requires the embrace of discord as a fair price for the general good. Tolerance is risky. Suppression, on the other hand, is logical—and, across history, it has been the norm.
Nor are those in the business of censorship often willing to admit to censoring.
Censorship generally involves the use of coercive power
protections of speech have almost always represented a gain for the powerless at the expense of the governing classes.
“The only permanent result was to lend an aroma of sanctity to the proscribed literature.”21
Authority must be constantly reaffirmed, and one way to do so is to make the elimination of forbidden texts a spectacle of power.
The destruction is, in fact, a confession by the authorities that they cannot coexist with nonconforming ideas. Censorship is always, by varying degrees, a display of weakness.
But then, what is venomous for persons in one social class is often nourishment for those in another, and class questions pervade most censorship issues.
Censorious elites almost invariably deem themselves worthier of expressing themselves or receiving information than others, and those others have usually been the poor, women, and the young.
The Catholic Church issued its Index of Forbidden Books (Index Librorum Prohibitorum)
Class-based censorship continued into the twentieth century, particularly of the new and first truly mass medium of cinema.
never erased from the collective consciousness. To guard against a resurgence of murderous intolerance and protect human dignity, many European democracies imposed speech limitations that the US adamantly rejected.
In 1946, Orwell published a trenchant essay about censorship titled “The Prevention of Literature.”
Rather, they were products of the divine, wrapped in awe and laden with taboos.
It contains illustrations of Jews with the heads of birds; since bird-people did not exist, the rule against representations of nature was not violated.
the sage Rabbi Akiva warned that the reading of any writings outside the Jewish canon was forbidden, on pain of being barred from the World to Come17—a
Parrhesia gave one license to be ridiculous, as in the case of Diogenes the Cynic, the philosopher
To call these truths into question during times of peace and prosperity was an irritation, but the good general welfare was evidence that the gods neither noticed nor cared much.
According to tradition, his writings were collected and set afire in public. If that indeed happened, it was likely the first book burning in Western history.
In Athenian cultic practice, as with most cultures at the time, fire played a central role in purification rituals. By using flames to “unwrite” the texts, the polis cleansed itself of polluting ideas that were, most evidently, bringing disaster.
Rather, the gods must be portrayed as models of virtuous thought and deed, and poetry must be restricted to that which demonstrates that “God is not the author of all things, but of good alone.”
Nor may poetry depict men or heroes grieving the deaths of comrades with moaning or wailing, as doing so would lead readers to “lose their sense of shame and their hardihood.” Even excessive laughter—a sign of temperamental incontinence—must never be described, as “our guardians ought not to be ready laughers.”
However, memory is nothing like an image impressed on wax. Once something is learned, it remains in the mind—to develop, to be recreated, however imperfectly, and to be transmitted to others, and
“anything in this state that might take people’s minds away from the worship [of] the gods.”36
A series of writers and historians were also targeted in high-profile literary treason prosecutions. One of the targeted was an irascible academic,
The reins of censorship never tighten or loosen in response to outcries from targeted writers.
All societies recast the past, and as governing authorities change (peacefully or not), some aspects of history are brought to the fore while others are deemphasized.
Like Stalin’s erasure of Trotsky from images of early Bolshevik leaders and the Ukrainian government’s destruction of thousands of Lenin statues in the 1990s, such measures usually heighten awareness of the persons disgraced and, in doing so, keep their identities alive.
When time and history were about to end, what use was knowledge accumulated over the past centuries?
Convinced that the Christian God had brought him victory and that he owed his “whole life” and “every breath” to that divinity, Constantine became a believer in Christianity (he would not be baptized until much later), and Rome was on its way to adopting
In France, and throughout nineteenth-century Europe, elites were intent on choking off information that might stir working- and lower-class demands for political and social rights, which the upper orders equated with rebellion.
“Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets,” observed Napoleon Bonaparte. “If I allowed a free press, I would not be in power for another three months.”
In 1842, Karl Marx extolled an unregulated press as “the ideal world, which constantly gushes from the real one and streams back to it ever richer and animated anew”—a numinous sentiment that was hardened into a battle cry by the liberal German parliamentarian Georg von Bunsen: “The fight for the freedom of the press is a holy war, the holy war of the nineteenth century.”5
We asked ourselves in principle if it was possible to allow the ridicule on the stage of the institutions of the country, . . . and expose them to the laughter and mockery of the crowd. We had no trouble in answering no.8
A novel or story, for example, might be barred if sold at a low price but approved if priced so that only the well-heeled could afford it.
The lower orders were seen as licentious by nature. Their
Without the consolation of religion, they might not accept the bitterness
their lives in return for rewards in the hereafter. “The consequences” of this, the same lawyer argued, “are too frightful to be contemplated.”14
publishers, librarians, and, often enough, writers did the censoring themselves.
“Good government is known from bad government by this infallible test: that, under the former the labouring people are well fed and well clothed, and, under the latter, they are badly fed and badly clad.”20 By
Authorities also viewed church and state as codependent; an attack on one was regarded as an assault on the other.
The prosecutor emphasized that the Catechism’s cheap price placed it in the hands “of the lower classes” who were “ignorant and uninformed” and “not fit to cope” with such blasphemous messaging.
In other words, poking fun at religion diminishes its soporific effect on the rabble, resulting in chaos.
A tinsmith-cum-atheist agitator and radical publisher, he found his life’s purpose in fighting legal battles for freedom of speech and promoting the anti-church writings of Thomas Paine, particularly the long-proscribed Age of Reason, published in three parts in 1794, 1795, and 1807.
