goodness...americans are SOooooooooooooooooo SENSITIVE.........

If you find someone else's speech offensive it's not OK to try and bludgeon him into shutting up...it's to use your own power of speech to try and convince him otherwise.

The bludgeoning approach is only resorted to by folks who are deeply insecure of the validity of their notions. And maybe they should be...

Ha, all Americans are not sensitive only lunatic right wing religious nutcases who can't or don't read. I would guess 99% of the people protesting haven't read any of the books they want banned.

Not to worry though, banning them will make the kids who will read seek these books. Kind of a best seller's list. The other kids of these people will not read either so who cares?

There is a good Southpark episode covering this nonsense.

Through my life, I've read many of the books on the banned list (though I didn't realize they'd been banned) and somehow I've managed to turn out to be a relatively 'normal' person. I guess I could have taken up witchcraft, or adultery, or mass murder or even just continuous use of 'banned (bad) words'...but, I didn't.

Deniers of the human experience, those who are afraid of all of their feelings and desires and fantasies, are the ones who need help (therapy), not the authors of so many informative, creative works of art.

Perhaps we should ban the holy books, too? As I recall, the Bible is chock full of violence, begatting, sodomy, destruction, plagues and worse. Hardly suitable fare for young, impressionable minds....?!!!

From a book author's Introduction
.
BEGIN QUOTE
Of course men are always in favor of the right to read when their own opinions are being presented in print. The test of literary freedom comes when they are asked to permit the reading of thoughts which challenge their own power and place in society. Then they tend to think of their own freedom as =liberty= and their critics' as =license=. For this reason the story of censorship in any country is almost always simultaneously a story for the struggle for power by some dissident group against some established interest of custom, politics or religion The forbidden book is often only one of the symbols in a larger struggle for power.
In that larger struggle, the law is only one of the potential instruments of suppression. Social pressure and custom may be far more important. The average American thinks to himself as living in a society in which the right to read is protected and controlled almost entirely by Congress and the Supreme Court, and there is a modicum of truth in that opinion. But in practice his literary choices may be made for him by extra-legal suggestion, or restriction as surely as if he lived in a police state. Sometimes the pressure is so silent that he may yield to it without realizing that it is pressure. The taboos which control his choice may be so deeply embedded in his own personal experience that he never identifies them as prohibitions or restraints. - -
In recent years Americans have become so accustomed to organized and very vocal pressures against reading, pressures which have often developed into terror and hysteria. Committees of vigilantes have invaded our libraries and ordered honest books of social dissent off the shelves. Self appointed prophets of purity and semi-literate policemen have united to ban from the book counters not only literary trash but also great classics of realism and moral discovery. Teachers in our schools have been frightened into patriotic conformity at the very moment when they needed to give their students a broadly critical world view.
END QUOTE

This book appeared in stores late in 1955, and intellectuals made a Christmas gift of it to each other. But - sales were so sluggish that publisher Beacon Press stopped printing at 2000 copies. In the previous six years the book's author had sold two Best Sellers, each approaching half a million copies. The author of the book is a now-forgotten man named Paul B. Blanshard. The words above are from the 8-page Introduction of his marvelous book: THE RIGHT TO READ - The battle against censorship.

HINT - the first three readers to bolt from here to Amazon Books will find a treat waiting to join their personal library. On your mark - -

As far as Slaughterhouse Five, do you think it it is:

- Billy Pilgrim's frolicking with Montana Wildhack on Tralfamadore,

- Or the graphic descriptions of what war looks like specifically, the bombimng of Dresden - which Kurt witnessed as a survuvor,

That these microcephalic fascists so oppose? I suspect it is mostly the latter.

When I was in HS, Vonnegut, Heller, and even Ken Keysey, were assigned to no controversey at all. How far we have descended!

"If young people are going to become sophisticated readers and thinkers they need to be exposed to this kind of literature in school."

And yet at the same time schools are being continuiously under-funded; music programs, physical education, art, humanities studies, civics, speech and debate et al are disappearing from cirriculum entirely. In addition: School lunches cannot provide basic nutrition requirements; teachers are under-paid and over-worked; "No Child Left Behind" is still being implimented, dispite the criticisms from professional educators. In some areas of the country, districts, due to cut-backs, are closing schools entirely.

Atop all this - Children are surrounded by a consumer culture that promotes unreal "entertainments" that inspire no further virute than to escape. Also, the technology so widely available to young people, cell-phones for example, leads to further distraction from reality. I'm not worried if a young person reads the "wrong" book; I'm worried if most can read at all - Unless, of course, the book is a 20 word text message.

According to John Taylor Gatto, compulsory schooling was created for the purposes of indoctrination and obedience; children, from a young age, are taught to obey authority, accept the mindless repetition of their tasks and retain no ability for critical thinking. (This is my summary; I do not speak personally for Mr. Gatto.) If this is truly the case, how can young people become "thinkers" or sophiticated in anything?

Some kids wouldn't plow through these books without the sexy bits to sugar the pill. And is it really reasonable to ban Slaughterhouse Five in a world where you can instantly google up just about any imaginable act sex or 'perversion' and watch it on your phone?

When will they make consumerism, religion and war officially obscene? Now that's a burn-pile I would dance around!

If we don't protect our little children, banned songs like "Wake Up Little Susie" could be played on the open airwaves! Think of how that could corrupt their morals with lyrics like "Ooh La La"...

We are lucky that such suggestive lyrics were banned, otherwise there could have been a revolution.

When I read the Catcher in the Rye, at first, I was really excited that they let us read a book with the "F" word in it! BUT, the real value of that book was that it was the first book to speak to me as a teenaged person, that dealt with the hypocrisy of the difference between what the world and adults said we were suppsosd to do and believe and what was actually going on!

You have no idea what a life saver that was! Not just for me, but for my friends too! SO....
Dear Scary PARENTS:

Books can save your life! They can talk about things that no one wants to talk about. They aren't necessairly "bad' things, but things that the creepy Puritan mindset would have objected to, such as being AUTHENTIC!

Books share another person ( or another character's thoughts) and maybe some thoughts that YOU may have thought and were wondering if you were the only one that thought them!

No matter where you are in life, whether up or down, there is a book that will help you through what ever is going on. BOOKS are the history of civilization and what it means to be human ( and sometimes inhuman too.)

To fail, to fall, to get up, to trip to succeed, to fly, to laugh, to grieve, to cry, to wail, to understand... to change..........TO LIVE! ( sometimes vicariously is just fine too.)

It is truly disgusting that the military has decided that a book should NOT be read ( national security..again?) and has not burned them, but they did pulverize them.....no purified fire, but a stomping of storm trooper boots...which is really even worse.

I never could understand the term"bookworm," but now I do,,,so to those who object, how about a Biblical allusion?

BOOKS are like little apples, that give eternal life to humanity through the ages. HOW dare ANYONE try to censor that!

To borrow from Shakespeare,...who steals my purse steals trash, but who steals my books steals freedom and life!

"so it goes"

Any of you, who have had a chance to spend time in a free country, know how preposterous this all is.

As a synonym for ‘censorship’, I offer ‘obscenity.

The Germans to this day hold Winston Churchill accountable for the fire-bombing of Dresden, which was completely unnecessary and meant only to terrorize.

This narrative, now accepted as common knowledge, has now been passed down to new generations of Germans.

A strong Neo-Nazi upsurge has developed, especially in the former East Germany, receiving strong support from the younger Germans. These guys don’t write letters to enlighten folks, like we do. They are – what’s the new buzzword – proactive! The dot used to connect people is the fire-bombing of Dresden by the War Criminal, Winston Churchill.

The Nazi Party is illegal, of course, but the revised name is the far right NPD - National Democratic Party of Germany - (der Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands).

The NPD is a minor party, having received only 1.5% of the vote in the last election, and it’s not that they haven’t received strong opposition. The larger concern may be that they receive the silent acquiescence of the larger community.

That silence speaks with a loud voice.

Thus - if we are going to get into a debate about what should be censored, I would demand we begin with anything written by the insufferable Republican, Winston Churchill – in order to counter ‘Terrorism’, if for no other reason.

In the land of the fear and the home of the hate we ban ideas.

Why is it that the Guardian (god bless em) is so often on top of these lunacies in U.S., and not an american press? By the way, what's the first thing a child does when you tell him/her they cannot do something?! I wish those commenting would put their eloquence to the front lines -- D.C./city hall, etc.--and not just a computer screen-- see ya on 10/2?

Conservatives do not believe in the strength of their own virtues and convictions...that is why they have to ban books and weed out "other" ideas. They do not believe or trust that what they espouse can stand up when one idea is compared to another.

"If young people are going to become sophisticated readers and thinkers..."

Since when was the goal of USAmerican public education? I don't ever remember reading and thinking, let alone doing either with sophistication, as expected outcomes of my education. At best, education is seen as a way of increasing one's income and social status. This is the reason that so-called conservatives want to police higher education---they want the job hunting credential without the challenges to received opinion that constitute a liberal arts education.

"Depriving students of the opportunity to read widely stunts their emotional and intellectual development..."

Sounds like the perfect plan to create another generation of so-called conservatives clamoring for the next Middle Ages while enjoying the fruits of post/modernity.

"[W]here they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also." --- Heinrich Heine

I got my first library card at age 6 and had one right up until I could afford to buy all the remaindered books I wanted. I am a product of open shelf libraries and bless Andrew Carnegie, that capitalist bastard, for them and, if you don't mind my saying so, I've been an intellectual radical socialist from my teens to my eighties, and it wasn't school that did it. So, along with the burning of books, mourn the closing of public libraries, the paradise of every poor book-loving child and adult.
It was the infamous Proposition 13 in California that popularized the idea that public money needn't be spent on libraries, art museums, swimming pools and parks. We, the wealthy, can buy books, build a pool in the backyard and head out of town whenever we need some fresh air and exercise. You want that too? Earn it, you lazy bum.

Nazi Germany revisited! Who cloned Hitler? Karl Rove???