2023-07-25 16:09:21
Literature US Libraries
More and more unpopular books are to be banned
As of: 4:09 p.m. | Reading time: 2 minutes
Censorship requests: Kansas Public Library in the form of a library
Quelle: picture alliance / Newscom
The freedom of literature is not only endangered by correctness from the left. Recent developments in the USA show that the cancel culture from the right is also on the rise. This is confirmed by current figures from the library association.
Such figures from the “land of freedom” must be worrying: more and more requests for banning or censorship of unpopular books reports the American Library Association (ALA). The umbrella organization of public libraries in the USA documented 1,269 applications for censorship in 2022. The number is almost twice as high as in 2021, where there were 729 applications to either remove books from stocks or prevent book lending. According to the ALA, 58 percent of documented censorship requests involved books and materials in school libraries, class libraries, or school curriculum; 41 percent of the requested bans related to public libraries in general.
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A total of 2,571 individual works have now been objected to or challenged for their presence in libraries, compared to just a few hundred 20 years ago, reports the US Library Association, adding that activist censorship groups are behind this record number. For centuries in Europe it was princes or the Church who compiled index lists of undesirable literature. Today, in the midst of democracy, it is groups from below, in the USA it is often conservative-Christian, evangelical circles who do not want their children to come into contact with certain topics, such as books with LGBTQ content.
An exhibition in Zurich recently described this phenomenon as the “new censorship from below”. It is interesting that this form of “cancel culture” comes from the right, i.e. from the side of the political spectrum that otherwise castigates the left, woke canceling of books – such as school readings with the N-word.
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One has to fear that ideological trench warfare will lead to more and more censorship campaigns in the holdings of public libraries in the future. Just last week, former US President Barack Obama saw the new trend towards banning books from the far right criticized. It is no coincidence that books that are about people with a certain skin colour, origin or sexual orientation are affected.
The tendency to simply remove from the public sphere anything that is undesirable for one’s own world view is increasing alarmingly. Modern, no, enlightenment, actually meant to endure the strenuous different view of things. What the church had to learn with great difficulty over the centuries is again difficult for responsible people in the free West. Elsewhere anyway. One could become culturally pessimistic if freedom did not also include initiatives that stand in the way of this development. It was recently announced that in the USA a digital library of forbidden books wants to open, which wants to make locally banned books nationwide accessible via an app. Sounds like a punch line from exiles or dissidents from the days of Eastern European Communism, but it’s happening today, in the midst of times of freedom.
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