Come on PG Library. You started the topic. Let’s put a little meat into it and give some real examples of censorship by society and how it works these days from days gone by.

Interesting to see, in reading the second link from a year ago, that the Canadian Border Service is still at it.

So what are the types of books and magazines that the local library has had to deal with when it comes to people and organizations wanting books off the shelves? Perhaps compare that to a larger city to see whether we are more open than others by actually having some controversial material in the library. Also, it would be interesting to know how the library selects books to be put on the shelves and on what basis they may reject some that have been requested by people.

http://drsaraheaton.wordpress.com/2011/09/12/books-banned-in-canada-a-partial-list

http://bibliomancienne.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/challenged_books_and_magazines_february_2012.pdf

So, in keeping with the FOI notion, how about releasing the information on here in response to such questions.

There will always be a rather ‘fine line’ when it comes to any form of censorship. Would a book containing explicit pictures of ‘kiddy porn’ be appropriate for the shelves of a public library? Or anywhere?

Yet there obviously is a ‘market’ out there for that kind of thing, or that kind of trash wouldn’t be produced. Where does tolerance for the rights of any individual, sick as they may be, to engage in perusing something that is overwhelmingly reviled, end, and promotion of its acceptance begin? Will we ever have the answers to that?

One could argue that such books as ‘Mein Kampf’ and ‘The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion’ should be banned as ‘hate literature’. One could also argue that parts of the ‘Old Testament’ of the Bible, and its elevation of one group as God’s Chosen People ~ and some of the Jewish texts like the ‘Talmud’, that expand on that idea ~ should be banned on the same grounds.

If actual evidence were available that ‘six million’ was an exaggerated number of those who perished in the Holocaust, and someone presented that evidence, as some ‘revisionist historians’ have tried to do, would that evidence as presented in those books be looked at objectively?

Or would the ‘official’ version prevail, and in some supposedly democratic countries, like Germany and Austria, for instance, books expressing such doubts in print would be totally banned and lead to a jail sentence for the authors thereof? After a ‘fair trial’, of course, to the degree that’s even possible where “truth is no defense” regardless of what it might be shown to be if contrary to the ‘official’ version.

Ponderous questions.

Using pornography and/or erotica as examples, in my mind is not a good example to discuss “censorship”

I rather use much more difficult topics to deal with. For example, animal cruelty, treatment of “conquered” peoples, etc.

For the year 2010, the Canadian Library Association learned of 92 challenges to books, magazines, other resources such as DVDs and even library policies in Canadian libraries.

I picked one at random and followed it through Hergé’s “Tintin in the Congo”

The illustrated story came under criticism for its depiction of Congolese people, with several campaigners and writers characterising the work as racist due to its portrayal of the Congolese as infantile and stupid.

When the book was first published in India in 2003, the Indian branch of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals issued a public criticism, with chief functionary Anuradha Sawhney stating that the book was “replete with instances that send a message to young minds that it is acceptable to be cruel to animals”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintin_in_the_Congo