The Enemies of Books by William Blades.
Published in 1888, The Enemies of Books reflects the biases and prejudices of its time, much as our literature transparently carries forward our biases and prejudices.
A valuable reminder in these censorship happy times that knowledge has long be deemed dangerous.
See in particular Chapter 5 Ignorance and Bigotry.
The suppression of “terrorist” literature, from tweets to websites, certainly falls under bigotry and possibly ignorance as well.
Extremist literature of all kinds is heavily repetitive and while it may be exciting to look at what has been forbidden, the thrill wears off fairly quickly. Al Goldstein, the publisher of Screw, once admitted in an interview that after about a year of Screw, if you were paying attention, you would notice the same story lines starting to circle back around.
If that’s a problem with sex, it isn’t hard to imagine that political issues discussed with no nuance, no depth of analysis, no sense of history, but simply “I’m right and X must die!” gets old pretty quickly.
If you believe U.S. reports on Osama bin Lauden, even bin Laden wasn’t on a steady diet of hate literature but had Western materials as well as soft porn.
If the would-be-censors would stop wasting funds on trying to censor social media and the Internet, perhaps they could find the time for historical, nuanced and deep analysis of current issues to publish in an attractive manner.
Censors don’t think and they don’t want you to either.
Let’s disappoint them together!