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Bad-mouthed, Blacklisted, and Banned
by Amy Arden
 The first recorded act of book burning took place in 213 BC when all Confucian books were burned to consolidate the Oin Dynasty in China. Lone copies of each book were preserved and kept in the Chinese State Library. Since then, book banning and book burning has taken place wherever opinions were found in print.
Just like the Confucian texts in China where the ban was lifted in 191 BC by the Han Dynasty, most banned books manage to survive and many eventually flourish. At times, the banning and burning of books reaches a fevered pitch that defies all reason.
“Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.” --Heinrich Hein, 1821
When Michael Servetus wrote Christianismi Restitutio in 1553, who could have foreseen that not only would the book be burned, but so would Servetus who was burned at the stake with bundles of manuscripts tied around his waist.
In Nazi Germany, bonfires of thousands of books were burned while masses of Germans (often young men and women) would give the Nazi salute and cheer. Most infamously, on May 10, 1933, students from the Wilhelm Humboldt University took books from their school library and tossed thousands of titles into the fire shouting denunciations of the authors. Some reports said that as many as 20,000 books were burned in Berlin that day.
 Of course, rarely does book burning go this far. Most often, books are banned with the best of intentions. The top three reasons given when a book is challenged are that the material is “sexually explicit”, “offensive language”, and “unsuitable to age group”. In some cases, the banning of books to certain age groups is completely understandable. There is, in the United States, a “ban” on pornographic material to all persons under the age of 18 and certainly you would not want to find such publications in an elementary school library. Another curious way that the United States has managed to “ban” offensive material without it actually being banned is through third party harassment lawsuits. Our first amendment right protects our freedom of speech and press—even “hate speech”—but, readers who are offended by racial slurs or other grossly inappropriate language can file a lawsuit in civil court.
What happens when banning goes too far? The burning of free thinkers at the stake seems far behind us. Even the book burnings in Nazi Germany seem like a unique tragedy in our modern history that certainly couldn’t be repeated. Nevertheless, books are burned around the world today.
In September of 2000, protesters at the University of California-Berkeley burned Dan Flynn’s book “Cop Killer”.
In March 2001, the Taliban destroyed Buddhist books and artifacts in Afghanistan.
In March 2001 in India, a Kashmiri separatist leader was detained for protesting while Hindus burned copies of the Muslim Koran.
In May 2001, books that were considered “communist” were burned in Jakarta.
In September 2002, books with gay or lesbian protagonists were slashed in a California library.
In August 2003, Harry Potter books were burned by a church in the United States.
Just last month in December of 2004, legislation was introduced to remove and destroy all books stating that homosexuality is natural from library shelves in the state of Alabama, United States.
In closing, I would like to leave you with the words of the former American President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as any document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.
And we have got to fight [communism] with something better, not try to conceal the thinking of our own people. They are part of America. And even if they think ideas that are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they're accessible to others is unquestioned, or it's not America.
—Dwight David Eisenhower, 1953
Amy Arden is the Dusty Shelf editor.
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