South Korea put out a list in 2008, which banned their military from reading 23 specific books, including Noam Chomsky’s Year 501: The Conquest Continues and Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chan. Though I don’t agree, I can understand those two titles being on the list, but why did they add the novel A Spoon on Earth by Hyeon Gi-yeong? Sometimes, these matters can get kinda personal. For instance, Pakistan banned copies of Stanley Wolpert’s biography Jinnah of Pakistan, after the book made mention of Pakistan’s founder, Muhammed Ali Jinnah, having a huge crush on pork and wine. The book The King Never Smiles reached the same fate in Thailand, when they believed author Paul M. Handley was messing with their King Bhumibol Adulyadej. Other times, it’s otherworldly, as when Salman Rushdie had a five million dollar price tag on his head, when the Ayatollah considered his work blasphemous against Islam. The book is still banned in Indonesia, Bangladesh and Iran. There were bans then, and still are bans today. Charlemagne’s four-volume refutation of Nicaea's Second Council, Libri Carolini, was hated by the Church so much in 790 C.E., that it did not see the light of day until 1549. Johannes Kepler had his Astronomia nova placed on the Catholic’s shit list in 1609. Daniel Defoe’s 1722 novel Moll Flanders was one of the first pieces of fiction to be banned. Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness was banned in 1928 Britain due to lesbian themes. In the 1990s, Germany outlawed The Turner Diaries by William Pierce, due to its calls for racial war. Today, China probably bands more books than they produce. The biggest problem is, unlike murder and rape, no one cares about book censorship. That is probably because no one reads books anymore, as almost every literary work and politicoreligious philosophic idea are now available on the internet. Hey! Doesn’t that just stream into our homes? Shit, the government’s going to be at all of our doors any minute now! Oh wait, never mind... they found a short cut through the bedroom.
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