Seems like Old Times

When I entered college at Holy Cross many decades ago, there was a locked section in the library where books on the Papal Index were kept.

To read them you needed special, written permission; I forget from whom.

So far as I know, all or most of them were available from the public libraries and many were in print in cheap paperbacks on sale in the college bookstore, some specially ordered and prescribed for courses.

Anyway, while I was there, the rules changed and the door was opened, permanently.

A tardy victory for the movement of secularization and liberalization sweeping the Occident.

But as we know, while the left pretended back them to be about free speech they never really were.

They were about disempowering Christian censorship and replacing it with liberal and radical left censorship.

‘Mein Kampf’: A historical tool, or Hitler’s voice from beyond the grave?

I have a very old paperback copy at home.

I read it in high school, if I recall correctly, and again at some point while in college, though I don't think it was actually assigned for any course.

I am not pleased with the idea that anybody could have the power or the self-conceit to decide whether or not I am to be allowed to read a book, the reading of which poses only the danger of political, moral, philosophical, or religious dissent from some supposed norm.

Not even my parents did that, though out of ordinary or sensible parental curiosity they once in a while asked what I was reading, if they came upon me reading a book, as I would ask them.

For that matter, I was not happy with the attitude of the "responsible" press toward publication of the manifesto of the Unabomber, back in the day.

True, instructions for how to make a nuclear bomb in your basement out of household chemicals ought not to be in general circulation, I agree.

But that is not what this is about.

And how do you like these apples?

Although authorities here struck deals with online sellers such as Amazon.com to prohibit sales in Germany, new copies of “Mein Kampf” have become widely available via the Internet around the globe.

In early 2002 I had an email exchange with Amazon about their insistence on publishing instructions on how to make bombs in your own home.

They insisted it was their right and goal to make available absolutely everything in print.

But not any more?

Or not in Germany, anyway.

As I recall, Mein Kampf is a very poor book and does not reflect well on either the education or intelligence of its author.

The Turner Diaries, I think, is far more frightful, to tell the truth - again, based on recollection.

All the to-do reminds me of the absurd reputation of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, one of the most boring and silly movies ever made, with its hours of flabby old guys marching about in cub scout uniforms.

Almost as numbing as Andy Warhol's Empire.

A tie, maybe, with Birth of a Nation.