Biblio-fetishism and freedom of wiping

Charles Brown CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us
Fri Mar 24 09:06:42 PST 2000


During the 50s and 60s, US embargo created all kinds of shortages in China, including toilet paper. Fortunately, American missionary organizations, with the help of the CIA, continued to smuggle bibles into China, which solved the problem for millions of pagan Chinese.

Henry C.K. Liu

Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:


> >From Doug to Charles:
>
> >I don't trust states or any other agglomerations of power (e.g.
> >capital) to be the arbiters of what I should be allowed to read,
> >think, or say. Call me a bourgeois liberal if you like, though your
> >average bourgeois liberal wouldn't include capital among the
> >potential censors.
>
> While I think it's a big waste of time trying to ask the capitalist state
> to ban books like _The Bell Curve_, is it also wrong if individuals
> sabotage them? There are cases of left-wing students waking up early in
> the morning, collecting papers published by conservative students, and
> throwing them away or burning them in protest. This is the sort of actions
> that annoy right-wingers to no end, but they are not against the principles
> of anarchism, Marxism, feminism, etc. Direct actions, not state censorship.
>
> As for not trusting capital to be the arbiters of what you should be
> allowed to read, whether or not you trust them, they already are the
> arbiters. Many worthy books are out of print, untranslated into English
> (or any other language you can read), prohibitively expensive, etc. Public
> libraries have been underfunded. University presses have cut back on the
> number of publications. Lots of books have already been and will be lost
> in the future, for no one makes an effort to collect them all. And what of
> editorial judgments? There have been & will be many talented writers who
> can never find a publisher. And there are those who do not have the time
> to write, too busy just surviving, and those who are plain illiterate.



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