Drag Queen Lady Bunny’s take on it…
I don’t really see an issue with this position. Replacing book bans with de facto bans by refusing to stock them could also become a problem. I’ve read Mein Kampf and I’d still gladly slug a Nazi.
bookshops can’t stock every book. Just because they don’t stock Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces or Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller or Marcia Citron’s 1988 biography of 19th century composer Camille Chaminade doesn’t mean those books are banned - they’re niche.
It seems more likely that current, contentious, right-leaning polemic is in a lot of stockist warehouses due to the political machine and the supply chain software is just presenting the inventory without comment.
Mein kampf is a terribly written book. Maybe it’s a translation issue? Does it read better in German?
I read it in English so I can’t say. I just chalked it up to Hitler being a dipshit
I’ve heard Germans say it’s terrible in German too.
I am confused… its a banned book in germany.
TLDR: “Mein Kampf” was never actually banned in Germany but its complicated.
I am from Germany and the fate of the book after WWII is pretty wierd, this is just written from memory and its way more complicated as history always is.
First you need to understand in nazi germany nearly everyone had a copy of “Mein Kampf” , it was given out like candy and not accepting/buying it would be pretty suspicious to the secret police. (had lots of talk about it with my 90 year old grandma, you needed to fly the swastika at every occasion and be able to produce shit like the flag and the book in case you were ever under suspicion or else… ) After the War most people got rid of the stuff or put it in the back of the attic because of ongoing denazification and to forget ( my guess is because the book is an afront to literary sensibilities).
Hitler seems to have bequeathed everything he owned to the German State, including the Copyright of “Mein Kampf”. That meant the exclusive publishing rights went to the Bavarian State, because he had his official residence in Munich. Now the Bavarian Government decided to just dont print the book and nobody could legally produce and sell new copies. This worked pretty much as a defacto ban because for obvious reasons, including it’s just unbelievably bad not only in content but in language as well, only (neo-) nazis or historians (who could just get it in Archives/University libraries or from that one wierd grandpa who likes showing of his medals and rants about the jews) would even want that book in post war Germany. Basically everyone was fine with the status quo and it went ignored.
Fast forward to ~2010 and Historians realise a Dilemma. They decided to start producing “Mein Kampf” as a heavily annotated “critical edition” because the German Copyright will run out at the end of 2015, and the defacto ban would be lifted. At the time that was quite controversial, discussions about banning it completely or even making it a mandatory read in history lessons, so teachers could put it in context, were ongoing.
Right after the copyright ran out the book was published, again to much controversy. I am pretty sure it actually sold well, atleast at first. Today its a nonissue again and there are still people in Germany who think its illegal to own a copy because why would you even want to read that shit, its worse than Atlas Shrugged.
RuPaul had come under fire previously for being anti-trans, but it’s okay because they apologized on Twitter by posting the wrong flag (literally a flag for trains - and I’m not making that up).
Regardless of your stance on the issue of a bookstore with a no-banning-books mission not banning books, RuPaul clearly is not an ally and this isn’t surprising.
How the fuck is someone who is so well-known for drag, not a trans ally?
What synapses have collapsed in his brain to allow for this cognitive dissonance?
He’s rich, that’s how.
The person you’re replying to is being a typical internet person.
Rupaul’s Drag Race used to not allow trans contestants. It does now. We’ve had more than one trans Winner.
Ru got some backlash for implying that being trans would be an unfair advantage on Drag Race, comparing it to taking performance enhancing drugs for the Olympics. She later apologized for it.
The show also had some vernacular that was very common in its early days which the trans community pointed out weren’t OK and it changed overtime.
Ru is a fairly old gay man who has done a pretty good job of changing with the times comparatively.
So a book store pushing an anti book banning agenda is in trouble for not banning books?
Paradox of tolerance stuff here.
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it - Aristotle (slavery stan)
(transcribed from a series of tweets) - @iamragesparkle
I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”
And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed
Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”
And i was like, ohok and he continues.
"you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.
And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.
And i was like, ‘oh damn.’ and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”
And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.
There’s a fundamental difference between allowing Nazis to gather in your bar and selling works by fascist authors. First and foremost is the reality that anti-fascist action requires knowledge of fascist rhetoric, it is not just Nazis that have read Mein Kampf. It’s also just an unfair comparison. Nazis aren’t going to be attracted to buying their rhetoric only from a drag queen and hanging out in an online book seller’s coffee shop…
And even if they were… Good? Experience is the bane of fear and hate.
I personally don’t think it’s particularly worthwhile, but there’s also the aspect of harm reduction.
Would you rather RuPaul get the proceeds from the sale, or the Koch Brothers?
This is not a simple question with objective facts to lean on. It is a conflux of opinion and ideology.
I agree that we shouldn’t be tolerant of the intolerant, but I don’t think censorship is the right tool to use in that fight.
It isn’t censorship to refuse to be a part of distribution, just as it isn’t censorship for a publisher not to print a book they don’t think will be profitable.
Burning the work, punishing the author, punishing anyone that prints it, banning it from print, that is censorship.
They are entitled to the ability to write and to publish, but they aren’t entitled to make others take part in it.
If you oppose banning books in libraries you should also oppose banning the sale of books.
Libraries are public institutions, book stores are not.
Public institutions must play by the rules of the people, private companies are only bound by the rules of the law.
Law is the lowest common denominator of standards. You should hold them to higher ideals than that.
Personally, I do. But I doubt any company gives a shit what my standards are.
I imagine that’s a common pitfall for most online bookstores that have any sort of volume. Unless you want to proofread and curate every single thing that gets sold, there’s bound to be things that slip through. The article even mentions they sell 10 million books… just not possible to curate properly.
And personally, I’d rather have a bookstore that occasionally sells a questionable title, rather than one that actively censors itself. There’s plenty of titles out there that someone would deem offensive, while others consider it essential works.
Heck, there have been many scholarly annotated versions of Mein Kampf as the article mentions. It’s a historically significant work, penned by a madman. Not everyone who’d read it is by definition a Nazi. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it could cure some of them if they did read it. It’s a terrible book. Even when it was first published it got shitty reviews.
We censoring books or not? I vote not. Is it so hard to be consistent?
You can’t seriously be against all censorship in books, right? Where are your actual boundaries? I don’t think you’d be ok with something obviously evil like a book of cp… Right?
Edgecases are why it’s hard to be consistent.
That’s illegal and for good reason.
Yet somehow the US functions with freedom of speech even with some restrictions.
But we’re not talking about CP are we? We’re taking about how we are still dealing with rightoids censoring books and now the left wants certain ones censored.
I argued against the right censoring books and I’ll continue to argue the same way, regardless of who the next shitty group trying it is.
