Do you mean banning books containing well-researched facts, which is commonly practiced in silence, or promoting fantastical fiction books about your political agenda by convincing kids that the evil censorship boogeyman is after them?
I've seen a huge push the last years to try to redefine what it means to ban a book, where political activists claim that a book is "banned" when children are no longer forced to read it in school. As no surprise, these are the same political activists who work zealously to ban anybody they disagree with from modern communication platforms.
There are plenty of busybodies running the school libraries ensuring books people would read never get bought and purging collections of books now deemed heretical.
There are plenty of busybodies lobbying bookstores to stop selling books.
These books don't, or rarely, make banned book lists. It's done quietly out and out of the public view. The books that get shilled as 'banned books' are all largely (not wholly) books agreeable to a particular class of people.
For example, a very popular children's author who passed away some time ago is completely banned from my library system for ideological reasons.
The “Banned Books” movement is clearly only about any books that have faced even minor protest from “the other side” of the political spectrum. They frame the censorship debate in terms of provocative, but otherwise meaningless fiction. Real censorship of factual and relevant information exists today, and they support it.
I don't know where you grew up, but our school library had lots and lots and lots of books that had nothing to do with the curriculum, and students were encouraged to read outside of the required material. The idea that certain books(or indeed, entire categories of books) should be banned from a school library is definitely censorship. It's like suggesting that school computers should be banned from viewing certain pages on wikipedia, on actually, in fact, providing students with copies of paper encyclopedias with pages torn out - it's the removal of knowledge that is the hallmark of censorship.
That is not how it actually works. Sometimes it creates publicity about the thing, but most of time the book just disappears. Censorship actually works.
I hear you loud and clear. Look from a systemic viewpoint.
Texts in the hands of people can have a great power at influencing the behaviour of their readers. When the author and readers are strongly prone to certain thoughts and actions as a result of a particular book, then short of education, banning a text may be an effective thing to do to avert a particular reality from occurring that a text may propose.
The fact that books are inanimate objects makes censorship possible in this way, rather than putting someone in prison. Sometimes people lose their freewill and are drawn to books... and meglomaniacs.
I gave examples of bans, the rest is politics, as I said. If you really were opposed to political book bans, which you aren't, you would be open to all sorts of unspeakable things being included in public schools.
in the US books bans have a tendency to be specifically refer to government efforts to censor certain subject matter... it doesn't always mean a universal ban in this context
Plenty of classic books where banned from schools (Mark Twain's books, Moby Dick, To Kill a Mockingbird, Sherlock etc.) over nonsense, But when people start banning books that push sodomy on children all of the sudden the left calls it censorship.
I used to listen to NPR every day but now when I see stuff from them I wonder if some of the Nazis had a point with their book burnings.
There are two operative phrases that you skipped over: "if not exclusively," and "in American politics."
I'm aware that there are ample other ways to (and entities that) ban books. Their severity is not meaningfully diminished by this conversation, and introducing them is a distraction.
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