Time to ban books again?
Democracies don’t like banning books. The proof of this is the recent decision in Germany to allow the publication of Hitler’s Mein Kampf for the first time since World War II. Hitler and his book are the enemies of democracy and everything it represents. Yet German democracy has finally allowed his voice now to be freely heard in its original tongue.
That will also worry many people, including many good democrats. The rise of the racist and populist right in Germany is an obvious fact. Will the return of Hitler’s book add to the flames now threatening German tolerance and reason? Nobody can be sure it won’t. It is naive to think that books can’t cause damage and death. Hitler’s book spread its vile message throughout Europe and many other parts of the world. His book helped foment hatred and massacre. Other books such as the forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion have had a similar influence. Many far-right and fascist writers have cited it as though it were actual documentation of an international Jewish conspiracy. Some of the lunatic fringe, ignorant that it has been long since exposed as a crude fraud, continue to quote it.
Liberals need to take this issue seriously and not retreat into easy, pious postures. The writer George Steiner has always refused to allow a German translation of his celebrated novella, The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., about the discovery of the 90-year Hitler in the Amazon jungle. Steiner believed that Hitler’s siren voice in its original language was too powerful to be allowed.
In New Zealand, this problem has never arisen in so acute a form. Here, book banning has become extremely rare. The extraordinary ban on sales to young people of Ted Dawe’s young adult novel Into the River proved temporary only, and was rightly overturned after a fierce row about censorship and prudery. The censors used to be much more active, however, and more than 1300 books have been banned in this country. Many were of a sexual nature, including gay sex, and gay rights campaigners have had to work to reverse these bans. Sometimes the bans have been clearly political, such as an initial ban on the film All Quiet on the Western Front as anti-war propaganda in 1930 (it was later shown with cuts).
The rise of Donald Trump, meanwhile, has shown that politics in advanced Western democracies can turn toxic and irrational and anti-democratic: Trump’s diatribes against Mexicans are an echo of every other populist’s scapegoating techniques.
So should we start banning bad books again? No. The best test of bad ideas is to release them into the democratic marketplace. There, they can be criticised and rebutted. Sometimes this might seem a haphazard business, and sometimes here will be alarming lurches into intolerance and even bigotry.
But democrats must believe that in the longer run bad ideas will be exposed and bad politicians will get their come-uppance. This is a gamble, but in the end what is the only rock that democrats have to cling to? Democracy itself.
- Fairfax NZ