someone in a podcast was saying that one needs to collect paper books, not ebooks, to preserve the book before the censors destroy them.
I thought that sounded a bit paranoid but now I am reading that someone decided to censor Ronald Dahl's children's books to make them politically correct and not hurt the feelings of the kids.
to expurgate (a written work) by removing or modifying passages considered vulgar or objectionable.
So even in those days, there were Karens willing to censor stuff they did not approve of.
Or maybe I should say Henriettas. From the ChapelHillBookBlog:
in his book, Dr. Bowdler’s Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books in England and America, Noel Perrin convincingly argues that the 1807 edition was actually edited by Thomas’s sister, Henrietta Bowdler (1750-1830), whose name was omitted from the title page.
By the time the first edition of The Family Shakespeare appeared, Henrietta was already a published author and a well-known bluestocking. Perrin estimates that Henrietta excised about ten percent of Shakespeare’s words, taking special care to eliminate any hint of religious irreverence.
yes. the more things change the more they stay the same.
cartoon by Dahl
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Update: it's worse in the UK where an anti terrorism taxpayer funded group has a list of bad books:
Yes Minister and The Thick of It were among the satire programmes flagged by beleaguered counter-terror Prevent scheme for 'encouraging far-right sympathies'
And now they came for comedies like Yes Minister, and classics like Shakespeare, the Lord of the Rings, 1984,Chaucer, Milton, Tennyson, Kipling and Edmund Burke.
The report even highlighted the BBC’s 1990s political thriller House Of Cards, John le Carre’s seminal spy trilogy Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and Sharpe, the ITV drama set in the Napoleonic wars.
Other books, shows and films on list
Beowulf
The Canterbury Tales
The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare
Paradise Lost
The Four Feathers
Lady Hamilton
The Dam Busters
The Bridge On The River Kwai
The Great Escape
Zulu
Civilisation
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
House Of Cards Trilogy
Sharpe
Ray Mears’ Bushcraft Survival
David Starkey’s Monarchy.
It said the works of fiction were ‘key texts’ for ‘white nationalists/supremacists’.
As I wrote in an earlier post: Christians have indeed started rebellions against the state when the state persecuted them and shut down their churches.
Which is why the FBI memo against Trad Catholics is so worrisome. Yes, there are a few out there who are crazy, but hey, don't we all have crazy uncles who believe such stuff? And calling everyone in the family, or who follow a certain religious tradition, similarly conspiracy theorists/enemies of the state is worse than wrong: It is stupid, because it makes one think that maybe crazy Uncle Joe might be a bit right.
Another problem? The FBI could infiltrate these groups and try to inspire violence, again to discredit the group.
“Let me first be clear: anyone who espouses racism or promotes violence is rejecting Catholic teaching on the inherent dignity of each and every person.
This in itself if troubling, because Racism and the promotion of (physical) violence is almost absent from the Trad sites I view.
There are websites who oppose the NWO and use anti Semetic language to criticize ethnic non believing Jews pushing the NWO's ideas. This needs to be criticized, but racism per se is absent.
However, in a time when JKRowling has been accused of bigotry and inspiring violnce for saying women are women and men are men, it is easly to pretend that saying the modern equivalent of "but it does move" when traditional Catholics write about the Christian ideas of sexuality and family: something that the PC insists is a form of violence that needs to be censored.
It has been said that Catholic law is strict, but God's mercy is larger, so there is a toleration for sinful behavior in Catholicism, since we are all sinners who need to repent.
Take the Philippines, where I live. Filipinos are often called "gay friendly", meaning that hey if a person is gay, or trans, or likes to cross dress, or has a second wife on the side, well, no big problem.
Just like Americans accepting our crazy Uncle Joes who think Roosevelt was Jewish or that UFO lizard people run the world, they are accepted as part of the family and we love them even when we don't agree with their views or lifestyle.
That is what being a Catholic means.
But this doesn't mean staying quiet when groups funded by people planning to destroy the family pushing the gender stuff on our kids in school, and letting boys claiming to be trans rape one's daughter in the restroom, and then having the FBI sicced on you for daring to say this.
In the USA, anti Catholic bigotry is the norm, because too many read the anti Catholic screeds of the reformation pushers and believe them.
because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected President, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured--perhaps deliberately, in some quarters less responsible than this. So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again--not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me--but what kind of America I believe in.
I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute--where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishoners for whom to vote...
and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.
....For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew--or a Quaker--or a Unitarian--or a Baptist.
It was Virginia's harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson's statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim- -but tomorrow it may be you--until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.
Ordinary Americans would say that this idea of separation of church and state should be the norm, and his words should be remembered.
After telling the story of how JFK had to face open bigotry and lies against the Catholic church and Catholic believers, the magazine didn't stop there.
The article goes on to lament that this speech "marginalized" religion and led to the Christian right movement in the Republican party.
This completely misunderstand Catholicism and how Catholics show their beliefs.
When JFK had his brother quietly arrange Martin Luther King be left out of a jail where his life was in danger, he did not give a "Jesus" speech to show off his piety: He just quietly did this.
And his Catholicism inspired his compassion for the coalminers of West Virginia, the need for decent schools in the slums of the large cities, and the need for a social welfare policy to prevent severe poverty that was a major problem in cities and rural areas alike.
Catholicism was behind both his distrust of communism and communist propaganda, but also inspired his non violent response to the Cuban missile crisis, and behind his reaching out to Russia to make peace afterward.
That is how Catholics (and many other Christians) do it.
They don't quote the bible like the Religious right, and they don't demonstrate and show off their piety as a SJW on the left.
They just quietly work to fix things: sending a neighbor in need food when they are sick, offering to work at the food bank on their day off from work, homeschooling their kids and the kids of their neighbors.
Picketing abortion mills is done by such people, because they want to show there mothers that there is an alternative to the decision that many chose from family pressure or from despair.
But what doesn't get publicity is the many taking into their homes a teenage girl who wants to keep her baby but needs a place to stay and someone to help her learn how to care for an infant.
The problem is that nowadays, any believer who openly claims they follow the beliefs of their religion and dare to publish it on the social media, are not just going to be called Hitler by the twitersphere mob, but could be in real trouble of losing their job for not bowing to the woke.
and that is the implications behind this notorious memo.
Many years ago, as a kid I read an interview with JFK that included a question about the Women strike for Peace which was essentially a pro communist group.
I was astonished to read JFK said he was happy that this group was out there, because it helped counter the pressure on him by the warmongers in the Pentagon who pressured him to make war.
Which is why, although I don't believe the JFK conspiracy theories, sometimes I do wonder.... so why are the documents released a couple months ago still have redacted areas?
Similarly, I supported the War in VietNam because as a Catholic we were aware of the massacres by the communists in North VietNam, and believed that a corrupt government that was a bit of a tyranny a bit better than a murderous totalitarian one, which is what happened after the US left. But the lies on both sides resulted in the debacle that led to the Chinese ethnics fleeing on boats and a lot of people dead in retraining camps, and even a man made famine that made the Vietnamese leaders decide communism might not work.
So here we have Jordan Peterson and Tulsi Gabbard discussing the war in the Ukraine.
.....
then we have Elon Musk, who gave them Starlink to defend themselve against the Russian invasion (at a time when most of the western countries figured that Ukraine would fall in a week, so dithered about helping them).
Musk says he plans to stop Starlink from being available to send drones to be aggressive against the Russians. The news reports are vague, and the twittersphere is going nuts calling him Hitler, but I suspect his is trying to stop escalation of the war with drones that could attack the Russian mainland.
as a result, the twittersphrere is full of talking parrots calling him Hitler because he won't toe the line.
'
But Musk is on record at stopping the war and making peace by letting Russian keep the areas of the Ukraine that are full of Russians, or the Crimea, which actually used to belong to the Ottoman empire, and long has supplied grain to the Middle East.
and now with the earthquake destroying part of Turkey and Syria, spending money to continue a war that is spending money on destruction when money for emergency help is needed.
There is going to be a man made famine in the next year: because of the war on fossil fuel will make food more expensive, and the war on the Russians in the Ukraine is making potash and natural gas more expensive, not to mention slowing the export of grain to the middle East.
So who is saying give peace a chance?
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they catch hell from both sides.
