This week is the annual Banned Book Week, a celebration of banning books throughout history! Okay well so not like a celebration of the actual act itself of banning books, but rather an historical acknowledgement of our messed-up societal history of censorship, both in its retrospective absurdities, and its horrifying modern relevance. I feel like it was stressed from a very early point in my educational experience that the banning of books was the trademark of a corrupt and/or totalitarian society and therefore the antithesis of the "Yay American Dream" that we were raised to believe in. Unfortunately, there are still stories being banned all across the country — let alone the rest of the world — and it's important to bring attention to these injustices and help make people aware of the inherent problems of such censorship (and to be clear, the censorship of stories by institutional authorities is much much much much much different from the censorship of, say, a bigoted, racist, shit-spewing asshole on Fox News who gets in trouble and loses his job for being a bigoted racist shit-spewing asshole. "Freedom of Speech" and "Freedom from Consequences" are two very different things).
Here's a compilation / rundown of some of my favorite links and infographics from various Banned Book Week celebrations all across the internets:
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