# A question about censorship



## Feo Takahari (Jan 14, 2015)

Suppose a story exists that you're not willing to read because of its content. To appeal to a wider audience, the author creates a version that removes that content. Would you be willing to read the censored version? (This is not a hypothetical question, for reasons of lolJapan, but I'm more interested in the general case than specific examples.)


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## Jabrosky (Jan 14, 2015)

Feo Takahari said:


> Suppose a story exists that you're not willing to read because of its content. To appeal to a wider audience, the author creates a version that removes that content. Would you be willing to read the censored version? (This is not a hypothetical question, for reasons of lolJapan, but I'm more interested in the general case than specific examples.)


I'm generally not in favor of censoriously editing literature. Even if it was over thematically minor issues like swearing, I feel it would misrepresent the story and the author behind it. 

For example, if an author had a habit of addressing African characters with the n-word in their fiction, is cutting out every slur really going to make their work less fundamentally racist? In my experience, as much as hardcore racists love their slurs, they only use them because their underlying mentality already devalues the targets of their animus. Racism at its core is an ideology, specifically one that sorts continental populations into different tiers on a value hierarchy, and cutting out certain vocabulary won't erase that ideology by itself. It's not like the author will portray African characters more sympathetically just because they don't use those buzzwords.


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## Tom (Jan 15, 2015)

I honestly don't know about this issue. I'm on the fence here.

I'm mostly against censorship, but I can think of times where I would be okay with it. Like graphic sexual content, for example. I'm asexual, and that kind of thing makes me _extremely_ uncomfortable. In a case like that, if the rest of the book was good, I would not object to censoring the sexual content.

With slurs and other anti-whatever elements, I think censorship is not the answer. Like Jabrosky said, things like racism go so much deeper than just words. You can cut out the most obviously offensive stuff, but there's still going to be the subtext left over. I also think that being exposed to slurs and controversial content in literature can be something of a positive thing, a catalyst for your development as an individual. It displays the attitudes of the past--in the case of a work like _Tarzan_--or incorrect and damaging viewpoints of the present. If you're never exposed to racism, chauvinism, the vile, the unjust, how can you recognize it otherwise? It's by exposure to such attitudes that we learn to reject them.

*gets off soapbox*

Er, got a little carried away there.


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## Penpilot (Jan 15, 2015)

Probably not. If I wasn't interested in reading the original story then I doubt a censored version has anything more to offer me, probably less in fact. If it's worth reading then, to me, it's worth reading, censorship or no censorship.


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## CupofJoe (Jan 15, 2015)

I'm going to pretty much echo what Penpilot has just written.
If I want to read on a story, book, article [whatever] and I find the subject offensive, changing a few words won't make any less offensive. 
In truth I'm more likely to read the full unexpurgated version as that is what the author intended...
Bowdlerisation can have wonderfully comic effects as anyone that has seen the TV version of Alex Cox's _Repo Man_ and the use of "Melon Farmers" will see.
I know you didn't want examples... but here is one...
I have read a truly offensive book [in some of its subjects material, its use of language and its entire ethos] but I found it very illuminative as to what I think made the writer tick... Actually I read it in two translations/editions, I managed to borrow a different version that had a detailed commentary by a noted scholar that highlighted how what the writer said fitted in a wider context. The book was _Mein Kampf_ - and it's out of copyright later this year... 70 years from the death of the author...


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## Tom (Jan 15, 2015)

You read _Mein Kampf_? I could only make it through the first chapter. Reading it made me literally, physically ill, as well as dangerously angry. Just reading the hatred...it made me feel ashamed to be German. Sort of unclean. 

I'll try again sometime, but for now it's too much for me to handle.


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## CupofJoe (Jan 15, 2015)

Twice!
Maybe not being German helps. I didn't take it personally. Oh, it is a terrible book on so many levels, at the very least I found it inconsistent, badly written, confusing and muddled logically [and that is trying to put aside what is actually written in the book]. I don't think many people bought it for the writing. 
Personally I'd find something else to read... a Telephone Directory, maybe. or an HP User Agreement booklet...


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## Devor (Jan 15, 2015)

Usually the answer for me would be no, but really it would depend on what my issue was with the original work.  Something about the question made me think of movies and TV shows such as those I watch with my children, and there are definitely things that I would watch with a bit of editing.  I might even watch sponge bob if certain characters were edited out...

But books have a tendency to be a lot more philosophical at times.  If there was something really repugnant to me about the content, as opposed to something I just didn't like, the answer is definitely no, I wouldn't read a version designed to placate me.  In fact I find the idea rather patronizing.


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## Tom (Jan 15, 2015)

CupofJoe said:


> Twice!
> Maybe not being German helps. I didn't take it personally. Oh, it is a terrible book on so many levels, at the very least I found it inconsistent, badly written, confusing and muddled logically [and that is trying to put aside what is actually written in the book]. I don't think many people bought it for the writing.
> Personally I'd find something else to read... a Telephone Directory, maybe. or an HP User Agreement booklet...



It has a lot to do with being German. I couldn't read it because I was just so disgusted that such a sick, sick mindset could take root in the country and the people that I came from. There's this visceral feeling of shame--just the fact that I'm tied to this man by my origin makes me sick. 

But, yeah, I got the impression from what I did read that it was very poorly written and even more poorly thought out. All reason was tossed out in the trash in favor of mindless hate. This is not the type of book you can censor. This is the type of book you present to the masses, completely untouched, and say, "You see this? This is deplorable, and this is what humanity can fall to if we're not careful. By reading this, we can learn to recognize and reject toxicity like it."

Hitler's Voldemort's You-Know-Who's manifesto can rot. I'm going to crack open my laptop instruction manual. The section addressing battery problems is especially gripping.


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## CupofJoe (Jan 15, 2015)

Tom Nimenai said:


> It has a lot to do with being German. I  couldn't read it because I was just so disgusted that such a sick, sick  mindset could take root in the country and the people that I came from.  There's this visceral feeling of shame--just the fact that I'm tied to  this man by my origin makes me sick.


A _lot_ of countries came very close to having the same ideologies in the 1920 and 30s. German, Italy and Spain may have been "officially" fascist but Japan, France, Britain, Greece, Finland, Belgium, Hungary, USA, and probably loads more all had strong and very active Right [and Left] wing factions.
There were a lot people that had to make their excuses and leave the table when it became a shooting war.



Tom Nimenai said:


> Hitler's Voldemort's You-Know-Who's manifesto can rot. I'm  going to crack open my laptop instruction manual. The section  addressing battery problems is especially gripping.


Have a ball! I prefer the 3rd part End User Software Limitations, I think it has a certain poetry...


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## Jabrosky (Jan 15, 2015)

Tom Nimenai said:


> It has a lot to do with being German. I couldn't read it because I was just so disgusted that such a sick, sick mindset could take root in the country and the people that I came from. There's this visceral feeling of shame--just the fact that I'm tied to this man by my origin makes me sick.


It could be worse. You could be brandishing a swastika around, or maybe slapping it on your bumper sticker, all while proclaiming you're only "celebrating your heritage, not hate".

While I certainly would never advocate censoring or banning even a book like _Mein Kampf_, since it's still a primary source of great value for historians and biographers, I don't know if I would feel the same visceral repulsion if I were to read it myself. Not only am I not of (recent) German descent, but these days it's no secret that Hitler was a tyrant representing an oppressive, genocidal ideology. Otherwise we Americans wouldn't have our national and bipartisan tradition of likening our Presidents to Hitler. Sure, there are American citizens out there who wholeheartedly embrace Nazi ideology, or at least believe there's a huge Jewish conspiracy to destroy the European race with multiculturalism and "political correctness", but thankfully most of those guys have barely moved an inch out of their parents' basements. Nazism as a specific ideology isn't really a potent political force anymore, at least not in the affluent and educated West.

On the other hand, reading some other old racist propaganda _can_ gross me out, but it isn't really because of shame. I don't take personal responsibility for what previous generations of white people have done. I'm more unsettled by the uncanny resemblance the racist arguments of the past have to _modern-day_ tropes that a lot of people in my generation, both white _and_ non-white, still earnestly accept. 

Remember when antebellum slave-owners excused their sexual assaults against female slaves by blaming an innate African hyper-sexuality? At least 90% of right-wing ranting about African-American children being born out of wedlock channels that same stereotype. Any discussion about police brutality and "black-on-black crime" is bound to invoke the old fear of violent and unruly Africans. Even news coverage of Africa itself, as well as the foreign aid commercials, still stinks of imperialist "white man's burden" rhetoric.

And don't get me started on the trope of European (or Asian) women inherently being so much more beautiful or desirable than African women that African men are all chasing after them. You'll be unpleasantly shocked at how many African-American men on the Internet themselves endorse that racist/sexist crud.

Whatever may be said of Hitler-style Nazism and its anti-Jewish animus, Afrophobic racist most assuredly isn't dead. And apologies for the tangential rant.


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## Tom (Jan 15, 2015)

I guess it just hits me a lot harder than other people. Part of it is being German, but a lot is thanks to my experience. When I was in early high school, I was really into WW2 history, and reading Nazi idealogy and Haulocast accounts and all the other horrible things that happened in Germany at that time made me super-sensitive to it and worldviews like it.

That's why I started that one thread a while back--Who are these people, and why are they ruining my internet searches? I was just so shocked and disgusted that those sort of out-and-out racial superiority claims--justified by insane "reasoning"--could still exist. It hurts you in a very deep and personal way to know that people who share your origin--could even be your distant cousins--are using that origin to say they are inherently superior to the rest of the human race.


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