When considering the history of book-burning in America, one’s first thought might be of the House Un-American Activities Committee which seized on the 1950s Red Scare to purge books authored by communist sympathizers. The chairman of the Senate Sub-committee of Investigations, Senator Joseph McCarthy sent the dynamic duo Cohn and Schine on a trip to Europe to rid the shelves of the U.S. State Department overseas libraries of books promoting left-wing ideas. They were scathingly called “book-burners” and “junketeering gumshoes”, by President Eisenhower and the indignant European press. Surely, those must have been the most prolific book burning incidents on the illustrious history of America. But were they?
It is most unfortunate that this belief is erroneous. Book-burning is alive and well today in America. Only, it is perpetrated by monopolistic corporations, instead of the government, and goes by the in vogue and perfectly benign-sounding name of “eradicating offensive speech” or “cancellation”.
The most recently incinerated book is “When Harry Became Sally” by Ryan T. Anderson, which criticizes the progressive theory of transgenderism. In February, Amazon stopped selling this book on all of their platforms, including Kindle and Audible. Amazon, in a statement, maintains that the company reserves the right to remove material they deem “inappropriate or offensive”.
Of course, as a private corporation, Amazon is fully entitled to craft its own policies. However, the company’s enforcement of vague and arbitrary company policies, evokes the dreaded imagery of book burning. Today, into the ash pile goes a book questioning the validity of transgenderism; tomorrow, any book deemed “offensive” may very well meet the same fate.
To refute those who refuse to recognize the magnitude of Amazon’s banning of Anderson’s book as book-burning, I find it necessary to take a quick trip to consider how the term of book burning had been applied in the past. Take the aforementioned incident in 1953 that was so fiercely denounced by President Eisenhower and the foreign media. The foreign information centers that Cohn and Schine visited were designed to counter Soviet propaganda by exhibiting the American ideals and way of life with a collection of books curated by the United States Information Agency. Books by communist authors were removed because they did not serve and in fact contradicted the explicit anti-communist mission of the centers. Since these centers were not public libraries, the removal of a book by a communist author did not adversely impact the public’s ability to obtain a copy of that book. Nonetheless, this incident provoked international and domestic outrage and is widely deemed one of the more memorable instances of book-burning in American history.
I must make it abundantly clear that it is not my objective to promote these publicly funded information centers. However, comparing and contrasting the above incident to the banning of Anderson’s book, one can hardly help but to realize the latter fits the description of book-burning far better. Amazon, with its formidable scale and monopolistic stature, has not professed to having any specific agenda, and its targeted audience has always been the general public. The removal of a book from Amazon’s retail platforms makes obtaining a copy of “When Harry Became Sally” considerably more difficult for the average citizen.
The liberal media’s silence and condonation of Amazon’s ban on “When Harry Became Sally” is appalling. After all, left-leaning media outlets like CNN and New Republic have long recognized Amazon’s ambition of driving out competition through lowering prices and eventually monopolizing the book retailing industry. Anyone dedicated to the preservation of the American freedom of expression should be alarmed by the banning of books by such an influential quasi-monopoly, and even more so by this quasi-monopoly’s vow to ban books that they vaguely deem “inappropriate or offensive”. It is unfortunate that the liberal media, which has prospered in the freedom of expression guaranteed by the American Constitution and had, in the past, expressed such seething indignation at alleged instances of “book-burning”, now finds it prudent to prioritize a progressive agenda over the preservation of free expression of ideas.