Published on January 6, 2025 at 09:45. / Modified on January 6, 2025 at 09:46.
3 mins. reading
The Freedom Workshop
Every Monday, essayist Nicolas Jutzet offers a column to better understand why we love freedom, and how it can help us respond to contemporary challenges.
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In March 2022, during a break during a freedom conference in Prague, I chanced upon a fascinating booth: that of End Banned Books, which presented books banned around the world. In the list, expected titles like The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, but also more surprising surprises. So, Harry Potter is banned in Saudi Arabia because it promotes “witchcraft”. But also Animal Farm by George Orwell. In the United Arab Emirates because the author makes pigs talk, and in Cuba because he conveys an anti-communist message. This meeting made me change the reading priorities that I had set for myself the previous January for the months to come. It was decided, in 2022, I was mainly going to read books banned elsewhere, yesterday and today.
In reality, censorship is much more current than we suppose. In 2023, an exhibition at the Strauhof Museum showed that the idea of banning books was experiencing a revival. Even in democracies. While it had become outdated to ask for the censorship of a work, “progressive” forces tried to ban or rewrite books that could offend the sensibilities of readers. This is how we saw the flowering of sensitivity readerresponsible for ferreting out in advance, before publication, what could one day shock the public. The works of monuments like Agatha Christie or Roald Dahl were judged discriminatory and “softened” before being republished. Rushing into this breach, several conservative movements, such as the poorly named Moms for Liberty, have successfully increased demands for censorship of progressive works. Mainly on the grounds that they might offend or disturb children. Among the works, we find classics like Brave New World by Aldous Huxley or Maus d’Art Spiegelman.
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