Section 14

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One is not reading them.”
- Joseph Alexandrovitch Brodsky, exiled Russian-American poet.

Librarian Janet Yanoshko has done us all a great favour and compiled an extensive list of banned and “challenged” books at Forbidden Library.

Most of the usual suspects are there for most of the usual reasons along with a few oddities. James and the Giant Peach apparently promotes drug use.

If your bookshelves are looking for a bit more zing, head over and see what takes your fancy.

The Australian Classification Review Board has banned Dr Philip Nitschke’s Peaceful Pill Handbook.

The decision (PDF) states that

The Classification Review Board determined that The Peaceful Pill Handbook warrants Refused Classification (RC) because it instructs in the crime of the manufacture of barbiturates. Further, a majority of the Review Board determined that it also instructs in the crimes of the possession and importation of barbiturates and in offences under Coroners legislation in all States and Territories.

So there you have it. In Australia (and stay alert in New Zealand), free speech is less important that the idea that citizens should surrender control of their lives to their political masters and the loss of free speech is regarded as the acceptable collateral damage from the war on drugs.

A group of science fiction authors in Britain has written an anthology of short stories to deliberately break the new Terrorism Act.

The Act prohibits behaviour which “glorifies the commission or preparation” of terrorist acts.

The book, Glorifying Terrorism, features stories which praise “terrorism” from the likes of Nelson Mandela.

Welcome to Rackstraw Press, created in response to the Terrorism Act of 2006 - the controversial ban on the glorification of terrorism in the UK.

This Act is opposed by people from many political parties as an attack on free speech. Government protests that it will only be used if someone “directly incites” terrorism have been regarded as implausible by lawyers who point to the many other laws which currently cover this action.

Science fiction is a political genre. There are many science fiction writers who have already written novels and stories which could be considered in contravention of the law.

Everything evil that terrorists might get up to, like blowing stuff up or planning to blow stuff up, is already illegal. There is absolutely no justification for criminalising the expression of opinion; if the battle aganst terrorism is a battle against those who would destroy our freedoms, this sort of legislation is a scorched earth policy.

There is no value in the Jim Anderton approach (used when discussing media censorship of suicide stories) that sweeping censorship should be used to keep the “lowest common denominators” in line. Criminalising everyone with wide ranging laws and then picking and choosing who to prosecute is police state behaviour.

Hat tip: Boing Boing.

Dr Philip Nitschke’s Peaceful Pill Handbook was launched in Auckland yesterday. The censorship threat to this book was mentioned here a couple of weeks ago.

The launch featured a speech by Lindsay Perigo, available from Not PC (MP3, 5.5 MB, 24 min), in which he vigorously defends of freedom of speech. He labels politicians and priests history’s greatest enemies of free speech and discusses the views of some of those we remember as advocates of free speech.

Hat tip: Not PC.

UPDATE 13/2/07: The Dominion Post reports (p A3) that Dr Nitschke is voluntarily taking a copy of the book into the Office of Film and Literature Classification today on the understanding that chief censor Bill Hastings “wanted to review its contents”.

95bfm has an interview between Dr Nitschke and Mikey Havoc (MP3, 16 min), that also touches on censorship and free speech. He mentions that Exit International has shifted its website to New Zealand because Australia has banned discussing suicide over the phone and on the web.

The CYFSWatch affair and the Ministry of Social Development’s flailing around trying to decide how to deal with the threat of people expressing themselves with a new technology (and the Prime Minister’s frothing last year about “right-wing bloggers”) brings to mind an earlier time when authorities grappled with a new technology in a similarly ham-fisted manner.

Rodney A. Smolla describes what happened in his book Free Speech in an Open Society (ch.11):

Censorship was logistically simple for the Roman censors and Church until Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1450. Handwritten books were laboriously produced by a small number of persons under the strict control of authority; there was no opportunity for the mass distribution of printed material challenging the orthodoxy.

It is no accident that shortly after Gutenberg invented the printing press, official authorities invented the first censorship bureau. In 1485, only thirty-five years after Gutenberg made mass dissemination of the written word a technological possibility, the archbishop of Mainz - the city where Gutenberg lived - created an office of the censor. The precedent took hold.

In 1493 the Venice Inquisition issued the first list of banned books; in 1559 the Church established the Librorum Prohibitorum, or Index of Banned Books, binding on Roman Catholics (and thus virtually the entire population of Europe). The Index was administered by the Office of the Inquisition, which continued to operate in France as late as 1774 and in Spain as late as 1834. (Today there is no Inquisition, but there is still an Index, though the Church now regards it as advisory only.)

Governments around the world reacted similarly to Gutenberg’s new technology. Censorship was instituted in Germany in 1529. The British monarch in 1559 chartered the Stationers’ Company and limited the right to print to the Stationers’ Guild, thereby hoping to check seditious and heretical speech. A series of British licensing laws were passed on the Stationers’ model, provoking John Milton to write his famous tract on free expression, the Areopagitica.

Governments and the Church burned books and heretics alike, but to no avail. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment followed. Smolla continues:

It is futile and foolish to enact our fears into law; law cannot and should not attempt to hold back the enormous tides of technical creativity that are altering the world around us. But we are challenged to manage these changes; to take into account how technologies alter the way in which we communicate, and thus necessarily affect our rules of freedom of speech; to understand how technologies may alter even the relationship of the individual to the state, and thus affect our thinking about how to ensure basic protection for civil liberties.

To repeat a Karl Marx quote I was reminded of today: History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. So, come on, just try and stop this new technology. I’ll be watching. And laughing.

Dr Philip Nitschke is planning to launch his latest book The Peaceful Pill Handbook in Auckland next month (Dominion Post, Jan 26, pA5) and there are concerns that the Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC) will “review” the book.

The book includes recipes for fatal drug cocktails and instructions on how to make a “peaceful pill” - a DIY suicide tablet.

Office of Film and Literature Classification spokesman David Wilson said it had not reviewed the book, but it was possible it would do so because of the content.

It would most probably be reviewed for criminal activity, he said.

Though suicide is not illegal, it is a crime in New Zealand to incite someone to take their own life.

The office could ban the book or place restrictions on its purchase, including an age limit.

When the book was published in the United States in September, it was classified as a prohibited import by Australian Customs. A more recent decision by the Australian OFLC has meant that the book can be sold to people over 18. Importing the book is still banned and the Australian government is seeking a total ban.

Dr Nitschke’s visit to New Zealand for the book launch is already under a cloud as the Medical Council of New Zealand has written to the Ministry of Health seeking Dr Nitschke’s prosecution here.

In Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion there’s an interesting discussion of people’s reactions to censorship.

The chapter on scarcity talks about how a perception of scarcity makes something more desirable. It covers how “compliance professionals” (i.e. salespeople, advertisers, con-artists, etc.) use scarcity to push people into making buying decisions and how being told that we can’t have something makes us want it more (”psychological reactance”).

In the case of censorship, being told that we’re not allowed to read or view something makes us all the more eager to do so. Moreover,

The intriguing thing about the effects of censoring information is not that audience members want to have the information more than they did before; that seems natural. Rather, it is that they come to believe in the information more, even though they haven’t received it. For example, when University of North Carolina students learned that a speech opposing coed dorms on campus would be banned, they became more opposed to the idea of coed dorms. Thus, without ever hearing the speech, they became more sympathetic to its argument.

This raises the worrisome possibility that especially clever individuals holding a weak or unpopular position can get us to agree with that position by arranging to have their message restricted. The irony is that for such people - members of fringe political groups, for example - the most effective strategy may not be to publicize their unpopular views, but to get those views officially censored and then to publicize the censorship.

Perhaps the authors of [the United States’] Constitution were acting as much as sophisticated social psychologists as staunch civil libertarians when they wrote the remarkably permissive free-speech provision of the First Amendment. By refusing to restrain free speech, they may have been attempting to minimize the chance that new political notions would win support via the irrational cause of psychological reactance.