BLOCKED Banned Books In The Digital Age

     When I was in school I remember hearing about people trying to ban books like 1984, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, and Of Mice And Men. I'm not the hugest free speech advocate, but I do have a bachelor's degree in liberal arts and I write books, so I suppose I'm more invested in the concept of free speech in the United States than most people. I also worked for GreenPeace for years asking people to write letters to Congress, but I understand that we don't really have free speech in America, just like we don't have democracy, we only have the appearance of free speech, and the appearance of democracy.

     Don't get me wrong, on the local level democracy is in action in the United States, but the Electoral College system means that there is not one person one vote in the United States when it comes to federal elections. And ever since they made senators stop representing the state's rights they have no real purpose, so are still insulated from the general public by having six year terms, but due to election laws and the cost of elections in the United States senators end up beholden to corporations that will often have lobbyists while the average citizen does not.

     Delaware for example specializes in being the home to corporations, and has slightly more than a million corporations registered there while slightly less than a million live people reside in the state. I say live people because ever since Citizens United it has been the law of the land per the Supreme Court of the United States that corporations are also legally people for lobbying purposes, but unlike people, corporations are sort of immortal, like elves or vampires.

     Corporations will make the maximum donation of nearly $3,000 to a campaign, and many large corporations and trade associations give the maximum allowable to both sides, while you'd be lucky to get a third of the adult voters to give $20 to any single campaign. Since corporations make the large contributions necessary to campaigns to allow either side to win an election, don't expect anyone in the Senate or even the House of Representatives to do anything about books being blocked on Amazon.

     In the past when a book got banned it was usually only banned in just one town, or in just a few towns in the United States or in just one state, or in Russia or the Soviet Union, and that was in the past.

     Within a few months of the beginning of the global pandemic that started in 2020, Amazon's self-publishing company CreateSpace blocked all books from self publication for simply being on the topic of the pandemic, or for containing the word covid-19. I know, I tried to publish a book titled, "End The Pandemic With Food And Vitamins," in June of 2021, and was blocked when I tried to publish it to Amazon Kindle.

     This was part of the orchestrated attempt through all social media as well as standard media to suppress all natural remedies, and to label anyone that was suggesting taking something as innocuous as 5,000 IU vitamin D daily a conspiracy theorist, all to make massive profits off of selling vaccines, and to curtail liberties.

     I would argue that the only books worth reading within modern English culture are the books that have been banned. We are talking about Orwell, Bradbury and Steinbeck among others. One of the most banned books in history is Huckleberry Finn, mostly because of the name of one of the characters, but it was considered offensive and has been banned repeatedly, ever since the day Mark Twain published it, which as he said was good advertising.

     But what if your book never gets published? Then getting blocked is worse than getting banned, because your book never has a chance to see the light of day, not even the light of an Amazon Kindle reader.  Where has free speech gone? The only place open to free speech is Twitter, and they don't publish books (yet).