Censorship: The Fight Against and the Cost of Not

First off, Kids strike back against book banners (This week in books) from Nathan Bransford on the fight against censorship with a paragraph (with links) on students fighting their school banning books.

Secondly, The Article's The slaughter of the innocents: writers under Stalin. If that is not self-explanatory, then this should explain:

Stalin extinguished what remained of contemporary Russian literature by declaring that nothing could be printed that did not promote the Party line. He decreed, on threat of death, that writers must advocate social awareness instead of bourgeois aestheticism and decadence. Political hacks had to produce officially sanctioned clichés — full speed ahead, ready to sacrifice our lives, freedom-loving peoples, in the name of mankind and all progressive humanity — in a language intelligible to the masses. Great authors under Stalin, though not yet arrested, had to serve terms of internal life imprisonment, a kind of solitary confinement of the self....

Be aware of what we stand to lose, what will be the costs, of allowing American democracy to die.

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 1/16/22