An Artist Is Building a Parthenon of Banned Books
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
I do not like seeing vinyl records used as pot plant holders, even stuck to the wall is wrong unless framed. With CDs I do not feel the same compassion, if someone has some CDs on a bit of string to scare seagulls off their land I am fine with that (even if I side with the seagulls). Books are a bit like this for me, they deserve respect beyond being mere consumer items. So using books to make anything other than a library feels wrong to me. Plus they will not be in readable form at the base of a tower. So there is some destruction of books going on here, albeit with a different spectacle to what the Nazis did.
Banned books are going to be anywhere but this 'banned books of the past' pile. It draws attention away rather than toward the really good stuff.
Banned books have some sort of special value to our culture. They are usually trending books that become even more popular when some school district or public library says "We are banning book X." there will be tons of prints available to keep up with the demand. There will be digital copies too. So what if one copy ends up in some guy's art project? That wasn't the only copy and definitely won't be the last either.
I don't keep many books on my shelf. They are typically expensive textbooks that have some condensed knowledge that would be hard to obtain elsewhere. Check out the yearly lists of top banned books: http://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10 Do you think it would be hard to obtain a copy of the Bible? or Fifty Shades of Grey? You could run to any used bookstore and pickup many of these books for dirt cheap for some dumb project.
But actual censored novels? Those are a rare find and typically don't have many prints unless they have been leaked out of a totalitarian country or published freely after the previous govt falls. But those aren't what this project is using.
One example of a suppressed book would be when the North American distributor of said books gets two shots to the back of the head. Another would be when its taken out of printing after a mere 3000 copies even though its author is a famous and well respected European professor. Another would be that its not translated into English even though it's by one of the most celebrated authors in the world. Another example would be when the author is thrown into prison under false murder charges because he's ruffling the wrong feathers. All true stories, to discover the books and the authors is an exercise for the reader.
If you look at the banned book list its usually because it offends Christian morality, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_commonly_challeng..., but offending social morals and offending (elements of) the power structure are very different.
I'm fairly certain your second example is Tragedy and Hope by Carroll Quigley, although he was an American teaching at Georgetown. Your first might be Dark Alliance by Gary Webb (if one defines "distributor" very loosely), but I haven't a clue on the last two. They don't trigger anything in memory and the details are too vague for a fruitful search. Be a good sport and elaborate.
My point is just there is another level of control, not banning books but silencing or suppressing them (or pick some other term that fits better)
Anyone not previously familiar with suppression as it is practiced would be more readily swayed with something they can sink their teeth into and investigate. What you've given them instead are vague and unverifiable claims that, without elaboration, carry the hint of paranoid fancy rather than serious conspiracy(which risks unjust dismissal by someone could have otherwise been informed).
Let's use my first guess of Tragedy and Hope as an example. Consider the following:
-pedigree of Quigley: History professor at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service who taught Bill Clinton and an entire generation of diplomats
-contents of the book: macrohistorical view of Anglo-American governmental, financial and intellectual organizations and how they shaped history
-manner of its suppression: first editition pulled, subsequent editions published without the passages detailing the establishment of the BIS backed by private bankers and the existence of what Quigley called the "Round Table Groups"
These combine to paint a clear (and researchable) picture of what you alluded to: books not being banned, but having their impact diminished, because they challenge or critique the power structure.
As an aside, when will we stop wistfully speaking about ancient Greek (Athenian) democracy? You know, the democracy where anyone could vote, as long as they weren't a slave, weren't a woman, and owned land?
How anyone can idealise a 'democracy' where some people were the property of other people is puzzling in the modern age. Academic interest, sure, but nostalgia?
Aristotle thought that you had to be a large-muscled man to be truly virtuous. Just about every European Enlightenment philosopher had something nasty to say about "savages" or women. Look past their period-specific blind spots, and their theories continue to hold weight.
I mean, what is the difference between a council of nobility and a council of land-holding Athenian citizens, where citizenship is an inherited trait? Is there all that much of a difference if 10% of the population gets a say instead of 2%? Not to mention that if you only get a say when you've inherited your title and also own land, then that really starts to sound like a noble class anyway.
Handwaving away "yeah, but slaves, women, poor people was just a thing of the period" just isn't good enough. I'm reminded of Stephen Fry's roar in his Catholicism debate, when one speaker defended past misdeeds by the Catholic church as 'well, no-one at the time knew any better', to which Fry responded 'Well, what then are you for?'. It's all very well to have a feelgood core of a theory, but you have to have the execution of it as well. Lots more has been added to democracy since the early days; it wasn't some sort of golden period of the common person.
If I had a nickel for every time someone said this, I'd invest in stocks and shares and become a capitalist. It's such a tiring trope, like an old version of "all the parties are as bad as each other". Infinely repeatable, and everyone agrees by default. Wonderful!