Frozen_Dream:
Why do people get so worked up over these things?
Because they matter?
Frozen_Dream:
nobody wants to ban King Lear because the blinding of Gloucester was a gross breach of his Human Rights.
As I've said before, we can only judge cases on their own merit - throwing in random references to other cases is irrelevant (especially when they are just made up) and a distraction.
Frozen_Dream:
A society can't judge or censor literature published in a different time by modern standards, even if it is racist.
Why not? We're already twelve pages of judgement (both pro and con) into this thread, for one thing...
Frozen_Dream:
banning or refusing to sell books sets a dangerous precedent.
You're not going to allow retailers to choose what they can and can't sell? That's a bit dicatatorial, and certainly has never been on the cards anywhere that I know of. Someone should be entirely within their rights not to sell anything they don't want to and aren't required to by law (I'm not sure if there
is anything that shops are required to sell by law...).
Also, again, the use of "banning" is such an emotive term.
We don't "ban" crime, it is outlawed; racism is a crime, and the test to be met here is, is the book racially offensive?
Frozen_Dream:
banning a book/movie/art merely attracts attention
Exactly - the call is for the publisher not to publish it, not for the state to ban it, which is an important difference.
Frozen_Dream:
By that reckoning, the Congo and Soviet albums illustrates the prejudice in which Europeans then viewed the Africans and the Russians.
I don't really get your point.
People used to pee out of upper storey windows into the street, bait bears, keep slaves, and all sorts of other things which society now deems as unacceptable; using the logic of "it was okay then, it should be okay now" would mean that we could start to do all of them again too...?
As I also said before, Hergé was moved to "ban"
Soviets more or less out of vanity, because it was a book he didn't care for, and only brought it back into print because pirates started to re-issue it (and even then that must have been on a truly tiny scale: I've only ever seen one copy of a pirate from those days for sale, so I doubt that they were ever common).
Congo could be let go out of print for far better reasons than vanity...