Vijay,

 

Did you mean to send this just to me, or to or to the entire board? I assume you meant the latter, so I have forwarded it.

 

In a message dated 5/21/2005 3:27:33 AM Mountain Daylight Time, rvijay07@myway.com writes:

 

 

I agree with this, within reason. One does not want to become obsessed with the devil's work. If you can afford to buy ebooks (some of us can't), you might like to go to FictionWise.com and buy RENTWING. It's my first fantasy and my first scripture-based novel, and it pretty well spells out my opinion in this matter.

I read it when I was thirteen. I'm 61 now, so there's been a long span of time since then and I remember very little of it. But I do remember that he started the book by saying, in effect, "I used to think . . . " and presenting reasonably normal reasoning. He soon got into "But NOW I know  . . . " and his reasoning became more and more insane the farther he got into the book. I felt that I was reading a man's collapse into paranoid schizophrenia. But too many people, even now, read it and believe his "logic."

My oldest daughter has an annual Banned Books Party. She sends out her invitations, then she goes to used-book stores all over Fort Worth, and then if necessary she buys some books at full cost. At  her party, she hands out as party favors copies of the banned books. If I were into party-giving and didn't live in a neighborhood so staid that a lot of people STILL want to ban books, I'd do the same thing.

 

I just bookmarked the site. I had it bookmarked at one time until a rather complex computer disaster occurred, and I hadn't gone back to look for it again.

I seem to have come in in the middle of this discussion. Please enlighten me. Are we talking about Adolf Hitler having not responded? He's, uh, sort of dead, as of course you know, so I take it you are speaking facetiously. I agree that no matter how detestable the work is, and it is extremely detestable, it is a major document of world history and therefore should be available. However, as it already IS available online, I also will go with the majority on whether or not Gutenberg should post it. PROTOCOL OF THE ELDERS OF ZION, which is an extremely inflammatory and vicious collection of lies and hatespeak, also is available online, but I would strongly object to PG posting it. My position is this, I think: Banning books is wrong. However, I am not required to publish them myself if I find them distasteful. Let somebody who DOESN'T consider them distasteful publish them.

 

Books are banned for many reasons, though, and some of them are extremely silly. Some schools have banned HUCKLEBERRY FINN because it uses what is now referred to as "The N-word." But Twain was making a point, and the point he was making was that a good black man is just as good as any other good man, and a lot better than most men, and he was demonstrating that. In one chilling example, Tom Sawyer's aunt, on being told of the explosion of a boiler in a paddleboat, asks, "Was anybody hurt?" The reply was, "No, ma'am, killed a nigger, though." To which the aunt replies, "Well, that's fortunate, because sometimes people are hurt in that kind of thing." But by this time the reader knows that Jim, the run-away slave, is the only REAL person in the book other than Huck. Everybody else in the book has assumed a persona in which a black person IS NOT a person, and thereby they have made themselves non-real. The cult of "the other" can cut two ways. As you may have noticed, I do not find this book distasteful, although I am from the Deep South.

 

So I suppose, on careful consideration, that I do think PG should not publish MEIN KAMPF, but I won't throw a tantrum either way. It's available, so it's not banned from the Internet.