The History of Censorship

Oxford University Press(2018)”The suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security is considered censorship.”Censorship has been around since 213 B.C. for example when Minister Li Si and Emperor Qin Shi Huang of China ordered the destruction of many history books. He wanted the people that come after him to believe that the world started with his first ruling. The struggle for freedom of opinion is about as old as the history of censorship.

Censorship in books is all throughout history. The Bolsheviks censored all books in Russia that did not contruibute to the beliefs of communism. These books included some religious work, works that spoke highly of past Czars.

In the 20th century Nazi Germany is probably the most well-known case of political censorship. On April 6,1933 is when the start of the massive organization of burning books and persecuting people with opinions against the Nazi way. The German student’s Association for press and propoganda urged the cleasing of literature against Nazi, so they threw public festivals to celebrate the bonfires. On May 10, 1933 a ton of University students burned around 25,000 copies of literature said to be “un-German”. Books written by communist, socialist, and jewish authors were burned in huge fires. Authors such as Upton Sinclair, Jack London, and Hellen Keller had their works as well find their way into the fires. Throughout history the end game with using censorship to burn books was to try and take away you right of and onpinon and free speech. Throughout these examples I have shown Political coruption. They use the burning of books as a way to mislead them into thinking that their way is the only way.

Christophor Muscato(2018) said Political censorship is when goverment or political parties withhold information from there citizens in order to avoid embaressement. “For example, during the Cold War, the USSR needed the areas under their control to believe that they were winning and that life in communist Eastern Europe was better than life in the United States or capitalist Western Europe.” The USSR frequently kept and eye on writers, newspaper editors, television programs and other sources of information to ensure that only positive comments about communism were heard.

Christophor Muscato(2018) Another frequent source of censorship across history is religious censorship. This is were information is forbidden because it goes against religious ideas. One example of this was the trial and imprisonment of Galileo in 1633 for proposing that the Earth revolved around the Sun.

These are some of the many different types of censorship used throughout history. For example a few others are, military, moral, self censorship, and many others. I chose to research on political and religion. I chose to write about censorhip because it was a topic I really did not have much knowledge on, or how much it was frequently used in the past by communist and how it still effects us today. On the COMM 410 Regional Focus Project Aqr5261(2014) wrote this “Censorhship still takes place in every country all around the world. Not all countries share the same form of censorship, but in one way or another all soceities are affected by it. In a general sense censorship is the supervision and control of the information and ideas that are circulated throughout people within the society.”

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