Digital Book-Burning: Amazon To Stop, Or Be Stopped From, Selling Dissident Books
10/16/2013
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Daily Mail Online today is running a piece lifted more or less intact from a webzine named The Kernel, not previously known to me but mainstream center-left to judge from the articles—if you’re traveling leftwards, about midway between the New York Times and The Guardian.

The gist of both pieces is that Amazon should stop selling, or be stopped from selling, books with an anti-Semitic or white nationalist theme.  One of the books cited has a foreword by Kevin MacDonald, an occasional VDARE.com contributor.

As a commercial enterprise, Amazon will undoubtedly fold under pressure of this kind and institute controls over what books it accepts for sale.  The controls will be devised by the usual Cultural Marxist geeks based on a cursory reading of Wikipedia, of which Cultural Marxist enterprise those same geeks are likely also part-time editors.

The resulting exclusions will sooner or later—probably sooner: the Left is brimming with confidence right now—embrace any writer more controversial than David Brooks.

London’s Charing Cross Road used to have a number of specialist bookstores whose patrons left with their purchases well-concealed in brown paper bags.  Perhaps the Internet will develop some equivalent.

Or perhaps we shall fall back at last on government protection.  I see that Richard Spencer’s upcoming National Policy Institute conference is to be held in a federally-owned building—the only kind of place left in our demented society where we can be sure that First Amendment liberties will be honored.

The paradox of anti-statist radical conservatives, including many Lost Cause sympathizers, being forced to meet in buildings owned by Uncle Sam, is not much talked about on the Dissident Right.  It actually tells us a lot about the relationship between liberty, capitalism, and the nation-state.  Discuss among yourselves.       

 

 

 

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