I want to bring up the parallels of un-American and un-German. Both had people in power *clears throat* Dictators who wanted to control ideas through banning media, and in this case, books. By limiting books to fit a certain agenda, it also limits free speech as books are protected under the First Amendment. Banning and limiting books is part of a larger censoring movement in the United States sets a dangerous precedent. “The Supreme Court held that the First Amendment limits the ability of school boards to remove books from libraries, emphasizing that students have a right to access diverse ideas and that school boards cannot remove books simply because they dislike the ideas contained in them.” But in the same breath, this is also true: “Removing a book from a public school curriculum or library or restricting access for some students may violate the First Amendment rights of students and others who have a right to receive information and ideas contained in those books. However, First Amendment protections only apply when these actions are taken by public school or other government officials.” In other words, a police officer can’t ban a book legally, but a parent sure can petition to have a book removed with little to no pushback. That’s a pretty giant legal loophole that is currently being exploited. 

The books being limited today are for the following top 10 reasons in the United States as of 2020: sexual content, offensive language, unsuited to age group, religious viewpoint, LGBTQIA+ content, violence, racism, use of illegal substances, “anti-family” content, and political viewpoint. In Nazi Germany, they were being banned topics include: “books written by Jewish, half-Jewish, communist, socialist, anarchist, liberal, pacifist, and sexologist authors among others.” They could even be banned if they were just deemed “degenerate”. 

“When Nazis seized libraries full of Marxist books, from Jewish organizations, or from left-wing presses, the first thing that happened was that expert librarians were called in to comb through the stolen books. Nazi librarians actually wanted massive collections of Judaica, about German democracy, on Communism, and about sexuality and gender, but they wanted them closed off from the general public. Only trusted adults should have access to these supposedly dangerous books. As a 1935 Nazi order stated, the goal was ‘to keep German cultural life pure from all harmful and undesirable literature [and this] will particularly protect the youth from corrupting influences.’...Today, if someone assures you that all they want to do is move library books out of general circulation and make them available only to adults to ‘protect the youth,’ while swearing that this is not like Nazi Germany, be wary. Historically speaking, this looks awfully similar to how the Nazis really banned most books. Nazis moved them into special collections to keep them out of the hands of ordinary people.”

The legal loopholes censorship supporters will jump through to limit information and knowledge is astounding. These actions are just making us backslide in critical thinking, empathy, and media literacy. Instead of banning books or trying to circumvent the rules to make sure said books have a limited reach, let’s focus on letting people access the knowledge they have a right to access - we ALL have a right to access. Limiting knowledge doesn’t mean the knowledge doesn’t exist or isn’t important, it just makes it so those in power can better control our information, and, therefore, better control us.