[Dragaera] OT: Ray Bradbury

[Davdi Silverrock]

On 7/18/07, Maximilian Wilson wrote:
>

> Not state-sponsored censorship, then. Self-censorship by the community.

When the "community" is large enough, it *is* the state.

Bradbury's assertion (various minorities wanting to burn stuff end up
winning) doesn't make sense.  All existing cases of censorship are
because of majorities performing the censorship - and if they are a
minority, they need the support of those in power, and therefore
become a /de facto/ majority.

Anyway, Bradbury is asserting that the whole book is about television
(and presumably, self-censorship via endemic apathy).  The
contradiction between Bradbury-then and Bradbury-now is that F451 is
(mostly) not about apathy, but rather about zealous and fanatical
censorship by destroying any possibility of anyone reading anything,
ever.  It might have started out as self-censorship via apathy in his
head, but F451 is, in its final form, about government censorship: the
(presumed) apathetic-to-reading community has become
antipathetic-to-reading; they voted to create tax-supported
destroyers-of-books, which is to say, censors for the government.


> This is interesting to me because I see a certain amount of this in my own
> community (I live in Utah)

My condolences.