Banned books week

I am told it is Banned Books Week, when booksellers and librarians preach to us about how baaad it is that books get censored. Usually that means some publicly-funded library or school being told they can't anymore teach from lying liars full of lies like Zinn's "People's History". Given half a chance those same librarians will trash a skipfull of books that were Products Of Their Time.

In light of that, Ron Unz has another of his characteristically verbose posts concerning stuff we're no longer supposed to read about the twentieth-century. This time he's on the case of AJP Taylor 1961. As it happens my local used-bookstore had a hardcopy - the 1983ish reprint. That one's blurb was pretty useless; also, it described Taylor's text as "revisionist".

That begs the question as to what Taylor imagined he was revising, a scant fifteen years after victory in Europe. In fact (so it claims) it was the first crack at writing a history of the war's cause. We're (apparently) not counting Bryant 1940; partly I guess because Bryant had already recanted his work, partly Bryant was discussing Germany, but mostly because Taylor libelled Bryant as "A Nazi Apologist" ... covering up a deep jealousy. Instead, Taylor promises to discuss how Britain and France got themselves involved in what - up to then - had played out solely over the Bloodlands. I can only surmise that Taylor meant to revise conventional wisdom, the late 1950s texto implicito; like Thucydides did for his fellow Greeks a few years after the Peloponnesian War.

Unz proposes that Taylor wasn't revising much, at the time. It is later that the texto implicito became a full-on Narrative. At that point, simply stating facts would get you tarred as a World War Two Revisionist. Worse: as a Holocaust Revisionist; then you'd be in for it.

Since the middle 2000s I think our culture has been less reflexive about small retractions here and there. Liberal Fascism and The Forgotten Man have pushed FDR off his pedestal, some, although unfortunately his mug persists on our dime. Human Smoke was still more daring. "Sovorov" and Solzhenitsyn took awhile to get translated over here; but it's happened, and people have been coming to terms with them. And Google Books, Archive.org, Gutenberg and now Unz have been preserving and displaying what was once lost.

That is, of course, why Melissa Barnett and others are working so hard to trash those Products Of Their Time. And why our Internet has become more curated.