fierceawakening:

leproblematique:

21st-century-flapper:

lordhellebore:

Because whether they realise it or not, they essentially condone the same mindset and methods as these groups. Only their label and their content is different. They can’t deal with a free pluralist society, so they long for totalitarianism – but it’s not totalitarianism to them, because it only forbids the things they think are wrong, meaning no true freedom gets taken away from them. Or at least that’s what they naively believe, because they don’t understand the consequences.

This is one of the reasons I’m so vehemently against any kind of censorship of literature and the arts – as soon as you give anyone the tools to ban something on the nebulous grounds of morality and decency, you’ve opened the floodgates for people who have far less noble goals in mind. 

I’ve read the speeches given at the Nazi book burnings. I’ve heard the slogans they used, spewed right out of the mouth of Goebbels himself, and yes, they sound exactly like some of the things I’ve read in the arguments of antis why this or that fanfiction or book should be banned – because they are polluting and weakening the minds of young people, because they advance the spread of sexual deviancy. We’re not just talking about books about queer themes here, we’re also talking about books that acknowledged that women have sexual fantasies outside of what is considered the norm (hell, that they have sexual fantasies at all).

If you sound like Josef goddamn Goebbels, maybe it’s time to sit your ass down and re-think your position. 

The thing is, to keep people from ringing the Godwin alarm, this doesn’t apply solely to fascism and fascist regimes. I was born and spent the early years of my life behind the Iron Curtain. The list of banned shit on various grounds was so extensive that it spawned its entire category of jokes. Book-smuggling was very much a thing, entailing significant risk (though, in typical Eastern European fashion, it wasn’t as profitable as smuggling in blue-jeans, coffee that didn’t fucking suck, chocolate and tapes with banned films). My own father had a hidden library stuffed with Western, foreign-language books, some dating from before WWII and the Soviet domination, others bought ‘under the table’. And when I say ‘hidden library’, I mean he kept all the books in sacks, among building and household materials, where hardly anyone would look for them. Others saved entire troves of historical and religious texts from destruction by stuffing them inside walls and bricking them over.

Totalitarianism and authoritarianism, regardless of their position on the political spectrum, are the death of knowledge, of free dissemination of information, of thinking that isn’t black-and-white and chained to the purposes of one ideology or another. The fact that people like the individual described above keep rubbing one out to totalitarian / authoritarian thought isn’t a surprise on Tumblr, a community with very poor knowledge of history and a habit of willingly putting on blinders.

Approximately once a day, I wonder whether antis even know about this. Because I don’t see how you could know about it and STILL think “oh but this time it’s different!”

It’s never different. You’re never better than the others.

And this is why it’s bad, kids! Stop being the thought police.