Regime-banned books are in school libraries and on indigo bookshelves at eye level for children.
REAL banned books are often decades out of print, going for hundreds of dollars used on eBay, they've been disappeared by publishers and distributors in spite of interest and demand. Others have authors who've died or been imprisoned for their ideas, yet more have been removed from city or university-wide library systems so that their "Misinformation" and "Lies" do not poison impressionable scholars.
Yet more are suppressed algorithmically, not appearing on the author's wikipedia page and not appearing in Google search if you type the author and "book" or "memoirs"... but only appearing when you already know the full title of the work (try this yourself: Type in "Pinochet Memoirs", and then type in "Pinochet: A journey through a life")
Yet others are explicitly banned, some to the point where a mere PDF on your hard drive can result in a decade-long sentence... IN THE UNITED KINGDOM, NEW ZEALAND, and AUSTRIA.
This has been a massive project. over 200 titles on the full list and 10,000 words in my "Cursory" survey.
Let me take you on a journey into the heart of the forbidden
UPDATE: Also Checkout My Addendum to The Real Banned Book list on Holocaust Revisionist Liturature
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Notes -
Interesting post! I have several of those on my shelves and in my Kindle already. I actually just finished reading Turner Diaries - quick summary, it's fun as an action-adventure story, but the politics are pretty unsophisticated and not discussed in much detail. I've been trying to find more books on Irish Loyalism as well, maybe I'll try and find a copy of Paisley's book next (though I have read from some Loyalist militiamen post-Troubles that they were rather annoyed at his tendency to swoop in to a volatile situation, stir everyone up with a firebrand speech, then be whisked away before any actual violence happens).
The meta questions are what this really gets into though. All regimes in history have banned books that they considered threatening to the Powers That Be. What's curious is how the current regime is obsessed with promoting the reading of "banned" books while simultaneously actually banning other books. It seems critical to the identify of the current power structure that they were formerly out of power and had their core ideologies banned, so it's both a dunk on the former Powers That Be which they overcame and a sop to the idea of Free Speech to promote them, but they're at least as totalitarian as those former powers, so of course they continue to ban things that threaten their new ideology, while of course paying no attention to the contradiction.
It's also interesting how we all seem to seek the authenticity of these types of books. Whatever they think, at least they actually meant it! Even the wildest-eyed radicals tend to become dull if they ever do manage to become the Powers That Be, only sometimes returning to authenticity once they're out of power but still alive and not in some terrible prison, and inclined to write more about what they really did and why.
These books aren't samizdat you obtain from a guy who stapled it together in his garage after photocopying it over at work(or I guess which come in a word document on a flash drive today). They're freely available if you want to spend the purchase price(which is often high). Some of them are banned in parts of Europe, but I don't think it's enforced particularly strictly and they're definitely not banned in the US.
This is more of a blindspot from the regime/cathedral/progressive-industrial complex, which takes for granted, sometimes with truly fallacious explicit justifications, that prejudice/oppression/authoritarianism only runs in one direction. Like the term "authoritarianism" literally is not used in the social sciences; instead it's "right-wing authoritarianism", and of course this is only measured in ways which make right wingers look more authoritarian.
That's not an unprecedented blindspot; except for a small minority of libertarians, everyone everywhere tends to define freedom as "freedom to do things I want". Conservatives are just explicit about it instead of redefining a half dozen other words to reify unfalsifiable boo outgrouping.
It's true that the majority of these books aren't really all that banned, at least in the US. It's hard to consider something to be banned when you can mail-order a copy off of Amazon. The Turner Diaries is a pretty good case for about as banned as you can effectively get though.
In the way of modern cancel culture, it's not technically banned in the sense that the Government will explicitly send you to jail specifically for possessing it. But Amazon and GoodReads removed the page for it entirely. I don't see it on any other online book sellers. I actually found a few paper copies on eBay, running around $100, apparently published by a Barricade Books, which according to Wikipedia went bankrupt in 1997. I would expect dire consequences if any publisher dared to do a new run now - in the form of every other author refusing to do business with them, credit card processors, shippers, and banks dropping them, etc. If you wanted a paper copy, something like printing it at home would in fact be pretty reasonable. PDFs over the internet are easier though - a DuckDuckGo search for it finds a downloadable PDF on the first page, so you don't have to work too super hard to find a free copy if you really want it.
While it's not explicitly illegal to have it, if it ever comes to the attention of the wrong people that you do, I would expect you risk getting busted for something made up or trivial that everyone else normally wouldn't be prosecuted for and some kind of sentencing enhancement citing the fact that you possessed it to document how dangerous you are.
The hell of it is, I don't see it being that great or dangerous. The ideology is pretty racist and anti-Semitic, but no part of the book actually advocates for it, it's just taken as a given that it's correct. The terrorism tactics seems to me like grade-school level stuff, the kind of thing where if you couldn't figure that out already, you really have no business conducting any sort of insurgent activity. It's kind of fun as an adventure story, and a circle-jerk if you actually believe in that ideology, but otherwise pretty meaningless.
I pretty much agree. I don't really follow social sciences much though, it seems pretty remarkable if they actually pay no attention to left-wing authoritarianism.
I'm really extraordinarily confident this isn't true. One, there are, like, several hundred thousand Americans who actively consume far-right online content as bad as anything in those books at this point, and at least tens of thousands who actively produce it. They are just not prosecuted, even the ones who are explicitly calling for the gassing of various ethnicities online. Two, merely possessing a book isn't actually a strong signal of believing in its ideology - one of the significant consumers of old far-right books are left-leaning (often far left) historians, political theorists, and writers.
Potential counterarguments: 1 is 'ricky vaughn', but that's one of many and the political motive there would be 'trump + election interference' and not 'far-right'. I think he was probably genuinely antisemitic, but I think he'd still have been prosecuted if he was merely MAGA. 2 is that far-right organizations that do things 'in real life' are targeted by the feds, but I think that's very different from 'owning a book' and they do that to far-left orgs too.
Perhaps that was a bit over-stated. I think it has a little truth, but more qualified, like that something that vaguely resembles that may happen to like a single-digit number of people, not anywhere near even a whole number percentage of everyone who's ever possessed such content. And "coming to the attention" would look more like far-left activists being majorly annoyed at you for some reason and digging up things you've wrote or sold somewhere to make a case about how bad you are. It may not be super common, but such things occasionally do end up becoming prosecutions, often including an extra step passing through a "mainstream" activist group.
If you're looking for an actual case, the best example that comes to my mind is Paul Miller. His prosecution was on weapons charges, for laws that are pretty commonly flouted and rarely prosecuted on their own, reportedly at least partly thanks to the prompting of the ADL (though he wasn't exactly doing himself any favors either). None of the documentation mentions any particular radical literature, though it would be a little surprising if he didn't actually possess any.
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The social sciences literally define authoritarianism so it can't be left wing. It's actually quite funny the chutzpah.
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