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 -
Greatest time of free speech in history? In US, it was the sixties/seventies. Anything went at the time.
Porn of any kind? Go ahead.
Racism, fascism, antisemitism and bigotry in general? All fine.
Anti government and anti military propaganda, up to open incitement to desertion and mutiny in wartime? No problem.
Stolen top secret documents? No internet yet, you have to print them in newspaper to get them to the public. Nothing will happen to you.
I'm pretty sure literal fascism is more popular now with the internet than it was in the sixties and seventies.
You mean time when KKK was still a thing, time when American Nazi Party was founded (and defended by ACLU), time when third party pro-segregation candidate won 13% of vote?
I couldn't quickly find polls. I agree America was much more racist back then, but iirc the lingering effect of the recent world war made america very much against the term 'fascism'
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I meant in the sense of not only legality or cultural acceptance but the sheer ease of availing yourself to this material, thanks to the Internet.
If one wanted to be specific it might be that the greatest time was 90s or the early 00s, but in a sense we are still living in the same era.
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