In rural Australia in the 1940s, my mother had rocks thrown at her and was branded a 'communist' because her father, a school headmaster, advocated for establishing a public library.
In the Canadian province where I now reside, the Catholic Church controlled libraries -- and thus access to information -- until the 1960s.
We forget how recent the democratisation of knowledge is -- how transformative such institutions were and how hard-won.
We should not part with them easily.
@MelMScow *nodds in agreement*
#KnowledgeIsFree and must be kept free by all means necessary!
All because the ignorant are easier to control…
Censorship can come in many shapes, I'm afraid.
The Catholic public library in my village is offering books that apparently are getting banned in public school libraries of the democratic state of Florida.
Example: Margaret Atwood's Handmaid Tales.
https://webopac.bistum-muenster.de/reken/index.asp?detmediennr=1
I'm not assuming church-managed libraries would have offered such literature in the 1960s. But would state-run/ municipal public libraries have?
People throwing rocks to preserve ignorance.
@MelMScow
The irony is that this would probably happen in America TODAY (being called a #Communist for wanting a library)...
...despite the fact Founding Father Ben Franklin founded the nation's first public library. 🤦♂️
I certainly didn't realise this.
I knew of the Nazi action on books pre WW2, but nothing else.
@MelMScow This is one of the many reasons why I think we should be a lot less welcoming of the Vatican's emissaries.
Theirs is a fundamentally malicious organization and they should be treated as such.
@MelMScow The Catholic church is always controlled information. They have some of the oldest text ever made at the Vatican and they won't allow anyone to see them
Hugz & xXx
@melissabeartrix @taur10 For a city state of fewer than a thousand people, they have done quite well for themselves, haven't they?
(I like your sign-offs, by the way!)
@MelMScow Nor should we forget that's how the internet started, full of Enlightenment values of education for all and copyleft ideas.
Before Apple Facebook Google publishers and more recent hangers-on were allowed to fence it in and try to own everything and trade us to the highest bidders.
We've already gone badly backward. We're already seeing how stupid-making those backward changes are.
In rural Australia in the 1940s, my mother had rocks thrown at her and was branded a 'communist' because her father, a school headmaster, advocated for establishing a public library. In the Canadian province where I now reside, the Catholic Church controlled libraries -- and thus access to information -- until the 1960s. We forget how recent the democratisation of knowledge is -- how transformative such institutions were and how hard-won. We should not part with them easily.
There's an awful lot of good here, and in many ways Québec is consistently in advance of the rest of Canada in respect to social programmes and social conscience. There's still a lot to be reckoned with as regards the historical role of the Church, though.
I'm pretty sure most Québécois would regard Tennessee as pretty 'different' also -- though the preferred term here is 'distinct' 😉 .
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