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We Need to Talk About Amazon Kindle and Censorship
A special weekend anti-censorship edition (Scroll to the end to listen)
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If you own an Amazon Kindle, this newsletter is for you. If you DO NOT own an Amazon Kindle, this newsletter is also for you.
On 26 February 2025, Amazon will remove the Kindle feature that allows users to download and backup Kindle e-books you have previously selected and/or purchased. This feature allowed users to store offline copies of their e-books.
I’m not here to write a How To. Readers can find a great tutorial for downloading and saving Kindle e-books at The Verge HERE.
This newsletter is about CENSORSHIP. Specifically, Christo-fascist censorship I have repeatedly predicted as it relates to anything Christian Nationalists deem to be “pornography.”
Because when a government decides to crack down on anything it considers to be “pornography,” they need a willing accomplice to make those items disappear. This decision by Amazon signals that they will be a willing accomplice to regime censorship by making it next-to-impossible to download and save digital content you have previously purchased.
For over a year, I have predicted this kind of censorship again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
(I got tired of typing the word again and linking it to my prior newsletters. Use the search feature in the upper right; type in the word pornography, and you’ll find over 20 newsletters on this topic. Or upgrade to paid and download my digital, word-searchable book How Project 2025 Will Ruin YOUR Life. Be sure to save it offline, because censorship could come to the cloud, too.)
If you value your Kindle library, it is imperative that you download and save it before 26 February 2025.
Here’s an overview of the types of stories that could be censored (in case readers want to scroll to areas of interest below:)
What Christian Nationalists deem to be “pornographic”
Books that are critical of Christian Nationalists
Stories that celebrate topics Christian Nationalists hate
Books that encourage women to leave abusive relationships, seek abortions, or petition for divorce.
Non-fiction books that educate readers about the history of fascism on this planet and/or give readers tools to resist and fight back
Any book that refuses to portray America as a Christian nation or otherwise rewrite history to reflect Christian Nationalist talking points
Shameless Plug: If you’re looking for a non-US alternative for e-books, go to Ratuken Kobo. Ratuken is Japanese-owned; Kobo is its Canadian subsidiary. All of my titles are available there. (I know most people read my NYT bestselling memoir Not Without My Father, but To Live Forever is my favorite of my books. To me, it’s a better version of the memoir. Though OF COURSE it is fiction. :) )
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My 30 January 2024 newsletter provides a detailed list of the types of reading Christian Nationalists deem to be “pornographic.” I’m repeating it below.
Two teenagers sharing their first kiss
Any unmarried characters who engage in making out or heavy petting
Scenes that focus on touch that could arouse (“He slipped his thumb under my watch band and slowly massaged my wrist.” “When he put his hand on my knee, all I could think about was how I wanted him to move it higher.” Romance novels are packed with this imagery.)
Descriptions of masturbation, including mutual masturbation between one man and one woman who are married
Mentions of a desire to masturbate or have sexual contact with another character without following through
Detailed sex scenes, even between one man and one woman who are married
Depictions of women longing for, enjoying or initiating sex
Characters discussing birth control, condom usage and STD’s
Depictions of BDSM
Characters describing how a look or touch affects them (“His smoldering gaze set my core on fire.” “She licked her lips, and my jeans were suddenly too tight because of my damn cock.”)
Scenes depicting orgies or sex between more than two characters
All homosexual/transgender sex, desire, and longing
Words that make people think about sex (“Fuck!”)
Or characters being vocal during sex (“Jesus Christ! Yeah. Suck my cock.”)
Implications that unmarried characters may engage in sexual conduct even if it isn’t described (“They went into the bedroom…and the lights faded to black.”)
Characters who swing, engage in sexual conduct with someone other than their spouse, or want to cheat without acting on it
Descriptions of a character’s body (“He whipped off his shirt, and my mouth watered at the tight V and the trail of hair that disappeared beneath his waistband.” “Her dress teased her perfect tits.”)
This newsletter
The list above only deals with sexual topics. Christian Nationalists also consider a whole lot more topics to be offensive and off-limits. If you enjoy reading any of the following types of books, download them and save them offline. Or better yet, buy a physical copy of your favorites NOW.
Books that are critical of Christian Nationalists
Here are a few examples:
Stories that mock Christians openly or covertly.
Tales that elevate and glorify non-Christian characters (think pagans/faeries/aliens/
atheists/monsters/superheroes and more.) To most Christian Nationalists, a non-Christian character is anyone who doesn’t bludgeon readers over the head constantly with their religion. Books that encourage readers to question the Bible. This wouldn’t only impact genres like science fiction. Many science books could be censored for writing about science from the perspective of evolution or be forced to include discussions of creation and intelligent design as science.
Stories that question the value of church attendance. Christian Nationalists expect storytellers to incorporate their worldview into everything. Hence, they will require more Christian Nationalist characters attending church and espousing their dogma. They will also want to portray characters who refuse to comply as worthy of punishment and consequences to further indoctrinate people about the importance of church attendance.
Books that give readers a worldview that might make one question any Christian Nationalist dogma.
Stories that celebrate topics Christian Nationalists hate.
Feminist stories that celebrate women who take charge of their lives, get educated, delay marriage and childbirth, pursue careers, and otherwise embrace their own independence.
Books that portray minority characters as normal, everyday people instead of standard Christian Nationalist racist cliches. These people hate what they call DEI enough to kill entire genres. It includes every non-white population.
Stories that portray men as weak. Especially if those characters are white men or white Christian Nationalist men.
Multi-cultural books that help readers learn about other cultures and/or build empathy for people from other places.
Tales that realistically portray characters with mental illness or physical disability.
Any story that doesn’t include Christian Nationalist consequences for characters who lose their jobs, find themselves homeless, are diagnosed with a disease, are permanently injured in an accident, or similar.
Books that encourage women to leave abusive relationships, seek abortions, or petition for divorce.
I wrote reams about Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us for this reason. Sure, the book contains sex between two characters who aren’t married. But it also shows a woman choosing to leave a relationship with an abusive husband and opt for divorce. Christian Nationalists do not believe women should be able to divorce abusive partners. Most think if a woman is abused, she’s not obeying her husband enough.
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Eight books you are forbidden from reading
In some places, at least. A brief world tour of book bans in the 21st century
OVID WAS exiled by Augustus Caesar to a bleak village on the Black Sea. His satirical guide to seduction, “The Art of Love”, was banished from Roman libraries. In 1121 Peter Abelard, known for his writings on logic and his passion for Héloïse, was forced by the Catholic church to burn his own book. And in perhaps the most famous modern example of hostility to literature, Iran called for the murder of Salman Rushdie, author of “The Satanic Verses”, in 1989. For its perceived blasphemy, the novel remains banned in at least a dozen countries from Senegal to Singapore. Book-banning remains a favourite tool of the autocrat and the fundamentalist, who are both genuinely threatened by the wayward ideas that literature can contain. In democracies books can provoke a different sort of panic. Armies, prisons, prim parents and progressive zealots all seek to censor literature they fear could overthrow their values. Bans on books that shock, mock or titillate reveal much about a time and place. They invariably attract legions of curious readers, too. Here are eight books you shouldn’t read.
Lajja. By Taslima Nasrin. Translated by Anchita Ghatak. Viking-Penguin India; 337 pages; $13 and £9.99
Lesser-known than the fatwa condemning Sir Salman to death, but probably inspired by it, is that aimed at Taslima Nasrin for “Lajja” (Bengali for “shame”). Her novel depicts the revenge meted out by Muslims to Bangladesh’s Hindu minority after a Hindu mob tore down a mosque in Ayodhya in India in 1992. It observes the Dutta family, who still bear the scars of earlier spasms of anti-Hindu violence; each member of the family deals in their own way with the latest. Bangladesh’s government banned the book. Ms Nasrin fled to Sweden and won the European Parliament’s Sakharov prize for freedom of thought in 1994. Photocopies of “Lajja” spread in Bangladesh; in India, Hindu fundamentalists distributed it as propaganda on buses and trains. Yet her novel was less about the conflict between Hindus and Muslims, said Ms Nasrin, than about that “between humanism and barbarism, between those who value freedom and those who do not”. The story still reverberates: a temple to Ram, a Hindu god, will open in 2024 on the site of the destroyed mosque.
Friend. By Paek Nam Nyong. Translated by Immanuel Kim. Columbia University Press; 288 pages; $20 and £14.99
“Friend” is the first novel approved by North Korea’s totalitarian regime to be available in English. Published in 1988, it is a beloved classic there. A compassionate account of characters caught up in marital strife and disappointed by their spouses, it is based on Paek Nam Nyong’s experience of sitting in on North Korean divorce hearings. An illuminating afterword by the book’s translator, who has met Mr Paek, situates it within North Korea’s literary output. It is the government of the country’s democratic neighbour, South Korea, that has banned the book for some readers. “Friend” is sold in the South’s bookstores. But its defence ministry includes it in a list of 23 “seditious books” banned for reading in the South Korean army (among them are two by Noam Chomsky, a linguist with radical politics). This prohibition applies to all male citizens for the 18 months, or more, of their mandatory military service. The ministry’s apparent fear is that a sympathetic portrait of South Korea’s hostile northern neighbour could undermine soldiers’ resolve to defend their country. Readers of “Friend” can expect some socialist-realist moralising. But this novel’s power is in its depiction of ordinary lives.
The Devils’ Dance. By Hamid Ismailov. Translated by Donald Rayfield. Tilted Axis Press; 200 pages; £12
When Hamid Ismailov was forced to flee Uzbekistan in 1992, he stood accused by his government of “unacceptable democratic tendencies”. In exile ever since, Mr Ismailov has written more than a dozen novels. All are banned in Uzbekistan. Aptly, “The Devils’ Dance”—the first of his Uzbek novels to be translated into English—reimagines the lives of real Uzbek dissident intellectuals during their time in prison before their executions in 1938. They include the protagonist, Abdulla Qodiriy, a poet and playwright, and Choʻlpon, who translated Shakespeare into Uzbek. When Qodiriy was locked up by Stalin’s secret police a novel he had been writing on 19th-century khans, spies and poet-queens was destroyed. Mr Ismailov imagines that Qodiry reconstructs in his cell the novel he had been writing. (We reviewed the book in translation in 2018.)
The Bluest Eye. By Toni Morrison. Vintage International; 206 pages; $16 and £9.99
Toni Morrison’s celebrated novel about beauty and racial self-hatred has long appeared on lists of books banned in some of America’s high schools. Parents complain about passages that depict sexual violence; teachers counter that such topics are best broached in the classroom. “The Bluest Eye” was the fourth-most-banned book in the school year ending in 2022, says PEN America, a free-speech body. (Ahead of it were two on LGBT themes and a novel about an interracial teen couple.) The American Library Association (ALA) says that its tally of ban requests from school boards and removals from library shelves has never been so high: 1,600 titles in 2021. The political stakes have grown. In 2016 Virginia’s legislature passed the “Beloved bill”—named for another of Morrison’s controversial novels—to allow parents to exempt their children from reading assignments if they consider the material to be sexually explicit. The state’s Democratic governor vetoed the bill; his opposition to it was one reason he lost a bid for re-election to a Republican in 2021. “There is some hysteria associated with the idea of reading that is all out of proportion to what is in fact happening when one reads,” Morrison said—more than 40 years ago.
China in Ten Words. By Yu Hua. Translated by Allan H. Barr. Duckworth; 240 pages; £8.99
China’s government keeps tight control over printed matter: publication codes such as ISBNs are allocated, with rare exceptions, only to state-run publishers; censors scrutinise works before they go to print. But the boundaries for fiction can be more fluid. That let Yu Hua become a best-selling author in his native country of novels that depict China’s journey from the brutality of the Cultural Revolution to the dislocations wrought by materialism. But Mr Yu saw commonalities between history and the present, and to expand on these he turned to non-fiction: “China in Ten Words”, a collection of essays each built around a Mandarin term, is a mixture of memoir and meditation on past and contemporary China. It could not be published there. The first chapter, “People”, refers to the bloodshed at Tiananmen Square in 1989. Mr Yu refused to excise it. In expounding on words from “Revolution” to “Bamboozle” he offers a view of how China got to where it is.
Piccolo Uovo. By Francesca Pardi. Illustrated by Altan. Lo Stampatello; 22 pages; €11.90
And Tango Makes Three. By Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson. Illustrated by Henry Cole. Little Simon; 36 pages; $8.99 and £7.99
What harm could one small, anthropomorphic egg do? A lot, if you ask the mayor of Venice. In 2015, within days of being sworn in, Luigi Brugnaro ordered Venetian nursery schools to ban 49 children’s books deemed a threat to “traditional” families. Uproar ensued, and Mr Brugnaro agreed to reinstate all but two of the books. One still off-limits is “Piccolo Uovo”, a delightful tale inspired by the real story of a penguin egg adopted by two male penguins in New York’s Central Park Zoo. Piccolo uovo (“Little egg”) is afraid to hatch because it wonders what its family will look like. It goes on a journey to meet families of many compositions and colours, and is satisfied that all are magnificent. Readers old and young who do not speak Italian might instead seek out an American children’s book about the same penguins that makes the same point: “And Tango Makes Three” has appeared on nine occasions in the ALA’s annual list of top-ten books banned from American libraries.
The Bible. By various authors. Translated by various people. Various publishers; varying numbers of pages; various prices
Parts are deemed by some religious traditions to be the word of God. Others bring the good news of Jesus. But the two-volume work has its first murder in its fourth chapter. And there is no mistaking the erotic charge of the Song of Songs. In June 2023 a school district in Utah removed the King James version of the Bible from the shelves of elementary and middle-school libraries under a state law that permits the ban of “instructional material that is pornographic or indecent”. But this petition was brought by a parent frustrated with bans of other books, including “The Bluest Eye”. Upset by the stunt, conservatives accused the parent of seeking to undermine Utah’s efforts to protect children from pornography. The Bible banner seems to share the perspective of Leviticus 24: “eye for eye, tooth for tooth”. ■
