Buying (and sometimes reading) The Books No One Should Ever Read!

 "Know thy enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles, you will never be defeated. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are sure to be defeated in every battle."Sun Tzu

 Today, February 4, 2023, I made a visit to the Goodwill store in Paintsville, Kentucky, to look for books which might be worth reading.   I never found a thing worth both buying and reading in my opinion.  But I bought one book anyway, not because I thought that I should read it, but because I did not wish to leave it on the shelf where anyone, for a dollar plus tax, could buy it, read it, and believe its contents.  The title of the book is "The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism's Long March of Death, and Infiltration" by Paul Kengor, Ph.D.  While I do not wholly, or even mostly, buy into the idea that communism, even perfect communism, could ever save the world, or even one small country, I do believe that, in some strictly controlled, small populations, and under the notoriously impossible to achieve perfect conditions, communism could be a viable system to achieve less than perfect but vastly improved conditions for those small populations.  But when I researched just who Dr. Kengor is, I found an individual who teaches at the notoriously Right Wing Radical "Christian" Grove City College, serves (if that is not a misnomer, nothing is) as the Executive Director of the "think tank/policy center" known as Institute for Faith and Freedom, and is also a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace which is another more mainstream, but decidedly Right Wing Radical think tank housed at the generally reputable Stanford University.  When you look at that resume and the title of this book, you should automatically blanch, perhaps puke profusely, and run in another direction.  But many years ago, with stringent, broad based, and productive mentoring and education by rational, well educated liberal mentors, professors, and friends, I became able to productively read, but not fall prey to, the propaganda which such Right Wing Radicals perpetrate on the naive and gullible.  As a result, I frequently buy highly questionable to assuredly dangerous books which espouse a variety of reprehensible political agenda.  I buy those books at discount stores, yard sales, and auctions in used condition and on some occasions throw them into the first available covered garbage can I encounter purely to prevent that particular copy of that particular book from falling into the aforementioned gullible hands.  I also sometimes make swaps for such books at Little Free Libraries in my area or other locales I might be passing through. 

Honestly, I don't know if I will read this particular book or not.  But you can rest assured that I will not allow it to fall into the hands of anyone who is susceptible to falling for such doctrinaire writing.  I realize this is a very limited and personal form of censorship which I also rail against just as frequently as I rail against Right Wing Radical politics.  But I have also always stated that I do believe that parents and guardians do have the right to prevent young children from reading literature that is not age appropriate.  But any form of censorship is a slippery slope and anyone, including myself, who engages in any form of censorship should always remain vigilant against the possibility that limited and appropriate censorship never cross the impossible to clearly discern line between appropriate into inappropriate, restrictive, overly controlling and unjustified censorship.  I suppose what I am saying is that I do recognize a fully cognizant and sane adult's right to read whatever they choose.  But I also recognize and freely support the right of the greater society to prevent the widespread propagation of destructive, damaging, and dangerous literature which espouses beliefs, opinions, and forms of government which endanger the greater majority of the populace.  Individual rights always end where the rights of the greater society begin.