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In the Samizdat Tradition of Writing against the Machine |
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Poets & Writers —Free Speech in PerilLiterature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor. —Chief Justice William O Douglas
The selector begins, ideally, with a presumption in favor of
liberty of thought; the censor does not. The aim of the selector is to
promote reading not to inhibit it; to multiply the points of view which
will find expression, not limit them; to be a channel for communication,
not a bar against it. All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of all censorships. There is the whole case against censorships in a nutshell. —George Bernard Shaw
Poets & Writers operates as one of a number of modern-day LITERARY CENSORING ORGANIZATIONS akin to the Catholic Church of yesteryear which put together the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. It refuses to even list The American Dissident with other literary journals listed on its website. See the editor's blog review of P$W.
Other
listing organizations with similar censorial mindsets
include
New Pages,
Poetry Foundation, and Arts &
Letters (The Chronicle of Higher Education).
The elitist nature of literature has become so great
today in America that anything not of that nature will
have the most difficult time presenting itself to the
public, unless it has the fortune to possess an
extraordinarily large budget. Money is the great
determiner of literature in America today and perhaps
always has been. Shamefully Poets & Writers
receives thousands of
dollars of taxpayer monies annually from the NEA and
other public organizations. For this reason, it is
scandalous that it closes its listing to journals that do
not fit its elitist taste and aesthetics.
As a citizen I am both outraged and fully disgusted!
As a citizen, I feel helpless to do anything at all
about the situation, except decry it here.
Democracy continues its downward spiral thanks in part
to the democracy-indifferent citizens managing
Poets & Writers.
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