Lawrence Hall
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The War on Books
The war on books, codified by Stalin’s functionaries
at the Soviet Writers’ Conference in 1934 and ruthlessly
waged by the secret police for the following fifty years,
was finally coming to an end, and Zhivago’s insurgent
guerrillas were winning.
-Duncan White, Cold Warriors:
Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold war
What books will America
purge this week -
What childhood adventures,
what scholarly works
What entertainments of an
idle hour
Will be forbidden to us in
this Land of the Free?
We pray that nations blessed
with liberty
Will smuggle books to us, stories
and poems
With innocent ideas that give
delight
And in their innocence
threaten tyrants
What books will America
purge this week –
And when did we become
afraid of ideas?
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