An Open Letter to Publishers and Readers
 Concerning Amazon.com, Censorship, and the “Liberty of Thought and Discussion”

Dear Friends and Fellow Publishers:
 
My name is Chip Smith and I’m the sole proprietor of a small press called Nine-Banded Books, or just 9BB. You probably haven’t heard of 9BB, and that’s fine by me. The books I publish aren’t for everyone. Some of them deal with prickly ideas that many people – perhaps you? – will find offensive. That’s nothing new. Offensive books are an integral part of the history of publishing. They’re easy to ignore, and just as easy to get riled up about. Some people like to discuss them, while other people wonder what all the fuss is about. And of course, there have always been some people who would prefer to set them on fire and punish the scoundrels who write, sell and publish them. It’s been a real tug-o-war ever since Gutenberg greased up the cogs.

But you already know this. Since I assume you’re a stakeholder situated somewhere above my marginal niche in the larger world of book culture, I’d wager that your fingerprints are probably on some books that many people – perhaps I? – will find offensive. And when the would-be censors rattle, I’m guessing you know just where you stand. You might write the occasional check to the ACLU, or maybe you attend the annual “Banned Books Week” events at the local library. Or, if you’re of a certain age, you may even have been a signatory when the Association of American Publishers and other groups protested the decision of a once-ubiquitous bookstore chain not to sell copies of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. I thought that was a good move, by the way. A proud moment for the AAP.

And I sincerely believe that those of us who devote our lives to books have had quite a few good moments over the centuries. Whatever our differences, we belong to a tradition that has from the beginning stood for the liberal advancement of knowledge and human understanding. As publishers and as readers, we’re guided by an ethos that runs from the broadsides of Martin Luther to the trials of Henry Miller. If there’s anything to the notion of being on the “right side of history,” publishers have set the odds.

Thus I am addressing this “open letter” to you, my fellow publishers and book mavens. And now that I’ve done my worst to butter you up, I mean to draw your attention to a recent event that has received little above-ground media coverage but that I think should be of profound concern to all publishers, not just naughty pipsqueaks like me.

Specifically, I am referring to the decision of Amazon.com, which is now the world’s largest book retailer, to discontinue the sale of dozens of books that promote, or are said to promote, Holocaust denial. This policy seems to have taken full effect on March 8, 2017, and a bit of Googling convinces me that it was in large part a capitulation to mounting pressure from presumably well-intentioned people who vocally objected to the content – if not the mere the existence – of such literature. In a communication to Castle Hill Publishers, the primary target of the delisting (or ban), Amazon justified its decision with a vague reference to a “content guidelines” violation.

Now, I understand that this is not the first time Amazon has taken the measure of removing material from its catalog for ostensibly content-oriented reasons, and for what it’s worth I have been troubled by such other instances of “soft” censorship that have come to my attention – whether they have targeted pederasty manuals or conspiracy books or divisive symbols. On some past occasions I have written polite letters to the corporate offices to express my consumer-minded objection. I haven’t cancelled my Prime membership, and I do not intend to stop selling 9BB titles on Amazon as long as my books are welcome there. Nevertheless, I do think this recent move represents a radical departure from Amazon’s longstanding and genuinely admirable (however imperfect) “open court” approach to bookselling. By focusing not on specific books of arguably questionable legal status but on an entire category of dissident literature, Amazon has embraced a chilling and illiberal precedent. Publishers of potentially controversial books should take immediate notice, but this is bad news for all who value and benefit from the free and open exchange of ideas.

To be very clear, I do not think public objection, no matter how strongly or widely registered, should weigh against a market-dominant bookseller’s core commitment to content-neutrality in the sale of literature. If you agree, then I urge you to speak out. Contact Amazon and tell them to reject censorship. Tell them to reinstate the laisser passer policy that has served publishers and readers well over the years. Tell them not to police the content of books. Tell them not to ban books. Tell them to revisit this misguided decision. Tell them to let their customers alone decide what books they wish to purchase and read.

For me, it’s as simple as that. At this point, however, I imagine that some of you will not be persuaded that I have identified an issue of real and urgent importance. Given my stature and questionable reputation, you may even suspect my motives. You may be inclined to simply ignore my pleading, just as you might ignore a book bearing the hallmarks of a vanity press. But if you’re still reading, I hope you will continue to indulge me just the same, if only for the next few minutes. I will try to anticipate and address your objections in order to clarify a message that should not be confused with the messenger. I know I’m tilting at windmills here, but I really think this is an ominous turn and I’m troubled that reliable free speech advocates haven’t spoken out.

OK, then.

Perhaps you will say that this is just another isolated episode and there is little reason to worry over further ramifications for decent publishers who do not make it their business to associate with loathsome people who engage in mendacious pseudo-scholarship. I’ll concede it’s possible that you’re right about that much, at least in the sense that Castle Hill Publishers and sundry other small imprints may be where the blacklist stops. I’ve certainly heard from people who believe that Holocaust denial (or Holocaust revisionism, as it used to be called) represents a sui generis deviation from ordinary intellectual discourse. People who invoke this line of argument can get downright metaphysical about it, but it’s conceivable that the folks who pull the levers at Amazon believe they have broken a lance with truly and uniquely evil forces.

I think there are serious problems with this view. To begin with, it assumes that human motives are predictably bound by circumstance and by specific information. That just isn’t so. I won’t doubt that your footing is secure, but consider how easily variants of the term “denier” have come to be applied to myriad species of contentious intellectual inquiry. Perhaps those who are said to “deny” climate science, to mention one of many possible examples, can be clearly distinguished in your mind from those who “deny” the scholarly consensus concerning the history of events that took place during the Second World War, but can you be confident that the most passionate environmentalists will toe that line? Are you sure?

And if you think “genocide denial” is the full-stop transgression at issue, I’m afraid you’ll be left to tread carefully over the variegated literature that could be next in line for scrutiny. Here, it is worth noting that the esteemed historian Bernard Lewis has been sanctioned for denying the Armenian genocide, and one needn’t look
far to identify books that are said deny other historical genocides – in Nanjing, Tasmania, Ukraine, Cambodia, etc. Indeed, the case has often been made that many canonical histories of “Manifest Destiny” in the United States deny or whitewash the genocide of Native Americans. Do such and other comparisons amount to “false equivalence”? That’s a question for the jury. My point is simply that there is always the possibility that what you see as a bright line will not be so sharply delineated to other minds.

If you look closer, you may notice a deeper problem: When we define any point of view as being uniquely evil, we erect a logical fundament that can, and eventually will, be used to justify less innocuous forms of censorship, including such forms that come under the onus of law. Click the lens back a few notches and I hope we can agree, perhaps with an ironic wink, that a very human tendency to anathematize ideas (and by extension, the people who express them) has fueled grave injustices throughout recorded history. If you think I’m indulging in hyperbole for present purposes, please do keep in mind that Germar Rudolf, the man who runs Castle Hill Publishers, has spent several years of his life in prison for writing and distributing some of the very same books that Amazon has now effectively banned. He isn’t alone.
 
Anyway, let’s assume that the dozens of books that have been placed on Amazon’s blacklist are indeed there for the stated reason that they violate some specifiable clause – a “content guideline” – nested somewhere in a standard vendor contract. If this is so, doesn’t it seem reasonable that a publisher, on receiving this information, might expect to be directed toward the specific content that triggered the violation, if for no other reason than to avoid breaching it in the future? I would think so. It might even be a legal requirement. Yet with reference to the dozens of delisted titles published by Castle Hill Publishers, it does not appear that any specific content was cited. By reference to circumstantial information we might assume that the content-violating books were selected simply because they espouse Holocaust denial, but this assumption is complicated by the fact that some of the books banned by name have little or nothing to do with this presumably proscribed subject. (A list of affected titles published by Castle Hill Publishers appends this letter, if you want to judge for yourself; one of them consists of little more than a court transcript.)

This reliance on fine-print legalese is another reason to suspect that the slope is indeed slippery, and of special importance to other publishers whose output will always be subject to contractual scrutiny and consequent rejection. It isn’t at all difficult to conjure a list of well-respected scholars and writers who have exposited ideas that might run afoul of a legal clause that can be invoked at whim, or in response to public pressure. Noam Chomsky and Christopher Hitchens have proffered strong words in defense of dissident historians, and a case can be made that they’ve gotten their hands dirty in the process. Should their books be subject to contractual review? How about Norman Finkelstein? Howard Zinn? Nicholson Baker? Pat Buchanan? Malcolm X? I know of an angry mob that would like nothing more than to see Charles Murray’s entire bibliography flushed down the memory hole, perhaps by dint of just such a clause.
       
If I’m told that “canary in a coal mine” arguments are out of fashion these days, I’m just as sure that some of you are by now chomping at the bit to remind me that Amazon is, after all, a private corporation that can sell – or not sell – whatever books it pleases. Notwithstanding contractual issues that lawyers might be inclined to chew over, let me assure you that I agree. This is not a First Amendment issue. It is, however, an issue that cuts at the very fiber of such values that have permitted true freedom of speech to flourish since the time of the Enlightenment. In abandoning content-neutrality, Amazon has disturbed foundational principles that serve to facilitate genuine critical inquiry before and after a statute is tolled. What’s really at stake is a matter, as John Stuart Mill would remind us, “of the liberty of thought and discussion.” It’s about freedom of inquiry in the operative sense that has always mattered.

The bedrock seemed firm enough when the publishers’ guild took Waldenbooks to task nearly three decades ago, when a fatwa hung over the chorus. I submit that the issue before us now differs in no essential respect, especially when we recall that many of the targeted authors have been prosecuted and imprisoned for their words.
 
While I do feel fortunate to make my residence in a country that aspires to protect freedom of the press as a matter of ultimate judicial appeal, this bulwark against government interference is no substitute for the core principles that undergird an open society. I fear this crucial distinction has been too easily lost in the frenzy of a cultural moment that perpetuates partisan conflict and enmity over reasoned discourse. Thus I have nothing to add to the relevant insights so carefully articulated by Mill in the second chapter of his classic treatise, On Liberty. I do hope you will take a few minutes to read it in its entirety, even if you’ve read it before. It isn’t very long, and it sheds brilliant light on every transcendent point I wish to stress.

Here is a crucial excerpt that was recently cited by my friend Sarah Perry in an online essay called “Why Is Freedom of Speech Important?,” which I also recommend.

"The greatest orator, save one, of antiquity, has left it on record that he always studied his adversary’s case with as great, if not with still greater, intensity than even his own. What Cicero practised as the means of forensic success, requires to be imitated by all who study any subject in order to arrive at the truth. He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion….Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. This is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of, else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty.

"Ninety-nine in a hundred of what are called educated men are in this condition, even of those who can argue fluently for their opinions. Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess. They do not know those parts of it which explain and justify the remainder; the considerations which show that a fact which seemingly conflicts with another is reconcilable with it, or that, of two apparently strong reasons, one and not the other ought to be preferred. All that part of the truth which turns the scale, and decides the judgment of a completely informed mind, they are strangers to; nor is it ever really known, but to those who have attended equally and impartially to both sides, and endeavored to see the reasons of both in the strongest light. So essential is this discipline to a real understanding of moral and human subjects, that if opponents of all important truths do not exist, it is indispensable to imagine them and supply them with the strongest arguments which the most skilful devil’s advocate can conjure up."

By blacklisting books that support or promote dissident historical interpretation in one problematic realm, Amazon has merely impeded the process of critical engagement that remains a conditional prerequisite in the broader societal quest for truth and understanding. Those who mean to sharpen their counterpoint will be left at a disadvantage, being effectively shielded from the “whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter…”

The rest of us are left to contemplate an implacable irony: As we quarantine the expression of arguments that are widely presumed to be meretricious, we strengthen perforce the perception that such arguments cannot withstand critical scrutiny. Meanwhile, the books and the arguments will continue to exist, cloaked as they will be in an aura of taboo that for some will suggest the shimmering truth of a guarded secret. A bad argument will eventually perish in the light of day; it is in darkness that it thrives.

If one should yet rejoin that Mill’s analysis could not have anticipated the enormity of the threat posed by denialist literature, I will leave you with the sober words of the preeminent Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg, who perfectly grasped the point that now eludes our intellectual gatekeepers:

"If these people want to speak, let them. It only leads those of us who do research to re-examine what we might have considered as obvious. And that’s useful for us. I have quoted Eichmann references that come from a neo-Nazi publishing house. I am not for taboos and I am not for repression." 

Once again, I encourage you to contact the men and women who govern the world’s largest bookstore. Remind them of their unique position. Tell them to allow the full cacophony of voices to sing in the sunlight. Tell them that true freedom of speech demands nothing less.

Thank you for your time and attention. Happy reading to all.
 
Chip Smith
Editor | Publisher
Nine-Banded Books
 

Postscript: It now appears that Barnes & Noble has shadow-banned the same books that were initially identified and proscribed by Amazon. If Google and market-dominant web hosts follow suit, the distinction between soft censorship and State censorship will be effectively extinguished. Guard your oxen.   
 
Addendum: Courtesy of Castle Hill Publishers, below is a list of books that were banned by name under Amazon’s “content guidelines” directive. According to Germar Rudolf, titles in boldface do not deal directly with Holocaust history or its denial.