Shapes of things (22)

Amazon isn’t talking about its suppression of Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally, but it has referred an inquiring reporter to its new hate speech policy. So Daniel Payne reports at Just the News.

I infer that Amazon isn’t talking, however, because there is nothing that can reasonably described as hate speech in Anderson’s book. Anderson himself comments in his First Things essay “When Amazon erased my book.”

The Washington Free Beacon’s Santi Ruiz followed up on Payne’s story in “Amazon quietly ends sales of books it labels ‘hate speech.'” Ruiz’s story drily concludes: “Adolf Hitler’s tract Mein Kampf can currently be ordered on Prime for single-day shipping.”

It is obvious that such examples could be multiplied endlessly. Need it be said that Quotations From Chairman Mao by the greatest mass murderer of all time remains for sale at Amazon? (Ilya Somin: “[B]oth Hitler and Stalin were outdone by Mao Zedong. From 1958 to 1962, his Great Leap Forward policy led to the deaths of up to 45 million people – easily making it the biggest episode of mass murder ever recorded.”)

Amazon is engaged simply in the suppression of heterodox views. Amazon, by the way, has an entire store dedicated to Che Guevara. Jay Nordlinger devoted the 2005 essay “Che chic” to the phenomenon. (Jay has more here, including a citation to Maria Werlau’s “Che Guevara’s forgotten victims.”)

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