Free The Word: Resisting Book Bans

It all began when the Texas State Board of Education mistook a brown bear for a potential red threat that might turn kids into communists. In 2010, the Texas State Board of Education banned Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? It was not because it was a piece of subversive literature corrupting young minds, but because they confused its author, Bill Martin Jr., with a completely different Bill Martin, a Marxist philosopher who wrote Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation (2008).

Joseph Maximillian Dunnigan, founder of the Banned Books Museum in Estonia, shared this absurd anecdote during a conversation with Outlook. He said, “When they banned this Bill Martin, they also accidentally banned the children’s author Bill Martin. That was very embarrassing, of course, and they had to apologise. But it shows, I think, something very important, which is censorship is not a very useful, effective tool. And usually it is used by people who are not very, let’s say, skillful and thoughtful.”

Apparently, a children’s book featuring a yellow duck and a blue horse was dangerously close to igniting a proletarian uprising or so they thought!

As bizarre as it sounds, this episode isn’t an outlier. It stands as a perfect example for the absurd logic that governs censorship worldwide. Whether it’s a misread author bio in the United States of America or a line about religious identity in India, bans are rarely about books themselves.

The Roots of Censorship

Book bans are about fear, control and the desperate need to manage public imagination. Throughout history, censorship has been wielded by those in power to suppress ideas that threaten their authority, often cloaked in the guise of protecting society. The Brown Bear incident, though a clerical error, reveals a deeper truth—that censorship stems from a fear of ideas that might challenge the status quo. The Texas Board’s knee-jerk reaction to a perceived Marxist threat mirrors a historical pattern where books become scapegoats for broader anxieties about diversity, dissent or a potential paradigm shift.

This type of fear-driven censorship is not unique to the United States. In 1988, India banned Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses (1988) not because it incited mass unrest but because its mere existence was deemed offensive to religious sensibilities. Politicians, eager to claim the moral high ground, acted preemptively, amplifying the book’s global notoriety. Similarly, Perumal Murugan’s Madhorubhagan (2010) faced outrage in India over its portrayal of a caste oppressed community, not from widespread readership but from self-appointed cultural gatekeepers who hounded the author into declaring himself “dead” as a writer. The courts later upheld his right to create, but the damage was done because these gatekeepers silenced a voice, however temporarily.

Globally, the pattern becomes noticeable. In China, books about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests are strictly banned to suppress historical memory, while online imagery of Winnie the Pooh has been censored since 2017 due to memes comparing the character to President Xi Jinping, though physical books and merchandise featuring the character remain available.

Russia’s “gay propaganda” laws target literature exploring queer identities, while Hungary labels books questioning gender roles or national identity as “harmful.” In each case, the book itself is secondary; the real target is the imagination it might unleash.This echoes what George Orwell wrote in 1984, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

Political Theatre and Moral Panic

Censorship thrives on political theatre, where moral panic is exploited to rally support and consolidate power. The Brown Bear ban, though accidental, was rooted in a broader anti-communist sentiment, a relic of Cold War paranoia repurposed to vilify a children’s book. This tactic that frames texts as threats to societal values is still alive today.

In Florida’s Hillsborough County, a state-driven campaign has removed over 600 books from school libraries, not due to local complaints but because they appear on lists banned elsewhere in the state, according to a PEN America report. Titles addressing race, gender, or LGBTQ+ identities, such as poetry by Amanda Gorman or novels by Toni Morrison, are labeled “inappropriate” or “pornographic” to fuel a narrative of protecting children.

This campaign, backed by Governor Ron DeSantis and groups like Moms for Liberty, exemplifies censorship as political performance. In June 2025, Hillsborough’s Superintendent faced a state interrogation, with threats of felony charges for librarians who fail to remove certain books. The district spent $350,000 on a review process, purging titles without community input, bypassing the due process, and creating a chilling effect.

PEN America notes: This is “a calculated effort to consolidate power through fear,” using vague laws like the Stop WOKE Act to silence diverse perspectives. This leads to students losing access to literary works that foster empathy or critical thinking, all in the name of a manufactured crisis.

This mirrors global trends. In India, the ban on The Satanic Verses was less about the book’s content and more about political posturing to appease religious factions. In China, the censorship of Winnie the Pooh was a performative act to shield the government from satire. These bans create spectacles that distract from substantive issues, rallying supporters while intimidating creators and educators.

Muzzling the Margins

“When people walk into this museum, they expect it to be a museum of Soviet Russia and they expect to see the books banned there,” says Dunnigan, sharing his experiences as the founder of the Banned Books Museum. “But that’s not what we have. In fact, that’s only a small part of what we have. The first thing they see in the museum is the UK section, the British section, and that catches them by surprise. Maybe they’re expecting the Soviet Union, maybe they’re expecting China or Nazi Germany,” he adds.

While overt bans grab headlines, “soft censorship” operates in the shadows, quietly erasing marginalised voices. Federico Erebia, a queer Latino author, notes this in a PEN America spotlight. His novel Pedro & Daniel, which explores intersectional identities, faces exclusion from libraries and bookstores without formal challenges. Libraries discard copies, schools avoid including it in curricula, and retailers like Barnes & Noble decline to stock it. “The effect is the same,” Erebia says. “Library patrons don’t have access to my book.” This subtle censorship ensures stories about BIPOC or LGBTQ+ experiences remain invisible, reinforcing dominant cultural narratives without the spectacle of a public ban.

Soft censorship is particularly insidious because it leaves no paper trail, making it harder to fight. Erebia’s advocacy, including his Pedro and Daniel Intersectionality Book Awards, counters this by amplifying underrepresented voices, but the systemic barriers remain.

Similar dynamics are at play across the world where books by authors from marginalised communities are disproportionately targeted, not because of explicit objections but because they challenge heteronormative or racially homogenous worldviews. This reflects a broader and insidious aim of censorship, which has always been used to maintain power structures by silencing those on the margins, whether they’re queer teens in Florida or caste-oppressed communities in India.

From Fire to Filters: Censorship’s Facelift

The road from book burning to digital censorship has made control both more pervasive and less visible. Historically, censorship meant physical destruction—think of the Nazis’ book burnings or medieval purges of heretical texts. Today, it’s subtler but no less dangerous. Algorithms demote or shadowban content deemed “offensive”, while governments pressure platforms to scrub dissent. China’s Great Firewall erases entire conversations, from Tiananmen to Pooh. In democratic societies, laws like Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill create ambiguity, leading educators to self-censor by boxing up classroom libraries to avoid prosecution.

“Digital censorship is extremely complicated and it moves very, very fast…We’re in a storm without sails… making random decisions,” says Dunnigan. He notes that digital censorship is complicated and random, adding that “we don’t have the underlying educational structure to give people the skills to respond essentially, carefully and in a nuanced way. What does that mean? It means that, for example, on we see things like X or Twitter randomly making decisions about censorship with no foundational theoretical framework. There’s no consistency because there’s no underlying theory. There’s no foundation of knowledge, skill and intention. That’s what’s missing. And the reason it’s missing is because nobody thinks about censorship in this way.”

This chaos encapsulates censorship’s core aim which is to manipulate and control narratives, as Orwell warned in 1984. Dunnigan’s own awakening came from reading the novel at age 11, when, as he recalled, “It really opened my eyes…about political communication, how that can be manipulated.” Orwell’s concept of “doublethink”—holding contradictory beliefs—explains why censors justify bans as protection while stifling free thought.

A Museum of Banned Books

It was in China that Dunnigan, then a young Scot learning mandarin, stumbled across how censorship works in real time. He says that when he was 11 years old, his step-father gave him a copy of Orwell’s 1984, which he accepts he was too young to understand. But he was taken by the Orwellian concept of ‘doublethink’ and the insidious ways power corrupts.

In Tallinn’s Old Town in the Soviet-era country of Estonia, Dunnigan’s Banned Books Museum is a sanctuary for stories that have faced a ban, securing over 400 books from 100 countries against censorship’s tide. The museum is not just an archive but it also educates, challenging visitors to see censorship’s patterns and resist its hold.

“The way to do this is to look at a wide range of examples. See how censorship happens all around the world. Then you will start to see the patterns,” says Dunnigan. “There’s no series of magic words, which if they are in a book, would lead to its censorship. What you have to do, is understand which topics are usually censored in your context,” he points out.

Dunnigan believes that the only real way to deal with censorship is through education and gaining a better understanding of how it works. The museum’s commitment to preservation extends to controversial works like Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which Dunnigan has included not to endorse but to educate. “Reading/free speech is not about speaking, it’s about listening and trying to understand the other person,” he says.

By contextualising such texts, the museum fosters critical thinking over suppression, countering the fear that drives bans across the political spectrum—whether progressive books in conservative states in America or nationalist texts in secular European countries.

Divya Tiwari is a video journalist based out of Delhi