Censorship involves the suppression of speech, communication, or other information that may be considered objectionable or harmful by a government, organization, or individual. It can include censorship of news, books, films, music, art, and online media and occurs for various reasons such as protecting national security, children, or certain political or religious views. While some countries have strong legal protections against censorship, these protections often require balancing other rights and determining what can and cannot be censored remains challenging.

1. So what is censorship?

3. Censorship
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship
• Censorship is the suppression of speech or other public
communication which may be considered objectionable,
harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient as determined by a
government, media outlet or other controlling body.
• It can be done by governments and private organisations or by
individuals who engage in self-censorship.
• It occurs in a variety of different contexts including speech,
books, music, films, and other arts, the press, radio, television
and the Internet for a variety of reasons including national
security, to control obscenity, sexual context, hate speech,
violence, to protect children, to promote or restrict political or
religious views, and to prevent slander and libel.
• It may or may not be legal.
• Many countries provide strong protections against censorship
by law, but none of these protections are absolute and it is
frequently necessary to balance conflicting rights in order to
determine what can and cannot be censored.

4. Statistics from China

6. What is the role of
firemen in the
novel?
“They were given the new job, as
custodians of our peace of mind,
the focus of our understandable
and rightful dread of being inferior;
official censors, judges and
executors” (p.77).

8. But would
any society
really burn
books?

10. • Adolf Hitler exhorted his followers to burn books by
Jewish or "subversive" authors, but the best of those
books have outlasted Nazi Germany by a good
seventy years.
• In an added irony, accounts of Nazi book burnings
helped inspire Fahrenheit 451, one of the most
haunting denunciations of censorship in all
literature.

11. • How ironic, too, that Bradbury's own
indictment of censorship has itself been
repeatedly censored.
• Fourteen years after Fahrenheit 451' s
initial release, some educators succeeded
in persuading its publisher to release a
special edition. This edition modified
more than seventy-five passages to
eliminate mild curse words, and to "clean
up" two incidents in the book. (A minor
character, for example, was changed from
"drunk" to "sick.")

12. • When Bradbury learned of the changes, he demanded
that the publishers withdraw the censored version, and
they complied. Since 1980, only Bradbury's original
text has been available. As a result, some schools have
banned the book from course lists. For all these
attempts to sanitize or banish it completely, Bradbury
remained diligent in his defence of his masterpiece,
writing in a coda that appears in some editions of the
book:
Do not insult me with the beheadings, finger-
choppings or the lung-deflations you plan for my
works. I need my head to shake or nod, my hand
to wave or make into a fist, my lungs to shout or
whisper with. I will not go gently onto a shelf,
degutted, to become a non-book.