Dangerous words
The SIS says some books pose a threat. But airport paperbacks?
"The Jackal. A tall, blond Englishman with opaque, grey eyes. A killer at the top of his profession. A man unknown to any secret service in the world. An assassin with a contract to kill the world's most heavily guarded man. One man with a rifle who can change the course of history. One man whose mission is so secretive not even his employers know his name. And as the minutes count down to the final act of execution, it seems that there is no power on earth that can stop the Jackal."
This is the jacket blurb from a mid-80s edition of 'The Day of the Jackal', a 1971 thriller by British novelist Frederick Forsyth. The book is actually better than this description makes it sound – the 1980s have a lot to answer for – but it may soon be difficult to obtain in Slovakia.
That's because Slovakia's SIS intelligence agency – or more accurately, its National Security Analytical Centre (NBAC) – has reportedly included it in a series of bulletins listing "dangerous" literature that were issued to government ministries earlier this year.
We know this because the Culture Ministry recently sent out an internal memo warning employees about Mr Forsyth's works and, equally bafflingly, those of Slovenian celebrity philosopher Slavoj Žižek. (It also included books by some considerably uglier characters – among them a now-imprisoned Holocaust-denier, Marián Magát, and the loathsome American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.)
All of these scribblings, Culture Ministry staff were given to understand, risked "radicalization of people in the context of modern technologies".
The list received applause from an unlikely source: Irena Bihariová, the deputy leader of opposition party Progressive Slovakia (PS).
She posted on Facebook: "Even I, who have specialized in extremism and misinformation throughout my professional life, could not have written a similar document better."
Bihariová's post was mostly ironic: the letter sent out by Culture Minister Martina Šimkovičová had also warned about Zem & Vek, a conspiracy-mongering magazine, despite it being broadly in line with her own worldview. Sure enough, Šimkovičová quickly disowned the memo (even though it had been signed on her behalf by her deputy minister), sowing yet more of the confusion and incompetence that have become her hallmark.
However, the Pravda daily reported that, separately, the Education Ministry plans to use the list to inform public institutions. One can only hope that school librarians do not really need to be told to avoid works by Hitler, Stalin and other mass murders who also made the list.
Pravda quoted Radoslav Štefančík, a political scientist from the University of Economics, saying that the creation of lists of prohibited literature should definitely not fall under the Ministry of Culture.
I quite agree. But should any state authority in an open society really be in the business of deciding what books citizens should read?
Banning books is both a) profoundly illiberal, b) pointless (perhaps someone should tell the SIS about the internet?), and c) counter-productive – at least if the purpose is to avoid dystopian outcomes.
The problem with banning or restricting books – apart from the fact that it's just a very bad idea – is that there have to be criteria that dictate what is to be banned.
But once you announce what these are, then pretty soon every Tom, Dick and Harry (and Slovak Spectator opinion writer) starts challenging your choices – or omissions. I mean, if we're in the business of banning books, why is 'Mein Kampf' on the list, but not 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion', for instance?
This back-and-forth very quickly becomes a massive pain in the neck. So what's a harassed bureaucrat to do? Obfuscate, naturally.
In this case, the criteria, we are told (the SIS has already said as much), can't possibly be revealed – for 'security' reasons.
But that's never quite enough: the lists still circulate – they have to, if all those culture ministers and librarians are supposed to enact them – and their contents allow the same smart alecks as before to continue speculating about the 'secret' criteria, based on what's on the list or isn't.
At this point, the bureaucrats invariably decide that not only the criteria, but the list itself must be classified. Et voilà! The list of banned books is itself banned, and Orwell's memory hole beckons.
***
Just a day or two after this pantomime premiered in mid August, the leaders of some of Slovakia's most august academic bodies, including the Slovak Academy of Sciences (SAV) and Comenius University, issued a public statement "on the current social situation".
Their statement notes that the quality of public discourse has become increasingly vulgar of late – which seems plausible, though no comparative analysis is cited – and concludes that vulgarity is, well, not nice.
So far, so unobjectionable.
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