In a chilling scene in Chernobyl, soldiers tasked with shooting animals in the exclusion zone pause to take note of a communist propaganda banner drooping from a deserted building. “Our goal is the happiness of all mankind,” they read. They derisively remark on how happy they are – and go back to shooting puppies.
Repressive socialist regimes love to cloak their authoritarianism in a false veneer of “kindness”. The harder they grind the heel, the more they witter about “happiness” and “wellbeing”.
Jacinda Ardern just loves to prattle about “kindness” – so it’s no surprise to find that she’s a thoroughgoing totalitarian.
New Zealand’s Ardern government has outdone even the world’s most authoritarian regimes, banning the sale of fiction. Emails have issued from a range of booksellers, including UBS, which has a small chain of stores in Auckland, Canterbury, Christchurch and Dunedin, unpacking the latest state-sponsored instructions and intrusions into their industry: Alert Level 4: We are very pleased to let you know that we have been given permission today, 17 April, to supply, through our online site, a wide range of children’s books for all ages (picture books, chapter books, activity books, reference, etc), to support everyone home-schooling or being home-schooled.
We can now also supply Maori & Pasifika books, learning & education, and books to support health and wellbeing.
These are all in addition to the essential textbooks & stationary, medical books, and books covering areas of professional education & learning support, that we have been allowed to supply for a couple of weeks.
Think about what all of that actually tells us:
It tells us that the New Zealand government is dictating just which types of books that bookshops in New Zealand are allowed to sell. The Ardern government is blanket prohibiting the sale of vast categories of books.
Novels are illegal to sell over the internet in New Zealand right now.
Yes, you read that right. Fiction — novels, and short stories — are currently banned unless, of course they feature on an approved reading list.
So, it might be legal for [a bookseller] to send you a copy of J. D. Salinger’s 1951 classic Catcher in the Rye, which appears on a number of school and university lists, but he could be locked up for sending you Salinger’s Franny and Zooey from ten years later, which is presumably deemed to have no literary merit by the new government censors.
By the same token, you could legally sell Tolkien’s The Hobbit, under the guise of it being a children’s book, but not his Lost Tales. You could order Umberto Eco’s Theory of Semiotics with impunity, but if you ordered his much more entertaining Name of the Rose, Wellington’s censors would have you booked to rights.
Just why is the Ardern government so afraid of allowing Kiwis to relax with a good novel – or even a bad one – while they’re confined to their houses and forbidden to work or play outside? Perhaps they’re afraid that New Zealander’s might read Mervyn Peake’s classic Gormenghast, in which life is ruled by byzantine rituals which no one understands but everyone obeys without question. Maybe New Zealand’s zealous censors will hurriedly re-classify The Gulag Archipelago as fiction, lest the kulaks start getting ideas.
If I were an enterprising government official, I’d be looking for my matches and my jerry cans. There is only a hair’s breadth of difference, after all, between telling us which books it is permissible to read, and telling us which ones should be burnt in the town square.
“Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form” – Section 14, New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990.
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