Captain Bezos, book-burner-in-chief
884 words
As we have already publicized on this site, Amazon has rolled out a new policy of censoring books based solely on their political content – specifically, those books which engage in thoughtcrime against the Establishment’s sacred cows of the unquestionable desirability of globalization, open borders, multiculturalism, and egalitarianism. Greg Johnson, Kerry Bolton, Jonathan Bowden, F. Roger Devlin, Kevin MacDonald, and Jared Taylor are among the host of authors who have already been victimized by this blatantly discriminatory – and entirely arbitrary – policy. They have also begun deleting product reviews by customers who are deemed to hold similarly unacceptable views. Unfortunately, we can expect that the list will get much longer, if nothing happens to dissuade Amazon from furthering this disturbing new trend.
Although it is true that we can continue to sell our books through our own sites, their absence from the world’s largest bookseller obviously greatly limits not only their accessibility but the possibility that readers previously unfamiliar with our work might discover them. As such, Amazon is trying to control the global political conversation by limiting readers’ ability to come across ideas with which they might be unfamiliar and judge them of their own accord; Jeff Bezos, it seems, doesn’t trust his customers’ judgment, and prefers to make those decisions for them.
Amazon did this quietly, like a thief in the night; their victims only found out that their books had been banned when they happened to notice that all trace of them had been removed from Amazon’s site, or when their publishers received generic form messages after the fact informing them that their books had been removed for unspecified “content guidelines” violations, followed by threats of even more extreme action. Here was one such message (click to enlarge):
Moreover, Amazon offered no opportunity to appeal the bans. And although several of the affected authors and publishers have issued public statements regarding the purge, including a press release by Jared Taylor, the mainstream media, unsurprisingly, has chosen not to take up the story. (We can be certain that the purging of books by Establishment liberals and Leftists would be greeted with indignant cries of injustice and accusations of “fascism.”) So unfortunately, we are on our own in this fight.
Unless Amazon is held to account for its actions, we can expect this situation to not only continue, but get worse. For now they are only testing the waters; if they encounter no resistance, they will be emboldened to become even more hostile to ideas they deem unacceptable in the future.
Below are several ways to contact Amazon and protest the company’s censorship. We urge you to call or write and demand explanations. Here are some questions you could ask:
- Why are books such as Greg Johnson’s The White Nationalist Manifesto and Jared Taylor’s White Identity no longer for sale?
- In 2011, a spokesman from your company publicly stated that “Amazon believes it is censorship not to sell certain books simply because we or others believe their message is objectionable.” Why has the company changed its policy?
- Please explain which passages of The White Nationalist Manifesto and White Identity are “offensive.”
- You claim to be a “customer-centric” company. How can censorship be more important than serving your customers?
In addition to voicing these concerns, if you have been a frequent Amazon customer over the years, it might bolster your argument to mention exactly how much money you have given them. This article from Business Insider explains how to easily obtain the total amount you have spent by using your purchasing records on the Amazon site. Mention this figure in your communications with them and make it clear that you’ll take your business elsewhere if they refuse to reconsider their violation of the right to free speech.
Remember to always be polite, however, lest we give Amazon’s apparatchiks a pretext to ignore us. And please let us know how Amazon replies by writing to us at [email protected].
How to call: If you have an Amazon account, call (206) 922-0880. Provide your name and e-mail address, explain the problem, and ask to speak to a manager. If you don’t have an Amazon account, call the general customer service line at (888) 280-4331.
Live Chat or e-mail: Log into your Amazon account, then click here to begin a live chat with a representative. Before you begin the chat, check the box to request an e-mail transcript. If you don’t have an Amazon account, send an e-mail to [email protected].
Social media: Please share this article or our previous articles about these attacks, Jared Taylor’s press release, and/or Gregory Hood’s article from American Renaissance about Amazon’s censorship as widely and across as many networks as possible. Also, you can write a Facebook post, send a tweet, share an Instagram story – anything to help spread the word about the latest efforts to silence dissidents.
Amazon is one of the wealthiest corporations in the world, and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, is the richest man in the world; and they have declared war on people like you. Don’t take it sitting down. Please, get in the fight and help us. Not only will we thank you, but so will the untold future generations who are depending on our work.
Portions of the above were based on an e-mail sent out last week by American Renaissance.
8 Comments
Hmmm… it seems that this functionality is not available on Amazon.ca. Drat. Any Canucks out there know how to easily get order totals?
Hello All. This bit of corporate censorship is unfortunate, and harmful to the coffers of CC and others. But I feel no sorrow, and see no defeat. It is a small skirmish lost–we’ve had a stall demolished in the marketplace. Like any good and civil dissidents we still have our samizdat–available directly from those bold enough to lead. Readers of these books, this website–we have always known we are a vanguard. Our ideas are not the ethics of the masses, they are it’s guiding prod. And any cattleman knows, you need only scare the rare dumb beast, and the rest move away without knowing the source of their correction. These texts were a politics–and many here and in other factions work towards a metapolitics. They forget that “meta-” as first used in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, was an expression of After and Above. What is needed for us cattlemen and spiritual rat-catchers is a focus on our Ante-Politics–the under and before–going. That means we must READ the actual TEXTs of the foundational thinkers of the West– with the same assiduity we approach Gregg Johnson’s brave prefaces of these same thinkers. These books are old enough to be un-bannable–for now– and will reward the time invested in them with the subtelty of persuasion needed to return things to right. The Cheese and Deli Meat that furtively feeds the medicine to good and bad dogs alike. And why should I care of the color of the pill? Keep reading, Ladies and Gentlemen.
Of course we will not let this setback defeat us, but at the same time we can’t just take all these attacks lying down. They are gradually tightening the noose, a little bit more each time. We can’t just cede all the mainstream platforms and go back to the fringes without at least trying to do something about it. It may not do any good, but at least we will have done everything we could. That being said, of course we at Counter-Currents encourage our readers to familiarize themselves with the classics of our civilization, and not just contemporary thought, even from the Dissident Right – which is a spirit we try to instill through our more cultural works here.
It does feel like the ‘net’ is closing in sometimes. I don’t have any major presence, I’m just a nobody, but I am increasingly finding myself banned from websites, my (now old) video’s have started being flagged and warned that they’ll be removed from YouTube, and ironically, given the protestations of Jared Taylor and appeals for ‘free speech’, my perfectly reasonable comments have even been deleted off the Amren website recently by the administrators there just because they don’t like to hear any form of criticism or have a counter-view to the content and nature of their articles.
However, what’s happening to me isn’t all that important. What’s happening in general is more important.
There’s the social media purges, being banned from monetization, videos being removed, books effectively being burnt and purged from the public sphere both in high street stores and online, newspaper comment sections being shut down or moderated to an inch of their life – and in this country, England, people being arrested and imprisoned for nothing much more than speaking, singing and writing things that transgress liberal orthodoxies.
America is seen by many of us as the last bastion of free speech in the world, but sadly, the creeping rot of tyranny is setting in there too in recent years.
With the likes of Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, it is now global and not even confined to boundaries and borders any more. They all appear going to a herculean effort to tighten their grip over what can and cannot be seen and said online – and even bought on line to read in your own homes!
In many ways, it smacks of desperation and fear. Yet that does not make it any less tyrannical or frustrating. Whatever one makes of the Daily Stormer, for example, it shows the power there now is to strip you of all platforms, even being able to host a website or use a domain name.
Try as they might, they cannot and will not be able to crush a counterforce to their own agenda though.
Trying to silence messages and ban books will ultimately fail. The issues out there are not going to go away. They are not going to get any better. The societies “they” have made are unstable and unsustainable. People are going to react, seek out answers, seek out change at some point and the “two party state” we all live in these days will not provide the answers or solutions.
Yes, Amazon makes that dissenting viewpoint more efficient and easier to propagate – but if they think purging the dissent in this way will make the dissenting course will fade away and the world a “nicer place”, I strongly suggest they are wrong.
They are just backing people even more into a corner with fewer options available to achieve change by normal routes and normal discourse. The polarisation will surely just increase.
Their own actions even tend to prove what we are saying when we suggest that there is an agenda out there and how there are powerful figures having too much control over what happens in this world.
On the one hand they suggest we are a tiny, tiny minority of people on the fringes of society – but on the other, they want to stomp down on any advancement we make, as though we are going to take over societal discourse at any moment.
I sadly doubt that White Nationalist books were flying off the shelves, but they either must have been a substantial rise, or the fear is there that they might do so at any time – and that they will not be able to stop the genie coming out of the bottle. The “broken windows” approach.
Once again, we find ourselves at the mercy of those who cannot be criticised (who tend to run the biggest platforms in the world) and find ourselves having to try and plead with our enemies to even get a fair playing field, whilst they still sell and promote all sorts of degeneracy and books which have led to the murder of millions.
I hope Amazon are forced to backtrack on their censorship. Isn’t it in the Rules For Radicals somewhere that one method of attack is to try and hold them to account by making it impossible for them to uphold their own supposed standards? (Make it impossible for them to operate).
Given their nature though, would they prefer to ban all the books that some people may have a problem with (ie, the double standards of titles) than concede that such one-sided policing is not right? Once they have started the slippery slope of being censors, I don’t see how they can feasibly stop. Those who champion the removal our our books today will find themselves in the same boat one day.
More memes please. The memes are good. They get interested reactions, because it’s not the same image with the same message over and over.
I’m purchasing my “Occult” and “pagan” books from these sites now, instead of Amazon:
> http://redwheelweiser.com
> https://www.weiserantiquarian.com
You can get some great deals, especially on the latter site, if you pick the right time.
Got the infamous “Golden Bough”, in hardback, for like $12.
Amazon banned my book Mohammed’s Koran (with Tommy Robinson). This book stands apart from all those other books which Amazon have banned.
On launch in July 2017, this book went straight to No.1 on Amazon. The first time a self-published book has ever done this. It stayed at No.1 until the first print run of 5000 copies ran out a week later. Once we got over our shock and got a second print-run done, the book was still the No.1 best-selling Koran for most of the following 18 months. There were around 1000 five star reviews from verified purchasers. Not one refutation of the case made in the book was ever published.
All the book did was to take a standard Koran and put it into the chronological order accepted to be true by experts (Muslims and otherwise). And all of those verses which are cancelled according to the scholarly Islamic doctrine of abrogation were all typed using strikethrough. The book had nearly 600 footnotes. What that book shows is what Muslims get taught by their experts, whenever the Muslim leaders deem it is time to set off the next wave of terrorism against non-Muslims.
Then suddenly, the book was banned. I have a recording of Amazon customer service saying that the order to ban it “came from above Amazon”. Unlike most of you banned authors, the UK media gloatingly reported on the Amazon monopoly dropping this book down the Memory Hole.
All the Korans that promote violence are still up for sale. The only Koran they’ve banned is the Koran which shows why the West will be forever plagued by Muslim terrorism. They banned the only Koran which denounces Islam-inspired murder.
The Introduction to Mohammed’s Koran demonstrated that throughout the 20th century the elite knew full well that Islam was a doctrine of terrorist violence and yet still the borders were thrown open to Muslim immigration. That Amazon were told by governments to ban this book is proof that the argument of the book was correct – Islam is here in the West to bring about the violent subjugation of the indigenous people.
The book is still for sale on my website – http://www.mohammeds-koran.com/store
I long ago predicted this censorship was coming. And it is only just getting started. The UK government between 1997 and 2006 tried to make all criticism of Islam illegal (in order to cover up that as many as 350,000 English schoolgirls had been seduced, drugged and raped by Muslim gangs — see my book Easy Meat). In 2006 the draconian law they tried to pass failed by one vote. The next time they try to pass this kind of law, they will succeed. The UK government is also funding AI projects to determine if some message you send to the internet is “hate speech” before it even reaches the intended recipient. In ten years time, we will look back on the Stasi and KGB as amateurs.
“We are standing face to face with the barbarians. The enemy is no longer outside but inside the City, and the ruling ideology, paralyzed, is incapable of spotting him. It stammers, overcome by its own moral disarmament, and is giving up: this is the time to seize the reins. Present society is an accomplice to the evil that is devouring it […] We should engage in battle without complaining about censorship and persecution, and without being surprised […]” — Guillaume Faye “Archeofuturism”, from introduction, pg. 18.