50 shades of Turkish censorship

In what amounts to a set of one irony after another, Turkey is freeing hundreds of books from decades of exclusion while simultaneously threatening to ban two world classics

Freedom of expression and censorship. It’s never been one without the other in Turkey. In a twist of irony, Turkey is at once celebrating the lifting of decades-old bans on 453 books and 645 periodicals while waiting for the fate of two classics whose fates are yet to be decided. One of these classics is John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. The other one is the beloved children’s book My Sweet Orange Tree by Brazilian writer José Mauro de Vasconcelos.

As part of the third package of judicial reforms, Ankara’s Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office recently decided to lift bans on 453 books. Some titles like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto, Lenin’s State and Revolution or Stalin’s The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), are understandable, given that they were banned in the late 1960s or early 1970s.

On the list are also books by Turkish authors like Nazım Hikmet, Aziz Nesin, İsmail Beşikçi and Abdurrahim Karakoç, whose books were banned due to the political atmosphere of the time. But there are also the titles that makes one scratch one’s head, such as the National Geographic Atlas of the World, banned as late as 1987, and an issue of the Italian comic book Capitan Miki, or known as Tommiks here in Turkey.

Click here for full article (Hürriyet Daily News)