Of the many canons in global literary history, specific attention has always been paid to banned and censored books. The reason for this seems pretty simple: Any book censored by a political authority must have in some way hit the nail on the head, revealing an inconvenient yet undeniable truth about the environment in which it was written. All copies of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s book The First Circle, for example, were notoriously removed from Soviet Russian bookstores after he pointed out the obvious hypocrisy of the Soviet Union: Forced labor and mass terror embarrassingly contradicted the vision of a Marxist Utopia.
What’s more, all of the literary works that fall in the canon of banned books are generally speaking very well written; one only needs to look as far as Orwell’s 1984, Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, or Huxley’s Brave New World to see that this is the case. Is it coincidental that these politically challenging books also happen to demonstrate exceeding literary ability, or is this characteristic in fact inextricable? This is the question we should ask when we consider Milo Yiannopoulos’ Dangerous, and whether its political censorship alone merits our engagement.
Although not technically banned, Simon & Schuster canceled Milo Yiannopoulos’ controversial autobiography “Dangerous” back in February 2017 after a recording emerged in which Yiannopoulos “advocated sexual relationships between young boys and older men.” Whilst this seems like a clear reason to sever ties with an author, Yiannopoulos responded by filing a lawsuit; he claimed that the cancellation was pretextual and that Simon & Schuster had in fact taken the opportunity to cancel the book because of its political content. In an interview, Yiannopoulos remarked that the decision “caved to pressure from leftists, caved to the protestors, caved to the boycotters, caved to the mob mentality.” Simon & Schuster, in his opinion, canceled the book because they deemed his opinions too offensive to deserve attention in the public sphere. If true, then Simon & Schuster would have exercised their veto power with undeniably political motives.
The book, according to Yiannopoulos, deconstructs and points fun at political correctness, Black Lives Matter, safe spaces, and other institutions considered “left wing.” There was no way to determine the validity of Yiannopoulos’ accusation until December, when Simon & Schuster made an unexpected counter-attack: The publishing company released the book’s manuscript and all editing notes onto the internet, laying bare the absurd and baseless arguments that make up the book. Some notable comments from Yiannopoulos’ editor, Mitchell Ivers, include, “This entire section is the most poorly thought out in the book. If you want to make a case for gay men going back in the closet and marrying women just to have children, you’re going to have to employ a lot more intellectual rigor than you do here” and “don’t start a chapter with the accusation that feminists = fat. It destroys any seriousness of purpose.”
As absurd as the editing notes are, the fact that they were released as justification for the cancellation does seem to prove Yiannopoulos’ assertion that the decision was made on political grounds. Whilst this carries much the same message as an authoritarian ban, it lacks the same effect: Canceled books can still be published elsewhere, with the added notoriety of having been canceled for raising challenging political questions. Must we now engage with Yiannopoulos’ diatribe, “lost in a sea of self-aggrandizement and scattershot thinking” (Ivers), as part of the same canon as The Jungle and The Gulag Archipelago?
An answer to this question may shed light on a much more general one: In this period of massive political polarization between the left and the right, which views are worthy of engaging with, and which, if any, can we dismiss? Dangerous, when considered in light of other books censored for political reasons, provides a tentative reason for not treating all political critiques as equal: Yiannopoulos’ self-proclaimed deconstruction of leftist institutions amounts to little more than unsupported opinion and provocative crudeness. The OffGuardian’s scorching review of the book remarked that “the critical reader…will derive about as much benefit from this trashy tract, devoid of almost any references to academic journals or studies, as from reading a primer on phrenology or flat earth theory.” The book is a far shout from the well-reasoned, structured, and restrained works of Orwell, Nabokov and other authors whose books were censored because of their political content. Incendiary thought is a definite component of a challenging political critique, yet quite clearly not the only one.
If any useful insight can be derived from the turbulent creation of Dangerous, it is the clear gap between its arguments and those of the censored books we hold to be thoughtful and perceptive political tracts. Whenever a controversial new work of political critique reaches store shelves, we should resist the easy decision of giving it the same status as the censored books which preceded it just on the basis of its inflammatory nature: Form, good writing and structured arguments remain the truly dangerous components of political discourse.
Your review is biased. It’s clear that you have not read Milo’s book and instead are allowing other people’s comments to form your opinions. If you read his book you would understand that referring to it as satanic is laughable.