Apple’s knee-jerk approach to banning content is making it look illiterate and unreliable.

Mike you have clearly not read the latter work — the comparison is not sustainable.

Seriously. Slow news day?

It is of course rubbish from beginning to end. Old (pre-WWI) German imperial aims, sloshed about with ridiculous anti-Semitic statements (made all the more ambiguous because in German then “Juden” also meant “commercial”) and the whole artificially wrapped up as some kind of personal revelation (which clearly it was not).

Its impact as a work of literature is zero, but as a historical document it does have importance. No-doubt neo-nazi’s will revere it, but hardly because of its largely incoherent and very dated content.

Making it available, even with the swastika, should not be a problem anywhere.

The “Karma Sutra of Vatsyayana” is a work of excellence and an important part of world literature, especially the beautiful simplicity of the Burton translation.

The problem is that Apple is selling a device, and just not some store deciding what they wish to market – a device is a means of reading itself, not a location, or repository of choice. In that Apple is running both it is more problematic, like Amazon’s Kindle.

Basically I don’t like the idea of some marketing manager deciding what I or my children will be allowed to read. Both Apple and Amazon should be legally separated from monopolising content through a reading device.

And I also agree that censorship isn’t the answer. That tends to create a mystique about a book that causes certain sorts of people to get curious: “They’re keeping it from me, so there must be some truth in it that they don’t want me to hear.” I saw that sort of attitude from Holocaust deniers on Seattle’s dreadful free-access cable channel. These people tend to be fools, but even fools can do a lot of harm.

But it is also true that when you sell a product, you incur a responsibility to tell people what it is. In general, books like Mein Kampf shouldn’t be banned, but they do need to come with clear warnings. Amazon has warnings on one of its Kindle editions of Mein Kampf in English but not the other.

It’s also true that similarly foul books need similar treatments. Mein Kampf bears some of the responsibility for roughly 20 million civilian deaths. Das Kapital bears a similar responsibility for the deaths of some 100 million people, five times as many. Any labeling and distribution rules apply to the former should certainly apply to the latter. The number of people who deny by their silence communism’s horrors is far greater and far more influential that the seedy little sorts who deny the Jewish genocide.

The NY Times, for instance, still refuses to return a Pulitzer won by reporting that included a denial of Stalin’s murder (by starvation and disease) of some 5 million Ukrainians in the early 1930s. The Soviets plied Walter Duranty, the paper’s once famous Moscow reporter, with booze and babes. Both he and the NY Times then compliantly said what they wanted said.