People making a big deal out of the cancelling are blowing it into a far bigger thing than it is. He's not being cancelled, those works are just being recognized as offensive. There's no gotcha to Obama having praised some of his books, because those books are still worthy of praise.
> He hasn't been cancelled, it's just that a few of the more egregious books are being discontinued. Horton Hears a Who? Still a great message. The Grinch? Still great
You are clearly in favor of banning ideas you disagree with. Nice to see you are fine with the publication of books when you approve of their "message".
People want the book removed because it exists, someplace - not because someone has a metaphorical megaphone. Let's stop with the metaphors, by the way. This isn't literary critique, or English Literature 301. It's a discussion of censorship. Stopping someone-who-isn't-you from reading a work that has nothing to do with you, is censorship.
Wait, sorry, is someone confiscating the book? Burning it? Requiring it be burned? Arresting people who have it? Arresting the people who wrote it? Legally compelling the publisher to edit it? Legally compelling distributors not to distribute it?
As far as I can tell, everyone complaining is upset that distributors don't want to tarnish their brand with certain content, and authors and stakeholders have decided that certain content doesn't match their modern brands. None of these are censorship!
As an author, you are free to write dumb things. As a bookstore, I am free to not sell the the dumb things you wrote. That's not censorship.
As a publisher, I am free not to publish the dumb stuff you wrote for you. That's the metaphorical megaphone, in case that is unclear, and no one can force a publisher to give you one.
Yes, we won't be sending people with the naughty Dr. Seuss books to the gulag. No one is saying that. We're concerned about monopoly power combined with wokist ideology.
The Hollywood Blacklist was completely voluntary on the part of the movie studios which enforced it, a decision of certain private companies not to -- how did you phrase it? -- "tarnish their brand" by collaborating with people suspected of Communist tendencies. It is held to be morally repugnant today, and somehow I doubt you would defend it with the same argument you use in the Dr. Seuss case.
I worry about the authoritarian leanings of anyone who doesn't draw this distinction.
Some private actor X performs an action Y which other people Z find reprehensible. The action Y is within X's legal rights to perform.
You can focus on how reprehensible Y is and how Z are right to condemn it. Or you could focus on how X should be totally free to do Y if X so desires, even if we don't like Y.
What usually happens is that if you feel Z are right or you wish to support Z or you wish to not be seen as supporting "enemies" of Z, you will focus on condemning Y. It won't even occur to you to emphasize that doing Y is legal; if pressed you'll freely admit it is, but to you focusing on how Y is legal will look like hypocritical attempts to evade the real issue, which is the terribleness of Y.
On the other hand, if you dislike Z or like the "enemies" of Z, you will focus on how Y is legal and how Z's dangerous rhetoric about Y poses a real danger of conflating Y with actually illegal acts. You might or might not agree that Y is terrible, but to you it will seem a decidedly minor concern compared to the dangerous rhetoric issuing from Z.
The book exists. The publisher's just decided they won't sell it anymore.
Stop misrepresenting facts.
"“EBay is currently sweeping our marketplace to remove these items,” a spokeswoman for the company said in an email. New copies of the six books were no longer for sale online at major retailers such as Barnes & Noble on Thursday afternoon, which put eBay among the most prominent platforms for the books to be sold."
The copyright holder / publisher can prevent any publication of books it holds copyright to, and has done so.
Distributors of books, like Amazon, can stop selling books they disagree with, and have now starting doing that too.
So the answer to your question is: all the above.
This is what happens when Amazon, for example, bans books that express views of transgenderism with which Amazon employees disagree.
This is a true statement. His behavior always showed this regardless of what obama said. Unlike your orwellian quote, we're not rewriting history, just changing our tolerances.
Also, if Dr. Seuss was always so racist, how come the left embraced him until very very recently?
Are you seriously claiming that all the many people on the left, including Obama, were embracing a clear and known racist as recently as a few months ago?
I don't really think this is a good-faith argument based on the language of the first sentence, but i'll reply anyways...
Yes the evidence is his clearly documented body of work. He used many racial stereotypes and derogatory imagery. He has images of Japanese Americans, Africans, East Asians, and they all use stereotypes and caricatures that are negative.
I can't speak for "the left" but he was embraced by most people because he was popular and many of his stories and books were benign. Lots of bad behavior was embraced by both left and right Americans throughout history. Past acceptance is not indication that the future must accept.
Yes. I am making the claim that people, including Obama (who is not the only image of the left, and not particularly important figure in a literary sense) were embracing Dr. Seuss. A lot of his more objectionable work is rather unpopular, so its not crazy to think that his supporters did not audit his behavior.
There is no doubt that people were embracing him. There is no doubt that much of his behavior is racist. There is no contraction here. People have embraced bad people before and that is (somewhat) ok as look as society learns and grows and corrects their behavior. This is the learning and growing. A book that sold 7k copies over the last few years is no longer in print because it portrayed people in bad ways.
President Obama praised, quoted, and recommended Dr. Seuss's books in official press releases throughout his presidency, all the way to his last year as president - 2015:
https://nypost.com/2021/03/03/barack-and-michelle-obama-prai...
But now the Woke Mob has come for Dr. Seuss, and we're all instructed to recite that Dr. Seuss is racist, was racist, has always been racist.
To quote Orwell: "The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia."