General Article Should books ever be banned?

Topic Selected: Censorship
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Back in 1925, Adolf Hitler wrote a book called Mein Kampf which shared his thoughts and plans for running Germany. Essentially, it was an outpouring of hatred, detailing the principles that later guided his Nazi regime. A system that – we now know from history – caused the deaths and torture of millions of people. 

But should this book be banned today? Could it inspire other people to repeat history? This is a tricky area and one that Germany has had to deal with only very recently. At the end of World War Two, it was decided that no new publications of the book could be made. But the problem was there were already 70 million copies printed and in circulation, and it wasn’t illegal to own one. In 2012, the German government had to start thinking about what they could do when the book’s copyright expired at the end of 2015 – meaning that it could now be published freely again. In the end, they decided to publish a new, scholarly, annotated version of the text. In other words, the boo...

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