The most interesting rabbit hole on the real banned book list, Kulak says, is the complete disappearance of Augusto Pinochet’s books, both in Spanish, and in their official English Translation:
Thousands of English Copies of Augusto Pinochet’s 4 Volume memoirs “A Journey through a Life” had been printed… And seemingly completely disappeared.
Such that even discovering such books had ever existed were an extraordinary challenge in 2024.
If one searched “Pinochet Memoirs” in Amazon or Google they’d encounter works by communists like “Pinochet and Me: A Chilean Memoir”, “Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter”, “I Surrender: A Memoir of Chile’s Dictatorship, 1975” “At the Edge of the World: Memories of a Judge Who Indicted Pinochet” and “Memoirs of a cyclist who disappeared during the Pinochet Era”
There is an entire book “Pinochet in Piccadilly” just whinging about Thatcher’s friendliness with Pinochet.
And yet the Actual works of the man, or the fact that they had been officially translated into English Was entirely gone.
Not on Archive, not on the Dark Libraries like Annas Archives, not in google search… And not in university libraries even.
I searched University websites and JSTOR… Not In the Entirety of Canada, The Oxford or Cambridge Systems, Seemingly the entirety of New York city… Nowhere except 1 or 2 obscure universities in US Midwest or Australia could I find a single copy of a Single Volume of the 4 volume memoirs… To even confirm they existed.
I had found the faintest low resolution Google image search results linking to now defunct Spanish language Facebook posts, and dead link websites…
But Even hammering down the publication history was a challenge…
[…]
You see I had a VERY good inkling of how these memoirs had disappeared.
Chile you see, much like Spain post-Franco… Almost immediately fell under intensive political influence by the Communists and their descendants immediately after the right wing dictator fell.
Catholic Dictators, despite what communists will tell you about atrocities and mass killings… Are almost overwhelmingly FORGIVING of open treason, conspiracy with foreign powers, joining armed factions, and generally being an open enemy of Man, God, and Civilization… Not just in word, but in open Armed Deed.
The Reason we endlessly hear about the “crimes” of Franco or Pinochet against the poor suffering innocent socialists… but not say, the Weimar Republic against Rosa and Karl, or Interwar Poland’s brutality against Polish communists during the Polish-Soviet War (1919-1921), or Pre-Anschluss Austria, or what the Finns did to Finnish Communists during the Winter War… Is because almost all the communists in those societies were killed or exiled at one point or another… Very few went on to get careers in government or academia once the mean dictator fell were they could pass laws against “Denial” of “crimes” against treasonous socialist revolutionaries.
Meanwhile… despite dropping communists out of helicopters over shark infested water… Pinochet only ever killed 3-8 thousand… In the middle of a near civil war. Then let the rest live out their lives knowing they had lost…
So most of his enemies survived to publish their Memoirs about being disabled lesbian bicyclists under “The Dictator”… Until one day, somehow, Democracy returned.
So I knew what had happened to Pinochet’s memoirs… across South American, American, Canadian, British, and seemingly the entire university system… Communists of the more daring sort had stollen and dumpstered them, but even more commonly Left-leaning librarians, one at a time had quietly ‘mislabelled’ the books, and then thrown them in a pile of books for shredding.
No group of people have ever destroyed more books than librarians. Like school teachers, they’re one of those nice sounding groups of people, til you apply any scrutiny and realize they’re all ideologically captured, exist largely to destroy the thing you’d naively think they exist to protect and, in my moderate conservative opinion, deserve to be lined up and shot to the last.
You should be trolling and buying up things at bookstores if you ever want to hold onto a work… Somehow my local library today has entire aisles of Monster fucker erotica, yet all the local history books that I remember occupying shelves when I was a kid… All the nice old regimental histories that had been there since the local regiments themselves had donated the copies in the 1950s? Gone. Not even on the library interloan system… I have to troll thrift stores located in barns to find a former library copy (with the library card slot still glued to the inside of the cover) of a Gilded hardcover history of the Grey-Simcoe Foresters or the Lincoln and Welland Regiment… With a “For Destruction” stamped on the first page.
I have ordered off Ebay, for $10 Canadian, an Arthur Rackham illustrated English Edition complete Ring Cycle by Richard Wagner… With a “Pittsburg Public Library” card slot in the cover.
See also the book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper.