Admittedly, I am from the UK, so perhaps because I'm not in the US directly experiencing this my perspective is skewed, but from what I can tell, there seem to be extremists on both sides of what you are alluding to here. For example, regarding the subject of teaching slavery in school, there seem to be one group who want to stop it completely, and another who want to teach nothing but slavery. Both positions are lunacy, to my mind.

I have heard about people on the left wanting to ban Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird. Absolute madness. These people seem unable to understand the difference between depicting something and endorsing something.

On the other hand, we have the kinds of nitwits you talk about here in right wing states. I think it is absolutely insane to ban books the way they have. I agree this is immensely disturbing. If free speech is to mean anything at all, it means tolerating free speech with which you disagree (which, to be clear, is different to incitement to violence - in the UK, we have common sense laws separating the two).

I think the reason I don't rail against truncated Shakespeare plays and the like is because the originals still exist and were never deceitfully put out into the marketplace in edited form, claiming to be the originals. If people want the original Dahl and Dahl censored alongside one another, fine. As long as they are clearly differentiated.

Common sense has prevailed on the Dahl question, though I doubt it will on the Fleming question, which is annoying. Grown-ups should not have to tolerate this kind of condescension. Again, if they want to put a censored version out there, clearly labelled as such, alongside the original, fine with me. But the original must remain (obviously they will in second hand book shops and so forth in any case, but I don't want watered down versions passed off as being the originals).

In short, I appreciate your response and respect your view, but I do think there are two sides to this. I loathe censorship to my very core, for whatever reason it takes place, regardless of whether it comes from left or right wing authoritarian groups. That's a hill I will die on.