A recent email from a publisher I know personally, about new books in their collection, was titled "Books with a Message." Books containing a social and possibly unwelcome message in a turbulent world.
The e-mail also said something about the significance of book bans. In the United States, scores of books and all kinds of cultural and historic content are now banned from public view due to the Trump administration's "anti-woke" censorship. Anything that clashes with the new ultra-conservative ideology is banned: climate change, black lives matter, immigrants, LGBTQ+.
This is reaching ridiculous proportions: even the name of the aeroplane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima (Enola Gay) had to be erased from history because the word "gay" appears in it…
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| Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the Hiroshima bomb. Source: Wikipedia |
Entartete Kunst
I sincerely hope that we won’t go down that way, but I’m not optimistic. Such developments are reminiscent of a dark period in German history, when books by Jewish authors were publicly burned, and modern art was portrayed as Entartete Kunst - degenerate art for those who don't understand German. Just as the first victim of war is truth, the first victim of a totalitarian regime is freedom of speech and expression.
If you take it one step further and sell your soul to Artificial Intelligence (AI), where not a flesh-and-blood author, but AI writes books according to the mantras that best suit those in power, there is no returning to sanity. Some time ago I wrote about Big Brother, the dictator in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. In that dystopian world, books, the news, and even history are continuously being rewritten according to the prevailing policies of the day.
Not only freedom of expression is at risk, but so is what we are allowed to think. If necessary, the new political correctness will be violently enforced. The Nazi brownshirts who destroyed Jewish shops in 1938, the American army being prepped in 2025 to defeat the President's "enemy within", and in our little country, anti-immigrant gangs causing havoc at asylum centers waving Nazi flags. Keep going, guys.
Books with a message
Often, my thrillers also contain a message. They are about people who find themselves in dire straits and manage to escape the horrors they experienced. Fictional persons like Syrian doctor Leila Hammadi, who flees the Assad regime during the civil war and, after years of hardship, manages to build a new life in Greece. And the Russian girl Irina Makarova, a victim of woman trafficking who is confronted by a heartless Dutch government, yet manages to keep her head above water. And the young African woman Efua, who three centuries ago, during the days of the Dutch West India Company’s slave trade, takes Anansi's stories with her on the slave ship and seeks her freedom in the interior of Suriname.
Most of these stories have a seafaring background, because the sea is our last wilderness, and because I know the sea well, as a former seafarer and (still) a yachtsman. At sea, you're left to your own devices, which adds an extra element of suspense to the story. Some reviewers of my books grumble a bit about the maritime content, but I have no complaints from my readers. Each to his own, I’d say...
Finally, there's a common theme in every book: romance developing between two people, often from very different cultures, who come together against all odds and refuse to let go. After all, our blood is always red, no matter where we come from, and love is our strongest emotion. I sincerely hope that love will triumph over the hatred that tries to poison us all.
My books are available from Amazon.
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