A license to publish? Call that censorship

My anger and frustration reached new heights when I read that publishers are now required to get licenses from the government to publish works from certain “sanctioned” countries, all in the name of “national security” [“Will Voices of Dissent Still Be Heard?,” by Scott Martelle, Dec. 7]. Unfortunately, it’s very easy to push “national security” until you no longer have a “nation” to secure.

Regulating the flow of “outside” ideas is the prerequisite -- and blood sibling -- of stopping that flow altogether and, as was proven by the rise of Nazism in Germany, a government doesn’t have to fall for a nation to be ruined. All you have to do is chip away at its fundamental freedoms (like freedom of information) and it will transform itself into something else, something ugly and dangerous. We seem to be transforming ourselves from the “land of the free and home of the brave” to the “land of the repressed, ignorant and fearful.” Who needs a foreign enemy when we are our own terrorists?

Katie Waitman

Los Angeles

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If today you can’t publish new books, tomorrow you can burn the old ones. This is the government that wants to hold American citizens without bail, lawyers or charges. What they can do to people they can do to books. Just ask Ray Bradbury how that works out.

Brian K. Lowe

Woodland Hills

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We are no different from countries that censor their writers when we censor them here too. Without freedom of speech and freedom of the press, we are not free. If we deny these freedoms to others, we lose them ourselves.

Mary Barker

Santa Maria