Goscomisdat is coming!
Goscomisdat: the Gosudarstvennyi Comitet po delam izdatelstva, poligraphii i knizhnoi torgovli, the Soviet Union’s State Committee for Publishing, Printing and the Book Trade. Goskino and Glavlit carried out similar functions in various branches of arts, except Glavlit also guarded state military secrets. All of them together were state censorship bodies of the USSR, responsible for ideological control of the media.
So it has come to this—we are on the verge of introducing state censorship. The thought sends a shiver down my spine. Unlike many Australians, I have actually lived with state censorship, until I migrated to the West at the age of twenty-eight after being stripped of my Soviet citizenship, and becoming a refugee. In the USSR, political correctness was everything and everywhere. It was in the classroom, in the student auditorium, in the movie theatre, in the library, in the newspaper—censorship was all-pervasive. Everyone knew exactly what could be said and what could…
Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.
Aug 29 2024
6 mins
To claim Aborigines have the world's oldest continuous culture is to misunderstand the meaning of culture, which continuously changes over time and location. For a culture not to change over time would be a reproach and certainly not a cause for celebration, for it would indicate that there had been no capacity to adapt. Clearly this has not been the case
Aug 20 2024
23 mins
A friend and longtime supporter of Quadrant, Clive James sent us a poem in 2010, which we published in our December issue. Like the Taronga Park Aquarium he recalls in its 'mocked-up sandstone cave' it's not to be forgotten
Aug 16 2024
2 mins