That we should censor violent video games

Soviet censors worked with a large volume called Perechen’ svedenii ne podlezhashchikh opublikovaniiu v otkrytoi pechati (List of Information Not Suitable for Publication in Open Sources). It was informally referred to among censors—many of whom were Jews—as the “Talmud.” Among the items “not suitable for publication” were crime statistics, reports of natural and man-made disasters (such as airplane crashes), price increases, individual incomes, the names of many officials, and the identities of their spouses. The censorship system was administered by Glavlit, established in 1922 as the Chief Directorate for Literature and Publishing Houses at the People’s Commissariat for Education (Narkompros). Immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution, works on Judaism and almost all publications in Hebrew were banned. Foreign Jewish literature was strongly censored in the 1920s and thereafter. By the 1930s, the list of forbidden subjects included Lenin’s Jewish ancestry on his mother’s side. Although in 1936 work critical of antisemitism was passed by the censor, at the same time Jewish themes began to disappear from Soviet prose and poetry, except in Yiddish. By 1938 brochures critical of antisemitism that had been published just a few years before were removed from libraries. The recording of Lenin’s 1919 speech condemning antisemitism was removed from record sets. It was reported that a six-cornered star, used as an illustration in a geometry text, had to be excised before the text could be published." (3)

"Finding that a young man who committed a violent crime also played a popular video game, such as Call of Duty, Halo, or Grand Theft Auto, is as pointless as pointing out that the criminal also wore socks." (5)

With this overwhelming evidence in support of my position, it would be foolish to claim that video games cause violence or delinquency in our society.

Case 3: Games That Would Be Censored

Let me go over my favorite first!

Saya No Uta: