When a Municipality bans a Book, it Is not defending the Institution. It Is defending Its own fear…

By Arian Galdini

I filed a formal request with the Municipality of Kuçovë asking to present my book, Neo-Albanianism, at the city library.

The request was simple. The matter was simple. A book. An author. A public library. A cultural event. Nothing more.

What came back was not merely a refusal.

It was a document of character. In a few lines of official language, local power disclosed what it can tolerate and what it cannot.

What it cannot tolerate is plain enough, a free author, a free book, and a citizen entering public space without bending first.

Let me put it plainly.

The Mayor of Kuçovë’s reply is arbitrariness, prejudice, and exclusion dressed up as procedure.

The municipality’s letter rests on the claim that I hold a political leadership role.

That claim is false.

My resignation is public.

The transfer of leadership is public.

The facts are public.

The refusal, then, does not rest on reality.

It rests on a fiction.

An institution that decides on the basis of a falsehood is not applying the law.

It is exercising power over a lie.

At that point, this is no longer a technical error. It is a choice.

Once an office decides not to see the fact that ruins its case, it is no longer mistaken.

It is choosing exclusion.

Then comes the second distortion, graver than the first.

The municipality is not banning a rally.

It is not banning a party meeting.

It is not banning an electoral event.

It is banning the presentation of a book.

And in order to do that, it collapses the book into the party, the author into the office, and a cultural event into political activity.

This is not a misreading.

It is a falsification of the thing itself.

A book presentation does not become political because of the author’s convictions.

It does not become political because of his public history.

It does not become political because a mayor happens to be disturbed by his name.

Otherwise every public library would become an office of ideological screening, every author with an independent mind would become a problem, and every citizen with a voice would be entered into a ledger of the unwelcome.

That is not democracy.

That is ideological filtering under municipal seal.

The most revealing part of the whole affair lies in the wording of the letter itself.

It states that activities of a political character are not permitted, nor the participation or promotion of individuals holding leadership roles in political parties.

That sentence is scandalous not only for what it forbids, but for the way it thinks.

It proves nothing.

It does not say which element of the event makes it political.

It does not say which programme, which party, which slogan, which electoral purpose, which organisational act supports that conclusion.

It offers no fact. It offers no evidence.

It offers no reasoning. It labels.

It does not judge the nature of the event.

It judges the person and, on the strength of the person, pronounces the nature of the event.

The proper order would have been simple. What is the event.

Does it contain actual political content.

Is there a legal basis for restricting it.

Is the restriction proportionate.

The municipality does the reverse.

Who is the author.

How do we read him.

Therefore it is forbidden.

That is a logical inversion, and a legal one. The library is not evaluating the book.

It is evaluating the man, and then using the man to kill the book.

The letter does not stop at restricting the event.

It extends to participation itself.

Which means the issue is not merely the book.

The issue is the author’s presence as such.

At that point every alibi falls away.

The institution is no longer examining a concrete request.

It is imposing an exclusionary regime on a person.

It is treating the presence of a citizen in a library as grounds for prohibition.

That is administrative censorship in its purest form.

Here every soft word ends.

A library that begins by screening the author before the book is no longer a library.

It is a barred threshold.

It no longer asks, What book is entering?

It asks, Who is entering?

And the moment that question shifts from the work to the person, the institution has crossed into censorship.

The phrase institutional neutrality, in this case, rescues no one.

On the contrary, it makes the act more disgraceful.

Neutrality is a just principle.

But neutrality is not preserved by shutting the door on an author.

It is not preserved by declaring a cultural event political without proving it.

It is not preserved by taking a false status, turning it into a label, and then using that label to justify exclusion.

Neutrality without factual truth is not neutrality.

It is arbitrariness with a seal.

It is fear dressed as rule.

It is petty power granting itself the right to filter thought.

That is what makes the Kuçovë case more serious than it first appears.

Because it does not speak only about one mayor.

It speaks about a type of power scattered across the country.

A small, provincial, anxious power that speaks in the vocabulary of a republic and thinks with the reflexes of a committee.

A power frightened not by ignorance, but by thought.

A power that does not blush at its own cultural poverty, but trembles before a word it cannot control.

A power that does not see the library as a refuge of knowledge, but as territory to be guarded against the undesirable author.

That is why this episode is larger than Kuçovë itself.

Albania speaks every day about the European Union.

Edi Rama speaks of clusters, negotiations, standards, summits, modernization, the diaspora, a developed country.

On the screen, you hear the language of openness.

On the ground, you see the hand of prohibition.

At the summit, English is spoken.

In the office, they still think in the language of banning.

That contrast strips propaganda to the bone, European décor on the surface, censorial reflex in practice.

Stalin City is no longer called Stalin City.

It is called Kuçovë.

But a new name does not, by itself, extinguish an old mentality.

And when a municipality is afraid of a book entering the library of its own town, the issue is not the book.

The issue is a power that has still not learned to live without the censor’s reflex.

A public library exists precisely because the state has no right to decide which beliefs are admissible and which are not.

It exists so that a city may live with the book, with thought, with disagreement, with the author, and with freedom.

The moment a library excludes the author, the city falls back into fear.

Only fear makes a book presentation look like a threat.

Only fear makes the presence of an author seem intolerable.

Only fear turns the library from the home of the book into an annex of the office.

The damage does not stop with one man, and it does not end with one town.

Today one author is excluded.

Tomorrow a scholar.

The day after a journalist.

Then anyone who fails to please the office enough.

That is how democracy is damaged: not only by a great dictator, but also by a minor administrator who mistakes public office for the right to filter thought.

I did not ask for privilege.

I did not ask for special treatment.

I asked for nothing outside the law.

I asked only this: that the book be treated as a book, the author as an author, and the citizen as a free citizen.

The reply I received does not refuse only a request.

It refuses that distinction itself.

A power that loses that distinction has already lost its measure.

A democracy is not damaged by the book that enters the library.

It is damaged by the fear that keeps the book outside it.

The issue is not the author.

The issue is the power that, in order to protect its own comfort, is willing to turn the library from a refuge of the book into a mechanism of exclusion.

Arian Galdini