Passage Summary: Governments that start by banning 'immoral' content eventually ban anything that challenges their control. This is why totalitarian states call anti-government books 'obscene.'

Conclusion: Totalitarian regimes label writings that might decrease public passivity as blasphemous or pornographic.

Reasoning: Regimes that censor for public morality eventually expand their censorship to include anything they perceive as a threat to their power.

Analysis: The historian is making a leap from a general rule about 'threats to power' to a specific example involving 'public passivity.' For this logic to work, the historian must assume that a reduction in public passivity actually constitutes a threat to the regime's power. Furthermore, the argument assumes that these totalitarian regimes are part of the group that censors based on public morality in the first place. Look for an answer that connects the specific behavior of the public to the regime's self-preservation instincts.