MOVEMENT TO BAN OR BURN BOOKS GAINS MOMENTUM

Although we just barely survived our hangover from the previous election, we are again ready to embark on a new electoral journey in 2022. Primaries around the middle of the year, and a hotly contested midterm election scheduled for November. The issues are being developed while many of us are still asleep. In most states, aggressive gerrymandering set the parameters, and political action committees are digging in in support of a set of policy concerns sold as essential values for the survival of the country. The current focus is on a renewed interest in public education. What began as a misplaced concern with Critical Race Theory (CRT) (see my blog entry of July 13, 2021) morphed into opposition to mask mandates and other Covid-19 measures, and presently into a movement to ban "objectionable books" from school libraries and curricula, including social justice, gender, race and related history. We have even reached the point when newly elected school board members openly suggest that, in addition to removing dozens of books from library shelves, literature they reject as reprehensible ought to be burned. By essentially promoting thought control, we are slowly beginning to descent further into the quicksand of authoritarianism. Calls for book burning came from two school board members in Spotsylvania county, Virginia, following the election of Glenn Youngkin to governor. The election turned on parental control of school curricula after former governor Terry McAuliffe declared: "I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach." Youngkin retorted that he would ban CRT on his first day in office. He also ran an ad featuring a local mother who tried to get "Beloved," the Pulitzer prize winning novel by Toni Morrison, removed from her son's A.P. English curriculum, claiming the book contained "some of the most explicit material you can imagine." This, of course, is true because the book depicts the horrors of slavery, which some parents would rather their children don't learn about. School board member Rabih Abuismail, supported by another member, Kirk Twigg, exclaimed that just removing books like this was not enough - "We should throw those books in a fire." The emergence of traditionally a-political school boards into the election year dialogue grew out of contentious, sometimes venomous, meetings dominated by parents opposed to regulations generated by the Covid-19 pandemic. School board members were routinely targeted, and ultimately threatened to be tried for treason for "poisoning the minds of children," when the discussion mutated into full-scale parental control issues. Unsupportive existing board members were being recalled in multiple states, while replacements appeared ready to take over, winning across the board, financially supported by national organizations like the "1776 Project PAC," which opposes CRT in education and which favors a more "patriotic curriculum." One of their slogans read: "The left is coming for our kids." It is not terribly surprising that in the heat of the moment, or for political expediency, the topic of book burning tends to emerge. In state after state books are being removed from circulation in response to parental objections. In Texas a school district even demanded that teachers using a book on the Holocaust must provide books with "an opposing perspective." At a time when burning books might appear as ignorant symbolic activities, since their content is usually still available on social media, the act itself sets a dangerous precedent. History is replete with similar acts designed to eradicate unwanted information or instigate unmistakable attempts at rewriting history. Book burning has a long and dark history, tied to censorship and oppressive regimes, most famously the one in Nazi Germany, led by Adolf Hitler. On May 10, 1933, Fascist university students burned upward of 25,000 books on the Opern Platz in Berlin.These included works by Jewish authors like Albert Einstein, and those "corrupting influences" like Ernest Hemingway. Goebbels spoke at the event, telling the students: "You do well at this late hour to entrust to the flames the intellectual garbage of the past." (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.) More recently, in 2006, "The Diary of Anne Frank" was burned in Pretzien, Germany, at a far-right summer festival. In this country, in 1956, on two occasions, books by psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich were burned, overseen by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. In Drake, North Dakota, its school board had objectionable books thrown into the school furnace, including 32 copies of "Slaughterhouse Five" by Kurt Vonnegut and 60 copies of "Deliverance" by James Dickey. And in 2001, Harry Potter books were targets at of at least six book burnings. Parents occupying positions on local school boards want to control what their kids are being taught. Sometimes this desire leads to a contortion of history, as it did in Texas when, in 2010, textbooks were essentially rewritten using a new set of standards: "The Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for Social Studies." These standards were adopted in the printing of 48 million textbooks, insuring that students in that state would receive a vastly different view of history than those in most other states. Sometimes entire nations rewrite their own history, and destroy materials depicting their verifiable past. China is doing that right now. Hungary and Poland are beginning that process incrementally. They can, because revisionists are in control. As George Orwell wrote in "1984": "Who controls the past controls the future, and who controls the present controls the past." As historical content is being "reinterpreted" or "sanitized" to eliminate uncomfortable historic truths from adoption in our curricula, we are wasting significant teaching opportunities. In the words of one observer: "We should learn to get past our discomfiture and use the warts of our past as tools for a less blemished future." (Michael Rosenbaum, "Rewriting history and the pursuit of ignorance," The Hill, Feb. 26, 2015). Parents should certainly have control over the quality of their kids' education. However, they should not be empowered to erase or sanitize factual content and turn the process into a partisan political agenda item. Politicizing curricula and attempts at erasing unwanted information, be it by burning books or replacing their subject matter, are historically precursors to an autocratic future. Theo Wierdsma