The Death of the Library
The Death of the Library
As the Marxists ram their equity ideas into all institutions, libraries are a critical target.
Eileen F. Toplansky - SEPTEMBER 29, 2023
As the Marxists ram their equity ideas into all institutions, libraries are a critical target. Consequently, "progressives and leftists must put public libraries at the top of [their] organizing agendas." To that end, they will offer resources to essentially transform libraries into indoctrination centers instead of places of learning.
The president of the American Library Association, Emily Drabinski, is a "self-described Marxist lesbian who openly posts 'in support of sexually exposing children, union-led political strife, socialist politicians, and libraries pushing explicit and far-left material on unwilling taxpayers.' In one 2021 lecture ... she stated that 'queerness includes the subversion of those kinds of normal family types' meaning husbands, wives, and children."
In 2012, Fred Lucas wrote, "[L]ike many national organizations, the American Library Association has long been captured by the Left. It postures as a champion of free speech rights, but in fact it twists the ideas of censorship and free speech to meet the ideological requirements of left-wing activism."
ALA has established the 'Social Responsibility Roundtable,' the 'Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Roundtable,' the 'Rainbow List' of the best gay books, and it bestows the Stonewall Award each year for best gay-themed books. This certainly seems like political advocacy.
But "while bemoaning supposed censorship, the ALA has opposed attempts to have more Christian-themed books in school libraries, and also has rejected attempts by members to take stands against real book banning and anti-free speech threats in other countries."
As articulated by Dave Seminara, the left conveniently twists the meaning of book-banning.
The Left has been collectively hyperventilating about 'book bans.' No one should be surprised that liberals are redefining the word 'ban' in an effort to stigmatize conservative politicians leading the movement for parental rights in education.
The first definition of the word 'banned' in the Merriam-Webster dictionary is 'to prohibit especially by legal means.' So when Americans hear claims from the Left that, say, Florida governor Ron DeSantis is 'banning books,' they often incorrectly take those words at face value, assuming that the books have been removed not just from school libraries but also public libraries and bookstores.
This is simply not true.
Moreover, "while many other library associations around the world condemned the Cuban regime's closure of libraries and jailing of dissident librarians, the American Library Association (ALA) never did." It can be attributed to the fact that the ALA has "long been notoriously liberal."
In fact, "progressive librarians already practice a form of book-banning by not ordering books seen as 'conservative,' ordering very few copies of them, or not featuring them prominently compared with liberal titles."
Then there is the lone conservative librarian who asserts that her "entire profession seems to have gone to hell in a hand basket and it appears that [she is] among no other conservative leaning MLIS librarians within [her] public library system."
The old days of balanced public library collections which offer something for everyone and every opinion appears to have vanished. Right leaning content has become stamped with a label of unfit due to 'misinformation' or has been 'fact checked' or absurdly donned 'hate-speech.'
In fact, right-leaning content's censorship "is absolute [emphasis mine] in that such books have been denied entry into ... collections. Such books are simply not purchased ... and thus never make it to [the] shelves. The taxpaying public has been fully denied access to these materials. This ... is unacceptable and is potentially illegal."
Shockingly, some of these titles are not even available though national Inter-Library Loan portals, indicating that these titles are available in ZERO public libraries across the entire United States!
As an example within the health freedom genre, [the] library system has only vaccine positive books. Any book that is well researched and . . . critical of vaccines, the CDC the FDA, and covid narrative, are 100% censored.
Thus, as the conservative librarian explains, her system "refuses to order Naomi Wolf's new book, C.J. Hopkins' new collected pandemic essays, Edward Dowd's new book, Peter Breggin's new book, etc. ... not even J.B. Handley's book about how he used a letter-board to teach his son how to communicate despite severe autism."
In fact, with libraries like these, who needs to burn books?
Dennis Prager emphasizes that young Americans are not taught about evil because most schools "[c]oncentrate on teaching about racism, sexism, preferred pronouns, homophobia, transphobia, LGBTQIA+[.]" Most students have no clue about the murderous regimes of communist countries. They never learn of the destructive leftist ideology that is now virtually running all educational institutions.
This desire to eradicate books is not limited to the U.S. For example, Jillian Becker established The Institute for the Study of Terrorism.
The Institute closed down due to lack of funding a decade before 9/11 and the collected archive covering a range of Soviet-backed terror groups around the world was transferred over to the University of Leicester. Now it's gone missing ... as the university has made the shift over to politically convenient wokeness. And Jillian Becker fears the worst.
In fact, Becker surmises that "[w]hat is most pertinent to contemporary research and teaching these days is 'ethnicity, sexuality and diversity.'"
Becker blames the "woke academics" at the University of Leicester who "threw away the archive of the Institute for the Study of Terrorism (IST) — compiled painstakingly over many years and often at personal risk by [her] and [her] fellow researchers — as unwanted trash."
She concludes "that the archive 'recording thousands of instances of the savage crime of terrorism — almost all of it by organizations on the Left, with support from the USSR and some from Communist China, through the Cold War years 1968-1990 — was an affront to the ideology of the 'woke.'"
Moreover, she sees this as part of a larger great erasure of information, ideas, and the entire Western past. In fact, "[m]ost universities in the Western world now are conscientiously trying to erase history."
It mirrors the deliberate destruction of historical statues.
But "[w]hile the University of Leicester can't find the archive documenting Communist atrocities, its librarians promote the original papers of Karl Marx[.]"
And, finally, Mark Tapson highlights the shocking information that Canadian public school libraries are clearing shelves through "equity-based" book-weeding.
Consequently, "The Diary of a Young Girl by Holocaust victim Anne Frank, the massively popular Harry Potter series, and the Newberry Medal-winning novel Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry about racial conflict in 1930s Mississippi are some notable examples of books that 10th grader Reina Takata can no longer find in her public high school library in Ontario, Canada. Why not? [It is] because those titles were culled as part of a new 'equity-based' weeding process implemented by the Peel District School Board (PDSB)[.]"
While it is customary to dispose of damaged or outdated books, a much more insidious action is evident.
It appears that "this new process emphasizing the leftist buzzwords 'equity' and 'inclusion' ... have led some schools to remove thousands of books simply because they were published in 2008 or earlier" (emphasis mine).
Furthermore, Lucien X. Polastron, in Books on Fire, "reveals the danger facing libraries with the digitalization of books threatening both the existence of the physical paper book and the very idea of reading for free."
Tapson warns that "anyone who cares about passing [the West's literary heritage] on to the next generation should begin collecting and hoarding physical copies of classic books in home libraries, because ... school libraries, public libraries, and bookstores today by and large no longer see themselves as the caretakers of that civilizational legacy but as the agents of a revolution against it."
Indeed, we should heed his advice as this new iteration of libricide[1] envelops our society.
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[1] Rebecca Knuth. Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century. Praeger, 2003.
ORIGINAL >
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/09/the_death_of_the_library.html