Mark Karlin: Burning Banned Books is the Next Step in the White Fragility March Toward Fascism
Greg Abbott is asserting authoritarian rule in Texas, and engaging in skirmishes of a new civil war. Gage Skidmore)
November 12, 2021
MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH
As Henry Giroux explained in a Truthout commentary, “GOP’s Banning of Books and Attack on Teachers Expose the Party’s Rising Fascism,” that warns “The attacks on suppressed histories of racism represent an updated modern civil war”:
The Republican Party’s view of “patriotic education” draws directly from the playbook of previous dictatorships with their hatred of reason, truth, science, evidence and the willingness to use language as a source of dehumanization and violence. This is a language that operates in the interests of manufactured fear while producing a void filled with despair. This is a form of apartheid pedagogy that embraces the cult of manufactured ignorance, freezes the moral imagination, erases unsettling forms of historical memory and works to discredit dissent among individuals and institutions that call attention to social problems
Sure enough a Pennsylvania school board member, Rabih Abuismail, recently urged “throw those books in a fire,” referring to texts that his school board had just unanimously banned.
No Republican governor exemplifies the perilous move toward book banning and burning than Texas Governor Greg Abbott. This week he announced that he was ordering a criminal probe into pornography in schools, after issuing two letters railing against such alleged books. It appears to be the latest cultural wars foray, financed by far-right Republican funders, into energizing the racial fragility of the white GOP base.
According to the New Civil Rights Movement,
South Carolina’s far right Republican Governor Henry McMaster has ordered an LGBTQ book for teenagers banned from school libraries, calling it obscene, “deeply disturbing,” “manifestly inappropriate,” and even “pornographic.” He has also ordered law enforcement to investigate, claiming the book’s very existence in school libraries “is likely illegal” under state law.
It might be that an organization such as ALEC is coordinating this attack on “liberal” education to mobilize rabid Republicans. It wouldn’t be the first time Neanderthal voters attacked books in schools, but the ground is more fertile now due to a generation raised on conspiracy theories. One just need look at Glenn Youngkin’s victory in Virginia, where his campaign weaponized a curriculum, Critical Race Theory, that is not taught in grammar and high schools.
A PBS article details massive book burnings in the early stages of Nazism in Germany:
On May 10, 1933, university students in 34 university towns across Germany burned over 25,000 books. The works of Jewish authors like Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud went up in flames alongside blacklisted American authors such as Ernest Hemingway and Helen Keller, while students gave the Nazi salute.
The article writes of the concerns of how the book burnings would lead to a despotic, violent government:
Walter Lippmann was one of the few journalists reporting on the Nazis who took the book burnings as an ominous sign of the Nazis' ultimate goal. "These acts symbolize the moral and intellectual character of the Nazi regime," he wrote. "For these bonfires are not the work of schoolboys or mobs but of the present German Government ... The ominous symbolism of [this act and] these bonfires is that there is a government in Germany which means to teach its people that their salvation lies in violence."
This indeed would be the likely outcome of rule by Trumpism, as Paul Gosar (R-AZ) previewed for us in his deadly tweet as he murdered AOC online. However, recent actual violence caused by the unleashing of the basest instincts of Trump followers is proof that the second Civil War is just a shot away, most notably on January 6. Just consider Kyle Rittenhouse and the killers of Ahmaud Arbery as specific examples.
In reality, the entire Trump administration and his post-election big lie have been facilitators of everything from synagogue bombings to the massacre in El Paso. Trump encourages violence to “defeat the enemy,” which consists of Democrats and non-whites.
Trump and his enablers poke the pig of hatred and create a community that sees violence as the only way to counter a fabricated existential threat to white fragility.
It is hard for Democrats, who generally value principle, to realize that the stakes are increasing every day that book banning and burning will lead to normalizing the hatred that turned “ordinary” Germans into Nazis, as “ordinary” Americans become apostles of violence setting the nation on a track to fascism.
The pieces are being assembled to seize power, as my colleague Hartmann recently explained, in a gradual coup that, when its gears are all working and in place, becomes a sudden descent into a nightmare of authoritarian rule.
Yes, it can begin with outlawing books in schools.
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