No, you don't get to read what you want. Got that?
It's not book burning yet, but don't think it can't go there.
By Morgaan Sinclair, Ph.D. for PolitiSage
Above is a photograph—one of many—of a widespread, coordinated national event in Nazi Germany, arguably the largest nationwide book burning in history. As the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum writes:
Beginning on May 10, 1933, Nazi-dominated student groups carried out public burnings of books they claimed were “un-German.” The book burnings took place in 34 university towns and cities. Works of prominent Jewish, liberal, and leftist writers ended up in the bonfires. The book burnings stood as a powerful symbol of Nazi intolerance and censorship.
This was, of course, an attempt at mind control in its most embarrassingly obvious incarnation. But the Nazis weren’t ashamed at all. They thought they were right, so they didn’t care what they did to people’s minds, and they didn’t care what they thought about it.
Whose thinking they targeted—that of the Jews, particularly—presaged the targeting of their right to draw breath at all. And that’s something to remember.
Today’s stunning surge in book bannings looks mild by comparison—until you realize who and what Radical Right Christofascism is really trying to suppress when they pull books off the shelf. And they, like the Nazis before them, are unphased by the exposure of their naked attempt to mind-control the whole country. They think they’re right, and they don’t care what you think or want.
They have decided they know better than you, and they will make these decisions for you, whether you like it or not.
PEN America has a handy chart so you can be painfully aware of what you’re not allowed to access in a significant portion of the public libraries in the United States. PEN will publish an updated list this summer. At the moment, this is the most recent chart:
Like Ron DeSantis’s infamous “Don’t Say Gay” laws in Florida, an attack on access to books is an attack on free speech as well as freedom of information. And, as the chart above shows, the targeting by the Radical Right in its current representation is non-cis-gendered people and themes, people of color, rights and rights activism, and characters who aren’t Christian. Jews hover in the background as possible victims who may be dragged forth with targets—stars of David—pinned to their sleeves at any moment should the pool of current targets start to dry up.
One of the implications of this chart is that in post-Roe America, people of color and non-cis-gendered people have replaced pro-choice women as the primary targets for enemy creation by the Radical Right. The targeting of people of color, who were enslaved by our ancestors for four centuries—continues and has increased since the death of George Floyd and the highly visible emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Dr. Jerrold R. Post, the late forensic psychiatrist who, for 22 years, was the leading terrorist-profiler for the CIA, once wrote that all religious states—like Israel and Saudi Arabia and Iran—must have two enemy types: the first type will comprise one or more external enemies; the other, one or more internal enemies. If a religious state doesn’t have both types of enemies, it cannot sustain its legitimacy since it is wobbly anyhow, due to its noninclusive nature.
For example, Iran’s external enemies are Israel and Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia; its internal enemies are Ismai’li Sevener Shi’a Muslims and women. Post cites women as the most frequent internal enemy of religious states as they are the least able to fight back. That doesn’t say a lot for the noble courage of religious states, which are fascistic—and therefore male-dominated, as fascism always is—to begin with.
Make no mistake. The United States is now a religious state, dominated, in the legal sense, by a Radical Right Supreme Court, so Post’s rules now apply.
There is never any dearth of external enemies for the United States, with China and Russia topping the list right now, as they perennially do.
Internally, however, the Radical Right, using its execrable Supreme Court, has re-incarcerated women in the forced-birth life cycle that always existed before the coming of reliable birth control. As soon as birth control became available, there were attempts by the Radical Right to limit it or ban it altogether. Those attempts failed.
Abortion, which became legal when Roe v Wade struck down several Texas laws criminalizing abortion in 1973, then became the target of the Radical Right. Abortion made it possible for women to enter and remain in the work force during the entirety of the two and a half decades most women had previously had to dedicate to child-rearing. This changed the balance of power—financial power, corporate power, and political power—tilting it towards equality from an almost pure state of male dominance. For the moment, women are forced back into this archaic forced-birth life cycle.
But the Radical Right has noticed a disturbing rise in openness by non-cis-gender people and in the prevalence of trans people operating visibly and audibly in the public sphere.
Ah!! Replacements targets—and just in time!!
Winning the abortion battle sent them into a frenzy as one of their primary targets had been momentarily disabled. The void was one that had to be filled!
These trans people and non-cis-gendered people became new primary targets of the Radical Right that thinks it has buried women’s choice. They were dragged into the limelight from a larger pool of perennial targets—gays, lesbians, queers and drag queens—who arguably commit far fewer crimes than their gun-toting militia cousins and school shooters who are virtually never represented in this group.
Look again at PEN’s chart, above, and you’ll see LGBTQ+ characters, as well as those representing people of color, at the top of list—a list that also includes books about human, racial, and women’s rights and rights activism that might teach people that the targeting of minorities and females might just possibly be wrong (she said acidly). Can’t have that! Then there’s sex, which seems to make the Radical Right nervous even when it’s vanilla.
These, according to the American Library Association, were the most banned books in America in 2022.
All of these books fall into the categories the ALA tells us are the most targeted ones of all.
Added to this accounting is the catalog of the 50 most banned books in recent history. Peruse this list, and you find among its number:
A Farewell to Arms, 1984, all of the Harry Potter books, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Alice in Wonderland, Lord of the Flies, the endlessly challenged anti-racist social conscience book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Beloved, The Kite Runner, The Bluest Eye, The Canterbury Tales — yes, I know, it’s a shock — The Color Purple, The Catcher in the Rye, The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, The Grapes of Wrath, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Hate You Give, The Satanic Verses, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, To Kill a Mockingbird, Ulysses, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Well of Loneliness, The DaVinci Code, Operation Dark Heart, Lolita, and In Cold Blood.
Read them all before they’re kindling.
We’ll be staying in touch about this.