I grew up with stories about banned books. My father, an Argentine immigrant, had a friend who joked that the military dictatorship in their home country banned chemistry textbooks because they contained the word “agitation.” Another friend, whose daughter narrowly escaped death at the hands of the dictatorship, used to tell the story of the frantic night when he learned the death squads were coming: helping her escape the country, then frenziedly passing any “subversive” books to friends willing to hide them.
He sounded saddest describing the books he never got back.
During my childhood in California, these stories were just stories—things that, in the words of Sinclair Lewis, “can’t happen here.” But watching book bans spread across the US, I fear they are a warning of what the future holds if we do not support the members of our community who are on the frontline of this battle and elect local officials who will oppose this dangerous rising tide.
The military dictatorship in Argentina banned hundreds of books, from The Little Prince to Basic Concepts of Modern Mathematics. Upon taking power, they set fire to one and a half million volumes.
They sought to create an Argentina rooted in the “Christian moral values” which had produced the “western and Christian world.” They wanted to remake the Argentine mind from the inside. Their “National Reorganization Process” disappeared, tortured, and murdered 30,000 citizens, but it also took on literature and the schools—the tools, they claimed, of subversives aiming to undermine the country.
These attacks on books and education were born from the fact that their ideas were never going to win elections. Their arguments could not survive exposure to critical thinking and the freedom to read.
Schools, they claimed, had been captured by subversives who offered “biased education” and “fomented corruption and pornography.” Sound familiar? Right wing activists in the US have been talking about the supposed liberal bias of education—from Critical Race Theory “indoctrination” in elementary schools to “cancel culture” in universities—for years. The Heritage Foundation published an op-ed describing Anne Frank’s Diary (a graphic-novel adaptation of the book) as “pornographic” for using the words of the original.
Book banners have been at the forefront of this movement. A majority of banned books focus on race or sexuality, threatening the purported natural order of the “western and Christian world.” Teachers are fired for reading them aloud, librarians for refusing to remove them from their shelves. Educators have been accused, in essence, of “fomenting pornography and corruption.” Laws are on the books in more than ten states allowing them to be prosecuted for making these titles accessible.
Activists disrupting a local school council meeting may seem like child’s play compared to burning books, but book banning has major allies in the Republican party. It is central to Project 2025, the blueprint for remaking the United States created by several Trump administration advisers—so much so that on page five, the plan calls for educators distributing banned books to be imprisoned and registered as sex offenders.
Project 2025 is the GOP’s plan for its own National Reorganization Process. It outlaws anything deemed pornography, which book bans have proven includes any mention of same-sex relationships. It punishes schools for accurately teaching history. It ends birthright citizenship, restricts voting rights, vows to spy on citizens and target journalists and protestors with federal law enforcement. And it was created by people with the ear of Donald Trump, who has mused about death squads and promised to be a dictator on “Day One” of his term.
The candidate has clarified that he would be dictator only for a day. The military dictatorship also claimed that it would happily relinquish power when Argentina had been re-educated into a society that could manage a “healthy democracy.”
If it seems alarmist—unthinkable—to imagine anything as bad as the Argentine dictatorship happening here, I understand; but four years ago, it was unthinkable that a mob of armed rioters would break into the capitol to try to nullify the election. Two years ago, it was unthinkable that the Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade.
So, I beg you: prove me alarmist. Look up who’s running for school board before you go to the polls tomorrow, and vote for the candidates against book bans. Let your librarian know you have their back. Because the freedom to read is just the first thing the book banners want to take away from us.
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