The United States defends in Ukraine, among other important things, its own military prestige, just as it does in the China Sea when it deploys its fleet in front of Taiwan.
But that same United States has an increasingly serious problem with its cultural prestige in the world, as evidenced by the fact that its own American Library Association (ALA) has had to ask for help this week to defend itself from the campaign that tries to ban certain books (increasingly) reach the shelves of your public and school libraries.
Librarians in the United States are asking readers around the world to support them in raising funds to enable them to fight in courts and school boards and to offer their members, often small, hard-pressed rural libraries, strategies practices to defend the books.
They make it clear that these are not spontaneous movements of parents concerned about their children's reading, but rather a movement directed by very specific political interests.
"Lists of books that should be banned from public and school libraries are an essential part of a political agenda," insists the ALA.
The political agenda of an increasingly larger sector of the Republican Party and of a group of billionaires with profoundly reactionary ideas,
According to the association, in the first eight months of this year, 681 attempts to ban the presence of books in public libraries and schools have been registered in the United States, attempts that affected 1,651 different titles.
In one year, no less than 137 censorship bills on book titles and topics have been presented in 36 state parliaments.
In general, it is about preventing young people between the ages of 14 and 18 (those who study in
high school
) from having access to books with “sexually explicit content”, “conflictive or divisive themes” (including racism), “ anti-police points of view”, “witchcraft and satanism” (within which Harry Potter books are included)… It is not surprising that the novel that has been on that infamous list for the longest time is
The Bluest Eye
, by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison (Blue Eyes; Editions B, 1994), which has been climbing positions, from 34th, back in 1999, to the first 10, in 2020. It is a hard novel: it deals with racism, incest and child abuse.
But
Blue Eyes
has not led any father to rape his daughter, but has helped some adolescents to report similar situations and ask for help.
As Irene Vallejo says in
El infinity en un reed
, “removing everything that seems inappropriate from books will not save young people from bad ideas.
On the contrary, we will make them unable to recognize them.”
More information
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“The unprecedented number of challenges we are seeing this year reflects coordinated efforts across the nation to silence marginalized voices and deprive all of us, young people in particular, of the opportunity to explore a world beyond the confines of experience. personal”, explains the president of the ALA.
“Efforts to censor entire categories of books that reflect certain voices and viewpoints show that the moral panic is not about children: it is about politics.”
That is the most important point of this whole matter.
It's not that many Americans have gone mad or winced at the avalanche of immorality attacking their young children.
No, those would be isolated cases, sad, but not dangerous.
What is happening in the US is dangerous because it is an organized and increasingly powerful movement.
May the campaign against book bans succeed, may the censors fail again and again, and may the United States once again be the country we have relied on for decades to defend free speech.
Margaret Atwood, the Canadian writer, one day explained this anguished feeling very well: "What was so splendor?".
Fortunately, going back to Irene Vallejo, we can always rely on reading: "We should not forget that the book of pages triumphed, to a large extent, because it favored clandestine, denied, non-consensual reading."
Praise be to the gods.
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