As I wrote recently for Insight, the online blog-and-Twit ecology have been working themselves into a fury that “right-wing religious nuts” are banning Holocaust classic Maus from schools. Book burning! Nazis! Censorship! Reeeeee!
There was just one problem: not a word of it was true.
Sure, the story suckered even me in for a day. But the truth quickly outed — for anyone who bothered to listen. The school hadn’t banned the book, they weren’t stopping students from reading it, it wasn’t taken off library shelves. All the school board did was remove it from the required reading list for 8th Grade students, moving it up to what they judged a more age-appropriate level.
But, weeks later, the story has become an idée fixe for “progressives”. Why do they continue to believe utterly in a long-debunked claim? (Hell, you could ask the same about every progressive nostrum, from “Russian collusion” to “socialism will work this time”.)
You could almost be excused for suspecting that they’re just trying to noisily distract attention from what they’re doing. From Dr. Seuss to Mark Twain, the left are banning, bowdlerising and disappearing books at a rate of knots. Especially if they’re written by white males. Y’know, like… well, most of the great books of the Western literary canon.
The Greater Essex County District School Board in the Windsor, Ont., area is supplanting its grade 11 literature curriculum, which up to now has featured great writers of the western canon such as Shakespeare and George Orwell, with a year-long program of Indigenous writers. The change has already been effected in eight of the district’s 15 schools.
In the Peel district as well, I am informed by a reader, the same transformation is in progress. It would be naïve to assume that these schools will remain anomalies for long. The “disappearing” of dead white European male writers, however magnificent their achievements, may well be normalized across Canada before long.
It is hard to overstate the alarming implications of this educational earthquake.
Banning Shakespeare might mean that young minds end up aesthetically malnourished, but it might — might — at least be excused on the poor grounds that Shakespeare is “hard to read”. But Orwell is famed for the clarity of his writing. So why ban Animal Farm?
For the same reason that Communist sympathisers in the British publishing industry tried to stop it being ever published in the first place.
It is from Orwell’s “Animal Farm” that young minds first grasp the nature of totalitarian evil, whether it arises from the left or the right, and understand the preciousness of their freedoms.
People today are all-too-ready to falsely spot “Nazis” anywhere and everywhere.
But the collapse of the Soviet Union did not shame left-wing intellectuals into embarrassment for their ideology. The utopian dream of human perfectability and equality of outcome under an all-powerful state persists and grows in the West. Today, on the 70th anniversary of its 1949 publication, Orwell’s novel “1984,” which exposes the inherent perils of Marxist ideology, is as worthy of study as it was at the height of the Cold War.
No wonder they don’t want kiddies to read it.
As the popular slogan goes, 1984 was a warning, not an instruction manual.
“I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive,” Orwell said, “but that something resembling it could arrive.” Has “something resembling it” arrived in the West? Is progressivism that “something”?
Spoiler alert: YES.
Cancel culture, “deplatforming”, “misinformation”, all are ideas of which 1984’s Party would thoroughly approve. Ditto, the panopticon surveillance state and fast-evolving “social credit” system. Meanwhile, analogs of the Memory Hole and the Two Minutes of Hate are around us every day on social and mainstream media. Consider the unhinged vilification of the Covington Kids or Kyle Rittenhouse. Even the mania for toppling statues features in 1984.
Orwell wrote, “[T]otalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences.”
The Epoch Times
And now we’re living them.
