Firemen in Ray Bradbury’s novel “Fahrenheit 451”– the temperature at which paper burns – were charged with enforcing a ban on books by setting them ablaze.
Bradbury wrote his book during a red scare incited by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and was inspired by the book burnings in Nazi Germany and Austria in the 1930s.
“The books targeted for burning [in Germany] were those viewed as being subversive or as representing ideologies opposed to Nazism,” according to the book “Book Burning.” “These included books written by Jewish, communist, socialist, anarchist, liberal, pacifist, and sexologist authors, among others.”
The books burned initially included those of Karl Marx. They later included very many other others, such as Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, writers in French and English, and effectively any book that was not ardent in its support of Nazism.
In a campaign of cultural genocide, books were also burned by the Nazis en masse in occupied territories, according to “Books as Weapons.”
We would not compare the campaign to burn books in Nazi Germany with the calls for “parental choice” and charges of “pornography” now being made in the race for trustee seats on the Great Neck Library.
But two things should give us all pause.
No one in the 1930s thought a campaign started by the German Student Union to ban books in Germany would turn into an effort to destroy whole cultures. But it did.
More importantly, the calls for “parental choice” and charges of “pornography” being made in online chat rooms and through social media in 2022 are not taking place in isolation.
Far from it. The effort to bar books in Great Neck with phrases like “parental choice” and pornography” are part of a national movement to suppress ideas and civil rights.
Call it Christian nationalism, White Supremacy, Trumpism, or whatever you like– the movement aims to advance an authoritarian agenda. And the battlefield covers every level of government – from the presidency to boards governing libraries.
The same words are being used in campaigns across the country to restrict books and curricula, usually centered around race, gender and sexual orientation. This is not a coincidence.
The large majority of book bans underway today are not spontaneous, organic expressions of citizen concern,” according to PEN America, an association representing authors. “Rather, they reflect the work of a growing number of advocacy organizations that have made demanding censorship of certain books and ideas in schools part of their mission.
This can be seen in Florida with the “Don’t Say Gay” law imposed on schools and the banning of books in places like Florida and Texas that are considered “divisive” such as those teaching disturbing things about slavery, the Civil War and Jim Crow. T
One school district in Texas briefly banned the “Diary of Anne Frank,” the story of a young Jewish girl in hiding with her parents during the Holocaust.
The focus in the Great Neck Library race are books with LBGTQ themes and books that depict sex in any manner, even educationally.
The books they are calling “pornography” include award-winning bestsellers that are housed in libraries across the country.
“Some books about sex for tweens and teens describe how their bodies work,” a Great Neck author and journalist Wendy Wisner writes in a letter to the editor this week. “Sometimes, there are images of bodies and even of sex. This is not new and this is how sex education works.”
By the definition being used by Great Neck critics you could consider books on biology, encyclopedias and even the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to be pornographic.
The decision to carry books with this content and where to place them in a library should be up to professional librarians – not politically motivated parents who do not like LBGTQ people.
Wisner correctly points out that parents have a choice. If they don’t want their children to view these books, they can supervise them at the library.
Or they choose to not send their children to the library.
We just hope these parents take the same care in supervising what their children view on the internet and television as well as the children with whom they spend time.
Fortunately, residents have strong alternatives in choosing who to run a library with a $10 million budget that is larger than most villages’ with four branches that serve all of Great Neck and North New Hyde Park.
Current Board President Liman Mimi Hu favors putting library decisions in the hands of librarians.
“Questions such as where to place the books, what books we purchase and how to run programs are decided by library professionals,” Hu said.
But her opponent, Jessica Hughes, gave no such assurances.
“This is not about censorship, but we shouldn’t be promoting content that is divisive and exclusionary,” she said.
“The library director has a role, but that doesn’t mean the board absolves itself of content for what’s in children’s section, with parental consent,” she added.
Hu is also opposed by Christina Rusu, crime analyst for the New York Police Department and trustee candidate who emigrated from Romania.
Rory Lancman, a former New York State assemblyman and New York City councilman who was just appointed executive director of the LIPA Commission, is running with Hu.
He is both well-qualified to oversee the library’s $10 million budget and address the threat posed by those trying to censor what the library offers.
“I’ll be blunt: There is a movement in this country that exists here in Great Neck as well that wants to inject ideology and culture war into schools, libraries, and restrict our freedom to read, learn, study and think about issues we care about,” Lancman said. “There is no place in the Great Neck Library or any other library to restrict content based on topic if it makes you uncomfortable – LGBTQ, civil rights. There is a long history in this country, unfortunately to this day, of people trying to ban, restrict, remove books from our libraries.”
Lancman has also addressed the library’s dysfunction, reflected in a lawsuit filed by the library’s nominating committee against the full board for filling a board vacancy and the board’s lawsuit against the nominating committee in response.
This lawsuit raises the obvious question of why the Great Neck Library – unlike virtually every other governing body in Nassau County – needs a nominating committee in the first place.
Lancman is the right person to work with both sides to resolve the dispute if the nominating committee is allowed to continue.
We strongly endorse Lancman and Hu in the upcoming library board election.
This is the time to stop the contagion of censorship before it reaches 451 degrees.