JAB wrote:
Ruth Ben-Ghiat @ruthbenghiat
Fear and hatred of books is an authoritarian malady shared by Hitler
(burned them), Pinochet (discarded them, burned them), Mao (burned
them), etc., and now the GOP.
@swalker_7
DEVELOPING: New College of Florida dumped hundreds of library books
this afternoon.
The school also emptied the college's Gender and Diversity Center,
tossing hundreds of their books.
https://x.com/ruthbenghiat/status/1824143485341143260
Small peanuts compared to what your side has been doing for decades:
Burning the past
January 14th, 2012
https://blog.reaction.la/culture/burning-the-past/
We are in the greatest era of book burning ever. Libraries
systematically destroy their older books, without allowing staff to go
through the books and sort out the valuable ones, the ones that would
bring enormous prices on Amazon.com.
This destruction allows a new past to be written, a demonized and hate
filled past.
Now one might suppose that this destruction is unintentional, a mere
result of perverse incentives, though what is the incentive that compels
people to destroy books that would bring high prices on Amazon? But that
Google gives limited access to our past, and that books are becoming
lefter and lefter makes this destruction suspicious. For example the disturbingly politically incorrect Hakayit Abdullah by Munshi Abdullah
is available on google only in snippet view. Why only snippet view?
The translation was published in 1874, which makes it well and truly out
of copyright everywhere in the world. Google only gives full access to
a tiny handful of past texts. One can get around this by looking up
texts on google book search, then downloading them from the internet
archive. Accessing our past is not criminalized, nor even particularly difficult, but it is systematically discouraged.
This restriction is not obviously politically selective. It is more of
a wholesale restriction on the past. Both "Froudacity", the left wing, politically correct view on decolonization by a black man affirmative
actioned to prominence, and "The Bow of Ulysses", a eulogy and funeral
speech for colonialism that looked back to the good old days when
colonialists were free to be pirates and brigands, are available only in preview, though of course, one can get them from the Internet Archive.
The author of "Froudacity" is also the originator of what we now call
Ebonics - the idea that black speech is not inferior, not less capable
of communicating ideas and instructions, but merely different - a
proposal that merely has to be stated for its absurdity to be apparent,
and merely has to be contradicted to create the most astonishing
outrage, for to contradict it implies that blacks are, on average, not
merely less literate but less verbal, less capable of human speech, and therefore, on average, significantly less human, speech being the
defining human characteristic.
"The Bow of Ulysses", on the other hand, endorses the old colonialism, nostalgically recalling the days when Britain was not an empire, but
rather British colonialists were pirates and brigands, who robbed,
conquered and eventually ruled, gradually making the transition from
mobile banditry to stationary banditry without the British government
paying much attention. In "The Bow of Ulysses" Froude condemns
nineteenth century imperialism as unworkably left wing, and inevitably
leading to the destruction of the British empire, and thus the ruin of
the subjects of the British empire, all of which ensued as he envisaged,
while the author of "Froudacity" endorsed imperialism.
(Since I posted this, people have reported to me that they can access
"The Bow of Ulysses" through Google, but I cannot, even when using Tor,
or using a Singaporean proxy)
If we read "Froudacity" and "the Bow of Ulysses", we discover the
remarkable and surprising fact that the imperialists, the ones that
upgraded Queen Victoria from Queen to empress, were the same bunch as
those then and now preaching ebonics. The imperialists, those
advocating British Empire, were the left, and the colonialists were the
right. And the colonialists correctly predicted that if this were to
go on, we would get the left that we now have - one of the many strange
facts one encounters if one reads old books. Reading the works of and
about Garnet Wolsely we find that when the British subjugated the Boers,
this was the left conquering the right, with a view to eventually
producing today's black ruled South Africa, which the right predicted
would be the way that it is in fact turning out to be.
The Google suppression of the past is not in itself directly politically biased, old left texts are not obviously privileged above old right
texts, but it is politically biased in that the texts of the past are
all non left by modern standards, and tend to discredit the politically
correct version of history, so if you suppress old books on the basis of
age without regard to their political content, you are suppressing the
non left, since old books are mostly non left, and new books are mostly
left.
Kim Standley Robinson, moves from far left in 1992 to frothing at the
mouth insane left in 1997:
In his 1992 fiction book "Red Mars", regrettably over-idealistic environmentalists harm people who are trying to develop and settle Mars,
harm people who are trying to make it habitable to humans.
In his 1997 fiction book, "Antarctica", evil developers seeking to
develop and settle Antarctica harm idealistic environmentalists
In "Lucifer's Hammer", written in 1978 by Niven and Pournelle,
civilization collapses, there is famine, and people start eating people
The cannibals are not especially black, even though realistically, it is
likely that the cannibals would be disproportionately black. The only
guy who suggest that there might be a correlation between cannibalism
and blackness is the horribly prejudiced ignorant hick.
In Lucifer's hammer the authors are careful to make the proportion of
blacks among the cannibal army exactly and precisely the same proportion
as blacks are a percentage of the US population, nonetheless today the
book is deemed utterly outrageous and horribly reactionary for having
any black cannibals whatsoever. Observe that in today's collapse of civilization books, all cannibals are white.
"Clone High" 2002-2003 is a cartoon series. It ridicules political correctness. In episode 11, "Snowflake Day; A very special holiday"
Christmas has been banned, replaced by a silly made up festival
"Snowflake day". Snowflake Day is celebrated in large part by telling
everyone how hate filled and exclusionary Christmas was - which of
course reveals that Snowflake day, not Christmas, is hate filled and exclusionary, reveals the intolerance of "tolerance". Again, I don't
see any recent mainstream works making such criticism.
All the clones in Clone High have foster parents instead of real
parents. Clone JFK has two daddies, which family, consisting of a
teenage heterosexual boy, and two male homosexuals, is presented as
vile, disgusting, ugly, perverse, unnatural, and disturbing, ridiculing
the political correctness of "Heather has two mommies". His two daddies display stereotypical gay behavior, which stereotypes these days would
be deemed hateful and hurtful.
Kage Baker's company series, for example "The Life of the World To
Come", supposes that over the next three hundred years, political
correctness will become ever more severe and oppressive - the background
is "If this goes on". In 2004 it was possible for novelists to condemn political correctness as oppressive and still get published by
mainstream publishers. No longer.
The science fiction writer John Ringo is pretty far right, as is obvious
in his earlier books. In "The Last Centurion" published in 2008 by a mainstream publisher, a military coup saves the US from the excesses of democracy. Like Sulla, though with considerably less bloodshed, the
military officers then restore the old republic and resign. The book optimistically promises that this restoration, unlike Sulla's, will
last. Could he publish that today? Let us look at what he is
publishing today:
In "Live Free or Die", published 2010, he tries very hard to contain his
right wing slant, and play straight down the middle with obligatory bows
to political correctness, piously endorsing the official line with
amusingly transparent insincerity. Unfortunately, he committed the unpardonable sin of a few lines about stereotypical blondes.
So, alas, the sequel ("Citadel", published 2011) has to have as its main character a counter stereotypical blonde female. In the sequel, the
rhetoric about freedom mysteriously mutates into anticolonialist, or decolonist, rhetoric, perhaps because merely having a counter
stereotypical blonde as main character is insufficient penance for
making a joke about blondes.
Writers are steadily moving left - each writer as time passes by
produces works that are far the left of his previous works, reflecting
what is politically acceptable at that time. The early Keith Laumer
ridiculed democracy. The later Keith Laumer did not. In "The Governor
of Glave", published 1963, he seems to take it for granted that everyone
knows that democracy is a corrupt system run by people who are foolish, ignorant and evil. The planet Glave is what we would now call a
terraformed planet. Earthlike conditions are maintained by some big high technology superscience machinery. The elite rules over their
inferiors, but are getting tired of providing their inferiors with
bread, circuses, and earthlike conditions. Most of the elite has left
for a frontier world less infested with inferior welfare parasites.
There is a democratic coup against the remaining elite. Finding
democracy even less attractive, most of the remaining elite attempt to
leave and/or go on Galt strike. The evil democrats refuse to let them
leave, and force them to work under armed guard.
The heroic Retief arranges for their escape. As they escape, we see terraforming collapsing and the planet starting to revert to its natural inhospitable condition.
Similarly, in Keith Laumer's "The prince and pirate" 1964, the Prime
minister and his party are vile treacherous cowardly scum. The prince
is kingly and the pirate is bold and martial. Retief makes a deal
between the prince and the pirate, which results in the prime minister
being killed, something unpleasant happening to his party, and the
prince becoming an absolute monarch.
The nearest thing to an anti democratic novel in recent times is "The
Last Centurion", where the military restrain the excesses of democracy -
but they then, like Sulla, leave politics so that democracy can
continue, whereas the prince in "The prince and pirate" permanently ends democratic politics by killing quite a lot of politicians. We just
don't see novels that unashamedly support technocracy, monarchy, or
aristocracy any more.
"The Last Centurion" is far to the left of "The prince and the Pirate",
"Live Free or Die" far to the left of "The Last Centurion", and
"Citadel" far to the left of "Live Free or Die". I am pretty sure that anything written by John Ringo is as right wing as anything a major
author dare publish, and what he publishes indicates that the rightmost
thing that a major author can publish gets further left every year.
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