{"id":6940,"date":"2012-01-31T00:10:15","date_gmt":"2012-01-31T08:10:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=6940"},"modified":"2012-01-31T00:10:16","modified_gmt":"2012-01-31T08:10:16","slug":"republican-book-burners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2012\/01\/31\/republican-book-burners\/","title":{"rendered":"Republican Book Burners"},"content":{"rendered":"

Images of Fahrenheit 451 come to mind, so I imagine today\u2019s Republicans will not be the last book burners.  Supply-side pseudo-Christians burned the great Library of Alexandria.  The Nazis burned books that did not support their devious ways.  Here in the US, we have the Republican party, and sadly, Joe McCarthy was not the last,<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\"31BookBurning\"During the height of the Red Scare, as Joseph McCarthy crusaded against all things Communist, including literature, Dwight D. Eisenhower famously urged citizens: \u201cDon’t join the book burners. Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship<\/strong>.\u201d <\/p>\n

It\u2019s a new century, but the xenophobic misgivings of a few Republicans in key positions has led to the banishment of Mexican-American Studies in Arizona\u2019s public schools<\/strong>.  In 2010 lawmakers John Huppenthal and Tom Horne drafted HB 2281<\/a> which decreed that state-run schools were to exclude \u201cany courses or classes that. . .are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group\u201d or \u201cadvocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.\u201d <\/p>\n

Despite the fair-minded rhetoric, this legislation was passed in a state where \u201cillegals\u201d from Mexico are frequently held up by Republican politicians as a menace to society, albeit superficially indistinguishable from the many latinos who immigrated legally or were born in America<\/strong>.  And since the list of verboten books<\/a> includes works by Mumia Abu Jamal, Howard Zinn and Winona La Duke<\/strong>, the word \u201cethnic\u201d takes on unsavory political undertones.<\/p>\n

The bill even goes as far as to conflate teachers of ethnic studies with terrorists plotting to \u201cpromote the overthrow of the United States government.\u201d<\/strong>… [emphasis added<\/em>]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Inserted from <The Nation<\/a>><\/p>\n

There is no excuse for this racist Republican war against ideas.  They must be kept out of power, because a government that censors thought is a Reich, not a Republic.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Images of Fahrenheit 451 come to mind, so I imagine today\u2019s Republicans will not be the last book burners.  Supply-side pseudo-Christians burned the great Library of Alexandria.  The Nazis burned books that did not support their devious ways.  Here in the US, we have the Republican party, and sadly, Joe McCarthy was not the last, […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6940"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6940\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}