Totalitarianism United States Arts Censorship Ny Times Op Ed

Opinion Book bans betoken the dangerous direction society is moving

(Jialun Deng for The Washington Mail service)

"First they burn books, then they kill people!"

That line often came to listen when I was living in the Islamic Republic of Islamic republic of iran, every time the regime closed a bookstore or a publishing business firm, every time information technology censored, banned, jailed or even killed authors. It never occurred to me that ane twenty-four hour period I would echo the same sentiment in a democracy, in my new home, the United states.

I'm aware that the U.s. is not Islamic republic of iran. Its government is not an Islamist regime, and information technology is non a totalitarian country. Merely totalitarian tendencies are unquestionably on the ascent inside segments of this country. We see this in the attempts to curtail women'south rights, in the rise in racism and antisemitism, and in the set on on ideas and imagination all-time exemplified in the banning of books.

Books are a threat to those who seek to rule through absolutism. Especially dangerous to the totalitarian mind-fix are slap-up works of fiction — such every bit Toni Morrison's "Dear" and Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale," both perennially challenged — because fiction is democratic in structure. Written well, information technology cannot be reduced to a preconceived message or ideology.

Good authors requite their fictional characters, even villains, their own voices. (Conversely, a bad author, like a dictator, imposes his own voice upon those of his characters, stifling them.) In this way, fiction becomes a space where readers can see people they might otherwise never encounter, create a dialogue with them, and become curious and find empathy with those who are different.

While teaching in Iran, I became vividly aware of how important this is.

Young people such equally my students, when deprived of contact with the globe, connected to it through its golden ambassadors: fine art, music and literature.

One pupil in particular keeps reappearing in my writing and talks. Her name was Razieh. She was a pocket-size, thin daughter with huge, dark optics, and we met at the university where I was her instructor. Her favorite author was Henry James. Once, when talking almost him, she said with a smile, "I think I am in honey!" She adored Catherine Sloper and Daisy Miller, two very different Jamesian protagonists, both rebels in their own ways.

When I left that university, I lost affect with Razieh. Years subsequently, another former student told me about beingness arrested in the 1980s, during the protests against the Cultural Revolution. While in jail, she had met Razieh. They reminisced about my classes and spent many hours talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Groovy Gatsby" and James'south "Washington Square."

"We had fun," she said. Fun? I wondered. There was a pause in our chat. "Y'all know," she finally said, "Razieh was executed."

I didn't know. Never when I was her teacher could I have imagined that Razieh would someday be in jail, thinking and talking nigh Henry James, pending her execution. But maybe jail was the kind of place to evoke James. He could non salvage Razieh from death. But he could remind her of life'due south beauties.

Information technology is alarming to think that American communities in 2022 are actively seeking to deprive people of the reading experiences for which my students in Iran paid such a heavy price. For I tin can tell yous: Book bans are canaries in coal mines — indicators of the direction in which a social club is moving.

In recent years, we have seen how truth is replaced by lies, and how dangerous a cultivated ignorance tin can be, especially when it is embraced by our political leaders and our loudest media commentators, those with the largest bullhorns. Book-banning is a form of silencing, and it is the next step along a continuum — one that I worry even in the United states of america presages a farther slide toward totalitarianism.

Information technology is essential that communities unite to resist this trend. I have been grappling with how this might be accomplished, particularly in places where bans are already underway. And what I keep coming back to is: Nosotros cannot be indifferent. We must read, and share, and press into the easily of students whatsoever books we believe it is young people'south right to run into.

I imagine subversive book groups connecting via the Internet and in schools, libraries and bookstores where people tin gather to read and debate. In some states, this is already occurring: From librarians and Blackness parents in Texas, to bookstore owners in Tennessee, to middle and high school students in Pennsylvania, to suburban moms nationwide, Americans are resisting. They are doing this because they know precisely what is at stake.

As Ray Bradbury in one case said: "You don't have to burn down books to destroy a culture. Merely get people to terminate reading them."

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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/14/azar-nafisi-book-bans-dangerous-warning-totalitarianism/

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