… but some are more equal than others

“Russian students are turning in teachers who don’t back the war. The cases are part of a Soviet-style hunt for ‘traitors’ who oppose the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine.” — Washington Post

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PEN America reported in April that 1,586 books have been banned in 86 U.S. public school districts in the past year, including, in Tennessee, the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, “Maus” —  allegedly because it contains swear words.

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In China, teachers are being fired and even sent to mental institutions for daring to step outside the Party line, according to reports in The New York Times, Washington Post and, most comprehensively, Peter Hessler in The New Yorker. Hessler, a fluent Chinese speaker and longtime teacher and correspondent there, was a victim of jubao, in which a student reports a teacher who comments even obliquely upon a Party diktat.

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In Texas, Granbury Independent School District has pulled 130 books from the shelves, for mentioning sex in some way. This came after School Superintendent Jeremy Glenn warned librarians that “I don’t want a kid picking up a book, whether it’s about homosexuality or heterosexuality, and reading about how to hook up sexually in our libraries.” Glenn told his librarians that “'Here in this community, we’re going to be conservative.’ … And to any school employees who might have different political beliefs, Glenn said, ‘You better hide it.’”

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In Russia, a Committee for the Protection of National Interest maintains a website in which “we, the patriotic forces of Russia, publish a list of traitors and enemies, and we consider it more important than ever to expose and make public the names and faces of these criminals,” who have opposed the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine. “They are traitors whom we will never forget or forgive. And we will do our best to make them answer for their actions,” the Committee says. They even have a cool feature through which we can search for “traitors” alphabetically — with mugshots and everything.

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In Oklahoma, Republican lawmakers have proposed a bill (SB 1142) that would allow any parent to request that a book be removed from a school library, and if it is not removed or the conflict resolved within 30 days, the school district would have to pay the complaining parent a bounty of $10,000 a day for every day it remains on the shelves. This allegedly is aimed at rooting out books that dwell upon or discuss sex, and virtually anything to do with sex, according to the language of the bill. Ah, yes, nothing a school district budget needs like another $10,000 out the window every time some bluenose discovers that James Baldwin was gay. Socrates too.

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Back in Russia, President Vladimir Putin has made it a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison for anyone to refer to his war in Ukraine as “war,” rather than a “special military operation.”

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And in Tennessee, the state House approved a bill requiring that every book in every school library (even charter schools) be approved by a state commission, whose members are appointed by the Republican Legislature and Republican governor. When a Democratic member of the state House asked a sponsor of the bill what the schools or state should do with the banned books, Rep. Jerry Sexton said: “I don’t have a clue, but I would burn them.” And what about “Huck Finn”? Should we ban it or rewrite it, to clear up that Huck’s friend Jim was never really a slave?

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Day by dreary day, Republican officials across the country, from Congress to state legislatures to school boards — members of the Republican Deep State — are acting more and more like Russian and Chinese Communists. Mini-men and -women and their cohorts are turning public education into snooping and indoctrination, and lawmaking into retaliation against political opponents.

Pardon me for comparing the United States in 2022 to the Soviet Union in 1932 — and for knowing anything about either of them — but today’s Republican Anschluss against public schools reminds me of poor old Pavlik Morozov, who denounced his parents in 1932 for making a joke about Stalin, for which his parents murdered him, for which Pavlik was declared a Hero of the Soviet Union.

I guess his parents should have home-schooled the little guy.

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