The Petty Tyranny of Banning Books

The Bonfire of Liberty: Banning Books and the Slide Towards Tyranny

My dear fellow teachers, I come before you today with a heavy heart and a stern warning – our liberty is under threat. The news that school districts and states across this nation are seeking to ban certain books from curriculums and libraries should chill us to our very bones. For when a society starts burning books, the bonfire of human rights is soon lit. 

To ban a book is to ban an idea, a thought, a different perspective. Every autocrat and tyrant in history has sought to control information and constrain free thinking. From Hitler's pyres of "un-German" texts to the dystopian world of Orwell's Oceania, the script is the same – ideas deemed threatening to the ruling ideology must be suppressed. And so the censors get to work, tearing pages from books and minds with equal zeal.

Today they start by targeting books that challenge traditional views on gender or race. Tomorrow it may be your ideas that are kindling for the flames. Once the precedent is set that some literature is forbidden, the list of prohibited reading can expand endlessly. Nothing is safe when free inquiry is slain upon the altar of dogma.

Do not be fooled, this has nothing to do with protecting children or traditional values. It is about control. The petty tyranny of MAGA and groups like Moms for Liberty taking over school boards want compliant minds incapable of challenging their authority. No free society can survive if its citizens are only fed a sterile ideological gruel.

So I implore you – do not go gentle into that good night of censorship. Rage against the dying of the light of liberty. Start by reading the books they want to burn. Arm your mind against ignorance. Defend the right of all ideas to be heard, even those we find objectionable. For if we sacrifice intellectual freedom in the name of political expedience today, the flames that light up the pages of censored books may cast long shadows over our democracy tomorrow.