Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House On The Prairie Deemed Racist By Librarian Association

For the record, The Simpsons predicted it again… a few months ago The Goldwater covered the Simpson's episode dealing with backlash related to the "stereotypical" character of Apu and the purported "brownface" represented by a white actor voicing him in the show. In the episode, Marge tries to introduce Lisa to a book she treasured as a child but upon rereading she realizes that, compared to current attitudes and political correctness, the book doesn't seem "appropriate."

The current situation with The Association for Library Service to Children striking Laura Ingalls Wilder's name from their award as racist seems like something out of a satire, but unfortunately, this is just reality in the current year. ALSC is a division of the American Library Association and it is libraries and librarians that are charged with the protection of our heritage and the dissemination of knowledge.

https://thegoldwater.com/news/22795-The-Simpsons-Under-Fire-Being-Politically-Incorrect

Philosopher, poet, essayist and novelist George Santayana is credited with originating the quote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Librarians, of all people, should be sensitive to this fact. It starts here, with the author of an innocuous children's tale being stricken from the prestigious Children's Literature Legacy Award. Next time, it might be the book itself being taken off shelves.

A similar situation occurred just a few years ago when one of my favorite storytellers, the master of weird fiction, H.P. Lovecraft was erased from Science Fiction and Fantasy award, due to Lovecraft's racial and political views. Here's the thing though, his views were fairly standard for a gentleman born in the 19th century. If we judge yesterday to the standards of today we will continually fall short.

Mark Twain is another candidate for bowdlerization. Huckleberry Finn was written as an anti-racist novel, but it's use of "period language" we'll call it, could result in its eventual disappearance down the memory hole. And I don't invoke the verbiage of George Orwell lightly, either. Then maybe let's burn the works of Shakespeare since he did write that play about the Jewish money-lender Shylock. After that, we can purge the shelves of Charles Dickens (who, like Twain used "the n-word" in his work). Maybe we should also burn Fahrenheit-451 by Ray Bradbury as well, just so no one gets a whiff of what's going on and why it is being done. Pretty soon, the classics section will be laid bare.

https://thegoldwater.com/news/22717-On-The-Road-To-1984

This is, of course, all part of the plan and has been for many decades now. Before WWII Communists realized that overtaking the world through war would not be viable and economical Marxism has also proven to be a failure, however Cultural Marxism broadcast through entertainment and news media, from the public school to the academies and other major institutions is a page right out of Gramsci. Rather than use economic might or martial strength to overtake the world, Antonio Gramsci prescribed a "long march through the institutions to achieve Communism." Gramsci argued that "popular schooling should be placed under the control of the great workers’ unions. The problem of education is the most important class problem."

In the 1980's and 1990's, more and more scholarly works were published calling out the so-called "academic left." This "academic left" is the outgrowth of Gramsci's dream coming to be. Ironically, much of this spirit of Orwellian censorship grew from the cultural revolutions of the 1960's which were supposedly aimed towards greater freedom of expression and liberty. The end result, as we can see, is far from that, however. I guess that's just what happens when the "fight the power" people become the power they were fighting.