Librarians on the warpath
Jorge Luis Borges, in his Poem of the WomenHe wrote: "I always imagined Paradise would be some kind of library." Now, however, in a must-see documentary on Movistar+, you'll discover that libraries in the United States have become a hellhole, especially those in public schools and colleges.
The Librarians (translated into Spanish as USA: censorship in librariesThe documentary denounces the harassment that schools and their librarians are suffering at the hands of the far right. It is part of an ultraconservative offensive that imposes lists of banned books related to African American history, sex education, LGBT+ issues, or racism. Librarians are accused of distributing child pornography and of pedophilic attitudes for not participating in this censorship or for processing the loans of these books to students who request them. This new library police also wants to know who has read the banned books.
The documentary shows unthinkable stories, typical of a fascist regime, that librarians in Texas, Florida, and other states have suffered, progressively, like an oil slick. It shows school committee meetings, transformed into cultural battlegrounds, and has access to secretly recorded conversations where superintendents control and coerce librarians. The witnesses are magnificent. The documentary follows the cases of various librarians who have been sued or fired. They lament that they have always been known for their discretion, for their largely anonymous work serving the students and the community they work in, and that now they have been placed at the center of controversy and made protagonists in a fabricated conflict with ideological motivations.
The documentary echoes the investigations carried out by some mothers and librarians regarding this ultraconservative offensive. And they all demonstrate how the group Moms for Liberty, ostensibly a group of mothers concerned about children's well-being, is actually a platform subsidized by powerful corporations linked to political power. They even include the testimony of a dissenting mother who denounces how the discourses on pedophilia and pornography are false messages used to impose censorship. "If you control the library, you control the community, because you control the flow of information and, therefore, you control its ideas," explains one librarian. It's the same thing Ray Bradbury wrote in Fahrenheit 451"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. You just have to stop people from reading them." The Librarians It incorporates excerpts from historical films and literary works that have addressed intellectual censorship, demonstrating that history repeats itself. The documentary is terrifying, with unprecedented sequences that prove these are not isolated cases but rather the rise of fascism. Libraries are like the canary in the coal mines: the first to react to the toxic atmosphere engulfing the United States.
