What happens to Florida’s banned books? Ask this ‘little anarchist bookshop’ in Asheville – By Dartagnan (Daily Kos) / Feb 14, 2024
The biggest threat to the odious practice of book-banning has always been simple human ingenuity. When Alexander Solzhenitsyn began compiling his experiences—into what later became the Gulag Archipelago, his landmark indictment of the sprawling Soviet labor camp system—he was still a prisoner in that system. To escape detection, he would write those experiences down, scribbling on small scraps of paper, then memorizing the words he’d written, and burn the scraps afterward. This mechanism enabled him to preserve and retain his thoughts in the face of an oppressive regime, terrifying in its ubiquity and efficiency.
Banned in the Soviet Union, his work was initially published clandestinely and passed along to furtive readers—literally one copy at a time—in unbound form, even as it was hailed internationally as a masterpiece. Still, it remained widely unpublished in the Soviet Union until 1989.
America’s modern book-banning aficionados are neither as ubiquitous nor efficient as the KGB, but Republican lawmakers in Florida are apparently intent on indoctrinating an entire generation of young people. By proscribing the availability of certain books that highlight racism and advocate tolerance of sexual identity throughout the state, they have opted for a shotgun approach that places the onus on beleaguered public schools to fulfill their edicts. This serves the dual purpose of imposing their questionable notions of morality on young students while burdening a public school system they clearly despise with pointless, wasteful, and time-consuming busywork.
