My Book Banning Experience
In my highschool we had to take a class called Americanism Versus Communism or AVC to graduate. You could get exempt from the course if you took other humanities or history courses, but even then the AVC curriculum was presumed to be covered.
This was the early 80's.
Relevant to the AVC curriculum, there was this Soviet dissident, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was pretty famous and relevant at the time. He had been sentenced to hard labor for a private letter that criticized Joseph Stalin. After he was released, he became one of the most important socialist realist writers.
His novel, Gulag Archipelago, was originally published in the Soviet Union as samizdat. Underground published dissident work. It documented life in the political gulag, the forced labor camps. Sourced from his own experience while imprisoned. From diaries, interviews, various forms of media.
It's English translation was arguably one of the most important books in Soviet cold-war American. I got my copy in the pulp paperback racks. Back when grocery stores and drug stores sold such books. It was a big fat thick thing. A couple of bucks. But what that book represented was what this country opposed in Soviet communism in direct, immediate, human terms. Doris Lessing felt the book was so important that it brought down the Soviet system. Jordan Peterson, despite what people might think of him, seems to agree. He called it the most important book of the 20th century.
Well, I brought the book to school. It took some time to read.
My humanities teacher, my AVC mentor, took the book from me and tore it in half. And threw it away. Why? He wasn't going to have any of that commie trash in his class. And so that ended.
This is one of my concerns about book banning. The people banning the books really may have no idea what they are talking about. This is a common theme. Ayatollah Khomeini never read Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses. The prick who stabbed him, a few pages.
This was the early 80's.
Relevant to the AVC curriculum, there was this Soviet dissident, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was pretty famous and relevant at the time. He had been sentenced to hard labor for a private letter that criticized Joseph Stalin. After he was released, he became one of the most important socialist realist writers.
His novel, Gulag Archipelago, was originally published in the Soviet Union as samizdat. Underground published dissident work. It documented life in the political gulag, the forced labor camps. Sourced from his own experience while imprisoned. From diaries, interviews, various forms of media.
It's English translation was arguably one of the most important books in Soviet cold-war American. I got my copy in the pulp paperback racks. Back when grocery stores and drug stores sold such books. It was a big fat thick thing. A couple of bucks. But what that book represented was what this country opposed in Soviet communism in direct, immediate, human terms. Doris Lessing felt the book was so important that it brought down the Soviet system. Jordan Peterson, despite what people might think of him, seems to agree. He called it the most important book of the 20th century.
Well, I brought the book to school. It took some time to read.
My humanities teacher, my AVC mentor, took the book from me and tore it in half. And threw it away. Why? He wasn't going to have any of that commie trash in his class. And so that ended.
This is one of my concerns about book banning. The people banning the books really may have no idea what they are talking about. This is a common theme. Ayatollah Khomeini never read Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses. The prick who stabbed him, a few pages.
