Lynne Cheney: Bookburner

[IrateCitizen]

Published on Thursday, October 14, 2004 by the LA Times
21st Century Book-Burning
Mrs. Cheney, There's More to U.S. History than Heroes.

by Steven J. Ross

One of the marks of authoritarian regimes is their effort to stop the spread of knowledge and free speech. In May 1933, Nazi sympathizers in Berlin burned 20,000 "degenerate" books, many of them written by Jews and anti-fascists such as Albert Einstein, Bertolt Brecht and Franz Kafka. Here at home, slaveholders were so frightened by the power of the word that throughout the antebellum South legislatures made it a crime to teach slaves to read and write.

Now, Lynne Cheney, Vice President Dick Cheney's wife and the former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, has placed herself in the company of dictators and slaveholders. At her urging, the Education Department destroyed more than 300,000 copies of a booklet designed to help parents and children learn more about America's past.

Cheney objected to the booklet's reference to the National Standards for History, guidelines for teaching history in secondary schools that were developed at UCLA in the 1990s and that suggest that American history should be taught with an eye not only to America's successes but to its struggles and dark moments as well.

Cheney could learn important lessons from the kind of history she apparently finds so un-American.

READ THE REST HERE: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1014-21.htm

[aden_nak]

1. Yeah, we sure wouldn't want to LEARN from our MISTAKES.

[phantom power]

2. unsurprising, considering that this is an administration whose

existence depends on us forgetting things they say from month to month.