Thread by @usacsmret

The Anti-Library Library
shar.es/aXnMX8

The Library Journal recently retweeted the accusation that, "Library collections continue to promote and proliferate whiteness with their very existence” and all the books by white people “are physically taking up space in our libraries."

The Library Journal had been founded by Melvil Dewey. Since then, the American Library Association, also founded by Dewey, pulled the name of its progressive feminist founder, who had issues with wandering hands and bigotry, from its medal.

It was the second time in two years that the ALA had renamed one of its medals. Last year, the Laura Ingalls Wilder award became the Children’s Literature Legacy award after accusing the Little House on the Prairie author of racism.

Little House on the Prairie is one of those “library collections” proliferating “whiteness” and “taking up space in our libraries”. Exhibits of the books already come with warnings about “problematic” content.

Before long, a pressure campaign will see them forced out of their traditional spaces in libraries.
What will replace them? Probably nothing.

In the 20th century, European radicals wanted to burn museums to destroy all the old works of art. During some leftist takeovers, such as the Bavarian Soviet Republic, the threats became serious.

The ideological justification grounded in class warfare, rather than identity politics, expressed the same idea as the Library Journal’s tweet. Collections represent the old. Changes comes from the new.

A library is reactionary. Burning books is progressive.

Leftism requires not just a revolution, but an endless cycle of them. Libraries seek to preserve the sum of human knowledge, science, art and literature. The ideology and the institution are on a collision course.

The ideology worships newness for its own sake, destroying the old to justify its power, while the institution preserves the old, deriving its legitimacy from the study of the past.

The easiest way to run a library is to stock as few books as possible. And that’s the future.
Modern libraries are dumping their collections, opening up more work spaces and adding classes, events and programs.

Lefties have little use for libraries with their collections of printed books. Library spaces have to function as social organizing hubs for immigrants, minorities and activists.

If people have to read in a library, it should be a screen. The internet rewards the trending topics of the moment. Not the past.

Accusations of racism become a convenient means of eliminating the past. And once that’s done, nobody knows anything at all. We all become millennial wunderkinds like Rep. AOC, forever discovering new things, and attributing those discoveries to knowledge instead of ignorance.

The real problem with the past though is the litany of the crimes and failures of the Left. That litany is mysteriously omitted in the latest lecture of how America was built by exploiting the oppressed.

Leftist history is always being revised. The revolution of the moment is urgent and inevitable. The revolutions of the past are old history. Nothing needs to be learned from the past. And it’s best not to have libraries.

The Communists were teaching the peasants to read. Our Marxists are teaching them not to bother.
The library, the radicals tell us, is an outmoded institution. Books full of words by dead white men are mainly of interest to dead white men.

Even replacing them with books by identity politics minorities doesn’t fix the structural problem that literature and history conform to the norms of dead white men.

So why have libraries at all?
The obvious answer is that they employ librarians. And they provide internet access to homeless people and teach English to day laborers.

They offer spaces for visitors to study the slogans on all their posters. That’s the anti-library future of the library. A space with few books and many screens.

A community organizing hub that occasionally happens to have a few books tucked away somewhere.
Not too many though.
There’s no reading in the anti-library.