-Urokråka, publisert i utgave #5
Det er en tendens som sprer seg in såkalt demokratiske vestlige land for tiden, bannlysingen av venstrevendt litteratur i statens utdanningsinstitusjoner. Dette skjer i kjølvannet av en moralsk panikk rundt venstresidas undertrykkelse av ytringsfriheten med beskrivelser av høyere utdanningssystemer som indoktrineringsleire for postmoderne nymarxisme, eller lignende. Denne diskursen viser seg naturlig nok tydeligere og tydeligere å være, ikke bare vås, men en kampanje som har banet vei for høyre-ekstreme krefter inn i et uthult nyliberalt utdanningssystem. Den siste tiden har det dryppet inn foruroligende nyheter på denne fronten.
Regjeringen har beordret skoler i England å ikke bruke ressurser fra organisasjoner som har uttrykt et ønske om å avslutte kapitalismen, selv når materialene i seg selv ikke er ‘ekstreme’. Dette ekskluderer et bredt spenn av materialer fra å bli diskutert og er en vag lovgivning som kan så frykt blant lærere på linje med ‘section 28’. Denne loven, innført av Thatcher, forbød lærere fra å ‘promotere homoseksualitet’ – med resultatet at lærere fryktet å nevne temaet i det hele tatt av frykt for å bli sparket.
Begrunnelsen for dette angrepet på ytringsfriheten, er naturlig nok, at antikapitalisme likestilles med motstand mot ytringsfrihet. Det er her man er fristet til å uttale, for en ironi! Men sammentreffet er alt annet enn tilfeldig. Man kan tenke seg en situasjon hvor lærere kvier seg for å kritisere kapitalismen overhode, og jeg spør meg om hvordan man skal få undervist fag som sosiologi eller historie uten å nevne sentrale hendelser, figurer og materialer? Blir Martin Luther King JRs ‘I have a dream’ nå å finne i en avlåst avdeling på Englands skoler sammen med det britiske arbeiderpartiets valgprogram? Jo nærmere en gransker det jo vanskeligere blir det å se for seg en slik lov bli håndhevet. Det er dermed ikke vanskelig å se for seg hvem de retter en slik lovgiving mot, BLM bevegelsen så vel som klima og miljø aktivister, tankene til disse bevegelsene er det Boris Johnsons regjering frykter at skal bli overveid i engelske klasserom.
Denne autoritære utviklingen kan man også kjenne igjen fra Ungarn, hvor en nasjonalistisk innsnevring av pensum har vært en sentral del av høyre-ekstremistenes uthulning av demokratiet og kupp av landets institusjoner. Nok et eksempel på at det som praktiseres av regjeringen er akkurat det de påstår de skal beskytte seg mot, nemlig et ønske om å avskaffe eller styrte demokrati og frie og rettferdige valg.
I Arkansas fremmes det også lovforslag om å forby bøker, spesifikt av Howard Zinn, i offentlig utdanningssektor. Litteraturen som setter presedens i klasserommene, skal heller være den som omtaler slaver som ‘arbeidsmigranter’. I ytringsfrihetens navn finner redaksjonen det passende med et lite utdrag av Zinn’s klassiker ‘A Peoples History of the United States’ om historiefortellingens propagandafunksjon.
“The historian has been trained in a society in which education and knowledge are put forward as technical problems of excellence and not as tools for contending social classes, races, nations.
To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to de-emphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves-unwittingly-to justify what was done.
My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)-that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable of classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly.
The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks)-the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress-is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they, the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court-represent the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is such a thing as “the United States,” subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a “national interest” represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.
“History is the memory of states,” wrote Henry Kissinger in his first book, A World Restored^ in which he proceeded to tell the history of nineteenth-century Europe from the viewpoint of the leaders of Austria and England, ignoring the millions who suffered from those statesmen’s policies. From his standpoint, the “peace” that Europe had before the French Revolution was “restored” by the diplomacy of a few national leaders. But for factory workers in England, farmers in France, colored people in Asia and Africa, women and children everywhere except in the upper classes, it was a world of conquest, violence, hunger, exploitation-a world not restored but disintegrated.
My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been, The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.
[…]
Still, understanding the complexities, this book will be sceptical of governments and their attempts, through politics and culture, to ensnare ordinary people in a giant web of nationhood pretending to a common interest. I will try not to overlook the cruelties that victims inflict on one another as they are jammed together in the boxcars of the system. I don’t want to romanticize them. But I do remember (in rough paraphrase) a statement I once read: “The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don’t listen to it, you will never know what justice is.”
For en tragedie det hadde blitt for staten om ungdommen i deres klasserom fant ut hva rettferdighet er.