[lbo-talk] in defence of the book

Chuck0 chuck at mutualaid.org
Wed Oct 15 15:02:22 PDT 2003


Jurriaan Bendien wrote:


>>A June meeting of the ALA provided an important clue of the
>>organization's real priorities. It declined to pass a resolution --
>>even a tepid one -- supporting 14 jailed independent librarians in
>>Cuba. These true martyrs to the free circulation of reading material
>>held little interest for the ALA, since they are anti-Castro instead
>>of anti-Ashcroft. Some ALA members even questioned whether the 14 are
>>"true" librarians. Good point -- how can they be, unless their top
>>priority is bashing the Bush administration?
>
>
> Doug, personally I sympathise with the ALA, and if they pass a resolution
> like that and it seems dubious, then you need to investigate the
> circumstances of the case. Libraries are an indispensable instrument of a
> democratic society, and socialists cannot very well afford to get offside
> with them. No ideological drivel, but what is really happening in the case.

I'm pretty familiar with this stuff because it dominaties the discussion on the ALA Intellectual Freedom list that I'm on. What's happening is that the right wing is conducting an old-fashioned Trotskyist intervention into ALA and the library profession. What we have is the work of one individual, who is advocating for these Cuban librarians, and the usual batch of leftist librarians who uncritically support the Cuban government. ALA has nothing to do with any of this, but the right wing uses ALA as the whipping boy because they come into conflict with ALA so much in their culture wars.

I've actually been stuck in the middle of this dispute, because I'm anti-Castro and think that *anybody* who runs a library doesn't deserve to be harassed by *any* government. Some of my radical librarian comrades have tried to dismiss these Cuban librarians as not being librarians, thus, not worth supporting. They have also accused the activist librarian who campaigns for them as doing the work of the CIA and the Cuban exiles in Miami. Basically, the leftist librarians know they are wrong on this, so they are mostly quiet these days.

The librarians and activists who have been campaigning for these Cuban activists have been dishonest about many things. They've taken their case to the right wing media, which has wrongly accused ALA of "declining to pass a resolution." As an radical librarian can tell you, getting ALA to pass *any* kind of political resolution is a time-consuming and hair-pulling process. I'm pretty sure that the people who proposed this resolution didn't do the legwork to get ALA to pass it and may have actually wanted it to fail so that their right wing supporters could use this to attack ALA. These folks have also claimed that ALA wasn't being fair about presenting all viewoints on Cuba at an ALA conference session. They are correct about being left out, but their beef in invalid. Session organizers are under no obligation to present all points of view in a panel. These folks could have organized their own panel discussion, but they didn't and I suspect that they had no intention to do so.

<< Chuck0 >>

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-- Jeremy Hardy, The Guardian (UK)



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