Pentagon Review Of Military Libraries Poses Grave Threat To Intellectual Freedom

(NEW YORK) — On Friday May 9, the Pentagon sent a memo to the country’s military educational institutions, including the War Colleges and Military Service Academies, instructing them to review all library collections for compliance with a previous directive that they not promote “divisive concepts” and “gender ideology.” The memo comes amid ongoing reports of book bans, cancelled speakers, and curricular censorship at Department of Defense schools, the Naval Academy, and West Point, among others.

The new memo from the Pentagon directs institutions to review their library collections to identify and “sequester” all materials “potentially incompatible” with the directive by May 21, using a list of 20 keyword search terms. The keyword list includes many terms already targeted by the Trump administration in federal agencies, such as, “affirmative action,” “discrimination,” “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” “critical race theory,” “gender expression,” “trangender people,” and “white privilege.”

The memo also announced the existence of a “temporary Academic Libraries Committee” made up of “knowledgeable leaders, educators, and library professionals drawn from across the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Military Departments” which informed the list of search terms, will advise on a further review process for the identified materials, and will determine the “ultimate disposition” of them.

“This is an ideological dragnet. Despite the appointment of a committee and the appearance of a review process, nothing about a government edict to yank books off library shelves in places we are supposed to be opening minds is either routine or appropriate,” said Jonathan Friedman, managing director of U.S. free expression programs at PEN America. “The United States military needs future officers who can think critically, informed by a full understanding of the world’s challenges and its complex battlefields. Restricting access to ideas by purging books is designed to do the opposite — to narrow the lens through which people see the world, and curb the freedom to read and think.”

According to the Pentagon’s memo, the review of military educational institutions’ library collections is to be carried out by keyword searches using the following list of 20 Library of Congress Subject Headings:

Affirmative Action Programs — Law and Legislation — United States
Affirmative Action Programs — United States
Affirmative Action
Allyship
Anti-Racism — United States
Critical Race Theory
Discrimination — Law and Legislation — United States
Diversity in the Workplace — United States
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Gender Affirming Care – United States
Gender Dysphoria
Gender Expression
Gender Identity — United States
Gender Nonconformity
Gender Transition
Transgender Military Personnel — United States
Transgender People — United States
Transsexualism — United States
Transsexuals — United States
White privilege (Social structure)

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The Reader, The Writer, The Informed and The Library

Ambrose Ehirim

May 17, 2009

I had held an open-minded discourse with a friend and colleague of mine, Austen Oghuma, on a variety of issues regarding books, library, reading and writing, and writing stands alone when it comes to the way most of us think. It all began from David Ejoor's biased and unintelligible interview that got internet crackpots outraged.

But I had reasoned Ejoor does not deserve the attention given him, so far, and I have kept my word that Ejoor is a midget in the history books of the Nigeria crisis and as far as I am concerned he has no place in that fabricated country's history. Well the point I am trying to make here is when I asked Oghuma where one can purchase Ejoor's "Reminiscence" he said probably in Nigeria but I doubt if the book is still around any shelf. Besides, most of the books in Nigeria are poorly produced and published.

We don't write and we don't keep archives which is why our history will one day vanish. On the other hand, it is absolutely why our democracy will keep to be fledgling until eternity and the following comments are vivid accounts why a democracy had thrived:

"A popular government without a popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."

James Madison

Libraries are the wardrobes of literature, whence men, properly informed may bring forth something for ornament, much for curiosity, and more for use."

William Dyer (1636 -- 1696)

"There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the Earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration."

Andrew Carnegie

"A democratic society depends upon informed and educated citizenry. Information is the currency of democracy."

Thomas Jefferson

"I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to change through that door and make the most of it. Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself."

Isaac Asimov, New York: Doubleday, 1994

Democracy works if applied on the basis of the above comments and I strongly believe in letters, and I encourage that as we learn each day that we live. Now, let me hear from you, where, how and when you write and which is your favorite and why writing is a powerful weapon.