Who would have thought, mere weeks ago, that Americans would need to be concerned with book banning and witch hunting in this day and age? But in his choice of a running mate, Sen. John McCain has inadvertently riled some murky Alaskan backwaters. And this is a good thing, because neither book banning nor witch hunting should go unnoticed or unexposed.
Jack London is perhaps the best-known author of tales set in the land of the Northern Lights. What American child hasn’t grown up with the tales of White Fang and The Call of the Wild? Yet this same Jack London was among the authors condemned by the Nazis in 1933. His 1908 novel, The Iron Heel was publicly burned along with writings by Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, H. G. Wells, Sigmund Freud, and Ernest Hemingway, among others.
In 1644, the poet John Milton commented on similar book burnings in England. “Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image, but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.” At the same time, the urge to ban, censor, and prohibit was being carried, along with smallpox and typhus, to the New World. The first recorded book burning in Massachusetts took place in 1650. The Puritan authorities condemned and confiscated a religious pamphlet by William Pynchon. The book, though not the man, was burned by the public executioner in the Boston commons. A few years later some women in nearby Salem were less fortunate.
Which brings us to Pastor Muthee, the guest pastor from Kenya who had prayed over Sarah Palin when she was running for governor of Alaska. According to the Christian Science Monitor,
Muthee began his life in ministry in Africa by hunting down a local woman named Mama Jane after proclaiming her a witch. Six months of fervent prayer and research identified the source of the witchcraft as a local woman called Mama Jane, who ran a “divination” centre called the Emmanuel Clinic in Kiambu, Kenya. Her alleged involvement in fortune-telling and the fact that she lived near the site of a number of fatal car accidents led Pastor Muthee to publicly declare her a witch responsible for the town’s ills, and order her to offer up her soul for salvation or leave Kiambu. After Pastor Muthee declared Mama Jane a witch, the townspeople became suspicious and began to turn on her, demanding that she be stoned. Public outrage eventually led the police to raid her home, where they fired gunshots, killing a pet python which they believed to be a demon.
This may sound comical to some, but smug smiles may fade when the incident is put into context. In 1999, Britain’s Sunday Telegraph reported that hundreds of suspected witches had been burned to death in a Tanzanian witch-hunt. “Police say 357 suspected witches have been killed in the past 18 months, but the Ministry of Home Affairs believes that the true figure is much higher. A departmental survey said as many as 5,000 people were lynched between 1994 and 1998.” Obviously, Sarah Palin has nothing to do with this, but the focus on the Wasila library, along with the YouTube phenom that one clergyman’s prayer has become, provides an opportunity.
Lest we forget, historians assert that hundreds of thousands of women, perhaps more than a million, were burned as witches over a 300-year holocaust that mercifully ended in Europe and North America in the waning years of the 17th century. Most of those victims had accusers, prosecutors, and judges who were operating within a judicial framework. Their tormentors felt themselves perfectly justified. They fervently believed they were combating Satan and doing God’s work on earth. Joan of Arc, today revered as a Saint in the Catholic Church, was burned at the stake as a heretic and a witch in 1429.
The omnipresent champions of moral rectitude often referred to a particular book they would never think of consigning to the flames. Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches) was published by the authorities of the Inquisition in 1485. It is a misogynist’s handbook. “All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman. . . . Women are by nature instruments of Satan. . . . They are by nature carnal, a structural defect rooted in the original creation.”
If Malleus Maleficarum was the book Sarah Palin had in mind at a Wasilla City Council meeting in the fall of 1996, (coincidentally contemporaneous with the Tanzanian witch hunts) when she publicly asked librarian Mary Ellen Emmons what her reaction would be if she requested her to ban books from the Wasilla library — there might be some sympathy as well as irony. But alas, the librarian has recently barricaded herself behind a wall of silence, so it’s hard to get a complete story.
We know the list of books banned by the Nazis. We know the books burned by Robespierre in the French Revolution and the interminable list of titles proscribed by the Inquisition’s Index. We know Stalin, Mao, and Herbert Marcuse’s repressive tolerance. We even know the title of Salman Rushdie’s book, for which he received a death fatwa from the Ayatollah Khomeini. Nothing upsets tyrants more, petty or omnipotent, than an unpleasant book. What were the titles of the books which so disturbed councilwoman and later mayor Palin? Did she ask her question(s) on her own or at someone else’s prodding? Or were the questions merely rhetorical?
Sarah Palin’s questions about removing books from the Wasilla library were resisted, and she never pressed them. But the incident raises an issue as old as time. To keep certain thoughts away from others, to control what others may see and read with their own eyes and intellect is a kind of mind control as old as papyrus manuscripts. It’s had many practitioners, each and every one of whom thought themselves ordained by a higher power. But their attempts to shield or save others in each and every case exposes and condemns others. The sentence is always a kind of death — of the mind, of liberty, and — in the most hysterical times — of the authors and their readers both.
In fairness: Following the tempest in Wasilla’s teapot, no book was ever banned by Mayor Palin. But it’s important to remember that the banning of books and the hunting of witches are not just wacky anachronisms meant to distract us from what’s really important — like the economy, the war, energy, and the environment. As we know well from mankind’s long and sorry history, the defense of liberty cannot afford a day off. Any attack on the freedoms enshrined in our First Amendment, however trivial, must be confronted with the same seriousness the founding fathers brought to bear in its creation.
At the one and only vice-presidential debate, candidate Palin may be asked to explain her motives in asking about whether books might be censored at the Wasilla public library. Or asked to explain her understanding of the First Amendment or the separation of Church and State. I’d like to hear her talk about it. I’d also like to hear Barack Obama — whose party and campaign have both engaged in dangerous First Amendment threats and practices, by virtue of congressional promises of an Orwelllian-named Fairness Doctrine and campaign truth squads which hound radio stations that dare to invite guests who criticize their Chosen One. The Left, after all, has shown a skill in censorship.
Book banning? Witch hunting? Threats to free speech? As we’ve been hearing lately on the campaign trail, “Thanks, but no thanks.” While the presidential race does highlight a real issue, it’s a shame it is embroiled in the three-ring circus that is our national politics, which doesn’t lend itself to the serious historic conversation we really should be having.
– Ron Maxwell is writer-director of the movie Gettysburg.