ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM has been a defining characteristic of far-right and fascist movements through time immemorial.

Through nazi book burnings and McCarthy-esque crackdowns on anything that might have been in the same room as a communist, regressive movements have often sought to limit our ability to engage openly and honestly with the world around us – and for a simple reason.

There is at least a grain of truth in the painted picture of Britain’s academics as ‘elitist’. The public school boy to bumbling Prime Minister pipeline is a known feature of the United Kingdom’s deference to class.

But rather than privately educated millionaires like Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson finding themselves the target of so-called ‘anti-elite’ politics, it is knowledge itself that inevitably comes under attack.

No more experts here, thank you very much.

Movements that seek to restrict human rights, to protect capital over workers, and to mythologise nations will always crumble under scrutiny. And for that reason, knowledge and understanding will always be enemies to any narrative that claims to have simple answers to complex problems.

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It’s for this reason that public libraries and bookshops often find themselves the targets of moral panics and claims of degeneracy.

Nuance and understanding of the world is anathema to the narratives of right-wingers and reactionaries alike; a light that dispels disinformation and campaigns that reassure the public that life really is as simple as they wished it was, where Britain is a perennial force for good in the world, and that those outwith the heteronormative nuclear family – or outwith in general – are deviants with nefarious intent.

Back in 2018, a video of far-right activists attacking a socialist bookshop in London was shared around online, and has always stuck with me.

In it, the far-right activists found, in just the titles of the books on display, the justification for their violent assault on free expression.

Holding aloft copies of Julia Serano’s ‘Whipping Girl’ and Robert Verkaik’s ‘Posh Boys’, they screamed about paedophiles and Donald Trump while rampaging through the store.

That these books were about, respectively, the means by which femininity is punished and (fittingly) how the English public school system has ruined Britain, did not matter. The material content of the book was irrelevant.

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Only upset over the imagined properties of the title was of importance. To find offence, willful ignorance and disinterest in the content of the books was necessary.

With Britain in the midst of a contemporary manufactured culture war, it seemed inevitable that libraries and bookshops would again find themselves the target of reactionary forces – and recent reporting would suggest that we may be about to see a lot more anger directed at book lenders in the near future.

A recent report claims that a third of UK librarians have been asked to censor and remove books by members of the public, while facing threats if they do not bow to the demands.

Unsurprisingly, most targeted were books dealing with LGBTQ+ issues, as well as race and the British Empire; all topics that regularly feature in the right-wing press – all topics regularly inflamed and twisted by bad faith actors.

So far along the path to radicalisation are some that when GB News covered the story, the presenters assumed the censorship to be a result of so-called cancel culture rather than, if we’re being honest, their own viewers.

Though while it is concerning that radicalised members of the public are targeting bookshops and libraries, what I found to be most unsettling was the revelation from the chief executive of Libraries Connected, Isobel Hunter, that while not all libraries were facing the same requests for censorship, they “have been receiving a large number of freedom of information requests, primarily from media organisations.”

Other than being a waste of time, these requests suggest that Britain’s infamously right-wing press already have institutions of learning in their sights.

There can be no good that comes from newspapers like the Daily Mail or The Sun rooting around in library catalogues – not when book titles alone are enough to send reactionaries into spittle-flecked rants.

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The past few years have seen a number of flashpoints over public libraries already but, given the relentless culture politics at play in the United Kingdom today – a useful scapegoat for the bullies and incompetents of the Conservative Party – I worry that they were only a taste of what may come next.

American libraries are already under a full scale assault from Republicans in the US.

While closer to home, Section 28 – the draconian Tory legislation that banned the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in the UK – was in part inspired by a wildly misreported-on book itself.

Jenny Lives with Erik and Martin, a black-and-white picture book by the Danish author Susanne Bösche, featured a young girl called Jenny living with her dad and his boyfriend.

The book faced significant backlash in the pressover such scandalous moments as Jenny, her dad, and his boyfriend, visiting a laundrette together.

The fact that an innocent story, of a gay couple essentially just spending time with their child, was enough to spur the British Parliament into legislating against any book that discussed homosexuality is an example of the hair-trigger reaction that the UK Government is capable of when spurred on by the press.

In order to function, right-wing movements need to demonise the Other – and the most successful means of doing so is through controlling what we learn about those whose experiences differ from our own.