Democracy with Chinese characteristics

Chinese election interference is a hot topic in Canada. Yet, while it is indeed a matter of enormous importance, its real significance can only be understood in the context of the new Cold War against the West.

This conflict is one in which China and Russia have long been engaged, while here at home our bien-pensant elites have continuously warned against us adopting a supposedly outdated “Cold War mentality.” The only ones who are out of date, however, are those whose understanding of recent history ends with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of the “end of history,” in which the values of liberal democracy and the West reign undisputed forever and ever.

History never stops, nor does the competition between states with diverging interests.

The tentacles of Cold War Mark II, between an aggressively imperialist China and a revanchist Russia on the one hand and a naive and credulous West, reach deeply into Canadian society, endangering our citizens, our economy and our interests.

Russia’s bloody invasion of Ukraine, like China’s imprisonment of Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig and its suborning of the very machinery of our democracy, has shone a bright light on this conflict. It is vital that we now harness this attention to concentrate the minds of Canadians on the scale of the attack on our institutions and freedoms, and how to defeat it.

Authoritarians learned long ago that people in the West will generally resist bald military threats to their domestic freedoms and democracy. The world’s bullies have now understandably shifted to working tirelessly to weaken the West’s moral resolve.

Misinformation and disinformation about us, delivered to our television, social-media feeds and inboxes by armies of internet trolls, are thus today’s front line in the struggle to defend freedom and democracy.

Authoritarians use the social-media megaphone to repeat that the West and democracy are vicious, corrupt and indefensible; our adversaries stoke conflict within our societies and sap our will to defend our values and our way of life. If our societies are nothing but vile repositories for all that is worst about human society – racism, sexism, white supremacy, homophobia, societies built on the legacy of slavery and colonial exploitation – then our adversaries hope we will conclude that we are not worth defending.

Our adversaries understand that Western military superiority over the world’s authoritarians is meaningless if we lack the political resolve to use it, if we think there is no moral difference between free democracies and authoritarian despotisms.

That is why China and Russia take aim at our culture, our beliefs and our institutions. Their objective is nothing less than to cause us to lose faith in ourselves and the society we have built.

manager of collections development Matt Abbott, who leads the TPL’s committee. “That is our job. That is an important component of intellectual freedom, which is a core value at a library.”

The TPL also received complaints last year about its drag story time programs.

As anti-trans sentiment rose in the U.S. (this week, Montana banned people dressed in drag from reading books to children at public schools and libraries), these events began being targeted here too, despite having gone on in some cities for years.

“Do any of these people know what’s happening in a drag story time?” says the Ontario Library Association’s Michelle Arbuckle, who chairs the Freedom of Expression committee for the Book and Periodical Council of Canada, which runs Freedom to Read Week. “If you watch RuPaul’s Drag

Race, that’s not what’s happening at a drag story time.”

An ugly protest can get a lot more attention than filling out a form. And do a lot of emotional damage.

In Calgary last February, the Reading with Royalty program was disrupted by protesters who made their way into the event, shouting homophobic and transphobic slurs.

The drag event had to be paused. But it’s back. “We are committed to reflecting our community in the programs that we offer. This is a program that’s about kindness and inclusivity,” Calgary Public Library CEO Sarah Meilleur told me.

“It’s an opportunity for kids to look beyond some of those gender stereotypes and embrace identity and self and feel like they matter. And our strategic plan is that everyone belongs at the library.”

ANNE FRANK, MAUS AND ME

I packed my sense of smug superiority into my carry-on as I headed to Florida for spring break. Part-time home to many Canadian snowbirds, the Sunshine State has become a book-banning epicentre under Mr. DeSantis, who would like to become U.S. president.

One of my destinations was Books & Books in Key West, the bookstore co-owned by Judy Blume, who has been the target of censorship battles since the publication more than 50 years ago of her seminal novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret – which deals with menstruation. Among the titles the store had on display when I visited was the American Library Association’s

Read These Banned Books: A Journal and 52-Week Reading Challenge.

I spoke to Ms. Blume later over Zoom, not long after a bill was introduced that would prohibit Florida public schools from teaching about sexual health, including menstruation, until Grade 6. “We live in a state with a Governor who is just making everything really dreadful,” she told me.

Mr. DeSantis has famously railed against what he calls “woke indoctrination” and has targeted school curricula and books – especially those dealing with critical race theory and LGBTQ issues.

Some Floridians aren’t having it. “Parents have the right to choose what their children read,” said Lourdes Martinez, a customer I met at Sandbar Books in Key Largo. “It’s not up to the school board. It’s a First Amendment right.”

Ms. Martinez, who lives in Destin, Fla., is a voracious reader. “Some of the books that are banned, it’s ridiculous.” She cited

Maus, Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust.

Last year, a Tennessee school board banned Maus, which is about Mr. Spiegelman’s parents’ wartime experiences and how that trauma played out tragically in his own home. The book depicts Jews as mice, Germans as cats.

The McMinn County school board pulled the book not just because of the difficult subject matter, but because of language (“bitch,” “god damn”) and, I can’t believe I’m even typing this, nudity. The depiction of a naked (illustrated animal) character.

“We don’t need this stuff to teach kids history,” school board member Mike Cochran told the meeting where Maus was debated. “We can teach them history and we can teach them graphic history. We can tell them exactly what happened, but we don’t need all the nakedness and all the other stuff.”

Readers like Ms. Martinez aren’t buying it. “If you don’t learn history, it’s going to be repeated.”

And this is where it gets even more personal. Some frequently targeted books, including Ms. Blume’s novels, were instrumental in my formative years. But also, especially, the diary of Anne Frank.

This book is very dear to many readers. But for me, it hit close to home. My parents survived the Holocaust and I related to Anne on a deep level. If those events happened now, I told myself as a kid, it could be me, writing in that attic. Because of her, I started keeping a diary. Would mine be published, I sometimes thought, after the Nazis rose back to power and sent me to a concentration camp? You could say that Anne Frank posthumously planted the seed of an idea that, decades later, saw me explore the Holocaust and intergenerational trauma in my own book.

When I learned about the Anne Frank bans (most recently, an illustrated version was removed from a Florida highschool library after being challenged by a member of Moms for Liberty), I figured the difficult subject matter must be the issue. Tough for kids to read about this teenager spending years in hiding only to be discovered and sent to her death.

But no. To quote the TPL’s Book Sanctuary: “This book has been banned due to a short entry where Anne discussed her sexuality and genitalia as she was going through puberty. Myriad attempts have been made worldwide to ban this book for that entry.”

More recently, Florida education officials revealed they had rejected dozens of textbooks – approving only 66 of 101 submissions. They initially approved only 19, but revisions were made in some of the rejected texts. Turned-down submissions included two about the Holocaust.

Coincidentally, I am supposed to be in Florida again when my memoir, Kiss the Red Stairs: The Holocaust, Once Removed, is released in the U.S. this August. I’ve considered trying to organize a book signing while there. But thinking (obsessing) about developments in that state, I began agonizing over a particular passage. In my research, I had learned that Jewish men and women in Radom, Poland, where my mother lived, were rounded up by the Nazis on Yom Kippur, 1939, and forced to clean windows and remove paint from a factory.

“The Germans did not supply rags for this job,” I wrote. “The men were forced to use their prayer shawls, the women their underwear. (What if they were menstruating, I wondered as I read this.)”

Among the most treasured comments I have received from readers has been: This book should

be taught in schools. Could that sentence about menstruation prohibit that? In Florida? Elsewhere?

Hypothetical as this scenario might be, I shared my concern with Prof. Turk. There was no way my Holocaust book could find itself censored because of a mention of menstruation, was there?

“Of course it could,” he said.

THE BIG CHILL

The most concerning, if fleeting, thought I had as I considered my memoir in the context of the culture wars was: If I had known about this when I wrote the book, would I have included that parenthetical detail about women and their periods? I mean, it was just speculation. How important was it really?

Well, very important, in fact. But could I have convinced myself otherwise?

This is what this climate does: it chills. It can make authors second-guess. It can make publishers revise textbooks, as we just saw in Florida.

Raziel Reid has been having trouble finding a publisher for his latest manuscript, a fictional account of the Jeffrey Epstein saga told from a feminist perspective. “People are afraid of it,” he says. Will it be deemed immoral? Especially in this moment? “Every publisher has to answer to the consensus of the market.”

And when it comes to booking authors, Mr. Bergman worries about schools making less challenging choices.

“That’s the silent chilling effect that this foolishness and nonsense produces,” he says. “Next time they choose an author to come in, there’s always the calculus of: Is this going to produce another set of irate parents in my office screaming about the gay agenda? And do I have the personal and institutional resources to deal with that?”

It may be a badge of honour to have your book banned; it can even increase book sales. But it’s not anything anybody wants to go through. And what could it lead to?

“If I were in one of those states I’d get a big billboard and say ‘Too hot to read’ and I’d sell a lot of copies,” said Ms. Atwood (who does not have to worry about book sales). “So it always backfires to a certain extent. Unless it’s such a ruthless regime that they find every single copy of that particular book and burn them. That’s what happens next.”

‘IT’S GOING TO HAPPEN MORE AND MORE’

It’s a cliché to say that books have never been more important. But I am going to say it anyway.

In an increasingly dumbeddown society where anyone can publish anything on social media, mis- and disinformation is a click away, and the halls of power are populated with ignorance, books can provide a refuge of intellectual sanity.

Not always, sure. But access – true freedom – must be protected.

Because this isn’t going away. “It’s happened in the States and now it’s happening in Canada. And it’s going to happen more and more,” says Mr. Robertson, who is also editorial director of a new Tundra Book Group children’s imprint dedicated to publishing Indigenous writers and illustrators. “So what people have to do is be ready for it.”

The first step is to ensure that libraries have appropriate policies when it comes to intellectual freedom, says Prof. Turk, who is training library staff across the country to deal with this issue. “I’m being run off my feet.”

And ensure those policies are being followed, says Mr. Robertson, still reeling from his experience in Durham.

Readers can also help.

Go to the library, take out books, buy books. Read challenged books. You can find lists in lots of places, including the TPL’s Book Sanctuary. See for yourself.

Want to help others see for themselves? Read banned titles with your book club. Put copies in little free libraries.

Tell a librarian you love them! Seriously – an e-mail or word of gratitude goes a long way when you’re being called a groomer and pedophile on the regular.

Contact government officials, write to your school board. Preemptively express your support for libraries and for freedom of intellectual expression.

We can attend as many Freedom to Read Week events as we like (every February; they’re great) but that kind of pleasant, passive advocacy may not be enough to turn the page on this scary moment.

It’s time to make a fuss, Mr. Bergman says. Consider not just contacting your school board, but running yourself.

“This campaign of hate can only be countered by people who are not hateful also getting loud about not being hateful,” he told me.

“The support has to reach the vigour of the detractors.”

In an increasingly dumbed-down society where anyone can publish anything on social media, mis- and disinformation is a click away, and the halls of power are populated with ignorance, books can provide a refuge of intellectual sanity. Not always, sure. But access – true freedom – must be protected.