Michael D. D. White, Co-founder of CDL Talks With Glasgow Loves EU About Control of Information and Privatization of Everything- Libraries and Court Prosecution of Steve Donziger Included

[Note: This post may get updated with additions]

On November 15, 2021 Michael D. D. White, Co-founder of Citizens Defending Libraries talked with Glasgow Loves EU as part of their regular series of interviews shared by Facebook and Zoom.  The conversation was about the control of information and the privatization of virtually everything, privatization of libraries as our library defenders well know, but also much more. . .

. . .  The conversation started out talking about privatization of the federal court `prosecution' of environmental justice lawyer Steve Donziger written about at Citizens Defending Libraries here:   What Library Defenders Need To Know About The Imprisonment of Environmental Attorney Steve Donziger Because He Obtained a Judgment Against Chevron For Its Pollution of The Amazon.
 
There is an absolute relationship and linkage between the control of information and privatization: The former is one reason you don’t hear about, or what’s bad about, the latter, and the latter is often a means to achieve the former.

We Tweeted a link to the talk where you can view video here.


You can also go directly to view it on Facebook.

Eventually it should be up at the archives.

This is the archive of the Glasgow Loves EU livestreams:

In discussing the privatization of everything Mr. White referred to the forums Citizens Defending Libraries have had about selling off public assets.  See, for example: Fourth Forum on Selling Off Public Assets, Presented by First Unitarian Congregational Society of Brooklyn's Weaving the Fabric of Diversity & Citizens Defending Libraries, April 8, 2017

During the chat, Mr. White said that he had been giving some thought to the theory of the “Tragedy of the Commons” and what would be its opposite.   You can find writing about the “Tragedy of the Commons” all over the place.  It gets enormous coverage, almost ad nauseam and almost too much despite the theory having its validity.  The “Tragedy of the Commons” is advanced as an argument for privatizing public property, privatizing property that is owned and shared in common.  The theory is that when everyone, all the public, has equal, unrestrained access to assets that are commonly owned, there is an incentive to use those assets to the point of depleting exhaustion.  Examples include the over-fishing of the oceans, or the race of landowners competing against each other to use, as fast a possible for their personal benefit, the ultimately limited water in the Ogallala Aquifer that lies under the lands in eight great plains states where we once saw the Oklahoma dust bowl.  That dustbowl area was retrieved from desolation, in part from newer technology pumping that aquifer water up from below.

Mr. White suggested what is likely the rightful opposite of the “Tragedy of the Commons” is rarely talked about although it’s a concept possibly just as valid, or even more so, than the “Tragedy of the Commons.”  Maybe the other theory doesn’t get equal play with the “Tragedy of the Commons,”  because the other theory argues against, rather than for privatized ownership.  In fact, you are unlikely to find the other theory that Mr. White presented articulated anywhere.  If you dig, you will be able to find what is referred to as the “Tragedy of the Anticommons.”  That theory is about what is lost when people sit on, and don’t share and combine, patents; when they keep information secret (like with the mediaeval guilds of old) so that others can’t similarly benefit from knowing things.  It is the kind of thing that was expressed well and talked about by Lewis Hyde in his book “Common as Air,” where he notes how a young America, departing from Britain, flourished as information was shared and experimented with disregarding British patents rights that encroached on the "cultural commons" and free experimentation. . .

. .  As a better opposite to the “Tragedy of the Commons,” Mr. White offered another, different theory of how decisions that privatize a world that’s better shared can be destructive.  He suggested that it was perfectly demonstrated by what environmental lawyer Steve Donziger had litigated against: The Chevron/Texaco takeover of Amazon rain forest lands as if those lands were that oil company’s private preserve to exploit and despoil at will.  He said that when one entity (or maybe just a few) was allowed to own an entire environment, an entire ecosystem, that the complex, multi-faceted, broadly inhabited environment would then be seen for only the limited value that the owning entity could see in it, not for the value that all of those dwelling in the environment, human and non-human could perceive in and glean from the environment.  (As fewer and fewer monopolies own more and more of the world this is more and more a problem.)  As Mr. White was speaking to a largely Scottish audience, you’ll see he mentioned that another possible example of this in Scottish history could be the private ownership (by Lairds) that led to the depopulation of Scotland in the 1700s when a new kind of sheep were introduced; it was something that Jane Jacobs wrote about in her “Cities and the Wealth of Nations” book.        

In other parts of the interview, Mr. White reprised things he has said in other interviews, for instance on the Project Censored Show.  See: Latest Project Censored Radio Show Features Interview With CDL Co-Founder Michael D. D. White On Dismantlement of Libraries- (And Another Interview With Investigative Reporter Dave Lindorff), May 22, 2019.
   
We furnished useful associated links at the time of that interview and furnish some of them again here:

The following are links you may want to us to delve deeper into some of things you’ll hear discussed in the interview:

Main Citizens Defending Libraries page

Of course, our our current main Citizens Defending Libraries page, which, with lots of links, takes you in any direction you would like to research more about the dismantling of NYC libraries.  In all, it provides a very good overview, fairly parallel to the interview, but with even more information, of what we are up against broken down by topics.

It's Not Just The Real Estate Industry Threatening Libraries: Examining The Panoply of Other Threats

Our CDL page on Digital vs. Physical books:  Physical Books vs. Digital Books.

Articles About Library Privacy and Surveillance In Libraries

Interesting to Think That it All Began With BOOKS? Except That Amazon and World’s Wealthiest Man (As We Know Jeff Bezos Today) Didn’t Exactly Begin That Way. . .

Amazon Headquarters Lands In Long Island City: What Happens When Our Elected Officials Hand The Task of Governing Over To A Private Sector Corporation

Citizens Defending Libraries has covered suppressed books, including here:
Books As Catalysts In A World Where Information And Points of View Are Often Suppressed

Biography of Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham, one example of a suppressed book.

As for Pacifica stations getting more content out and the possibility of HD radio (and you can think about the parallels between why it's important to preserve traditional libraries and why terrestrial radio is similarly important, there's a bit written about HD radio here:

Feeling Constrained By Your Digital `Liberation’? Speaking Personally, I Am

Interestingly, what that article mentions about our doorbells no longer being zones of privacy became a NY Times op-ed subject (Time To Panic About Privacy) in the special Sunday Review privacy project (but the way the Times has it set up on line is creepy and may turn your brain off).

Michael White reported a little bit of Esprit de l'escalier (spirit of the staircase) after his Project censored interview-  He said that when co-host Chase Palmieri asked about implication of Amazon Prime's reach (and he couldn't answer that exactly), he should have one-upped the conversation respecting such concerns with a jump to mentioning Alexa.  And when it comes to Alexa, our YouTube channel has a short Alexa video that's funny in a creepy, black humor sort of way.  See:

We think you will enjoy this video: Alexa Explains Surveillance Valley (+ Siri on Alexa)

The video:
Alexa Explains Surveillance Valley (+ Siri on Alexa)

The Alexa video is also embedded in a CDL post about Yasha Levine's book (Levine could be a good Project Censored guest):

Reading on the Internet vs. Reading a Book You Picked Up Browsing In Your Library: Yasha Levine’s “Surveillance Valley- The Secret Military History of the Internet”

There is another immediate followup Citizens Defending Libraries post to the above Yasha Levine book post (below), but the implications of it are very layered, nuanced and frightening, offering an uncomfortably challenging perspective.  It would have been, a real "rabbit hole," to get into-- It's basically another angle on where Levine gets around to for the end of his book.  Levin was even interviewed about it on WNYC's "On The Media":

Self Proclaimed As Fighting Surveillance, Library Freedom Project Is Tied to Tor Service With Its Deep Ongoing Connections, Including Financing, To The U.S. Government

The article mentioned by Michael White at the end about the interview about the non-representation of super-majorities of the public on major issue after major issue  (including not giving us the libraries we can afford):

Everybody’s Realizing It Now: The Political Establishment Is Not Willing To Give The Public The Things The Vast Majority Of Americans Want And That We Could Easily Have

Signing our petition lets people get email updates.

Scott Sherman Writes An Article In The Nation That Declares Us As Activists The Winners In Thwarting Library Destruction Plans: Is It Believable?- Let’s Boil It Down To Some Quotes

Scott Sherman's new article in The Nation declaring Library Defenders victorious- His 2015 book and bio from its dust jacket.

Let’s begin here with a few quotes:

I hate careless flattery, the kind that exhausts you in your efforts to believe it.—
   Wilson Mizner

History is written by the victors.—

That’s an old adage that so reflexively accepted as true, we don’t even know who first said it and there are so many various iterations of it that hardly matters. . .  like Winston Churchill famously saying, “history will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”  

We begin with these quotes because?–  Because Scott Sherman has written an article in The Nation that declares us as library defending activists the victors in the fight to rescue our New York City libraries from destruction by the trustees.  See: The Rescue of the New York Public Library—Activists—and The Nation—thwarted NYPL trustees’ harebrained plans and restored democracy to this vital public institution, July 26, 2021.

When you’re flattered, there is always the impulse to go along willingly to accept it as true, but that can be dangerous, which is why Machiavelli counseled shunning flatterers.    “Flattery is all right so long as you don’t inhale.” said Adlai E Stevenson somewhat more lightly.

The reason why we are not inhaling Mr. Sherman’s flattery, is because, to go back to our first quote, his flattery is so careless that, try and exhaust ourselves as we might, we just can’t believe it.

What also makes Mr. Sherman’s article so hard to believe is his very strange way of writing this history of us as the ostensible victors: He may have proclaimed us as the `victors’ but he never contacted us for quotes or perspective on the conclusions he was about to assert.  So much for ‘history being written by the winners’!

In fact, whatever accomplishments we might in fact admit to, and they exist, and whatever caveats Mr. Sherman supplies about his proclamations, we overall disagree with Mr. Sherman’s simplistic conclusion that we’ve rescued the NYPL libraries or restored democracy to the NYPL as an institution.

We were one of two groups with overlapping membership foremost in taking the lead and working together to prevent the library destruction that Mr. Sherman writes about: The Committee to Save the New York Public Library and Citizens Defending Libraries.  Although Mr. Sherman names our groups in the book he wrote and in earlier articles he had published in The Nation, we go unnamed in this latest article.  Citizens Defending Libraries was the first of the named plaintiffs in the “two lawsuits” Mr. Sherman mentions were filed against the NYPL’s destructive Central Library Plan. The plan was the intended consolidating shrinkage of Manhattan’s most important centrals destination libraries: The 42nd Street Central Reference Library (the one with the lions), The 34th Street Science, Business and Industry Library, the Mid-Manhattan Library and the remnants of the then just destroyed Donnell Library.

Mr. Sherman notes that the “trustees, from 2007 to 2014, were bent on selling the property, on 40th Street and Fifth Avenue, to real estate developers,” and he rhetorically asks “How did one of the world’s greatest libraries get into the real estate business?” then supplying his analysis that the “sordid” answer was that the NYPL wanted to “profit from the city’s real estate boom” by central Manhattan real estate.  While Mr. Sherman had already written derisively about the NYPL’s dismantling plans for the 42nd Street Research library, Citizens Defending Libraries was first to identify the role that real estate interests played in driving proposals so adverse to the public interest.

We don’t want to underrate the value of Mr. Sherman’s prior work.  He was on the scene writing about the expensive foolishness of the NYPL’s plans for the 42nd Street central reference library as early as November, 2011.  That’s before Citizens Defending Libraries was born in the very beginning of 2013.  His 2015 book “Patience and Fortitude: Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library” brought further attention to these issues and included valuable additional research.

The main criticism some offered of his analysis back then was that he was too kind in the judgments he offered of the New York Public Library’s wealthy and powerful trustees even while he described them as inept and clueless.  He never accused them of greed, self dealing, or of placing any other goals above the public interest in setting their agenda.  As he described it, the main flaws these wealthy trustees had was apparently not being very clear sighted about financial matters and not caring enough about scholarship and the real value of the information in libraries, and being too enamored of the glitzy, glamour of the redesign of library space by starchitect Norman Foster.

Mr. Sherman also confined himself to writing about just the NYPL, which only has  responsibilities for the New York City libraries in the boroughs of Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten island, and he wrote mostly just about a few libraries in Manhattan.  He did this without relating how the issue of library trustees straying off path this way was a citywide issue.  For example. he pretty much neglected to mention the sell-off of libraries in Brooklyn. Although, as he obviously had to, he wrote often about David Offensend the NYPL’s Chief Operating Officer being very involved in steering the NYPL into its library sales, including, the shrink-and-sink sale of the beloved 97,000 square foot Donnell Library across from the Museum of Modern Art, he totally didn’t mention the striking non-coincidence that at the very same time Janet Offensend, David Offensend’s wife, was a trustee of the Brooklyn Public library who was steering that library system into its own library sales including the shrink-and-sink sale Brooklyn’s second biggest library (63,000 square feet) in a transaction mirroring the Donnell sale.       

Mr. Sherman’s book did unveil relevant numbers showing that when the very valuable Donnell was sold in 2007 in what was essentially a secretly handled no-bid sale (the transaction brought Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law a hidden windfall), the NYPL netted less than $30 million for it, maybe only about only $25 million when all costs are reckoned.  In other words, it netted less than individual apartments would be selling for in the in the luxury hotel and condo building that would replace Donnell.  It likely netted less than the hidden windfall to Jared Kushner (a windfall that Mr. Sherman did not identify or mention, something he has never caught up with to include in his writings).

Although Mr. Sherman tells us in various of his writings that the NYPL’s Central Library Plan was “born in secrecy, with Booz Allen Hamilton as the midwife” he does not tell enough about Booz Allen and he leaves it mostly to the readers of The Nation and his book to be self informed enough to wonder an important question: Why Did The NYPL  Hire Booz Allen Hamilton, A Top Spy Firm Working For The U.S. Government, Before Launching These Book Banishing Plans?

Booz Allen Hamilton “is really an arm of the intelligence community,” that we know from the 2013 Snowden revelations has been involved with the federal government’s “most controversial federal surveillance programs in recent years.”  It is:

virtually indistinguishable from our government itself when it comes to surveillance, with as Bloomberg Businessweek said, the "federal government as practically its sole client."  The government's surveillance work is now carried out predominantly through `private' spy organizations like Booz: "About 70 percent of the 2013 U.S. intelligence budget is contracted out, according to a Bloomberg Industries analysis."

And with the U.S. contracting out the huge preponderance of its surveillance to private firms, and mainly to just a very few firms with  Booz Allen Hamilton regarded as the “colossus” of those few.

Mr. Sherman mentions Booz Allen Hamilton being hired and describes the firm as “a gargantuan consulting firm that derives much of its revenue from U.S. military and intelligence agencies.” He did not, however, follow up well on the implications of that passing statement.  The closest he got was in the one of his last Nation articles, (The Hidden History of New York City's Central Library Plan- Why did one of the world's greatest libraries adopt a $300 million transformation without any real public debate? August 28, 2013) where he expressed some anxious concern about what Booz was up to, but neglected to identify Booz as a spy agency, instead identifying it to readers of The Nation in alternative, if related, terms:

Finally, what was the role of Booz Allen Hamilton—the gargantuan consulting firm whose tentacles reach into the defense, energy, transportation and financial service sectors—which was hired by the NYPL in 2007 to formulate what became known inside the trustee meetings as “the strategy”?

Mr. Sherman did us a favor by combing through the minutes of the NYPL to find juicy tidbits that help tell his story in compelling ways (for instance he reports Booz Allen was paid $2.7 million by the NYPL), but he neglected to report how those NYPL minutes reveal that the NYPL hired Booz Allen not very long after its board was advised of the expectation that new federal law might “require” the NYPL and “to reengineer their Internet service facilities to enhance law enforcement's ability to monitor and intercept communications.”  Moreover, under direction from Mayor Bloomberg’s administration and his First Deputy Mayor, Patricia Harris, the Booz services were extended to the Brooklyn and Queens library systems, thus applying to all three. The NYPL’s initial hire was also around the time that it was finally disclosed to the public that a group of Connecticut librarians had fended off a federal government attempt to surveil their library as the government secretly asserted the PATRIOT Act for years.  

Scott Sherman also let us know that, before Booze Allen was hired, McKinsey & Company, replaced by Booz, had been advising the NYPL starting around 2003 on what became its real estate sell-offs.  Since that information about the NYPL hiring McKinsey & Company was furnished a lot of has come out affecting people’s understanding of the unsavory things McKinsey & Company (a private company that thereby avoids publicly reporting its activities) routinely gets involved with.  It has recast the firm’s reputation.

See: Why McKinsey’s Century Old Brand Name Is at Risk- Accused of aiding corruption, bribery, fraud, and opioid sales, the consulting giant faces reputation damage it may never recover from
Lance Ng, March 18, 2020,  Has McKinsey Lost Its Luster? More tough headlines for the consulting firm. By Andrew Ross Sorkin, Jason Karaian, Michael J. de la Merced, Lauren Hirsch and Ephrat Livni
February. 25, 2021, How McKinsey Has Helped Raise the Stature of Authoritarian Governments, By Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe, December 15, 2018, The McKinsey Way to Save an Island–  Why is a bankrupt Puerto Rico spending more than a billion dollars on expert advice? By Andrew Rice, April 17, 2019, The Secretive Firm Profiting from Puerto Rico's Crisis, WNYC, April 18, 2019, CIA has paid millions to a consulting firm to help with reorganization, By Greg Miller, July 1, 2015, Spies fear a consulting firm helped hobble U.S. intelligence- Insiders say a multimillion dollar McKinsey-fueled overhaul of the country’s intelligence community has left it less effective. By Natasha Bertrand and Daniel Lippman 07/02/2019, US gov, Tony Blair, and McKinsey plan to rebuild Gaza – with sweatshops to exploit Palestinian workers, Max Blumenthal·October 16, 2014, Immigration and the Prison Industrial Complex, – Major companies like Booz Allen Hamilton, Deloitte Consulting, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and McKinsey & Company have contracted with ICE, and it is the latter which has gained the most notoriety for its connections.  By Andrew Moss,  January 8, 2020, Doing Business with Tyrants, By Lawrence Davidson, January 9, 2019

McKinsey & Company surfaced as a topic in the 2020 election given that it was part of Pete Buttigieg’s resume.  He worked there from June 2007 to March 2010.  At first Buttigieg treated this as a commendable part of his past, but then while being evasive about what he did for the company, he switched over to saying that McKinsey has made a lot of “poor choices” in recent years and that some of its work was  “disgusting.”  The issue of his employment there was being raised by those referring to Buttigieg as “Deep State Pete” who saw such evidence of deep state connections in Buttigieg working for McKinsey on unspecified assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan and his thereafter going back to Afghanistan to work alongside the CIA while serving as a high-ranking Naval intelligence officer in 2014.  See: Media darling Pete Buttigieg was in unit that worked with CIA in Afghanistan, Alexander Rubinstein, February  7, 2020

In other words, there is a pattern that’s become much clearer in recent years of seeing McKinsey & Company get hired for dirty business.  This is something that Citizens Defending Libraries has come to appreciate only lately and well after the fact of knowing earlier that NYPL had hired McKinsey in connection with its library restructuring plans.  So we can’t chide Mr. Sherman for similarly not making more of a point of disreputableness of McKinsey & Company when he first wrote, but we are catching up with our writing here.

Mr. Sherman could, however, have brought more attention to the implications of hiring the Booz firm.  Did he hold back because he worried about sounding too shrill or too suspicious?  Or did his editors at the Nation want him to write at the level that the issue would only be picked up on by Nation readers capable of recognizing the issue and knowledgeable from reading other Nation articles about Booz and surveillance?

Booz Allen aside, had Mr. Sherman contacted us for quotes about how successful we consider ourselves to be in the ongoing fights to defend our libraries and where we consider ourselves to be in those fights, we would have brought up things not mentioned in Mr. Sherman article proclaiming us victorious.  We would have brought up things relating exactly to what Mr. Sherman mainly wrote about in his previous writings, the sale of libraries and the elimination of books.

We would have . . .

. . . brought up the fact that, just as previously planned, one of Mid-Manhattan’s central libraries has been sold: SIBL, the NYPL’s Science, Industry and Business Library and the city’s biggest and only real science library was sold one of the very richest of the world’s multi-billionaires to be turned into a “comic book museum.”  See: Wall Street Journal Reveals Fate Of SIBL, The City’s Biggest Science Library: Super-Wealthy Paul Allen Will Turn It Into “Pop-Culture Museum.  June 4, 2018.  More shutting down of science just as we are facing challenges like global warming’s climate chaos?

Losing SIBL we lost a library that held a research collection of 1.2 million volumes, plus a circulating collection of 40,000 books and videos, over 10,000 business and scientific serials, open shelf-shelf reference offering 60,000 volumes.
 
Where are those 1.2 million+ volumes from SIBL going?–  To the revamped Mid-Manhattan Library with which SIBL is supposedly being consolidated?  The NYPL is not even really pretending that such is the case.  The resource is more or less simply vanishing with the NYPL saying to the public that it is abandoning collection of science books, expecting that people can resort to “the internet” to learn about science instead. . . . That's the increasingly censored internet. . . that's also data scraped and surveiled.

In his latest, Mr. Sherman retreads his previous account of the loss of Donnell and while asserting that we Library Defenders were victorious he says that “much was still lost,” cites as the examples of what he means the money lost and squandered on the plan he indicates was abandoned and he does not mention the loss of SIBL as being part of that plan fulfilled and he does not mention the loss of its books.  In fact, what he writes implies that with our saving of the Mid-Manhattan Library there has been a happy outcome with respect to the availability of books at Mid-Manhattan.  He says:

The NYPL wars of 2011–2014 were about saving the libraries and preserving the books on the shelves. When the trustees hatched their plan in 2007, they mistakenly assumed that e-books would replace actual books. That faith impelled them to hastily remove 3 million volumes from the 42nd Street facility; those books were never returned to the stacks under the Rose Reading Room. It is appropriate that the new Stavros Niarchos Library* has 400,000 books.

(* The Mid-Manhattan has been renamed the “Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library”– We say SNFL, Sniffle, for short– after the Greek Shipping Magnate with whom Edward G. Robinson, who played a librarian in his very last role, had a beef.)

Mr. Sherman does not put into context that "400,000" quantity of books for Mid-Manhattan, New York City’s largest circulating public library, as we have, when we, for instance, point out that Karl Lagerfeld’s personal, one-man, private library when he died held 300,000 books.  (See: Through The Windows of Privilege (Like Karl Lagerfeld’s) The Enduring Value Of Physical Books And Libraries With Big Collections Can Readily Be Discerned, March 8, 2019)

Moreover, no one reading Mr. Sherman’s words would know that the previous incarnation of the Mid-Manhattan was designed to hold 700,000 books, Plus, aside from supposedly absorbing SIBL that once held 1.2 million+ volumes, Mid-Manhattan was supposed to absorb another 175,000 books from just one of Donnell’s collections when that central destination library was shut down.  And the NYPL has publicized that there could be even fewer books in the library in the future because the bookshelves “are not structural . . . you can take [them] away later if you want.”  Another dirty little secret: Although some administration space will be converted and added onto the public space, with only 100,000 square feet, the “renovated” SNFL Mid-Manhattan will have one third less space than the pre-renovation library.  This significant loss of valuable floor space is due to the floor space lost through the creation of atriums in the building.  See: Open House New York Hosts an NYPL Presentation of Its Mid-Manhattan Library “Renovation” Plan March 6, 2018

Had Mr. Sherman interviewed us we would also have told him that when it comes to the 42nd Street Central Reference Library and its banished 3 million books we Library Defenders are complaining strenuously about proposed and ongoing renovations designed to commercialize it.  See:  NYPL’s Presentation of its “Master Plan” to alter and commercialize the 42nd Street Central Reference Library, January 27, 2018.  Heaven knows what has rushed forward under the concealing cloak of Covid.  

Moreover, we have pointed out and objected to in testimony before the City Council the NYPL’s very contracted and shortened hours for use of the 42nd Street Central Referenced Library by scholars in order to hold private gala events at the library, and “cocktail parties for the connected” represents a highly inappropriate privatization of that public asset intended to serve the public.

We would also have told Mr. Sherman to talk about the loss of other libraries and library space, like the Inwood Library, Sunset Library, etc.

Mr. Sherman’s article has a feel to it that he wants to close the book on this story, but his journalism in doing so is a very poor first draft of history.

There are well-known sayings about history, knowing and remembering it.  One of the best known is George Santayana’s “When experience (which is history) is not retained...infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” which may be viewed as something of a retread of Cicero’s “Those who have no knowledge of what has gone before them must forever remain children.”  Malcolm X took a crack at essentially the same sentiment with: “History is a people's memory, and without a memory man is demoted to the lower animals.”

If Mr. Sherman had so much as mentioned Citizens Defending Libraries or the Committee to Save the New York Public Library by name instead of just referring nondescriptly to “an indefatigable group of citizens came together to save the libraries” as the victors his readers might have gone to our respective websites to get a far different picture of the status of our fights than he portrayed.

Dwelling on problems unrelentingly without solutions can be enervating and it can defeat the activist spirit.  That’s why on our Citizens Defending Libraries main page we proudly do declare our actual victories.  See: Achievements and Partial List of Successes of Citizens Defending Libraries (founded early 2013).
 
Notwithstanding the importance of giving due recognition to our victories in maintaining spirit and forward momentum, Mr. Sherman’s account that everything is now happily taken care of in some kind of lulling “end of history” way seems designed to send all the activists home and for all challenges to and questioning of the library trustees and their decisions, current and future, to cease.   Such a happy-ending erasure of our ongoing fight and important history raises this concern: If history is, as they say, written by the victors and we did not write this history, then somebody else somewhere, other than us, must be the actual victor. .  Somebody who had more to do with what te wanted written.  Then, with dread we remember George Orwell’s, words: “Whoever controls the past controls the future.”  

Hope you found some quotes you enjoyed reading this post, because, answer is, if you are looking at Mr. Sherman’s latest article in The Nation we don’t think you’ll find anything in it that’s in any way worthy of quoting. 

Privatization of History: Scary Information About What Is Happening At Our National Archives and Records Administration

"Erasing" history or "privatizing" it?  Churchill, a man whose flaws you may be unfamiliar with said: “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”-- And he did.

This one hits home for us at Citizens Defending Libraries.  At Citizens Defending Libraries we have paid much attention to how the shutting down, selling and deliberate underfunding of libraries relates to information control, information elimination, and censorship.

On February 6th, Democracy Now had a story about how millions of documents are being expunged from the National Archives.  This was right after the National Archives delivered an altered version of history concerning the 2017 Women’s March by doctoring a photograph of the March that the Archives used as a main feature for a new exhibit, The doctoring removed criticisms of President Trump.  See:  Erasing History: The National Archives Is Destroying Records About Victims of Trump’s ICE Policies.

Our National Archives is a form library intended to be a repository for the protection of our country’s history, as well as a form of watchdog for its protection.  Let’s note again: It’s a form of library.  Matthew Connelly, professor of history at Columbia University and principal investigator at History Lab, interviewed for the Democracy Now story about the expungements said that:

a lot of what’s happening at the National Archives is happening because they are being starved of resources.  They have a smaller budget now than they had back in 2008. That budget has been cut every year for the last three years.

That sounds exactly like our New York City libraries.  And we will remind you that there is no excuse for starving our New York City libraries of resources the way we are being starved, because libraries are an almost infinitesimal portion of our city budget, especially in terms of the benefits they deliver.

Mr. Connelly was on Democracy Now, having written a recent piece for The New York Times on the Archive expungements headlined “Why You May Never Learn the Truth About ICE.”

While the hook that was used for both the Democracy Now interview and Mr. Connelly’s New York Times op-ed was the destruction of information about the recent and ongoing atrocities being committed by ICE under Trump, the violations of “immigrant rights” involved, and how ICE may be “destroying records from Trump’s first year, including the detainees’ complaints about civil rights violations and shoddy medical care,” Mr. Connally ventured further in his concerns.  He expressed his worries about our government’s “long history of destroying records related to the overthrow of democratically elected governments, mind control experiments and torture,” and he noted how our country has “destroyed all of the records of the deliberations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff [he didn’t get to finish his sentence].”  He noted that the “Department of the Interior and the National Archives have decided to delete files on endangered species, offshore drilling inspections and the safety of drinking water.”

The Democracy Now headline for its segment with Mr. Connelly refers to “Erasing History,” but is this characterization directly on target?  Isn’t this instead, a likely “privatization” of history?

In his New York Times op-ed Mr. Connelly mentions how now when things go into the National Archives, “Everything must be digital, or the departments and agencies must use their own resources to scan them.”

We are currently in an age when there is unprecedented private storage of data.  Everything is saved.  Data storage is insanely cheap, and keeps getting cheaper.  Much of that data storage is done by companies like Amazon, private companies that have strong ties to the CIA and the military industrial complex.

With private data collection running rampant for every conceivable purpose, is it reasonable to think that any anything that ever exists in digital form, even if that digital existence is brief, is ever truly expunged, that it truly ever vanishes?  Is it reasonable to believe that just because we starve our libraries and public national archive, that the information they made available, however briefly, especially if it was made available digitally, will not continue to exist in private hands?  Probably not.

When information exists digitally, it is easy to suck it out on into private databases a wholesale basis. . .   It is instructive to remember that, before his premature and extremely disheartening death, Aaron Swartz, the young activist  who was, among other things, a fan of libraries and an advocate for democratic empowerment through publicly available information (plus an open internet with net neutrality), was legally persecuted by our government for sucking out digital information on a wholesale basis to do exactly the opposite: He downloaded 4.8 million academic journal articles from a from a private database with the probable intent of making them more publicly accessible.  A number of years before, Swartz downloaded and made more freely available to the public 2.7 million federal court documents (essentially the law) from a federal database, documents which were technically already public, but were somehow not actually readily accessible to the public unless they paid to go through private channels, except through private channels.  Prosecuted for his download of the academic journal articles, Swartz faced a potential 90 years in prison and his father accused the government of hounding him and bringing about his death.
         
It is therefore important to understand that what we are talking about is the privatization of history and information, not its erasure.

The control of history and its narratives has been going on for a long time with those who are powerful thinking a lot about it.  Winston Churchill famously said, “history will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”  Our more liberal friends from the United Kingdom, who are better and more knowledgeably acquainted with Churchill, tell us they have very mixed feelings about “Winnie.”  Their feelings toward him are probably less favorable than ours, as we on this side of the pond, have likely been subjected to more unadulterated myth-making propaganda about the man.  There is much that was simply appalling about Churchill, but the fact that Churchill did, indeed, actually write a lot of the history about himself counteracts much of that.

Interviewed on On The Media, journalist Madhusree Mukerjee explained that after World War II, Churchill:

had complete access to all United Kingdom documents and an entire team of researchers and writers who helped him actually write six volumes or so of his World War II memoirs. And these volumes put Churchill at the center of the war, whereas historians have filled out some of the detail, which is that it was the Soviets who defeated the Nazis and the Americans who defeated the Japanese.

(See: Churchill's Forgotten, Ruthless Past, March 16, 2018)

Mukerjee also notes that “when his political career was in shards after the First World War, he wrote a history then, as well,” and that he wrote several histories, including “something called The History of the English-Speaking Peoples.”

Putting the resources of the British government at Churchill’s disposal to write is one way of letting history be written by those that command the reins of power. . . But pulling back on our public resources to put all of our history in the hands of private corporate monopolies that do not have the best interests of the public assuredly at heart is probably an even more serious surrender of the custodianship of truth and memory.  Global warming anyone?  How about perpetual wars?

. .  Privatizing history is probably far worse than just trying to erase it.

Our last thought on this: You may have already observed for yourself that, whether its studying to understand history or just trying to follow the news, the most vital key to comprehension is most certainly a careful focus on what the powerful don’t want you to know.

PS: (added February 29, 2020)– On February 21, On The Media caught up to run a segment, “The Vanishing National Archives," about  Matthew Connelly, his  New York Times op-ed and the expungements from the National Archives.

It mostly tracked the story above:

by the end of this year, they're [the archive is] going to be able to start destroying records from the first year of the Trump administration when it first began to crack down on undocumented immigration.

* *

[On the chopping block] . .  everything from aviation safety to the takeover of American firms by foreign nationals. All of those records are slated for destruction in the Department of Interior, records related to protection of drinking water, enforcement of laws on endangered species, the management of the mismanagement of native lands, native assets, all that stuff's gonna get deleted, too.

However, it ends using a nice quote from Churchill’s counterpart in the United States, Franklin Roosevelt:

“A nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people.” So to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future.