How the mighty have fallen as the fascist purge marches on. The US Naval Academy posted a list of nearly 400 books being removed from the Nimitz Library as part of Trump’s purge of anything smacking of truth in history or social reality. Amongst the items purged were works by Maya Angelou, as well as books memorializing Holocaust survivors, or books on the history of the Ku Klux Klan or racism.
Here is an excerpt from an article posted online:
WASHINGTON (AP) — Books on the Holocaust, histories of feminism, civil rights and racism, and Maya Angelou's famous autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” were among the nearly 400 volumes removed from the U.S. Naval Academy's library this week after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office ordered the school to get rid of ones that promote diversity, equity and inclusion.
The Navy late Friday provided the list of 381 books that have been taken out of its library. The move marks another step in the Trump administration’s far-reaching effort to purge so-called DEI content from federal agencies, including policies, programs, online and social media postings and curriculum at schools.
In addition to Angelou's award-winning tome, the list includes “Memorializing the Holocaust,” which deals with Holocaust memorials; “Half American,” about African Americans in World War II; “A Respectable Woman," about the public roles of African American women in 19th century New York; and “Pursuing Trayvon Martin,” about the 2012 shooting of the Black 17-year-old in Florida that raised questions about racial profiling.
Other books clearly deal with subjects that have been stridently targeted by the Trump administration, including gender identity, sexuality and transgender issues. A wide array of books on race and gender were targeted, dealing with such topics as African American women poets, entertainers who wore blackface and the treatment of women in Islamic countries.
Also on the list were historical books on racism, the Ku Klux Klan and the treatment of women, gender and race in art and literature.
In a statement, the Navy said officials went through the Nimitz Library catalog, using keyword searches, to identify books that required further review. About 900 books were identified in the search.
“Departmental officials then closely examined the preliminary list to determine which books required removal,” said Cmdr. Tim Hawkins, Navy spokesman. “Nearly 400 books were removed from Nimitz Library to comply with directives outlined in Executive Orders issued by the President.”
The books were removed shortly before Hegseth arrived Tuesday for a visit to the academy, which had already been planned and was not connected to the library purge, officials said.
The Pentagon has said the academies are "fully committed to executing and implementing President Trump’s Executive Orders.”
The Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, the Air Force Academy near Colorado Springs, Colorado, and the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, had not been included in President Donald Trump’s executive order in January that banned DEI instruction, programs or curriculum in kindergarten through 12th grade schools that receive federal funding. That is because the academies are colleges.
Pentagon leaders, however, turned their attention to the Naval Academy last week when a media report noted that the school had not removed books promoting DEI.
A U.S. official said the academy was told late last week to conduct the review and removal. It isn’t clear if the order was directed by Hegseth or someone else on his staff.
A West Point official confirmed earlier this week that the school had completed a review of its curriculum and was prepared to review library content if directed by the Army. The Air Force and Naval academies had also done curriculum reviews as had been required.
An Air Force Academy official said the school continually reviews its curriculum, coursework and other materials to ensure it all complies with executive orders and Defense Department policies.
Last week, Lt. Gen. Tony Bauernfeind, the Air Force Academy superintendent, told Congress that the school was in the middle of its course review, but there was no mention of books.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss academy policies.
Hegseth has aggressively pushed the department to erase DEI programs and online content, but the campaign has been met with questions from angry lawmakers, local leaders and citizens over the removal of military heroes and historic mentions from Defense Department websites and social media pages.
Apparently, the whitewashing of our history continues, yet the man who blatantly lied about posting classified material on a public commercial texting ap goes unpunished, and will soon be inspecting his master’s works. George Orwell would be proud to see his vision coming true.
What’s next? Will we see Montag and his co-workers racing down our streets to their next book burning? We can see how 1984 is coming true - just how much longer before we see the likes of Fahrenheit 451 come true?
Comments
I'm all for reinstating Fort Bragg
General Bragg probably did more for the Union victory than almost anyone else.
There is a point beyond which removing statues and renaming…….
Military bases can go too far. Radicalism from any angle is wrong. Would we remove George Washington or Thomas Jefferson from our history because they were slave owners? Like all people, they were not perfect; they were flawed. That is what makes their achievements that much more important - they strove to overcome their flaws rather than wallowing in them.
A few years back, a statue of Phillip Schuyler, a hero of the American Revolution, was removed from the grounds of City Hall in Albany, NY - because he was a slave owner. The statue has stood in Albany since 1925. The man was not only a Revolutionary War General, but a U.S. Senator, and the father-in-law of Alexander Hamilton. As should be obvious to all here, I am not a fan of Trump and his MAGA crowd - but neither do I condone the attempts to eliminate people like Schuyler from our history, our community consciousness. Like most of us, he was flawed. But his statue did not celebrate the fact that he was a slave owner; rather it celebrated the fact that an ordinary man did extraordinary things. That he strove to be better. How is pretending that our founding fathers, that many others within our history who were flawed simply didn’t exist, any better than what Trump and cronies are doing now?
Hell, my family owned slaves until the mid-1800’s, at which time one of my forefathers manumitted all of the families slaves, providing each one who wished it with a small plot of land and offering to pay them an honest wage to work for the family, while allowing those who so wished to leave. Even though my family is rooted in the area around Union and Cabarrus Counties in North Carolina, deep in the heart of Dixie, he believed that slavery was un-Godly, and it’s perpetuation would damn him and his descendants to hell. As an aside, my family actually fought on both sides of our Civil War - some fought as sons of North Carolina or South Carolina, and some fought for the preservation of the Union, but none fought as slave owners.
Erasing history is WRONG. The simple fact is that if we pretend that we have nothing to correct, nothing to strive for, then we will never change. We will never become better people, or a better nation. If we ignore our past, or worse, cover it up, then we have learned nothing.
In the words of our founding fathers, flawed men each and every one, "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America…….”
IN ORDER TO FORM A MORE PERFECT UNION - not a perfect union, but rather a more perfect union. The phrase speaks to the aspiration of the framers. They did not want to claim the new system was perfect. They did, however, believe it would be a significant improvement to the Articles of Confederation that existed previously. For them, use of the words “more perfect” also implied eternal effort. The endeavor for the United States of America to always strive to improve and refine its union continues to this day.
We must ever strive to be better, and ignoring our flaws, our past errors, is most definitely not the way to do this.
D. Eden
“Hier stehe ich; ich kann nicht anders. Gott helfe mir.”
Dum Vivimus, Vivamus
Those who cannot remember the past
“The Life of Reason, or The Phases of Human Progress”
Chapter 12 -- "Flux and Constancy In Human Nature”
By George Santayana 1905
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin ein femininer Mann
What's in a word?
When I first read about this I was struck by one particular detail.
Deleting the Holocaust from history is perfectly OK. That is not anti-semitism
Criticizing the actions by the Nethanyahu government in Gaza and other areas IS anti-semitism.
According to Trump that is.
List of Books Removed Nitiz Library
Every time I read about some activist happenings whether it be from the liberals or the red necks it's time to do my own research and find out if it's true. Ms Eden has the heart of the story and it's all true. What bothers me is it happened in a government supported library. It smacks of government over reach on what is allowable reading material for not only adults but everyone who wishes to do research on history. Books, not history books, books written from all points of view provides a realistic history. Not a history approved and controlled by the government. China, Russia, Germany, name any nation which hasn't purged their books. Rome, Constantine did the same what was written about Jesus. It goes back even further in history.
https://media.defense.gov/2025/Apr/04/2003683009/-1/-1/0/250...
Hugs Ms. Eden, this is so wrong, there is no justification for doing this.
Barb
Humans are doomed to repeating history because they don't want to learn and understand history.
Oklahoma born and raised cowgirl
Hopefully...!
Hopefully they just remove the books from the shelves to put them in storage.!
Peace tmf
Even Fiction Deserves A Place On The Shelf
Problems arise when someone(s) tries to demand and make everyone else think and believe as they them selves do. Hitler, Cesar, Poi Pot, Stalin, the list is almost endless. In many instances it's the neighbor next door, the stranger in the bar. Not going to mention the ignorance, stupidity, mindless following protests, or propaganda but..., DEI, Affirmative Action, and so many others passed to make everyone equal only makes one class of people more equal than others. God handed down Ten Commandments and got it right. Man has made millions, maybe billions, of laws and still can't get it right.
Hugs Miyata
Barb
I blame God. He gave us freedom to make our own decisions, make mistakes, not enough brain power to understand..
Oklahoma born and raised cowgirl
There is never a valid excuse for the removal of knowledge…..
One does not have to agree with the author, or even read what they have written. But that does not require that those writings be proscribed so that no one else has access to them. There can be no valid excuse for removing books which pertain to parts of history which you do not like simply because you don’t like what it says.
Those who have seen my comments here in the past will be familiar with the fact that I do not approve of certain types of stories, namely those which contain abuse of some form - and especially forced feminization. However, that does not give me the right to tell an author that they cannot write it, or another person that they cannot read it. Just as they do not have the right to tell me that I have to read it.
The Holocaust happened. Millions of people were brutally killed just because they were different - and not just Jews. People like many of those here on this site as well. The Ku Klux Klan existed, and still does exist. It is and always has been a racist organization whose sole purpose was to suppress those who were different. Blacks and women in this country were treated as second class citizens for many years, and still don’t have true equality in many ways.
Denying these things and trying to change history by removing them from libraries and forcing schools to remove them from their curricula is simply setting up our future generations to fail. And all because a certain group of people don’t want to face the reality that their forefathers were not perfect, or perhaps that they aren’t really better than those they were taught to hate.
D. Eden
“Hier stehe ich; ich kann nicht anders. Gott helfe mir.”
Dum Vivimus, Vivamus
Not every book is worth keeping
The task of a librarian is to curate a collection suitable/useful to the libraries users. The problem here is that bigoted ideology has been allowed to override that professional judgement. Future leaders need exposure to the ideas that are being suppressed.
Eternal reward….
Slave owners who never rebuked their ownership, including clergy and founding fathers, do not go to heaven. Neither do rich men.
Hegseth will follow his ordained prophet Trump to hell come the day. So be it for all of MAGA. In time, if these are not the long prophesied end times, the radical conservative pendulum will swing back. Some other nation will be great and lead the way. I wonder who they will be?
BAK 0.25tspgirl
Project 2025 continues apace
This sounds like a splendid piece of malicious compliance: doing as you're ordered, but making sure that not only the Secretary of Defense knows it, but also all the news agencies. That's clever. In such ways, the resistance is forming and firming up.
If those almost four hundred books are in the public domain, perhaps a patriot could establish a digital repository, such that they're made freely available to all who serve. Even if they aren't out of copyright, there are reciprocal lending arrangements, etc. (Do not mess with librarians; they are magnificent when roused.) A news item about the establishment of the repository could then find its way into the Nimitz library, and elsewhere...
I think you're wrong that we're seeing '1984' playing out in Washington, though. To my mind it's more late-stage 'Animal Farm'.
Sugar and Spiiice – TG Fiction by Bryony Marsh
Burn Those Books!
Burn Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl, Dr. Seuss, Mein Kampf. They were all racists of a sort!
We also have a problem here in Australia. Statues of Captain Cook are being defaced and/or toppled on the grounds that he was the instigator of colonial genocide against our original inhabitants. He had nothing to do with it.
Cook was a public servant employed by the British Government of the day to search for and chart lands unknown to the Europeans. This he did extremely well, one of the great navigators of his day. He mapped New Zealand and the whole east coast of Australia and many Pacific Islands including Hawaii, where he was killed BEFORE there was any British settlement in Australia.
That settlement came only after the dumping grounds in colonial America were no longer available for those who were nominated as criminals in that era.
Cook was also known for enforcing the consumption of fruit and veg on his vessels. Not one sailor died of scurvy during his voyages.
He respected the rights of aboriginal Australians during his voyages. He recorded only one hostile incident in his logs and conceded that it had been due to misunderstanding. His death in Hawaii is contested but was probably also due to a clash of cultures.
Here, I have to agree with Dallas that an honorable man is being vilified for imagined offences. Australia's record of dealing with the native inhabitants is by no means great, but it was not Cook's fault. Ignorance never solved any problems.
Nor did burning books. The Great Library of Alexandria probably contained many wise writings which are lost to history. We are luckier today as printing and publication make it almost impossible to totally erase the contents, but much experimental knowledge in very limited circulation can be 'disappeared'. The German studies of transgender conducted before the Nazis obliterated them are one example. And, of course, history is written by the victors.
We must strive to ensure that America's new Nazi regime does not win.
One of my favorite movie quotes…….
Is a scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. In the scene, Indiana and his father travel to Berlin just before the start of WWII in order to retrieve his father’s diary. While there, they witness a book burning in the town square, with hundreds of people cheering as the Nazis pile books upon the flames. Indiana’s father, played by Sean Connery, turns to him and says, “My boy, we are pilgrims in an unholy land.”
That accurately describes how I feel each and every day when I awaken. Knowing that it will be yet another day of dealing with the lunacy which has overtaken not just my country, but people I have known for years - people I recently thought of as friends and family. I begin to feel like Charlton Heston in The Omega Man - the last sane person in a world gone haywire.
I read an article recently while researching something, an article with which I would normally not agree as it was written by a very religious person - not that I have anything against religious people, just that many of them seem to be very much against me. I thought of this article just now because it too referenced the quote from Indiana Jones regarding pilgrims.
But taken in a different context than the author intended, the article actually spoke to me. The author wrote thus:
But you know what the truth of the matter is? If you are a Christian, you ARE a pilgrim in an unholy land. Seriously. Part of the definition of the word “pilgrim” is- “one who journeys to foreign lands”. We are living in a foreign land, regardless of what “land” we live in. Why? Because we are called to be IN the world, but not OF the world. We are called to be counter-cultural. And I KNOW that sounds crazy to some. Abby Hoffman was counter-cultural. Lenny Bruce was counter-cultural. The hippies of Haight-Ashbury were counter-cultural. And we are NOTHING like them…are we?
Well…yes and no. We probably don’t look, act or dress like them. BUT…we are called to speak out against that which is not of God. We are called to NOT simply “give in” and be like everybody else but instead be who God calls us to be, regardless of what others think. We are called to stand our ground. We are called to be pilgrims…in an unholy land.
The key lines here being, ”We probably don’t look, act, or dress like them. BUT…we are called to speak out”.…. “We are called to NOT simply ‘give in’ and be like everybody else but instead to be who God calls us to be, regardless of what others think. We are called to stand our ground. We are called to be pilgrims…in an unholy land.”
Isn’t amazing how that quote fits our own situation? Yes, we are counter-cultural, in that we are opposed to the culture of MAGA, the culture of Trumpism. And as such, we are travelers in a foreign land - pilgrims in a land not of our making. But a land in which we are called to be who God made us, rather than what society would have us be.
In the words of Martin Luther, “Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me.”
Be that pilgrim in an unholy land.
D. Eden
“Hier stehe ich; ich kann nicht anders. Gott helfe mir.”
Dum Vivimus, Vivamus