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Award Winning Children’s Book promotes Socialism
By ABH Alexander
Within the battlefields for the minds of our young there are ideological agendas being quietly fought. The field of Education has seen some great minds come and go. Today regretfully that field has devolved as much if not more than the political one.
The public end of the education spectrum is now getting run over by the Federal Government who is insisting on accountability for the bad test scores and serious issues of competency within the teaching ranks. A recent Associated Press article on March 20, 2007 was quietly suppressed and claimed that a full one-third of Washington D.C. residents are illiterate, this compares with about one-fifth nationally according to a D.C. report.
From a historical perspective, people of any country are much easier to manipulate, tax and control when they are, well… basically dumber. The more uninformed a country’s people becomes, the less they will be able to compete internationally. They will also be less capable about making the right decisions about their own personal and familial welfare. So what are we allowing our children to read that sends them down a slippery slope into depending on others to make their world better? Also, should we teach them self-reliance instead or perhaps a combination of the two? One author Marc Pfister presents his solution in a 1992 Abby award-winning book entitled The Rainbow Fish.
Pfister was born in Berne, Switzerland with his first major career as a graphic artist getting him a seat in an advertising agency. By 1983 Pfister began to pursue his own artistic endeavors and got his first children’s book The Sleepy Owl published. His most notable work to date among over 33 other children’s books is The Rainbow Fish, which is an oversized book featuring holographic foil stamping to clearly show the shiny scales of the Rainbow Fish as he swims through the dozen pages of the tale.
Google had 670,000 hits on Marc Pfister, one of them answer.com described Pfister as,
“Often considered a moralist who creates parables in picture book form, Pfister underscores his works with themes about sharing, trust, cooperation, consideration, courage, and acting responsibly.”
This official explanation bears closer scrutiny.
As we are talking only twelve pages, let’s break a few of the key pages down, with an enlightened analysis provided of course:
First Page Text:
A long way out in the deep blue sea there lived a fish. Not just an ordinary fish, but the most beautiful fish in the entire ocean. His scales were every shade of blue and green and purple, with sparkling silver scales among them.
Analysis: Other fish named this fish the Rainbow Fish and unfortunately, The Rainbow Fish was too busy to stop and play with all the other fish. The other fish pleaded and yet the Rainbow Fish was proud and silent and just glide past letting his scales shimmer.
This sounds more like a fish with a wealth of beauty and since this wealth is a part of this fish and he has little to do with the other fish a conflict arises. Pfister uses a parable metaphor style to send his fish into some kind of guilt about its wealth of shiny scales. Some of the other fish even ask the Rainbow Fish to give them some of his shiny scales…why? Simply, because he has so many.
Pfister, whether intentionally or not presents children with the basic tenets of socialism. We have a wealthy fish, who has something everyone else wants…OK, it’s shiny scales.
On another page the conflict between the haves and have-nots is ratcheted up a notch
Revealing Page Text:
“You want me to give you one of my special scales? Who do you think you are?” cried the Rainbow Fish. “Get away from me!”
Analysis: At this point the other blue fish were upset, swam away and told all their friends about that selfish Rainbow Fish. When they saw the Rainbow Fish again, they just swam away. When we are confronted with elevated greed and people who seemed designed for profit at any price, don’t we in a way…swim away? Unless of course we want to swim with them.
Naturally the Rainbow Fish becomes concerned with the fact that he is not well liked, so he had to get advice about what to do about it from a starfish. The advice was to go to a deep dark cave beyond the coral reef and find the wise old Octopus maybe SHE can help you. Feminists should rejoice in the fact that the female in this book is the expert with the advice, even though she stays in a deep dark cave, her home.
When the Rainbow Fish finds the cave he couldn’t see anything until the Octopus decided to come out and her two eyes caught what normally would be lunch in her glare.
The Octopus reprises the roll of the Wizard of Oz as she announces, “I have been waiting for you, the waves told me your story” The Octopus advices the young impressionable Rainbow Fish to “give a glittering scale to each of the other fish, you will no longer be the most beautiful fish, but you will discover how to be happy.”
It would not be long before the Rainbow Fish would meet other fish and pull out one scale at a time, giving his wealth, or wealth of beauty away. After successfully completing the redistribution of his wealth, the Rainbow Fish was finding himself happier and happier. The Rainbow Fish did not stop until he too had only one scale, which he kept himself so he could look just like everyone else.
What a solution, if you have wealth, just redistribute it amongst everyone else! This will bring happiness to all! What a Utopia, what a solution?
Even by the definition found in wikpedia.org, or answers.com Socialism is described in collective terms, with the redistribution of wealth and power being a central trademark.
Socialism defined on answers.com
Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy.
The stage in Marxist-Leninist theory intermediate between capitalism and communism, in which collective ownership of the economy under the dictatorship of the proletariat has not yet been successfully achieved.
Childrens books as Primers for Political Thought
What we have here dear reader is a primer for the youngest most pliable minds that acquiring anything in amounts far surpassing others is simply not very nice. This will not make you friends, help you influence people and it will get everyone to shun you.
The solution to all of this is to be sure there will be something, a government or an octopus in a dark mysterious cave to insure that this wealth is redistributed among the have-nots.
Those in the have not category have always enjoyed someone giving them something for simply wanting it, or for just existing. However, is that the best solution?
According to Internet reviews The Rainbow Fish supposedly emphasizes sharing. There is no mention of this being a primer for Socialism.
While there are an abundance of Americans today who are both sympathetic to Socialism and Communism and regretfully some who feel our US Constitution should simply be torn up and we start over. Many in that same crowd have spent very little time actually doing the studying needed to fully understand what Socialism, Communism and a world without the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights would bring.
A few Political and Historical Reference Points
If your political antennae are up and working you will no doubt detect a very strong influence in the mainstream press and particularly Hollywood when it comes to promoting the Socialist agenda.
While movie references are too numerous to mention, one in particular has always been a favorite. The 1981 movie Chariots of Fire with the popular undulating soundtrack by Vangelis depicted one of the lead Socialist movements of its day as the young track stars arrived at their college. A group of people rushed up to them to get them to pledge to the Fabian Society, a group reportedly financed in part of fully by Cecil Rhodes, the South African Industrialist for which the Rhodes scholarship is named after.
Fabians believed in evolutionary rather than revolutionary socialism. The name for the group was derived from Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, a Roman General and Politician who earned the Latin nickname of Cunctator or Delayer for his tactics against Hannibal’s army in the Second Punic War.
Since Fabians wanted to do it slowly, gradually and without a big pitched battle, members would use public meetings, lectures and research to educate the public. Among the Fabians were George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb. The efforts of these renowned authors would trigger a separate British party that became the Labour Party in 1906. With many members of the British Parliament having links to Fabians, it goes without saying that England would become more Socialistic as have France and Germany.
While examining the intrusion of politics into Children’s Literature it is hard not to ignore the work of Christa Kamenetsky with her book from the time of Hitler’s Germany, The Cultural Policy of National Socialism
Kamenetsky presented the idea that totalitarian control of thought has ''negative'' as well as ''positive'' dimensions. Nazi ideology followed the pattern of all totalitarian governments. Nowhere are the central elements in this type of cultural politics more clearly evident than in children's literature. The Nazi program not only prohibited the expression or even harboring of certain thoughts, but also dictated what was to be thought. It created a worldview, but it also sought to govern emotional life and to set up a code of conduct. It aimed to isolate individuals from the outside world, shutting them up in an artificially created universe in which no standards but those supplied by the rulers were available.
It is clear that both the Nazi’s and anyone wanting to sway future populations will find ways to target the young, the next generation.
As Switzerland also leans more Socialistic and the author of Rainbow Fish would no doubt be perceived and given his due awards for quietly moving more children into being more accepting of having less and giving more to the state.
Being a citizen in the United States of America allows one to have a different point of view, without being shipped to the nearest Gulag for espousing such a view publicly. If we ever make take the plunge in the Socialist, Communist or Totalitarian pool, such differing points of view will no longer be tolerated. It would be prudent to point out that heat in such a pool is likely being turned up very slowly and with some very well intentioned people pushing the buttons.
You choose the fight by what you choose for your children to learn, so Americans choose well, the next 50 years will demonstrate what kind of future you have selected for your children.
(See other articles by ABH Alexander on associatedcontent.com, search for ABH Alexander of course!)
