Is book banning a covert form of book burning?

In Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, books are burned with impunity by the unnamed government of an unnamed nation of the year 2053. 

Discerning readers were quick to see the ghost of totalitarianism in the novel; the Nazis were adept at burning books because books, the repository of ideas and dissidence, were the single biggest threat to Nazi authority.

What ghost of which past are revived in the eyes of our collective historical consciousness (if 21st century Americans have any), when books are banned? Banning, as I see it, is a covert form of burning, just as minimum wage labor in a society with hard core capitalistic principles, is a covert form of slavery.

Books, especially novels, are banished with regularity from k-12 curricula in the United States with mind-numbing regularity. Often times school libraries are asked to "remove" certain books from their shelves. 

A brilliant librarian once made a counter library, hidden from the view of the public, of banned books.

Last week of September this year is the banned books week when we remember this most ignominious of all anti-social and anti-intellectual activities undertaken by school boards across the nation. However, the recent case of book banning was not undertaken by school authorities but by some of the parents and grandparents of kids attending Highland Park schools in the affluent suburb of Dallas, Texas.

Seeds of Nazism/totalitarianism may be embedded not only in governments but also in the general public. 

From my metaphorical observation deck, upon which I perch myself and try to observe society through the mist of half-knowledge and half-truths that filter down to me through the media, I see the emergence of a very tyrannical American public who impose their narrow world views on everything, ranging from foreign policy to family and education, down to how to best care for the self.

Parents and grandparents of children who attend institutions of education for the relatively well-off, whether they be P.S.'s or private schools, are a particularly egregious group in this regard. They have a conviction of what's "good" and what's "bad" for the intellectual nurturing of their wards. 

Grandparents are worse off than the parents, as they are retirees, taking care of their grandkids because the grandkids' parents have divorced, leaving their children behind to be raised by their parents who have the house and the money. As retirees, they have too much time on their hands to meddle into the curriculum choices of the schools their grandkids attend.

The seven books that the consortium of parents and grandparents want the Highland Park school district to erase from their curriculum are as follows:

I know why some of the books may stir controversy in the placid moral and intellectual universes of the so-called children, whom the parents and grandparents are trying to raise in a sanitized world, free of the germs of inconvenient truths of society.

Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha is bound to get the boot with its commingling of purity and prostitution (two sides of the same coin, the second P being more intellectually honest than the first). Which Dallas mind will see the fun in that?

As for Toni Morrison, almost everything she writes is banned from the intellectual diet of American children. Why? Oh, because she has painted a cosmos of slavery where there are no chirpy birds or bespectacled cutsie Harry Potters to come to the rescue of folks who are mindlessly brutalized and rendered unto property. 

No searing portrayal of American poverty will sell in the heartland of unfettered capitalism--Texas. No critique of capitalism will be brooked. So a book on the invisibility of the American poor (too redolent of the invisibility of the blacks before civil rights) will be unpleasant to say the least.

If words like "absolute truth" and "half-Indian" show up in the title itself, even if the title is of a book by Sherman Alexie (a "half-Indian" himself), it's bound to appeal to the imagination of Texan grandparents.

The dog book by Gareth Stein is a mystifying selection in the ban bucket: Apparently, the canine perspective is celebrated when it shows up through the scrim of Disney. Otherwise, it's bad.

Jeannette Walls is brutally honest about the perils of growing up a girl in working class America, so off goes her memoir into the burning pyre.

John Greene? How can this fella who writes young adult romance and who has worked hard over the years through social media and what not, to build a huge fan base of swooning young adults, offend? The plot of some of his novels can be morbid, but offensive?

But overall, the books were banned for having too much sex and such other social taboos in them. Sounds believable? 

I have a sneaky feeling that the books were banned/burnt because they have the capacity to stir a moral fibre of the sleepwalking American youth. Thus they are dangerous.