https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/27/tennessee-school-board-bans-pulitzer-prize-winning-holocaust-novel-maus


The decision comes as conservative groups across the country are stepping up campaigns to ban books from school libraries, often focused on works that address race, LGBTQ issues or marginalized communities.

The board did have some supporters with Julie Goodin, an instructional supervisor and former history teacher, and Melasawn Knight, the federal programs supervisor, backing the novel’s inclusion in the curriculum.

“I think any time you are teaching something from history, people did hang from trees, people did commit suicide and people were killed, over six million were murdered. I think the author is portraying that because it is a true story about his father that lived through that,” Knight said.

“I can talk of the history, I was a history teacher and there is nothing pretty about the Holocaust and for me this was a great way to depict a horrific time in history,” Goodin added.

After much discussion over the redaction of words the members found objectionable, the board eventually decided that alongside copyright concerns, it would be better to ban the graphic novel altogether.

Spiegelman said he was “baffled” by the outcome in an interview with CNBC on Wednesday. “It’s leaving me with my jaw open, like, ‘What?’” the 73-year-old author said, adding he thought the school board was “Orwellian” for approving the ban.

Spiegelman’s Jewish parents were both sent to Nazi concentration camps and his mother took her own life when he was just 20.

“I’ve met so many young people who … have learned things from my book,” Spiegelman said. “I also understand that Tennessee is obviously demented. There’s something going on very, very haywire there.”

We live in a culture that says aspects of Dr. Seuss is too dangerous for children, and many here applauded. So…

(…and of course the article easily invokes the Holocaust. You can go Godwin all you like, except when it is actually apt to do so.)

anybody Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> n/t


WHO "desires" that?

Nobody. Not anybody?

What if Russell M Nelson could be the dictator?

The people who fear everything they don't understand and want to ban everything that they are afraid of or don't agree with.

anybody Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> "The people who fear everything they don't understand and want to ban ['cancel'/ ignore/ deny/ avoid/ fight/ remain ignorant of...] everything that they are afraid of or don't agree with." >

Some just want to, or don't want to-

Help, Study, Learn, Teach, Share, Realize, Appreciate, Understand, Comprehend, Communicate, Agree With, Delve Into, Open Up To, Come Together, Build Community, UNITE, Listen, Laugh, Live, Love, Forget... Remember... Think of Others...

Some people don't read enough into it, while some people read too much into it, and others, yet, grasp as straws. Just trying to communicate.

The important thing is Not To Be Like Them!
And not try to Make Them Like You!

People are going to do what people are going to do. Don't be like people. Be like person!

Sounds like they have r similar attitudes to what the hollywood production code said pre 1967 which was that any material that encouraged ss relationships, immoral romances divorce, disrespect to law and America is banned for the protection of vulnerable classes who are easily influenced (minorities and women). [Wikipedia article, hollywood code]

I'm guessing they want to protect vulnerable groups?

Except perhaps racists and extreme "conservatives".



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/27/2022 03:35PM by Soft Machine.

+1,000

"No amount of extremism can make up for failure in the erogenous zone!"

--Six Pac Shakur

anybody Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> After much discussion over the redaction of words
> the members found objectionable, the board
> eventually decided that alongside copyright
> concerns, it would be better to ban the graphic
> novel altogether.

Copyright concerns? Unless they have decided to go with public domain material across the board, why would this book's copyright be any different from that of other books?

The very idea of banning books is a bit fascist in itself, isn't it? And banning books about the Holocaust is meta-ironic, so to speak. The Holocaust sort of started with banning and burning books.

... Although there is something comforting in being able to spot the good mormons by their white shirts at church...

“I also understand that Tennessee is obviously demented. There’s something going on very, very haywire there.” Love that.

Meanwhile, all the kid's are thumbing through Playboy with Purity Rings on their fingers.

And to the list of demented states, I would like to add . . .

>
> And to the list of demented
> states, I would like to add...
>

This is particularly amusing having noted online that Rev. Rusty Buns Nelson says that it's gonna be the mormons who save Europe from losing its religion ...  Apparently cuz he's doing such a bang up job with Utah...

A story made more relevant by the fact that today is Holocaust Memorial Day. Reminders are more necessary than ever in the face of those who want to pretend that unpleasant history never happened. Today I am recalling my visit to Yad Vashem (A Memorial and a Name) and the tears I shed when left the children's memorial.

I am running out of sighs. McMinn County TN is immediately north of me - 10 miles away. It is a neighboring county. I looked at the names of the board members with a slight possibility of knowing them personally since I worked with many McMinn county residents years ago. Religious fundamentalism is out of control here. It is like a contest of who can out Christian another. Our schools in Tennessee need significant resources. To worry about a book is insane when there are issues of teacher pay, class room size, low national rankings etc. It is discouraging. These idiots now want to decide what books children can read. I would like to bring up the Bible for its violent and sexual content and recommend it be banned on the same basis.

Sigh.
I wish your state was the only one with such regressive dangerous tendencies.

I like Stephen King's response to book banning. The second a school bans a book, have your kids go to a library, check that book out, and read it. Any book that they ban is a book you definitely need to read.

I don't think it is about out Christianing another. More about out self righteousing another perhaps.

Closer to home, the Idaho Freedom Foundation is gaining political power. They are pushing their extremist Christian agenda. No book-burning yet...yet.

https://theidahofreedomfoundation.org/

Why does private Idaho have to be a cliché?

Eric K Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> These idiots now want to decide what books
> children can read. I would like to bring up the
> Bible for its violent and sexual content and
> recommend it be banned on the same basis.


Two can play that game. Go for it.

Parents and school boards will often find books to get worked up about. Often those books go on to become classics of childrens' and adult literature. It's unfortunate that a book about the Holocaust was banned because it sounds like the students would be best served by learning about faiths other than Christianity.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2022/01/28/maus-sales-surge-after-tennessee-school-district-bans-the-holocaust-graphic-novel/

Titles from Maus – a Pulitzer Prize-winning series about the Holocaust – made up nearly half of Amazon’s 10 best-selling comics and graphic novels Friday after one of the books was controversially banned by a Tennessee school district.

The surge in sales followed a vote by a school board in Tennessee to ban Maus in its eighth-grade classrooms over what they claimed was the novel’s “unnecessary use of profanity and nudity” and depictions of violence and suicide, according to a statement from the district.

It was removed from the curriculum because of language and nudity concerns. There's a difference between "banned" and "dropped." But "Banned" is sensationalistic and is powerful clickbait for certain people. It also provides ammunition for certain people to deride and hate those they perceive as anti-literary bigoted rubes.

Remember when "Banned Book Week" comes around that many books on the list were simply dropped to make room for other titles.

Remember that many "journalists" and "news sources" are simply reworking (I'd say regurgitating) material they pick up from similar, like-minded outfits. Genuinely worn tires and shoe leather is very rare among this generation of "journalists."

Edited to add source:
https://freebeacon.com/media/misinformation-alert/

"It ain't necessarily so,
It ain't necessarily so.
The 'news' that you're readin'
May be misleadin.'
It ain't necessarily so."



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/29/2022 08:59PM by caffiend.

> "Banned" is sensationalistic and is powerful clickbait for
> certain people.

Like "deplatformed?" "Woke?" "Critical Race Theory?"

They are dog whistles used by snowflakes.

Let's also note that the people so eager to toss "Maus" are the same who worked themselves into a froth over "cancel culture," Mr./Mrs. Potato Head and Dr. Seuss, which were private business decisions.

The only "standards" they have are double standards.

"If it wasn't for Double Standards
We wouldn't have no standards at all!"

--Every partisan group ever

All four words are in common usage--with powerful connotative value... for US conservatives and now, sadly, the European right wing of the extremer variety. The only times I have heard or read these terms has been from the mouths/keyboards of what you lot call conservatives. So for me, yes, these terms have powerful connotative value for people who like believing in phantoms.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/31/2022 03:17AM by Soft Machine.

Some posters are imprecise with language, which usually goes along with imprecise thinking. The former hides the latter. Other posters think that if you repeat propaganda long enough, it becomes fact. caffiend is definitely in that category. He spews misinformation about COVID all the time, and he told us for months--and may in fact still insist--that the insurrection a year ago was undertaken by Antifa and Black Lives Matter.

It's all Orwellian Newspeak. Change the words and you change the reality. Truth is "deplatformed," a word that extends beyond government censorship and implies that private-sector actors are not free to refuse to promote lies.

It's like reading Marxist propaganda. To clear thinkers, it's nonsense but to True Believers the mantras become unquestionable truths.

"Some posters are imprecise with language, which usually goes along with imprecise thinking."

Isn't it possible to be precisely wrong? Only saying because I'm not married to you.

"profanity" = one use of "god damn." As if eighth-graders have never heard that before.

"nudity" = a couple of panels with naked cartoon mice.

One panel can be seen here:

https://www.rebelnews.com/in_pictures_holocaust_memoir_maus_banned_by_school_board_for_cartoon_mouse_nudity_cussing

Specious reasons.

Using these same parameters, ought not smartphones be banned in schools?

If the school board is having a book removed from the curriculum, my guess is that the book will be removed from school libraries as well. But I could be wrong about that.

"Temporarily out of stock" at Amazon.

Guess I'll have to wait.

You're a deliciously subversive woman, Kathleen.

Kathleen Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> "Temporarily out of stock" at Amazon.
>
> Guess I'll have to wait.

I'd say, use the time well. Order it from your nearest good book store.

Hatred is a learned behavior.

You have to be carefully taught.

People once took young children to lynchings and gave them the body parts of the victims as ghastly souvenirs.

They even took pictures and put them on postcards.
https://freepress.org/article/lynchings-past-and-present

Hatred is a learned behavior.

You have to be carefully taught.


https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/27/opinions/maus-ban-holocaust-teaching-spiegelman-perry/index.html


To ban "Maus" for being an uncomfortable read is, in fact, to be against teaching the Holocaust, regardless of the school board member's protests to the contrary. To actually engage with the horror of the Holocaust, one has to be horrified, thrown from one's comfortable position, engaging with the terrible, messy reality.
But I think back to my encounter with the book on my couch, and I think that's the kind of moment that kids actually do need. We need to be unsettled by history, especially if presented by a well-trained teacher with a thoughtful supporting curriculum. Because the Holocaust is not just a collection of unthinkable numbers -- six million Jews, hundreds of thousands of Roma and tens of thousands more of political rivals, disabled people, LGBTQ people and others. It's millions of stories of individual lives lived in full complexity, and to understand what happened, the whys and hows, the generational traumas that live with us today, we may need to be unsettled in our encounter with this grim past.

And of course that's true if we want to understand other grim moments in history as well. And while the timing of canceling "Maus" a few days before International Holocaust Remembrance Day is telling, it's also happening in the midst of a growing number of right-wing attacks on teaching history. Before this latest incident, for example, a White Tennessee mom tried to take advantage of a new law against "critical race theory," which is being used as a catchall phrase for any history that tells accurate stories of racial oppression, to try to get an autobiography of Ruby Bridges banned as "divisive." And then, earlier in January, Florida Republicans advanced a bill designed to shield students from feeling "discomfort" over race, sex and gender when learning about history (of racism, sexism and gender discrimination). The effect will be, as likely intended, to make it impossible to teach history effectively.
And that's likely the point. When we are unsettled by history, when our perceptions start to shift, that's when we're ready to learn. To outlaw discomfort in the classroom is to outlaw good teaching.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/30/2022 08:18AM by anybody.

the history of slavery and its effect on the USA.

A similar debate about slavery is also happening in the UK, where the right prefer centuries of propaganda to actual history - even centuries later. Sad.

Tom, conservative Americans are already trying to suppress the teaching of slavery. That's really what the bans on Critical Race Theory are all about, and one state is trying to ban the teaching of subjects that makes (white people) feel guilty or uncomfortable.

The truth is it is very difficult to find or define "Critical Race Theory" let alone to differentiate it from "history." No one can identify a primary or secondary school that teaches CRT because such a school does not exist. It's all propaganda by right-wing Orwellians. As BoJ mentions below, you don't need Jews to have anti-semitism and, by extension, you don't need CRT to have CRT witch hunts.

I was just going to post a link to the CNN article but I saw that you have already done so, anybody. The following statements stood out to me:

"To actually engage with the horror of the Holocaust, one has to be horrified, thrown from one's comfortable position, engaging with the terrible, messy reality."

Profound.

"…to understand what happened, the whys and hows, the generational traumas that live with us today, we may need to be unsettled in our encounter with this grim past."

Unsettled - an understatement.

Generational trauma - I haven't really thought about this before. Of course, it would be a consequence, a major one.

"When we are unsettled by history, when our perceptions start to shift, that's when we're ready to learn."

I hadn't thought of it this way before. Interesting.


To actually engage with the horror one has to be horrified - this thought struck me mightily when I read the article last night. I have avoided as much as possible reading or hearing details about the Holocaust. It was a school subject in jr high and so I knew about it from a young age. I always knew it was important to have an overview, at least, of history but I'm terribly squeamish and have never liked to fill my head with details of anything unpleasant or worse - something horrifying. Of course, it's been impossible to avoid hearing and seeing and learning a great deal about the Holocaust as it is among the top most horrific crimes of any century. But it was only this past November, during the run-up to Remembrance Day, that I watched a documentary reviewing the lives of some of the survivors and saw and heard the personal stories and all the grim details that I had tried for so long not to let into my brain. Those who lived through the horror, who carry their personal experiences close to this day, feel a driving imperative to share their stories with the world, to honour those lost, to memorialize their own suffering so as to be instructive to others, to achieve the "Never Again" objective. And through one woman's story, who travelled back to the camp where she was imprisoned, taking her grandchildren with her, I saw the grandchildren crying for what had befallen their cherished grandma and her loved ones and friends and neighbours, and I saw then an aspect that is also vitally important to comprehend - the generational trauma - the crying grandkids in 2021 - the Holocaust having the power to wound even a couple of generations later.

I've recently mentioned generational trauma too in relation to the issues of the residential schools in Canada from the 1870s to the 1990s. The 1990s? It's almost unbelievable and certainly incomprehensible. The children of the children of the children of the children are still suffering trauma themselves because of the trauma inflicted on their great-great-great's....

It's more than uncomfortable to know these histories. Horrifying is the word. And yet to avoid them, to shove them out of sight, to try and block subsequent generations from learning about them is pouring salt in the wounds. Anything unpleasant hidden away festers. One of the chief ways we can demonstrate that we care is to listen, learn, and help keep the stories front and centre, because that's their rightful place. Not in darkness but in light.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/30/2022 01:51PM by Nightingale.

I commented about this on another thread but I got the spelling of the book's title wrong.

A lot of what those who would prefer to ban books like this or drop them from school curricula are seeking, at least publicly, is the preservation of innocence, and I have a big problem with that.

When you preserve "innocence", then you are inviting the same kinds of activities that occurred in the past to happen again precisely because those proposing the new round of these same activities are "innocent" and have no, or very little, idea of what happened before when their proposed ideas were tried. Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.

Yes, I support the concept of "innocence" for the very young to keep them away from the cruellest and crudest behaviors that humans can offer. But while this "innecence" is allowed, the time should be used for learning, with age-appropriate materials, why and how things happened that destroyed the lives of other people. It is only through the learning about the how's and why's of cruel and crude human behaviors that we have any chance of not repeating grim human history such as the Hollocaust.

So much for the fig leaf of conservatives being all about the freedumbs.

Fran Lebowitz was in SLC last night doing a Q&A with the audience, and one of the questions was about antisemitism. She described it as the fallback prejudice when you can't find a better target. She said the unusual thing about antisemitism is that it doesn't require actual Jews. Some of the most antisemitic people out there have never known enough Jews to populate a small backyard BBQ.

She went on to describe an antisemitic movement in Japan which she said was the perfect essence of antisemitism - no Jews around whatsoever. None.

She also talked about how some of the victims of racism in the US after 9/11 were Sikhs, who are neither Arab nor Islamic, but they vaguely look like what some people think of as Arab, so they were on the hit list.


Lebowitz is basically a professional curmudgeon with a sense of humor. Her program for the evening consisted of a 40 minute or so interview by Doug Fabrizio of KUER public radio, and then she took questions from the audience for a little over an hour.

That sounds like fun, I mean, to be there-

This is an amazing account of Manfred Gans, a Jewish commando who rescued his parents from a concentration camp:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/01/27/jewish-commando-x-troop/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

(Warning: Disturbing details).

Manfred Gans went on a harrowing journey at the end of the war to try and find and rescue his parents. The article linked above describes Gans and other Jewish commandos and the work they did during the war. It details the dangerous journey Gans undertook to find his parents. At one point he meets "...a few British prisoners of war walking on the road. They were rail-thin. “You ought to see what they did to the Jews,” they told Gans."

There are countless stories like this that deserve to be heard. The incomprehensible cruelty. The amazing resilience. The incomparable courage.

February 2, 2022 - Democracy Now

https://www.democracynow.org/2022/2/2/art_spiegelman_maus_a_survivors_tale

Erasing History: Holocaust Graphic Novelist Art Spiegelman on “Maus” & Wave of Book Bans Sweeping U.S.

Actually about 15 states currently ban "Maus"

anybody Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Nothing

We report the news. That's it! Nothing else-
We don't make it, fake it, or take it.

Afraid you might learn something?
It's inevitable, if you follow.

Can't lead?
Don't follow-
AHA!

News is every moment... Always know what's going on... Keep paying attention- it doesn't cost all that much... Look Left & Right, and certainly down the middle!

Watch what you're saying-
Watch what I'm saying-

They SHOULD BE the same thing-
If not, let's keep listening...

I hope those who read "Maus", and then determined that it is harmful for others to read are seeking remedial therapy to deal with the acute damage done to them by its imagery.

+1

I just started reading Maus yesterday. What a profoundly moving and poignant book it is, so far.

I should probably thank the McMinn County school board for inadvertently educating me.

Ignoring things doesn't make them go away

Banning only makes a book more sought after, and CLEARLY, harder to get/ find.