Nah, fascism is on the rise, so talking about fascists is on the rise. Ignoring them doesn’t make them go away. Complaining about people talking about them will only embolden them.
If we start calling them populists, how long till you start complaining that the term “populists” is overused?
ETA:
Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/) is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and the economy that rose to prominence in early 20th-century Europe. … Fascists believe that liberal democracy is obsolete.
In what way does that not describe Trump, the MAGAts, and the authoritarians who want to censor books to prevent children from learning about the dangers and horrors of fascism?
And no, you don’t have to have achieved these objectives to be a fascist, you just have to be working towards them.
I see cultural populism as a subset of fascism, not something different and unrelated, as you seem to be trying to claim.
If any rule, policy, or moral absolute is applied differently in different contexts, then the literal “is person or group X acting in accordance with their stated purpose” is a useless question when applied to a specific situation. The relevant question is: “what about this situation is inspiring this specific application of policy when other situations are ignored”?
It’s not about a gotcha, it’s about actually digging into the “why” behind choices in an attempt to understand decision making, to have predictable enforcement of policies or wishes based on the actual intentions, to remove policies that can’t be reasonably defined, and to develop more robust understandings about the intention behind a policy.
Taking their stated reason for removing this book from the curriculum as the definitive truth requires one to ignore any and all decision making that goes into times when similar content is excised and times when it is allowed to stand.
I appreciate your insistence on not accusing people of intent that is not provable, but at the same time you seem to be arguing that any assumption that the purpose for removing the book is other than stated is unfounded. Whether its Bravehart, the Encyclopedia, or any other number of cultural artifacts, educational materials, or works of art, there’s a reason why THIS book is being removed from the curriculum, while they’re not going through books in the library and Sharpie-ing over photos of Michelangelo’s David (and no, I don’t have a cite on that). Maybe (probably) the Board of Education hasn’t done the self reflection to be able to understand why those things feel different. But it’s wholly appropriate for them to be called out for enacting policy based on reasons that are obviously and immediately inconsistent with how they treat other material.
Just for the record, the profanity and nudity in the book for this curriculum had already been censored by the county’s instructional supervisors, under the supervision of their legal counsel. Instead of “bitch”, you’ll see something like “b****” and “G** d***” instead of “God damn”. They also redacted the picture of the female that was being objected to. The school district’s lawyer said that completely greying out “bitch”, instead of replacing it with “b****”, could run afoul of Fair Use issues. The lawyer even proposed to send off an email to Art Spiegelman to see if he would approve completely greying out those words, but that proposal was basically blown off and they went straight to voting.
Fucking Nazis (or Klan, they are effectively one and the same these days).
I don’t know if it’s been mentioned in the thread, but the meeting was opened with this statement from the McMinn County Director of Schools, whom the instructional supervisors work for.
The values of the county are understood. There is some rough, objectionable language in this book and knowing that and hearing from many of you and discussing it, two or three of you came by my office to discuss that. I consulted with our attorney, Mr. Scott Bennett. After consulting with him, we decided the best way to fix or handle the language in this book was to redact it. Considering copyright, we decided to redact it to get rid of the eight curse words and the picture of the woman that was objected to.
So this entire charade around profanity and nudity took place AFTER that opening statement.
Art Spiegalman is an underground comic artist, who brought that same subversive ethos to Maus. Nice middle-class Americans don’t like subversion. It is their enemy to be shunned and fought.
They are not Holocaust deniers. They just prefer to wait for Anne Frank to come out as the newest Disney Princess.
There is a really key aspect of all this in here which we must not brush past. It relates to the “pajamafication” twitter thread I linked earlier. (Thanks to TroutMan for calling it out.)
What’s absolutely critical in educating anyone about the Holocaust — what Maus gets right, and what makes people uncomfortable — is that ordinary everyday Germans were if not complicit with then at least aware and tolerant of the atrocities being committed in their name. The Nazis were not a minority that forcibly imposed their will on a reluctant majority. The greater proportion of the citizenry went along with it or looked the other way.
The point of educating anyone about this period is to wake them up to how this happens so they can be vigilant and prepared for the signs that they are being lured into madness. To reassure them that they are good people who will of course be heroic protectors in dark times is the opposite of education; it blinds them to the reality that most ordinary Germans were, in fact, “good people” who were swept into malevolent insanity.
It’s not about guilt. It’s also not about innocence. It’s about moral duty. And in order to understand it, one needs the complete picture: not just what one should do, but the circumstances in which many, many people exactly like us failed to do it.
From reading the lesson plans in this curriculum, the board has done a horrible disservice in this regard. Unit 3 is all about the “Voices of Upstanders” and goes into various accounts of their deeds in spite of great personal risk. At the end of the unit, each student will create a fictional upstander based on their study of actual heroes, as well as a fictional interview of this upstander.
I think the board would rather create bystanders (like themselves) than upstanders.
McMinn County isn’t middle-class suburbia. It’s lower class rural Appalachia. Besides, Spiegelman wrote Maus in the 80s and it’s gone on to win awards. In 2022, it’s about as middle-class subversive as a The Who album.
The lesson of the Holocaust isn’t “Germany did something very bad once.” The lesson of the Holocaust is, “If it could happen there, it can happen anywhere.”
I can guarantee you that every single one of those Southern libraries has books containing erotica in them (actual erotica, not just clinical nude illustrations), and I can further guarantee that Southern authorities would fight tooth and nail against any effort to remove those books from the libraries.
I’m guessing many/most here are familiar with this, but on the off chance you aren’t … it’s painfully relevant.
The Third Wave was an experimental social movement created by California high school history teacher Ron Jones in 1967 to explain how the German population could accept the actions of the Nazi regime during the Second World War.
Ron Jones would be burned at the stake if he tried this in today’s Bible Belt. The fact that it was a Palo Alto (CA) High School, in the 1960’s, made it fertile ground.
And like the Stanford Prison Experiment (same neck of the woods), it serves as a powerful cautionary tale, reminding us that
Well, all it’s done is make me dig it out from my daughter’s bookcase and read it. I bought it for her some years ago after she visited Auschwitz on a school trip, but never read it as I’m not into graphic novels. Until now. The author and the publishers must be blessing the school board for its stupidity. There was, in any event, nothing remotely offensive in the book. The proximity of the ban to Holocaust Memorial Day is very suspicious.
Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits.
Quite the cunning linguist.
My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him.
