By Barbara Levine
Folks in McMinn County, Tennessee, and across the country are still fighting against evolution, truth, and anything else that makes them feel uncomfortable. You know, like science and history and people who aren’t exactly like them. Tennessee was, after all, the site of the Scopes trial about 27 miles to the west. People just weren’t comfortable with the idea that we had descended from the apes. Now it’s cats and mice creating discomfort.
In Maus, Art Spiegelman, son of concentration camp survivors, narrated his parents’ story of fear, torture, and deprivation, and the effects those experiences had on their son, through the only graphic novel to ever win a Pulitzer Prize. In the novel, Jews are mice, Nazis are cats, and Poles are pigs. The cats, mice, and pigs do not wear clothes. It is not a pretty story; there are no fairies or unicorns or even superheroes. It is not located in the scenic Austrian hills of Sound of Music, but in Auschwitz, where Art’s parents were interned. However, it portrays truth depicted in animation to make a particular point. The folks in McMinn didn’t like it, so they pored through this distasteful material and, eureka, found a “damn”, a bare breast, and naked animals! Shameful! Can’t let our impressionable children read that! They decided that their discomfort should deny this prize-winning historical piece to the curriculum where it was used as the centerpiece to the English Arts module on the Holocaust.
Teaching about the Holocaust and Nazism has been mandatory in schools in Germany since the 1970’s. One would think if this was not too uncomfortable for the children of the perpetrators, it should certainly not be a problem for one of the countries that won the war, put an end to the killing, and liberated the camps!
Nevertheless, book bans and burnings have been around for a very long time. John Milton, whose books were burned in England, wrote Areopagitica in 1644, and said this: “Anyone who kills a man, kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself”.
In 1821, Heinrich Heine–a noted 19th century German poet–wrote in his play, Almasor, “Where they burn books, they will, in the end, also burn people.” His books were burned on May 10, 1933, as SS brown shirts and Hitler youth gangs torched more than 25,000 books surrounded by a cheering crowd. Apparently, the horrors that followed have still failed to teach us what this sort of conduct means and where it leads.
In 1821, Heinrich Heine–a noted 19th century German poet–wrote in his play, Almasor, “Where they burn books, they will, in the end, also burn people.” His books were burned on May 10, 1933, as SS brown shirts and Hitler youth gangs torched more than 25,000 books surrounded by a cheering crowd. Apparently, the horrors that followed have still failed to teach us what this sort of conduct means and where it leads.
In the 1960s–the 1960s!–in suburban Farmingdale, New York, members of the John Birch Society strode into school libraries, removed books they considered offensive–can’t have the kiddies read Catcher in the Rye–and burned them. Librarian witnesses were so terrified that they declined to identify any of the Birchers. Will we still stand by and be too frightened or too callous or just too self-absorbed to cry out against these acts of suppression?
Right-wing Holocaust deniers in Germany have initiated efforts to stop schools from teaching that significant part of German history by suppressing history. In Poland, some nationalists and the government are attempting to rewrite the uncomfortable fact that many Poles encouraged and took part in rounding up and killing Jews as part of Hitler’s “final solution,” focusing instead on a narrow theme about the few courageous Poles who assisted Jews, insisting that Poland was simply a helpless, occupied country.
Here in the United States, we are seeing more and more instances of denial of history; the horrors off slavery–in the new right-wing buzz phrase CRT; of the Holocaust; of COVID; all in the name of a bizarre concept that we shouldn’t teach anything that make people uncomfortable. In Virginia, it is characterized as “divisive.”
The educational process cannot shy away from the “uncomfortable.”
The educational process cannot shy away from the “uncomfortable.” Kids are sometimes uncomfortable with reading. Should they not learn to read? Others find math disconcerting–so, no learning numbers or adding and subtracting for them? If people only concentrated on the known and comfortable we would have no science. Children would die of diphtheria and be crippled by polio. There would be no TV, no cell phones, no trips to the moon, no cars or airplanes or anything that didn’t exist at the beginning of time. And, of course, there would be no United States, since Christopher Columbus would be way too uncomfortable to dare defy the belief that the earth was flat.
Book burning has certainly been around for a long time, and is often a harbinger of fascism and control by the few over the many. Add this to the draconian voter suppression laws being enacted all over this country and ask yourself not why book burning happens, but how we can stop this before reason itself is killed for good.
Categories: cultural icons, EDUCATION, Issues, National, political discourse
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