“The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.” Oscar Wilde
Never Forget.
Those words were seared into me as a child. Today on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jews come together as a community to say we will never forget the horrors of the Holocaust.
Even as some American schools choose to ban books that do just that.
On the day before this solemn one of remembrance, one Tennessee school is asking us to forget.
“Maus” Art Spiegelman’s brilliant graphic novel on the Holocaust was too graphic for the Mcminn County School Board.
The vote was unanimous. As was the denial.
A Pulitzer prize historical graphic novel about Auschwitz was banned for nudity and profanity citing words like “God Damn” as offensive.
Banned for horrific themes.
Well, Goddammit, the Holocaust was horrific. Offensive. It was ugly it was profane. There is no whitewashing it.
This new momentum on book banning driven by conservative activists targeting local school boards is choosing to purge reality out of our libraries and curriculum.
It has happened before.
In Nazi Germany.
Never Forget.
Envisioning The American Dream 
Thank you for speaking out. I just read a Twitter post in which the writer explained in detail how THE STATE determines what teachers teach and don’t teach and that otherwise they are to keep “their version of history” to themselves. Violators will be terminated. It was a perfectly reasoned concept — in a totalitarian state where schools and everything else are policed by the Ministry of Truth. What’s next, Tennessee? Will making it illegal to even own certain books make your culture more “pure”?
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That is a very frightening thought.
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It’s so important for educated people to pay attention to school board elections, town council elections. Any public office where reactionary individuals gain a voice can lead to just the kind of thing that’s happened with a school board in Tennessee and has with other school boards in America.
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Various editions of MAUS are available on Amazon and other places in paperback, hardcover, and boxed sets. Though it is about the Holocaust, it also is about a son trying to understand a father whose whole outlook and quirks were formed by living through time in a concentration camp.
Every child from 12 and older won’t be perverted by a read. Good grief! They see worse on social media, and awareness of the Holocaust, which can happen again and has happened in smaller numbers in Africa, Europe, and Asia several times in the 20th and 21st Centuries isn’t something to be ignored. Ukraine is looking like it may become the next place one happens.
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