Book Banning

I forgot to post this yesterday. Forgive me if it seems a bit disjointed. I am still finding my voice again after the break in posting.

There are a lot of discussions as to why ‘Maus’ is being banned in Tennessee. I believe people with an actual thought process can agree it is not for the reason that the McMinn County Board of Education states. Their argument is nothing more than the cut-and-paste debate used by authoritarian-minded people throughout history.

An argument from the anti-ban side is that ‘Maus’ is being banned because it is being told from a completely Jewish perspective. There is some truth to this debate. The viewpoint of the story makes it an outlier to the average Christian American.

It is not because it is about the Holocaust. There are plenty of stories about the Holocaust. The problem is that this does not have the “necessary” Good Christian Doing Good Things to make people feel better about something completely horrible.

It also doesn’t end the story before the horrible thing needs to be talked about so people can make it a narrative about the bravery of the protagonist(s). Instead, it tells the complete, unvarnished truth about what is probably the most horrific event of the 20^th century.

Again, this is a valid viewpoint. But, it is only one tenet of a larger picture… and problem. Let us begin with the debate of Critical Race Theory. It tells an unvarnished truth. It is a truth that many people don’t want to hear.

The narrative on slavery in the United States has always allowed white Christians to feel good about some role they can claim to have played in the ending of the institution. This has always been the problem with history in the United States. White (Christian) Americans have to be made to feel good about the bad situations they create.

Programs that fall under Critical Race Theory tell the unvarnished truth. Good (White) Christians Doing Good Things are not included in the story. Therefore, it must be stopped because, now, white people have to feel bad about their history.

‘Maus’ takes it a step further. It completely eliminates Christians from the story. In a certain worldview, that can never happen.

But, even this is just a part of a bigger problem. When I was a child, I remember a skit in my school that discussed the horrors of authoritarianism. In the 70’s, the authoritarian regime in question was the Soviet Union.

The rise of authoritarianism does not just happen. We do not live in a democracy one day and under an authoritarian government the next day without a war being fought. To use the overly used Nazi comparison, Germany didn’t go from a democratic government to concentration camps right after the Nazis took power.

It is the frog in boiling water analogy. If the water is heated slowly, the frog sits still until it dies. In our case, as long as the authoritarian-minded (read: the GOP) people go slowly, the hope is that we will just take it. So far, this has been true.

The United States has always had a sketchy history with our own… history. We have never been able to critically think about the blemishes of our past. We couch it as protecting our children. It is never about protecting our children.

The difference is that now, instead of being weaponized to protect triggered white Christians, now it is being weaponized to overthrow democracy. If we really want to protect our children, we need to teach them the truth about history. If that is uncomfortable, so be it.