#I read Mein Kampf in high school

[a-s-fischer]

Antisemitism and the Nazi Worldview: a Guide for the Perplexed

While most people know the Nazis hated Jews, few people understand just how integral Jew-hate was to the Nazi philosophy. This leads into many of the misconceptions about Nazis and the holocaust that regularly pop up, so it bears discussing what Nazis believed about racism and the Jews.

The Nazi conception of "race" was much narrower and "scientific" than we think of it today. The Nazi conception of race was that humans were split into subgroups with distinct traits, that set them apart from each other and gave them advantages in a great and bloody contest of the races. These races pattern on better to ethnicities, nationalities, or even language groups, than race as we think of it today, which is why it would make sense in a Nazi framework to talk about an Irish race, or a Polish race, for example. And of course in the Nazi mind, these races were a real biological reality, and not a social and cultural construct, and the strength and purity of a fit race might be lost through race mixing.

And of course races were differently fit or unfit, superior or inferior, and through the races warring against each other in a battle of the fittest, the superior race would rise above the rest, and subjugate the earth. Hitler came of age in a time of scarcity, war, and famine, and he believed there was no way to feed the entirety of the human race, so eliminating the lesser races through this perpetual struggle of races against each other was the only way for humanity to survive. It was all very Darwinian except that it completely misunderstood how the Darwinian model of evolution actually works, since the unit of selection was the nonexistent race, not the individual.

This struggle of the races was in Hitler and the Nazis' conception not only natural and necessary, but good. Conquest and the slaughter of inferior races was good. The state of the world with nation states and silly notions like laws, and morals, this was bad and unnatural. Humanity, or the strongest race, needed to do away with this system, or humans would all perish of starvation in a degenerate race-mixed scrum. The Nazis were heros, looking to save humanity from this foul unnatural state it had been tricked into adopting.

Tricked by the machinations of one race. One race had broken away from the others, and learned how to hack the system, to survive over under the rule of other races, when it should have been destroyed as a weaker lesser race. This race figured out how to lie and cheat, and live off other races as a parasite, while controlling them from within with fake, unnatural, vile concepts of laws, ethics, notions of justice and compassion, human rights, and international cooperation. And also with money. That race was the Jews.

In the Nazi mind, other races might be lesser, weaker, worthy only of a slow starvation under Nazi rule, but Jews, Jews were unique, special. Weak but cunning, only the Jews had figured out how to subvert and pervert the noble struggle of the races. The Jews were not only especially hated in the Nazi mind but they also served an explanatory purpose. The Jews were the reason humans were not in what the Nazis viewed as a state of nature, and the reason that the areas hadn't eliminated all the other races and taken over the world already. And anything that went wrong for the Nazis was of course caused by Jewish manipulation. The Jews had to be stripped of their unnatural power and control, and eliminated quickly, to keep them from continuing to undermine the strongest race, the Aryan Germans.

Early on, there was some discussion about how this was to be done. The mass slaughter of Jews under this philosophy might have been inevitable but it wasn't obviously inevitable to all Nazis. The important thing was to reduce the Jews to a state of nature, to take away their unnatural control, and leave them in the position of any other lesser race. This is where ideas, like sending all the Jews to Madagascar, to "build their own state" but really to inevidably die in the wilderness, came from. If Jews were separated from their stronger hosts, the logic went, they would just be one more weaker race and they would die just the same. This was also why so many Nazis took a special delight in simply denying captive Jews the means of survival, leaving them to starve, freeze, and die of disease in a state of nature, without the resources they had parasitically leached out of their host races.

But that process took too long. There were simply too many Jews, and too many (to the Nazi mind) Jewish controlled enemies. As Germany and the Axis' began to lose the war, and then as that loss became increasingly only a matter of time, the Nazis ramped up their efforts to kill Jews, by bullet and by gas, because if they could kill enough Jews, surely that Jewish control over their enemies would break and the Aryans among those enemies what recognize their racial interest, and join with the Germans, giving them victory. Instead the resources poured into the wholesale murder of Jews were resources stripped from the Nazi war machine, hastening the Allied victory.

Antisemitism wasn't simply one more bigotry for the Nazis to tack onto their general racism. It was foundational to the Nazi conception of how the world functioned. It was the explanitory mechanism in the Nazis' conspiratorial framework. And with this philosophy at the core of Nazism, the Holocaust became not only inevitable, but the highest calling of the Nazis, their sacrifice for humanity, or at least what was left of humanity after the strongest race had triumphed over all the others. Very little about Nazism is unique. Their militarism, their glorification of violence and struggle, their racial pseudo-Darwinianism, certainly their conspiratorial antisemitism, all had plenty of precident long before they came on the scene. It was their particularly potent combination of these existing elements that made them Nazis. And in this combination, it was the Jew-hate which held everything together and which provided the energizing force.

[hungriestofbears]

I read Mein Kampf here in the USA for school, high school not even college, and that doesn't mean I should be bombed to death you enormously dumb piece of shit.

Genuinely wondering how you thought this was a good comparison.

If you are in the West taking about Mein Kampf in academic settings, you are critiquing the text as antisemitic bullshit.

The Mein Kampf text is revered by Hamas militants. The ideologies in that novel are positive to them - the copies found have notes filling the margins, so lots of time is dedicated to really mull over those words.

Antisemitic bias is taught to Gazan children

You have children chanting for the death of Jews because they are taught that all Jews should die.

To ignore the systemic antisemitism in Gaza and then claim antizionism not antisemitism is... enormously dumb you piece of shit

[scotianostra]

On April 10th 1936 Activists including the 'Red Duchess of Athol' formed a committee to send an ambulance to Spain in memory of three Dundonians killed while fighting for the Spanish Republican government.

A remarkable Scottish woman of principles.....

I’m using this wee bit of history to actually tell you about one of the woman in particular here, I will touch on the Ambulance story during the post, but in the main it’s about one remarkable lady

The Red Duchess, or Katherine “Kitty” Murray, the Duchess of Atholl, as she was formally known, was Scotland’s first female MP, The Red Duchess tag is a bit of a misnomer, as Kitty was a Tory politician, but beffore you judge her on this, please don’t hold that against her though, read the post and then judge her.

Kitty shook up parliament with her high principles and disregard for old school tribal politics, she joined the House of Commons in 1923 after winning the seat of Kinross and West Perthshire for the Conservatives. She also realised the threat Hitler posed and defied her party whips – reading Mein Kampf in the original German and giving translations to Chamberlain and Churchill to try to convince them of the imminent danger.

She was a woman full of contraries, before women had received the vote in 1918 she had outspokenly opposed giving them the vote, arguing that they were not yet sufficiently educated!

In the late 1920s her attention shifted to international issues. She supported a campaign to prevent female genital mutilation in the British colonies in East Africa and she became concerned over developments in the USSR: her book The Conscription of A People exposed and denounced Soviet forced-labour practices.

Her understanding of the dangers the Nazi’s posed influenced her support for the Spanish Republic after the failure of the attempted military coup in July 1936.

The U.S. journalist Louis Fischer gave this assessment of her;

“In her old-fashioned black silk dress that fell to her shoe tops she would sit on the platform, at Spain meetings, with Communists, left-wing socialists, working men and disabled International Brigaders and appeal for help for the Republicans. She would interrogate everybody who had been to Spain and hang on their words and note many of them in a book filled with her illegible scrawl.”

It was the ease with which she aligned to the communists fighting in the Spanish Civil War, that the Red Duchess name came about. It was much more than politics with Kitty though, she organised the evacuation of nearly 4,000 children from Bilbao and accommodated them in Britain.

It was Katherine Murray and another Scottish woman Fernanda Jacobsen who helped with humanitarian efforts during the war in Spain, Jacobsen became commandant of the Scottish Ambulance Unit (SAU) which provided humanitarian assistance in three convoys.. Jacobsen led the first unit of six ambulances and a lorry, with a crew of 19, which set out from Glasgow on 17 September 1936. Over the course of the war there were three such convoys, all led by Jacobsen.

The Red Duchess toured Scotland to raise support, stirring audiences into action with her spellbinding oratory, and visited Spain with Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson. The fruit of her journey was the enormously affecting book 'Searchlight on Spain', which sold 300,000 copies in Britain. The aristocrat's work demonstrated the social breadth of the Aid for Spain campaign in Scotland, and inspired women from all backgrounds.

While casting aside the politics of left and right, Atholl believed in the right for the Republicans to legitimately govern and defend themselves. The Duchess, who was also an accomplished pianist and composer, proved to be a heavy weight and fearless operator - but her name today remains relatively obscure.

It wasn’t all about Spain though, The Duchess, even before she had taken her seat in Westminster, had already reported on the dire state of health provision in the Highlands and Islands as part of the influential Dewar Committee, whose findings became the blueprint for the NHS in Scotland.

As I said earlier this was a woman of contraries and her opposeition of women’s suffrage at 21,led to Lady Astor, the first English female MP to take their seat in Westminster, derided her as “Canute trying to keep the waves back.”

Later, her position changed and the Duchess would befriend Sylvia Pankhurst who was to publicly endorse her as an independent candidate in the 1938 by-election which she triggered after losing the support of her local party over her views on Nazi Germany. At the time there was a widespread feeling of appeasement towards Hitler and his policies, Kitty Murray was a lost voice in her opposition to them. Such was her belief that she resigned her seat and stood as an independent, fighting almost entirely on this single issue.

A telegram from Stalin supporting the Duchess' campaign inflicted further damage to a campaign that was set against the vast resources of the Conservative Party. She lost the election by just 1,305 votes.

Her friend and campaign organiser Frieda Stewart said: “The challenge was one of principle against a whole party-political machine; and the Tories were determined that they were not going to be put in their place by one dissident individual, whatever her title.”

Murray, who authored several books, largely stepped away from the fray of public and political life following her defeat.

Following the death of her husband in 1942, she became Honorary Colonel of the Scottish Horse Regiment and also served as President of the Perthshire Branch of the Red Cross Society. Kitty Murray, the Duchess of Atholl spent spent a lot of her private income on assisting refugees. With the support of the Foreign Office she broadcast a message of support in the autumn of 1944 to the Poles resisting the Germans in Warsaw. She was also very concerned for those suffering at the hands of the Soviets. Just before the war ended, the Duchess of Atholl, chaired the British League for European Freedom, a post which she held up to her death in 1960.

Katherine “Kitty” Murray, the Duchess of Atholl died in Edinburgh in 1960, aged 85, after falling from a wall.

Read more about this all but forgotten woman here https://www.basquechildren.org/-/docs/articles/atholl2019

[mariacallous]

(JTA) – Nazi book burnings, antisemitic attacks on high school students and Shylock were all invoked during a Senate hearing on school book bans Tuesday morning. 

The hearing brought to Capitol Hill the debate over how much control parents should have over what kinds of books their children can access in their school and public libraries — and whether it constitutes a “ban” when a book is removed because of their activism.

The hearing comes as a national movement of “parents’ rights” groups, stoked in some cases by Republican lawmakers, have brought challenges against thousands of books in school libraries, saying that they are not appropriate for children. The vast majority of the challenged books deal with topics of race, gender and sexuality; Jewish books have also been ensnared, with the Holocaust-themed “Maus” and an illustrated adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary among the highest-profile book removals.

“Extremists continue to fight popular graphic novels like ‘Maus’ and other books,” Illinois Democratic Dick Durbin, the judiciary committee chair, said during his opening remarks. Art Spiegelman’s comic-book memoir about his parents’ survival of the Holocaust was the first book named at the hearing, closely followed by texts including Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”

“Limiting access to a book about antisemitism or racism does not protect students from the actual history or the reality that hate still exists,” Durbin said, before introducing Illinois’ Democratic secretary of state as a witness. Illinois recently passed a law aimed at curbing book bans. It would revoke state funding to libraries that remove books for partisan or ideological reasons.

An opening video at the hearing produced by Senate Democrats also emphasized the widely publicized case of a Tennessee district that removed “Maus” from its middle school curriculum, and featured a quote from Spiegelman. “Maus” has also been removed or nearly removed from additional districts in Missouri, Iowa and elsewhere. 

One of the Democratic majority’s witnesses on the panel was a Jewish college student and book-access activist named Cameron Samuels. Samuels, who is nonbinary and uses they/their pronouns, described how a challenge to “Maus” at their Katy, Texas, high school felt like an attack on their Jewish identity.

“When Katy targeted Art Spiegelman’s ‘Maus,’ I could not fathom how cartoon mice walking shamefully naked towards the gas chambers were considered sexual by the book’s challengers,” Samuels, a Brandeis University undergraduate who has received a Teen Tikkun Olam award from the Helen Diller Family Foundation, told the panel. 

“My ancestors fled religious persecution in Eurasia. I faced too many antisemitic remarks in school to remember,” Samuels continued. “Classmates told me the Holocaust did not exist. Many could not name a Jewish person so they learned about Judaism through media representation, often dominated by stereotypes. Books like ‘Maus’ teach accurate reflections of Jewish identity. 

“If a friend knew the real extent of the Holocaust,” Samuels continued, “maybe they would have thought twice before spraying cologne in my face, saying he was ‘gassing the Jew.’”

Durbin and Samuels further invoked the book-burning activities of Nazi Germany in their objections to parental challenges. But conservatives at the hearing, in addition to disputing the definition of “book ban,” also fought the Nazi comparison.

“My public school did not carry ‘Mein Kampf.’ Was it banned? I don’t know,” Max Eden, a research fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who was a witness at the hearing, testified, referring to Hitler’s manifesto. “I’ve read a few books about this era since, and I’ve so far missed the part where the Nazi Party forced schools to relocate books to guidance counselors’ offices.”

Nicole Neily, president of the conservative parents’ rights activist group Parents Defending Education, also disputed the comparison, claiming, “Headlines and research papers by activist organizations have intentionally muddled the waters between World War II book burning and what is happening in America’s K-12 schools.” 

Later, referencing Muslim parents in Maryland and Michigan who have organized to protest books about sexuality in their school districts, Neily added, “To conflate that issue, that I don’t want my child to be forced to read something with a book that is being burned in Nazi Germany, is disingenuous and false.”

During her testimony, Neily also claimed that librarians and freedom-to-read activists were on a mission to “extract a pound of flesh” from book-challenging parents by having them “pilloried in the public square.” The phrase “pound of flesh” comes from William Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” which features Shylock, an antisemitic depiction of a Jewish money-lender who demands a pound of flesh from a client unable to pay his debts.

Present at the hearing were Republican Senators from Tennessee, Iowa, Missouri and South Carolina, all states where Jewish books including “Maus” and Bernard Malamud’s “The Fixer” have been challenged or removed from public schools. None addressed those books. Instead, many of them used their time to accuse publishers, tech companies and the Biden administration of silencing conservative voices, or pivoted the hearing to a debate over immigration reform. John Kennedy, a Republican senator from Louisiana, turned heads when he used his allotted time to read sexually explicit passages from frequently challenged LGBTQ-themed books “Gender Queer” and “Lawn Boy” into the Congressional Record.

The hearing wasn’t the first time “Maus” bans had been invoked on Capitol Hill. Earlier this year, Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declared, “Extreme MAGA Republicans want to ban books on the Holocaust,” while holding up a copy of “Maus” during a press conference. Jeffries was opposing a House bill passed by Republicans that would grant parents greater influence over their children’s educational materials.

[ameliathefatcat]

I’m totally 100000% against banning books even if I completely disagree with ‘the politics’ of the book or if the book is written by a ‘problematic author.

My only exception is if the book was written by a genocidal maniac so ‘Mein Kampf’ and even then for historical purposes it’s ok to read ‘Mein Kampf’.

Also when it comes to schools there are three levels of schools here in the state’s Elementary Middle and High school. There are so many books that are appropriate for all three schools, some that are not appropriate for elementary schoolers but appropriate for middle and high schoolers, there are books that are only appropriate for high schoolers. When I’m talking about books being appropriate or inappropriate I’m talking about books with mature themes. Most of the books I’ve read for high school are totally inappropriate for kids in elementary school. The books I’ve read have SA, slurs, self harm, suicide, alcohol issues , sexual content, and so much stuff that kids under a certain age shouldn’t be read or watching. I’m not saying banning books with this content I’m saying don’t put them in the elementary school library.

[illiath-the-fae]

So, books are awesome, ESPECIALLY the books that are "shameful" or "bad" or "hateful" or whatever else you might call it.

I'm not a librarian, I'm a psychologist (now), but once upon a time I was hate-filled teenager looking through my high school library to find something new to read, and got fed up and complained to a librarian, she suggested I start "at the beginning"... So I went to the 000-100s. In the direct middle of the shelf was two books side-by-side, The Communist Manifesto, and Mein Kampf. I decided then and there I had to read both of those. So I did.

Now, say what you will about those books, their literary complexity, their importance to literature, the fact they were in a high school library, whatever. But here's the thing, having read those two books, at basically the same time, I can assure you that it did two things for me, the first was remind me I was a little shit (come on, I was a teen, what did you expect?), the second was make me realize how many adults (at the time) had NO IDEA what the content of either of those books are.

So, instead of whining about adult literacy, and adults inability to comprehend "basic" concepts, give them one of those "shameful" books you think are so bad and let them read it, or help them read it.

Also... not to brag, but I'm currently reading through an entire "free" (monthly fee for as many books as I can read) collection of litrpg books. So far I've been reading them for almost five years straight with some weeks going through multiple books. There's some absolute gems in the trash slush pile, but come on, this is tumblr, show us your freak!

Ok, real quick, speaking as a librarian, you absolutely cannot despair about the adult literacy crisis and shame adults for reading fiction books you do not personally care for or think are "challenging" at the same time. It doesn't work with kids, and it doesn't work with adults.

Here's how to increase someone's reading level:

1) Let them read whatever they choose without shame or judgment. Maybe get them talking about it using open-ended, non-leading questions to encourage critical thinking and comprehension.

2) Let them get bored after a while and seek out different books.

3) Repeat.

[writer59january13]

A civil war ferociously raged...

within complex edifice... derelict hulking corpse delineated courtesy seared, singed, smoldered smithereens formerly robust warrior slain during prime of his life heavenly corporeal outstanding entity subjected to fateful foragers courtesy camping buzzfeeding carrion - fancy feast for famished uber twittering, jump/kick starting crowing angry birds

made short shrift decayed discarded detritus filched flesh from felled soldier denuding human legendary poet picked bone clean his once powerful promising physique skeletal remnants displayed burnt offerings abandoned sun bleached, petrified lovely bones strewn across a field of shattered dreams desiccated skull detached situated askew

athwart castoff liberated phalanges impossible mission to envision former formidable specimen fallen hero pronounced earthen imprint traced impression outlining his outsize stature bonafide definition where his corpse laid only memory remains of doodling yankee, (a Norwegian bachelor farmer wannabe) harkening back and plucked from the "little town that time forgot and the decades could not improve." Composite character sketch of arbitrary conjured fighting

jaunty opportunistic understudy

strong likely to be template of actual anonymous template forgotten in the aftermath melee of battle

subsumed by and belonged to history,

a bit part he played after

North and South pitted against each other,

though the former named Union soldiers

during the War Between the States

acquired many names and nicknames,

especially by the Confederates: They were called Billy Yank, blue bellies or blue coats, which spontaneously generated idea came to my mind linkedin to a personal affinity for aforementioned rebellion to some people after Confederate troops fired

at 4:30 a.m. April 12, 1861

on Fort Sumter April 1861 initially President Lincoln

described the situation as an “insurrection.”

But within months,

he instead adopted “rebellion.”

That word evoked

a more distinctly negative connotation

then than it does today,

or rather prior to the heavily armed,

Trump-incited mob attack

of Jan. 6, 2021, an attack (premeditated in my humble opinion)

not just on the U.S. Capitol building,

but also on democracy and the rule of law. Though at no time did I enlist

in the armed services,

(although after high school

my parents coaxed, goaded,

and loathed their second born

and only son intimating becoming a nonconformist, and nonestablishmentarian, ne'er do well, (which outcome adequately sums up how mein kampf evolved), nevertheless yours truly exhibits

psychologically traumatic wounds synonymous with the horrors of mortal kombat, and clear out of the blue behavior associated with deadly carnage oozed out from every one of my pores, misleading an observer to deduce

writer of these words experienced and underwent text book example

being shell shocked under heavy bombardment.

At present attention of mine plugged into a biography titled Custer's Trials | A LIFE ON THE FRONTIER OF A NEW AMERICA | storied author T.J. STILES, current reading material populates thought processes of mine with trappings of internecine bloodshed forever wrenching fledgling United States of America away from slave holding Southern lifestyle. Enslaved people in the antebellum South constituted about one-third of the southern population. Most lived on large plantations or small farms; many enslavers owned fewer than 50 enslaved people. Landowners sought to make their enslaved completely dependent on them through a system of restrictive codes.

[ithisatanytime]

DRESDEN ER

 in other less interesting news i watch a six hour long iceberg style video about columbine, bringing me up to speed with every single woman on this fucking website, i was just never all that fascinated by the story, even though embarrassingly the documentary bowling for columbine is probably more than a little responsible for my several years long stint as a leftist. i wanted to watch it because i assumed it would be fairly in depth and i wanted to see if any information presented would challenge my view on the shootings, which basically boil down to, there was a lot of over the top bullying at columbine but ultimately both shooters were just ethnically canaanite and acting on their natural satan given impulse to kill. klebold is the only one of the two shooters with confirmed jewish ancestery which he diminishes by saying hes only a quarter jewish on from his mothers side, but not only is this not how it works, its just not true, his mother is obviously more than half jewish but even if she were, if that half is her mothers side that makes her fully jewish as well as dylan, but its all beside the point because his father is among the most obviously jewish men i have ever layed eyes upon just look him up yourself if you think im embelleshing, not only that but klebold himself has strong jewish features that only typically manifest with high so called jew admixture. the other shooter doesnt have any confirmed jewish heritage whatsoever, but hes made fun of for his looks by other students frequently, even though if you just look at a picture of him a flattering one he appears at times quite handsome, so whats different about his looks what makes him stand out at all? he was mocked for being short, he has a fleshy upper lip, and a characteristically ratlike face, these are extremely jewish features on an otherwise pure white nordic looking person. there is some hubbub made about them being nazis, but even in their own tapes eric will mention that they like hitler, and klebold responds with “but im jewish” and jokingly eric harris acts surprised to this klebold adds “only a quarter!” its all played for laughs but a lot of people intentionally or otherwise ignore the clearly humorous nature of this exchange and pretend as though its to be taken literally that eric didnt know klebold was jewish despite mountains of evidence showing eric knew and they were obviously just joking. the two also frequently wore the communist hammer and sickle, and the only real nazi stuff in the entire six hour deep dive was them shouting things like “we like hitler” and “heil hitler” clearly they were just trying to be edgy though. but lets pretend they actually read mein kampf and believed in fascism or volk or whatever, they clearly didnt but lets just pretend, who fucking cares? i already wrote about this exact phenomena where these so called jews, who are alien to us inside, will have all kinds of different political views from both sides of the aisles, far leftist, authoritarian, far right, far left, but ultimately no matter how eloquently they describe the percieved political problems the solution is always the same, kill a bunch of random people! the right wing unabomber, the left wing tranny who recently shot up that christian school, in fact ive said before that if you look into the ancestory of most of these so called white (or even nonwhite in the case of elliot rodgers and a few others) you will find they were not white at all but so called jews. all the manifestos political or social posturing and philosophizing are just window dressing at best, for justifying what ulitmately they feel like they need to do, which is strike out randomly and violently. the phenomena of mass shootings arent nearly as murky a thing to understand as the media would have you believe, they are practical and racially motivated if even only on a subconscious level. here is a parable to try to illustrate whats going on.

  imagine there is a group of east asians who look ALMOST exactly like the chinese, with a few minor differences that a trained eye would eventually be able to pick up on with practice. lets call these people “wapanese” now suppose these wapanese while outwardly similar to the chinese were inwardly very different in temperament, more sexually forward and pervers, more inclined to violence, had their own religion and were very insular keeping to themselves and doing everything to remian a distinct racially and culturally pure people among the much larger and almost physically indistinguishable japanese population. suppose after centuries of the wapanese living among the chinese, you have wapanese kids in chinese schools who dont even KNOW that they are wapanese because culturally they were more or less raised chinese. but they arent chinese and those differences in temperament arent cultural but genetic in origin, so as much as these wapanese kids want to fit in, they just cant, and whats more they dont want to fit in, as perverse as the wapanese seem to the comparably reserved and cool chinese, the chinese seem boring and uptight to the wapanese, there are essential intrinsic differences in these two peoples that make creating meaningful relationships next to impossible for the wapanese living isolated amongst the much bigger chinese population. he might start to feel insane, why is he so different? is there something wrong with me? but these differences again are genetic he has no hope of changing really, eventually he starts to despise “Everyone” and come up with all kinds of gibberish as to why hes special and better and deserving of life while all his peers who reject him are actually in the wrong and deserve to die. when in reality neither party is in the wrong, the wapanese is just unknowingly completley cut off from his literal family (race is literally just family, there isnt a speck of metaphor in that statment it literally is just family they are synonymous) in tribal times, or any times really but well pretend this is just strictly relevant to tribal times because its less controversial, it would behoove a man in that situation to kill the rival tribe that hes surrounded by if hes at all able, and maybe take their women for his own. its not even madness that spurs these shootings, but cold hard evolutionary truth, tribalism. now the so called jews are a special murderous people in their own right and the wapanese metaphor really doesnt cover that but you get the picture, imagine being the only woman in a world full of men, only women arent a thing in this world so no one knows what to make of you, you are just a weird incomplete man, how isolating that would be, how that isolation would eventually turn to rage and hatred. its about being funedmentally different from your peers to the point you cant even begin to relate. 

 i also want to point out that eric was made fun of for being short, while dylan was made fun of for being tall... what gives? no one bullied ryan hemsworth for being tall im sure so why dylan? its because he wasnt just tall, he had an ugly rat like face and his arms and torso were in bad porportion to one another, remember what i said about so called jews varying from dwarves to giants and that ultimately what sets them apart isnt so much extreme height or lack thereof but a body (skeleton really) that is in some way in proportional disharmony. we were made in the image of our father, and our father is beautiful, they were made not in the image of their father, but in mockery of ours.

[scotianostra]

On April 10th 1936 Activists including the 'Red Duchess of Athol' formed a committee to send an ambulance to Spain in memory of three Dundonians killed while fighting for the Spanish Republican government.

I’m using this wee bit of history to actually tell you about one of the woman in particular here, I will touch on the Ambulance story during the post, but in the main it’s about one remarkable lady

The Red Duchess, or  Katherine “Kitty” Murray, the Duchess of Atholl, as she was formally known, was Scotland’s first female MP, The Red Duchess tag is a bit of a misnomer, as Kitty was a Tory politician, but beffore you judge her on this, please don’t hold that against her though, read the post and then judge her. 

Kitty  shook up parliament with her high principles and disregard for old school tribal politics, she  joined the House of Commons in 1923 after winning the seat of Kinross and West Perthshire for the Conservatives. She also realised the threat Hitler posed and defied her party whips – reading Mein Kampf in the original German and giving translations to Chamberlain and Churchill to try to convince them of the imminent danger.

She was a woman full of contraries, before women had received the vote in 1918 she had outspokenly opposed giving them the vote, arguing that they were not yet sufficiently educated! 

In the late 1920s her attention shifted to international issues. She supported a campaign to prevent female genital mutilation in the British colonies in East Africa and she became concerned over developments in the USSR: her book The Conscription of A People  exposed and denounced Soviet forced-labour practices.

Her understanding of the dangers the Nazi’s posed influenced her support for the Spanish Republic after the failure of the attempted military coup in July 1936.

The U.S. journalist Louis Fischer gave this assessment of her;

“In her old-fashioned black silk dress that fell to her shoe tops she would sit on the platform, at Spain meetings, with Communists, left-wing socialists, working men and disabled International Brigaders and appeal for help for the Republicans. She would interrogate everybody who had been to Spain and hang on their words and note many of them in a book filled with her illegible scrawl.”

It was the ease with which she aligned to the communists fighting in the Spanish Civil War, that the Red Duchess name came about. It was much more than politics with Kitty though, she organised the evacuation of nearly 4,000 children from Bilbao and accommodated them in Britain. 

It was Katherine Murray and another Scottish woman  Fernanda Jacobsen who helped with humanitarian efforts during the war in Spain, Jacobsen became commandant of the Scottish Ambulance Unit (SAU) which provided humanitarian assistance in three convoys.. Jacobsen led the first unit of six ambulances and a lorry, with a crew of 19, which set out from Glasgow on 17 September 1936. Over the course of the war there were three such convoys, all led by Jacobsen.

The Red Duchess  toured Scotland to raise support, stirring audiences into action with her spellbinding oratory, and visited Spain with Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson. The fruit of her journey was the enormously affecting book 'Searchlight on Spain', which sold 300,000 copies in Britain. The aristocrat's work demonstrated the social breadth of the Aid for Spain campaign in Scotland, and inspired women from all backgrounds.

While casting aside the politics of left and right, Atholl believed in the right for the Republicans to legitimately govern and defend themselves.  The Duchess, who was also an accomplished pianist and composer, proved to be a heavy weight and fearless operator - but her name today remains relatively obscure.

It wasn’t all about Spain though, The Duchess, even before she had taken her seat in Westminster,  had already reported on the dire state of health provision in the Highlands and Islands as part of the influential Dewar Committee, whose findings became the blueprint for the NHS in Scotland.

As I said earlier this was a woman of contraries and her  opposeition of women’s suffrage at 21,led to Lady Astor, the first English female MP to take their seat in Westminster, derided her as “Canute trying to keep the waves back.”

Later, her position changed and the Duchess would befriend Sylvia Pankhurst who was to publicly endorse her as an independent candidate in the 1938 by-election which she triggered after losing the support of her local party over her views on Nazi Germany. At the time there was a widespread feeling of appeasement towards Hitler and his policies, Kitty Murray was a lost voice in her opposition to them. Such was her belief that she resigned her seat and stood as an independent, fighting almost entirely on this single issue.

A telegram from Stalin supporting the Duchess' campaign inflicted further damage to a campaign that was set against the vast resources of the Conservative Party. She lost the election by just 1,305 votes.

Her friend and campaign organiser Frieda Stewart said: “The challenge was one of principle against a whole party-political machine; and the Tories were determined that they were not going to be put in their place by one dissident individual, whatever her title.”

Murray, who authored several books, largely stepped away from the fray of public and political life following her defeat.

Following the death of her husband in 1942, she became Honorary Colonel of the Scottish Horse Regiment and also served as President of the Perthshire Branch of the Red Cross Society. Kitty Murray,  the Duchess of Atholl spent  spent a lot of her private income on assisting refugees. With the support of the Foreign Office she broadcast a message of support in the autumn of 1944 to the Poles resisting the Germans in Warsaw. She was also very concerned for those suffering at the hands of the Soviets. Just before the war ended, the Duchess of Atholl, chaired the British League for European Freedom, a post which she held up to her death in 1960. 

Katherine “Kitty” Murray, the Duchess of Atholl died in Edinburgh in 1960, aged 85, after falling from a wall.

Read more about this all but forgotten woman here https://www.basquechildren.org/-/docs/articles/atholl2019

[testure-1988]

I remember this girl I was friends with in high school dated a neo-nazi and he corrupted her with his bullshit. Skrewdriver became her favorite band and she worshipped Varg from Burzum. One day she was actually reading Mein Kampf and another girl ripped the book from her hands and used it to beat the shit out of her.

[kushblazer666]

i dont actually want to read the nazi mass shooter's manifesto and its not cuz i want to remain blithely ignorant of the evil carried out in the name of white people in my cushy little bubble its cuz i dont wanna read 80 pages of rambling nazi bullshit. like genuinely i dont think on the whole germany would be a less racist place today if they made all their citizens read mein kampf in high school or whatever

[awed-frog]

Do you think maybe banning that stuff from AO3 could be a good thing?

I don’t know. I don’t like censorship, and I think it’s very hard to know which stuff one should censor in the first place. I do wish some people would not share what they share, that’s for sure. I think maybe there should be a system that recognizes how long you’ve had a page open - sometimes people will open a fic with weird tags in a kind of Dead Dove moment then close it, but the result is that some truly upsetting works have a very high number of hits, which pushes them at the top of any search. And I also think that stuff that’s just porn shouldn’t be in the same place as other stuff. I know the distinction is problematic, but again - writers should be more honest about what they’re writing. A lot of things you find on AO3 are one-chapter PWPs or ‘one kink per chapter’ fics, and imo those don’t belong in the same category as a long fic with two explicit sex scenes in it. And also: maybe some tags should show up only if you’re specifically looking for them. Like, if a fic is tagged ‘castration’, then it only shows up in your search if you’re typing in “enemies-to-lovers, castration” so that if you type “enemies-to-lovers” you don’t get pretty weird porn you never asked for. 

Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but I think people often underestimate the damages porn can do, and while movies are worse for lots of reasons (chief among them, the presence of real human performers who’re often abused on screen, or whose work is shown and sold without their permission), fiction is not great either. It can still normalize stuff that shouldn’t be normalized, and desensitize us to stuff we should find unusual, unacceptable or shocking. 

And while fanfiction is not the whole problem here (published books are doing what they can to close the gap), I think it is still part of the problem. 

(Anyway: I say porn, but there is a lot of other stuff that’s harder to catch but a lot more dangerous - mostly the way some ‘romances’ are written.)

Most of all, I wish that people would stop spreading these ideas:

1) It’s okay because it’s not real. Yeah, no. Fiction matters, it shapes how we see the world and how we respond to it. Obviously this is more complicated than *sees Se7en, becomes serial killer*, but fiction is central in our life as humans and that should not be taken lightly.

2) It’s okay because trauma. As far as I know, there is zero research into who writes and reads the most extreme stuff out there, and even if those were all trauma survivors working through their stuff and not, say, people who get off on child porn or whatever else, there is still no reason to put that stuff out there.

3) It’s okay because Nabokov. A sex scene in a book (or long fic) is very different from a PWP, or a story built around porn. I’m not a prude, and I don’t think all porn is necessarily bad, but comparing some of the filth that’s out there to the Decameron is a bit much.

4) It’s okay because libraries. This is what irritates me the most. Libraries don’t keep everything, and they don’t keep everything for a reason. If you ask for white supremacy propaganda, for instance, you’re likely not to find anything unless it’s a university library, in which case it will be a heavily annotated edition and not simply a random ‘Jews are bad’ pamphlet. And another thing: a librarian won’t say, ‘Since you enjoyed If This Is A Man, try Mein Kampf.’ People recognize the two works are different even if they can both be tagged as ‘history, memoir, WW2, holocaust’. AO3 doesn’t do this (and as far as I understand it, it’s a deliberate choice). If you enjoy Coffeeshop AUs, it will happily offer you a fic that’s 90% about bestiality set in a Starbucks. And I know the argument - readers should search better - but the thing is, 1) I won’t necessarily know what I don’t want to read and 2) some stuff is just tagged the same when it comes to the main tags, but obviously it doesn’t mean the two stories are similar in any way.

5) It’s okay because free speech. Well: free speech has limits. We regulate some of it, as there are laws against hate speech, genocide deniers, Neo-Nazis, threats, bullying, harassment, and a lot of other things. So free speech doesn’t mean you get to regurgitate whatever bs into the world.

6) Children are old enough to protect themselves. Literally no, they are not. Any sane person should recognize a child is not an adult and that there are certain choices about his life he shouldn’t get to make (for instance, you wouldn’t allow a child of 12 to join the army no matter how much he begged you). Now the internet has become a central tool for education and lots of stuff of everyday life, it’s absurd that we ask children to do the right thing and that’s it. I mean, you wouldn’t have a bakery near a school sell meth by the croissants and then be like ‘It’s labelled as meth! I asked this kid if he truly wanted it and he said yes, it’s not my job as a random adult to decide stuff for him!’. Like - what the fuck? In a way, yes, it is your job. Children are raised by the entire community. We should do what we can to make sure they have more good choices than bad, and in my opinion that includes not having stuff that’s objectively awful freely available and sitting right next the cuddly and fluffy stuff.

(A stupid example from real life: this school I taught at had a convenience store next to it, and some kids would sneak in there during breaks to buy energy drinks. While that’s legal, and it was also allowed for them to leave the school grounds, energy drinks still have a lot of caffeine and are not healthy for 13-yo kids. After this happened regularly with the same kids for about a month, the owner refused to sell them anymore of the stuff and went to talk to the teachers instead. The school started a whole project - on the one hand, they had kids doing science experiments and learning why energy drinks are bad, and on the other, they offered support and free breakfast to anyone who needed it - and specifically to those who normally skipped a meal because their families had to leave for work very early - and the gorging on energy drinks and chips at 10am stopped.) 

I don’t know. I’m very conflicted about this. I wrote fanfiction and though my style is pretty consistent, I know my own stuff has issues. There are days I reconsider even having it out there, tbh, especially when I got yelled out for forgetting to tag something or I see a particularly callously libertarian pro-AO3 post, but rn I don’t have the time or energy to make a decision about that. 

I just wish we would all think of each other a bit more, that’s all.

[a-s-fischer]

My high school had copies of Mein Kampf and The Turner Diaries in the library, for students in AP history. I read both in my freshman year. Not being in AP history yet, I had to talk to the vice principal about my reasons. My reasons being I was Jewish and morbidly fascinated by what motivated that level of murderous bigotry. Reading propeganda will not automatically brainwash you, and keeping these kinds of texts around for analysis and discussion absolutely gives you insight into how people who hold the ideas espoused in the text in question, think.

There is a genuine problem with the way a lot of people think about propaganda, or even just any art with noxious ideology embedded in it, in that they think that it is inherently corrupting. More than anything else, this way of thinking reminds me of Christian parents who were terrified to let their children read the Harry Potter books, because it would lure them into witchcraft and Satanism. Sure, that particular manifestation of this belief always feels very laughable, but there were Christians of a similar persuasion, and of course still are who create an entire alternate pop culture, with Christian music, Christian novels, Christian television, and their children are not allowed any exposure to secular culture, because this they feel will protect their children from the corrupting influence of outside ideas.

What this actually does is create Christian children whose Christianity is extremely brittle, because they have never had to deal with any ideas outside the Christian bubble, and so have no idea how to handle other people's ideas, so when they grow up and go out into the world and eventually encounter other ideas, as you do, they can't cope with it. And this has a lot to do with why a lot of these kids grow up and leave Christianity far moreso than might otherwise.

I use this as an illustration, of what happens when people become afraid of exposing themselves to other ideas, including other really terrible and noxious ideas that we disagree with profoundly, and start treating anything containing those ideas, as inherently corrupting. It leads to ideological brittleness. And more than that, a fear of the enemy's ideas and avoiding those ideas, leads to a lack of knowledge of what those ideas actually are, and an inability to recognize them when they come in other guises.

imitingSo yeah, absolutely, we need to keep examples of things like The Turner Diaries, and Mein Kampf, and For Such a Time, and Atlas Shrugged, and Gone With The Wind, and Birth of a Nation. We need to be able to read/watch such things, and pick a part the ideas in them, and what makes them so terrible, and also what makes them appeal, and to whom, and where that appeal can lead. We need to be able to do this because it helps us recognize when we see these ideas, usually in milder guises, in ourselves and others. And there is no reason to exempt fanfic from this. It is no more supernaturally corrupting than any other kind of art, and it can be equally as capable of giving us insight into the way people take on and respond to terrible ideologies.

Limiting free speech, in the name of eliminating hateful ideologies doesn't work, and all it does is leave us vulnerable, without the insight that actually encountering and coming to understand the ideas at play, gives us.

I know ao3 is supposed to house transgressive works but like, what’s the value in hosting actual racist screeds? Like a racist can post racist fanfic on their own blog or whatever. But why do we need to protect the rights of racists to be hosted on ao3

--

It's the same question we ask everywhere about free speech vs. protecting community members.

The biggest issue is that it's hard to find clear cut-offs. On smaller sites, it makes sense to have a mod make the call. When you're small enough for human curation by a few people who can talk things over, it's easier to sort through the gray areas. Small forums can have taste-based curation, and they're often nicer for it. AO3 is way too large for this, however.

I know it seems obvious which things are just completely beyond the pale, but it's difficult to make clear rules that will hit only those and not other things. Like it or not, every rule on every site is instantly weaponized by assholes. In the case of fanfic content rules, that usually ends up as people reaching really hard in order to attack a rival ship or fandom or explicit fic or shipping in general. Often, readers attack a fic because they can't imagine anyone could have genuinely found it hot or could have written it to work through personal trauma... but it turns out the author was absolutely in earnest and this is just a failure of imagination. And this doesn't just go for majority groups having oppressive fantasies: often, minorities grappling with things that affect them more are the ones who make dark or contentious art and then get attacked for it.

Thinking it's simple to sort different types of art is the black and white thinking of a child.

If an author is calling people slurs in the comments, we can judge their intent by their behavior. If the work itself seems offensive, it's harder to tell what's going on.

[theunderdogwrites]

THREE BOOKS THAT NEED TO BE WRITTEN AND THEN IMMEDIATELY BANNED

Banning books is not common practice here in Canada. Instead, we “challenge” certain titles. I love us.

The first book banned in the United States was in 1637. And the name of that book is: New English Canaan.

It was written by an English businessman named Thomas Morton. In 1624, he arrived in Massachusetts with a group of Puritans, but left them because he didn’t want to abide by the strict rules and conventional values that made up their new American society.

Morton stomped off and created his own colony (now Quincy, Massachusetts) with the forbidden old-world customs that the Puritans loathed. The Puritan militia exiled him, sparking his anger. He filed a lawsuit and wrote a TELL-ALL-BOOK. Read that again. The first book banned in America was a tell-all-book critiquing and attacking Puritan customs. It was so harsh that even other New English settlers disapproved of it. He compared the Puritans to crustaceans. Imagine living in a time where the most abhorrent insult was being compared to a lobster (the cockroach of the sea back then). Nowadays people will call you a lousy, dirty heathen for forgetting your reusable grocery bag in the car.

If you ask the all-mighty Google search engine which books have been banned, the first site to come up is this one:

http://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/classics

It gives a substantial list of books that have either been banned or seriously challenged over the years and lists the MANY reasons why. The list contains such classics as:

- The Great Gatsby: Challenged at the Baptist College in Charleston, SC (1987) because of "language and sexual references in the book

- Ulysses: Burned in the U.S. (1918), Ireland (1922), Canada (1922), England (1923) and banned in England (1929). (Side note: this book was thought to be “like the work of a disorganized mind” and that makes me laugh)

- 1984: Challenged in the Jackson County, FL (1981) because Orwell's novel is "pro-communist and contained explicit sexual matter."

-  Of Mice and Men: Banned from classroom use at the Scottsboro, AL Skyline High School (1983) due to "profanity." The Knoxville, TN School Board chairman vowed to have "filthy books" removed from Knoxville's public schools (1984) and picked Steinbeck's novel as the first target due to "its vulgar language."

-  Slaughterhouse Five: Banned in Levittown, NY (1975), North Jackson, OH (1979), and Lakeland, FL (1982) because of the "book's explicit sexual scenes, violence, and obscene language."

I’ve read all these books, except for Ulysses. It’s a 730-page quest I’m not stoked to embark on anytime soon. And with the exception of Slaughterhouse Five, all of these other books were school assignments.

I’ve said this before – I’m a free speech advocate, BUT words and actions have consequences. Do I always agree with those consequences? No. I struggle with ‘cancel culture’ and the unwillingness to let people atone for their behavior. But pulling at that thread right now will start a whole other conversation and I’ll spiral off topic for a long time.

I did a quick search on what books have been banned / challenged recently and found a few:

- Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher (published in 2007)

- The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie                    (published in 2009)

- Beartown by Fredrik Backman (published 2016)

- Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami (published 2002)

The reasons range from the books being obscene with very vivid descriptions of sex to being vulgar, graphic and just unnecessary subject matter to the use of filthy words to reference masturbation and themes viewed by many as anti-Christian. A couple of these books were specifically targeted because they were being assigned in high schools and parents were the driving force behind getting these titles removed. Fair enough.

There is always going to be someone who gets offended by some thing. Always. And if they have the drive and can convince enough people to see it their way, well then that some thing could be at risk.

Out of all the books I’ve ever read, I can’t think of a single one I found offensive enough to warrant keeping others from reading those words. And I’ve read Mein Kampf. No, this is not me supporting Hitler. If you want to read it, go for it. But let me save you the time you’d be wasting by reading that book with this quick review: Even Hitler distanced himself from the book.

The recent dust-up around the Dr. Seuss books got me to thinking about books I’d like to see written just so they can then be banned. I’ve come up with three. Lucky you.

1. The Cat Owner’s Guide to Being Owned

Synopsis: So, you got yourself a cat? Welcome to The Thunderdome. Prepare to be dominated! This book will assist you through the process and inevitable transformation into the 1-20 year sentence of being a servant to your house tiger. You will be taught how to cope with your newfound humility because of realizations such as:

1. You are no longer in charge

2. Scooping piss and poop from a litterbox is a chore you willingly took on when you brought that fucking cat into your home

3. Failure to fill a food dish that is already 65% full results in constant pestering and could bring on serious consequences ranging from the destruction of your valuables to urine-soaked bed sheets. Please note: you no longer own any valuables

4. Your size is a non-factor. The house tiger is a brilliant survivor who will not think twice about eating your eyes should you die in your sleep

By the end of this book, you will have come to the conclusion that you may have made a mistake.

Why this book should be banned: If the cats get a hold of it, WE ARE DOOMED.

 2. Your Period and You, by Dr. Peter Tampon

Synopsis: Dr. Tampon is a renowned Florida based gynecologist who understands women and the female experience better than most women. And in this follow up to his multi copy selling debut “Lady, It’s Not Your Hypothyroidism, You’re Just Fat and Lazy!”, he will tell you all the reasons why you get so fucking batshit crazy one week a month. Discover your body through the eyes of a male professional and learn practises to save everyone around you from certain peril should they speak to you during Aunt Flow’s monthly visit. Techniques include: just keeping your mouth shut, crying into your pillow to avoid bothering others with your weeping sounds, going for a long, long walk so no one has to deal with your imagined pain & discomfort and Dr. Tampon’s personal favorite – it’s all in your head.

Why this book should be banned: If it’s not self-explanatory then chances are you’re an actual tampon.

 3. In Absence: A True Crime Novel About The Disappearance of Kindness

Synopsis: It’s 2021 and in the midst of a worldwide pandemic – Kindness is missing. But where did it go? Some will blame The Maskless Deniers – a group of petulant children posing as adults hellbent on spreading selfishness and misinformation about their personal freedoms being violated. Perhaps science is the culprit; with all it’s pesky facts and unashamed insistence that you pay attention. Others will say it’s The Sheeple – those willing to blindly follow without question while forcing others to adhere to public health orders. And then there are those who will say the world is full of jackasses who feel they have invisible permission to create chaos and screw civility in the eye socket, so Kindness packed its bags and left on its own.

Why this book should be banned: Maybe it shouldn’t? Maybe this needs to be written about and just left alone.

 “We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.” – Mahatma Gandhi

[writer59january13]

Daemons within gray matter of this male run amuck...

hence yours truly (me) seeks mental health services

without any luck even after reading Scripture

from my namesake who exuded pluck after paging thru

the AETNA Medicare directory, whether a group practice or individual, I expended energy and precious time today June sixth two thousand and twenty four

hoping to get linkedin and truck with a suitable therapist, cuz various and sundry issues such as chronic anxiety, dysthymia, obsessive compulsive disorder, and panic attacks plagues sexagenarian old body electric matter of fact mein kampf and hard times reducible

to four letter description conveyed by the word yuck. Exhaustion prevails courtesy emotional distress self evident to any anonymous reader predicated on morose poetry of mine invariably discouraging positive ambitions for friendship receiving, yet I experienced

unexpected welcome response from over the hills and far away where Teletubbies come to play with me, whose fealty being a bosom buddy gratitude sexagenarian does express and so what if three score plus five year old does regress. Once upon a time

more than half century ago,

in a faraway galaxy

this second born and singular son

of Harriet and Boyce Harris

(mother and father since passed away

May third two thousand and fifteen,

and October seventh

two thousand and twenty respectively) though

both parents during their lifetime

beset with impossible mission

to administer to my psychological woe

and actually unwittingly exacerbated

dysfunctional behavior of mine

exhibited, jump/kick started, and witnessed videre licet

courtesy their verbal

browbeating with ultimatums

aghast at irregular impulsive decisions

to attend this, that or another institution

of higher learning

post high school graduation

psyche subjected to actions experienced

being whipped back and forth,

to and fro, hither and yon

analogous to ma yo-yo.

Scads of irrational thought processes

bombard nooks and crannies

within me swiftly tailored

harried styled noggin

sense and sensibility

doth create veritable boondoggle stumping psychological masterminds

even Sigmund Freud himself if alive

would be mystified and ask ghost writer

of Mary Shelley to craft sequel,

where Doctor Victor Frankenstein

rids trademark neurosis of mine

shape shifting Matthew Scott Harris'

witnessed when whirled

wide web of electrodes

activated courtesy toggle subsequently flash brilliant lightning bolts

in tandem with deafening booming thunder

reconfiguring bitta bing bitta

chitty chitty bang bang switch

rendering corporeal cerebral flesh

truly significantly reconstituting

dogma, enigma variations, karma,

and persona of aforementioned

poet of Perkiomen Valley into altered state, whose psychological state now mimics,

dovetails, and approximates

that of Neanderthal man

forever linkedin to seventh heaven.

[james-joyces-right-eyeball]

Random Thoughts on the Concept of Banning Books

I am currently reading a book about the controversy surrounding and the subsequent banning of James Joyce’s Ulysses (The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses by Kevin Birmingham; check it out if you’re interested I like it a lot so far and it’s a must for any Joyce fan.), and I just had some thoughts about the mere concept of banning books.

Now, as an avid reader and aspiring writer, I have always been against censorship in literature, even in books I find relatively dangerous in its ideas, such as Mein Kampf. This wasn’t always the case. I was, as most people are when they are younger and often also when they are older, a bit of a hypocrite. I often joked with my friends about books I hated that had been banned that they, “Deserved it.” (examples that come to mind are the previously mentioned Mein Kampf, Go Ask Alice, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover). However, I quickly came to realize that if I were to take an anti-censorship stance, I would have to confront these ideas head-on. 

So I eventually grew out of my hypocritical views on censorship. While I still do not like these books and think they should never be held up as great examples of literature (Hitler’s book more than the others for obvious reasons), I do not think any work of art should ever, under any circumstances, be banned. Rather, I think art needs to be discussed, and I despise the idea often taken in primary schools that this cannot be the case. Slightly off-topic, but the way literature especially is taught in middle and high schools does not lend itself well to the understanding of controversial and often-banned ideas. High schools especially, at least in my experience, seek to teach the baseline literature trappings such as symbolism and metaphors more often then not just to have their students get the questions about these literary things on their standardized tests. These classes rarely have discussion for the sake of discussion or for the sake of the student’s own personal improvement and broadening of horizons.

I think this is why books are banned more in middle and high schools than in entire countries like in the case of Ulysses. It is far easier to simply ban a book for using a controversial word, portraying racial issues, expressing any sexuality/having a sex scene, or any other reason a book gets banned than to have discussions around it. The school system does not lend itself to doing so, and the parents often prefer not to. 

But to bring this back to Ulysses and the book about it that inspired me to write this post, one of the reasons Ulysses was banned was because of the ideas it expressed. The U.S. government was looking for anti-American/any ideas considered “radical” or against the war (then WWI) and Ulysses caught their attention because A. There are broad themes about the struggles of the underclass and B. Joyce himself was a bit of an anarchist. Ignoring the inherently terrifying fact that a government can just...ban ideas/books it does not like, this approach is, I think, similar to the one that public schools and other places of book banning take now. Rather than interacting with ideas, it is easier to get rid of them. Of course Ulysses eventually came out on top, much to the disdain of English majors in the future made to read it for their classes, but what’s interesting to me about the banning of Ulysses (and the banning of other books in particular) is the censors unfailing ability to look at a piece of art and only see something to get rid of. I love Ulysses, so I may be biased in this, but how someone could read a beautiful, funny, somewhat tragic book that says so much about love, life, sex, religion, nationality, and class and not only not be moved, but say, “No one else can see this. No one else can be allowed to experience this piece of art.” is just baffling to me. To limit art is to limit life, and that is all there is to it. 

Censorship is bad; this is not a new take and I don’t pretend that it is. These are just some thoughts I’ve had for a while about it, some frustrations I’ve had since I was a young teenager in high school and was outraged at adults trying to tell me what I could and couldn’t read. Art is meant to be seen and experienced in its whole form, and all censorship, no matter how small, harms this crucial element.