Progressives Have More in Common with Censors of ‘Maus’ than We Think

By DAVID SCHMIDT

Over the past year, conservatives have gone into an uproar over a series of supposed “cancellations” by the left: Mister Potato Head; Dr. Seuss; the Muppets. It didn’t matter that nobody was actually trying to ban these beloved icons—the fires of right-wing outrage roared on.

In January 2022, it was the progressives’ turn.

With indignation, liberal news outlets reported a story of “banned books” in Tennessee: the McMinn County Board of Education had voted to remove Maus, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel about the Holocaust, from their Junior High curriculum.

Social media immediately lit up with angry posts. Clearly, these anti-Semites wanted to deny the Holocaust! The book’s own author stated, “Tennessee is obviously demented.” Even Neil Gaiman chimed in with accusations of Naziism: “There’s only one kind of people who would vote to ban Maus, whatever they are calling themselves these days.”

When I called the school district office on Jan. 31 to do a little fact-checking, the receptionist expressed relief that I wasn’t calling to shout at her. “We’ve been called every name in the book lately,” she said with a trembling voice. “We’re getting upwards of 200 angry messages a day.”

Then she then told me something even more interesting: the book had not actually been banned. “Maus” is still available in McMinn County school libraries, and students are welcome to read it. It was simply removed from the official junior high curriculum, and had only been a part of said curriculum for a year.

In fact, the school board itself made ample attempts to clarify that they were not teaching revisionist history. “The atrocities of the Holocaust were shameful beyond description,” they wrote in an official statement, “and we all have an obligation to ensure that younger generations learn of its horrors to ensure that such an event is never repeated.”

Of course, many—including the author of “Maus” himself—are wondering why the district would object to this powerful, moving book in the first place. So why did they remove it?

According to the board, the book contained too much adult content; specifically, the “unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide.” We on the Left have much to learn from this—we have been guilty of such thinking plenty of times as well.

Over the past several decades, some liberal critics have sought to remove “Huckleberry Finn” from school curriculum because it contains the N-word. No consideration is given to the context in which the word appears: a critical depiction of the horrors of slavery. Similar arguments are used against “Of Mice and Men” and “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which, according to the New York Times, were two of the library association’s 10 most-challenged books in 2020.

In more recent years, progressives objected to the 2019 film “Joker” because it depicted antisocial violence. (See “The Left got ‘Joker’ wrong,” by this writer, 12/15/19 TPP.) IndieWire described it as “Incel-Friendly,” while Robbie Collin of the Telegraph tweeted, “I’m worried someone’s going to get killed.” The numerous liberal critics completely ignored how this violence was depicted on screen, in an antihero story about how a villain is created. For these critics, the context did not matter; the mere act of depicting objectionable content was a sin in and of itself.

One of the most bizarre cases of selective censorship occurred in certain productions of Mel Brooks’ musical, “The Producers,” where swastikas were removed from the Nazi uniforms. Of course, historical Nazis were still depicted (in a critical, satirical context), yet someone decided that the symbol of the swastika was more offensive than the actual violence of the Nazi regime.

And therein lies the lesson all of us can learn from the McMinn County Board of Education. Are we more upset by offensive content — symbols, words, on-screen violence — than we are by the real-life horror it represents?

The progressive Christian minister Tony Campolo was famous for challenging Evangelicals on such misplaced sensibilities. “While you were sleeping last night,” he once preached, “30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition, [and] most of you don’t give a s*it. What’s worse is that you’re more upset with the fact that I said ’s*it’ than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.”

Centuries before Campolo, a carpenter from Nazareth expressed the same sentiment, condemning religious hypocrites for “straining out a gnat, yet swallowing a camel.”

This mindset is prevalent, widespread and insidious on the left and right alike. It is disturbingly more common than any fringe attempts to deny the reality of the Holocaust. In our knee-jerk efforts to censor and block all content that we find offensive, we run the risk of forgetting to confront human brutality itself.

And, as those who experienced the horrors of the Shoah firsthand would say, we must “never forget.”

David J. Schmidt is an author, podcaster, multilingual translator, and homebrewer who splits his time between Mexico City and San Diego, California. He is a proponent of fair and alternative forms of trade, has published a variety of books, essays, short stories, and articles in English and Spanish, and is the co-host of the podcast To Russia with Love. See holyghoststories.com, Twitter: @SchmidtTales

From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2022

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