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I’m So Fucking Sorry Your Child Had to Read a Fucking Swear Word in a Book About the Holocaust
Is he fucking okay?
A few days ago The New York Times reported that a school board in Tennessee banned the brilliant graphic novel Maus because it included “rough language,” a naked person, violence and suicide. By way of reminder, Maus is a Pulitzer-prize winning novel about the Holocaust — so yeah, there’s gonna be some fucking violence, and maybe a little fucking suicide, for fuck’s sake. (The author’s mother, a survivor of Auschwitz, committed suicide). Also by way of reminder, the Holocaust was a murderous campaign against anyone the fucking Nazis thought didn’t fit into the definition of a master race — mostly Jewish people but not only Jewish people — and therefore needed to be destroyed. Add some economic insecurity and megalomania and you’ve got yourself a fucking genocide.
This genocidal campaign included fucking gas chambers, fucking death marches, fucking shooting babies and throwing them into ditches, fucking hangings, fucking starvation, among other fucking unthinkable things. Fun fact: the word “genocide” was coined in 1944. Before that, there simply wasn’t a word to describe not only what the Nazis had done, but also the Armenian genocide that had occurred during WWI. Genocide isn’t new, but our awareness of what it means — the…
