- cross-posted to:
- texas
- cross-posted to:
- texas
Conservative activists, led by a local pastor and outspoken Israel advocate, pushed the district, Mission CISD, to excise books mostly about gender, sexuality and race. Their demands represented an extreme version of a nationwide culture war over books that has played out in recent years — and ensnared a number of books with Jewish themes.
In Mission, the long list of books on the chopping block includes a recent illustrated adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary; both volumes of Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust graphic memoir “Maus”; “The Fixer,” Bernard Malamud’s novel about a historical instance of antisemitic blood libel; and “Kasher in the Rye,” a ribald memoir by Jewish comedian Moshe Kasher.
There’s a reason for that, which I mentioned in a post elsewhere in the thread:
Even without the whole Religion angle, racists the world over just love ethno-nationalism: each ethnicity living in their own corner, separate from the rest, is exactly what these people want.
In my experience something similar exists with a subset of Russians, - they hate Israel the particular way, they just love the fact that it exists and commits crimes.
When you are Jewish and proud of yourself, it makes them just as livid as when you are Armenian and proud of yourself.
Republic of Armenia is quite miserable and they enjoy that, Israel is strong, but lacks dignity even more than RoA and they enjoy that, so the emotion gets especially extreme when you put these states and your own pride and the fact that they can change and have dignity in contrast.
(I have tested that.)
Armenians have suffered their own genocide as well, one the Turks still refuse to acknowledge. At least the Germans acknowledge the Holocaust.
That’s actually imprecise.
They acknowledge that “something” happened, but deny various separate traits, like intent or numbers or relevance for today or even just say that genocide wasn’t illegal then. There’s also that “it didn’t happen, but they deserved it, and we’ll do it again” thing. Which gives a very special feeling, considering they are well in position to do it again.
And it’s illegal to publicly recognize it in Turkey, so not only malevolent, but also benevolent voices seem to be kinda in denial, while in fact not.
Still had Germany not lost WWII so conclusively, I suspect we’d be amazed at how self-conscious a lot of Turks are as compared to Germans.
True, I was not totally right in that. It just is so sad beyond the genocide and the genocide denial that Ataturk was such a force for good when it came to his own people and such an evil fuck when it came to Armenians. Until Erdoğan, Turkey was a generally secular state, a rarity for a predominantly Muslim country and that is down to Ataturk, who was an atheist. I wish I could praise him, but I can’t. He was part of the Young Turk movement and he was instrumental in trying to erase what happened from history.
He wasn’t as good to them either, look up Dersim rebellion and such. Erdo started as a democratic change with a small flavor of Islam. Because that secularism was about creating a fascist state and a social layer of Kemalist privileged elite (military mostly). But that’s something a Turk may explain better.