Samizdat, Transchriften and Maus
A Brave New New World of Mind Control
If ever it was needed, now is the time for some good old fashioned samizdat topped off by a healthy measure of tarnschriften and while you’re at it, I want my Maus.
Samizdat was word for when dissidents risked their lives and printed and distributed censored publications to avoid arrest and worse by the feared East German secret police, known as the Stasi, in the former communist East Germany. The danger was especially acute given the Stasi’s estimated 189,000 citizen informers.
Tarnschriften were camouflaged publications created by the underground in Nazi Germany to avoid the total, stark censorship and those found violating the law would be imprisoned or executed. The writings were given innocent looking covers and first and last pages to conceal the real and very dangerous documents.
“Maus,” if you haven’t heard, is Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Holocaust graphic novel that was recently banned by the McMinn County School Board in Athens, Tenn., because it contains “inappropriate language” and an illustration of a naked, female mouse. The 1986 book and a sequel tells the story of the author’s father, who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp. The tale feature mice as Jewish prisoners and cats as Nazi oppressors. Book banning is becoming more common on the far right. In December, a Texas school district banned the graphic novel “V for Vendetta” and comic book series “Y: The Last Man,” both dystopian novels in an authoritarian future.
“Maus,” “V for Vendetta” and comic book series “Y: The Last Man,” are among the many award-winning books that have been banned in a time when Stasi-like citizen informers are being groomed around the country to defend against so-called liberal policies.
Welcome to Stasi-light and the far right world of attempts at mind control and censorship and neighbors turning in neighbors who violate right wing ideas. Texas has taken the citizen informer a dangerous step further as citizen vigilantes are even being offered minimum payments of $10,000 for turning in anyone linked with an abortion. “The Texas Heartbeat Act” bans abortions as soon as a fetal heartbeat is detected it allows citizens to be awarded a minimum of $10,000 plus court costs if they turn in “any person who knowingly engages in conduct that aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion.”
Book banning, abortion restrictions and the field of critical race theory, are the latest flashpoints for the right wing. Critical race theory is a cross-disciplinary intellectual and social movement of civil-rights scholars and activists who seek to examine the intersection of race, law and slavery in the United States and to challenge mainstream American liberal approaches to racial justice. Proponents of critical race theory say that slavery is the defining moment in U.S. history and that banning instruction is an unwarranted attempt to distort and sugarcoat U.S. history.
This tipping point for the debate over critical race theory came in a September 2020 executive order signed by then-President Trump, which banned certain types of diversity training in federal agencies. The order, since revoked by President Biden, barred teaching that people of any race or sex are inherently better than another, that all people of a certain race have unconscious bias, or that the United States is a fundamentally racist or sexist country.
Since January 2021, 36 states have introduced bills or taken other steps that would restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism, according to an Education Week analysis.
Alabama, in the heart of Dixie, is among the many states opposing teaching critical race theory. Alabama was the site of some of the most violent episodes of the U.S. civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s, including the 1963 murders of four Black girls after a bomb was set at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.
“The Alabama State Board of Education believes the United States of America is not an inherently racist country, and that the state of Alabama is not an inherently racist state,” according to a draft resolution by the board to ban critical race theory.
Another proposal in New Hampshire bans teachers from advocating “any doctrine or theory promoting a negative account or representation of the founding and history of the United States of America.”
Florida is in the front of the pack in attempts to deny information in schools about slavery and racism. One bill before the Florida Senate says that students should not be subjected to instruction that might create “discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress” on account of a person’s race.
In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has proposed the “Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (W.O.K.E.) Act,” an effort to push back on the “woke” movement that began in the 2010s. Woke is a point of view that started in the African American community to point out racial prejudice and other social inequalities including sexism. DeSantis’s plan empowers parents to sue school systems if they believe children are being taught “critical race theory,” and in winning suits, parents would be entitled to collect attorneys’ fees. It is a frightfully chilling way to make teaches toe the line and veer away from any controversial instruction regarding the history of slavery and racism.
In another blatant effort at blatant censorship, on April 10, 2021, DeSantis signed into law, the “Combating Public Disorder Act,” defined as “a robust approach to uphold the rule of law, to stand with those serving in law enforcement and enforce Florida’s zero tolerance policy for violent and disorderly assemblies.” Fortunately a federal judge shot down the plan because its “vagueness permits those in power to weaponize its enforcement against any group who wishes to express any message that the government disapproves of” and that “the lawless actions of a few rogue individuals could effectively criminalize the protected speech of hundreds, if not thousands, of law-abiding Floridians.”
In Virginia, newly elected Republican governor Glenn Youngkin has created a tip line for parents to rat out teachers whose classes include “inherently divisive concepts, including Critical Race Theory.” Youngkin said he wants parents to call the tip line “where they feel that their fundamental rights are being violated, where their children are not being respected, where there are inherently divisive practices in their schools.”
In New Hampshire, GOP legislators are supporting legislation that makes it illegal for a teacher to “advocate any doctrine or theory promoting a negative account or representation of the founding and history of the United States of America in New Hampshire public schools which does not include the worldwide context of now outdated and discouraged practices. Such prohibition includes but is not limited to teaching that the United States was founded on racism.”
In the heat of the attack on critical race theory and schools is the Center for Renewing America, a right wing group, led by Rusell Vought, a former high ranking official in the trump administration. An indication of Vought’s xenophobic, Christian philosophy came during his confirmation hearings, when he said that “Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology. They do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ his Son, and they stand condemned.”
The center’s website has a glowing, all-caps, recommendation from trump who said that “RUSSELL VOUGHT DID A FABULOUS JOB IN MY ADMINISTRATION, AND I HAVE NO DOUBT HE WILL DO A GREAT JOB IN CONTINUING OUR QUEST TO MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”
The center provides model school board language to prohibit critical race teaching, with the purpose “to prohibit: the teaching and promotion of critical race theory, divisive concepts, and other forms of government-sanctioned or -facilitated racism in our school district and to uphold the foundational American principle that all people are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
The Kansas Board of Regents recently asked its six universities, the University of Kansas, Kansas State University, and Wichita State University, to produce a list of any courses to be examined that include critical race theory. At Iowa State University, the provost refused to sign off on the new university diversity requirement, pending a review of how the state’s new ban on critical race theory would impact the requirement.