A message from our executive director Julie Packard on the passing of Dr. Jane Goodall:
Dr. Jane Goodall was a remarkable individual—as a scientist, as an advocate for wildlife and wild places, and as a source of profound hope for the future of our planet. She brought such a joyful spirit and unfailing optimism to her work. Most importantly, she recognized that—together—we can make a real difference through our actions, large and small.
I mourn her passing and celebrate her life. It was an honor to know and work with Dr. Goodall. Her legacy will live on, in the lives of the millions of people she inspired.
Btw this is smth I kind of see around in Jumblr circles but I dont really see an answer yet: how is The Boy in Striped Pajamas contentious in the portrayal of the Holocaust?
Disclaimer: I haven’t read it. I am going based off of other reviews. I do not want to read it and give the ([ex?]-Catholic) author any money. Pirating it does a disservice to my computer’s storage space.
Ok. That said.
Fundamentally, the book and film are a goy exploiting our genocide for money while framing Nazis more sympathetically than Jews and erasing us from our genocide.
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is fundamentally inaccurate, but more than that, it heroizes and focuses on the Nazi perspective. It has a hero whose family is full of loyal Nazis, and this is not treated with the gravity it should be. It is a goy using our genocide, our trauma, for cheap attention. Let’s go into the problems.
The main character is nine. The Holocaust Centre North says that he “doesn’t seem to be aware of the war around him, who the Jews are or even who Adolf Hitler is. As a young German boy, and the son of a senior SS officer, Bruno would have been, by law, a member of the Hitler Youth. He would have attended a German school where students regularly swore oaths to Hitler and where antisemitic propaganda infiltrated every part of the curriculum. Children were taught that the war was something to be proud of as it meant that Germany would become a great power once more.”
This also, as the author points out, plays into and actively promotes the idea that Germans didn’t know.
They did.
They knew. They willfully blinded themselves, perhaps; but that means they knew there was something to be ashamed of. Germans knew. Germans knew perfectly well Jews were being persecuted, killed. By and large, Germans just didn’t care.
Then there’s Shmuel, the one-dimensional Jewish boy, always a victim, never fleshed out as anything but a sheep. He also couldn’t have existed – most likely he would be gassed, or possibly working or in medical experiments.
And then there is the ending, where Bruno and Shmuel are both killed. As the author writes, “The emotional focus of the story is on Bruno’s family and their distress as they realise what has happened to their son. The reader’s attention remains with the experience of the concentration camp commandant and his wife whose son has been killed in what is portrayed as a tragic accident…the reader’s sympathy is directed towards a Nazi concentration camp commandant and his family [rather than Shmuel or Jews as a whole].”
As one anonymous author for Indiana University notes, “Bruno’s murder means that The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is a Holocaust story centered around the death of a German child.” Not a Jewish child. Not our suffering. A German one–the child of a willing genocider, no less.
Evidently one historian described it rather memorably as “a travesty of facts”.
Other studies have noted that “the story regularly elicited profound and often somewhat misplaced sympathy for German and even Nazi families whom, students argued, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas helped them to see as ‘victims’ too.” Let me be extremely clear: An SS officer is not a victim. Bruno’s father should have been put on trial at Nuremberg and convicted. ‘Sympathy’ for a Nazi is absurd. It is also exceedingly popular, the most assigned media piece (book and film combined) in the UK.
Here are some student reactions:
Well we always think of the Nazis as the bad guys [BECAUSE THEY WERE!!!] and this [the film of the Boy in the Striped Pyjamas] shows that the Holocaust didn’t just affect the Jews.
Ah yes it affected Nazis too. They got money and they got land and they got our things.
I feel sorry for practically everybody who was under Hitler’s control…. And it doesn’t matter who was the bigger victim, they were all still victims of Hitler’s control in some shape or form
I dunno I’d say a Jew slaughtered for being Jewish whose stuff was stolen and whose memory was erased is rather a bigger victim than an SS officer who willingly chose to slaughter. As one teacher noted, students in the UK often think that the book/film “was the Holocaust”.
The Auschwitz Museum – an organization in Poland, run by Poles, may I remind you, where I would not be surprised if there are more people descended from those who profited personally from our murder than Jews on the board – has condemned it. (The sequel, by the way, is no better. “Isn’t poor Big Sister and Child of the Nazi such a victim?? Those evil people trying to hold her family accountable!”)
This isn’t an issue solely with Boyne, of course. But it is aimed at children and masquerades as educational. It makes it a “fairy tale”, as Tanya Gold writes in her Jewish Chronicle piece, a lovely little fairy tale. It makes the Shoah not a condemnation but a tragedy in which all, even perpetrators, are victims – useful in a society built on our slaughter (not just in the Shoah, of course). It’s the same reason Anne Frank is popular – it glorifies goyim, it makes them seem heroic, it dodges realities, and the “in spite of everything I still believe people are really good at heart” quote allows reckoning with the antisemitic roots of western society to be neatly avoided, the closest one can get to a feel-good story for goyim.
Read Night instead. Night is hard. But it is unflinching. It is Jewish, it is angry, it is rageful, it is beautifully written and it is fucking haunting. Read Night, and don’t even think of reading Boyne or any of the other Nazi-glorifying profiteers.
hey so I just found out that the knights and squires at MEDIEVAL TIMES can only be male to preserve the ACCURACY and GENUINENESS of their shows. you know, Medieval Times, that bastion of historical accuracy that’s not dirtbag pop medievalisms central??? Medieval Times sitting here going “I can excuse one billion historical inaccuracies, but I draw the line at knights (and squires) who aren’t dudes [for historical accuracy]” (knights who weren’t dudes existed in the historical past) (both in real life and in popular literature) (many such examples)
Oh, that’s just for the casting page. When asked in a staff meeting why the “Lord Marshal” character (essentially the MC) couldn’t be gender-neutral (to give more working hours to the female cast), Medieval Times CEO Perico Montaner stated that it was simply because women could not be believably “commanding” enough.
“99 times out of 100,” he smirked, “any man can kick any woman’s ass.”
….is that Eleanor of Aquitaine’s music?? By God, King, she’s got a chair!
Send Diane Duane to the Reichenbach Falls to outline a cyber/steampunk Sherlock Holmes novel
…Well, they say you’re supposed to declare the challenge in the topmost sentence. Will that do, you think?
So let me tell you what’s going on, as sometimes when an idea sneaks up behind you and hits you over the head, you should, you know… just shove it out there and see what people make of it.
Background: Once upon a time, I wrote a short story for this Holmes & Watson anthology. Here’s the first paragraph of the story.
It was early autumn of the year 1895 when Holmes and I, having been caught up in the events earlier that year that surrounded the return of the abominable giant “rats” of Sumatra III, were at last able to return from deep space to the familiar environs of Baker Street. After months of headlong flight among too many planets of five systems, being caught up in not merely one or two but three major on- and off-planet engagements, and pursuing (or being pursued by) malefactors and their minions through the unexplored catacombs of an anciently abandoned alien city, the prospect of resuming something like our normal routine came as a great relief.
…So who’d like to see the prequel novel?
But first (because I am a career-long outliner, as discussed at some length here) will, of necessity, come the outline. …This is because I don’t want to waste my readers’ time, any more than I’m willing to waste my own. (Not least because as too-recent events have reminded me: Art’s long, but life’s too damn short.)
Adding a break here, because the logistics on this are a touch complex. WARNING: contains very time-sensitive changes to travel plans (six hours, and the clock is ticking!), multi-national rail journeys (on senior-citizen discounts), writing work done to good effect in foreign places… and the Falls.
Found a long Mastodon thread that makes a lot of sense, and goes a long way to explaining how we got to this point (re: conservatives shooting up the place).
Link to the complete thread in the source thing below. Tumblr won’t let me embed Mastodon links inline (probably because of the embedded @ symbol which tumblr thinks is an email address).
“It’s worth asserting, as some pundits seem to find it uncouth, that it’s simply true that right-wing extremists have killed far more people and tended to be more violent than their left-wing counterparts in the past few decades. Still, it’s striking that discussion of guns, the tools virtually always used to carry out this violence, has all but fallen out of the national discourse. Even Democrats hardly bother to bring it up anymore.”
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Unions are trash. Theyll Destroy a whole company for firing a shitty worker.
unions are the reason you aren’t paid 2.50 an hour with steel beams about to bust ya head open shut up lol
Unions are why you have 5 day, 40 hour full-time work weeks. Unions are why they have to pay you in actual dollars instead of “company credits” that you can only spend at the company-owned stores. Unions are why there are fucking fire exits at your place of work. Unions are why it’s not okay for your supermarket ground beef to be any percentage human.
You think your company pays you out of the goodness of their hearts? Or even out of “market pressure?” The “job market” is a myth perpetuated by the capitalists. Corporations would pay you nothing if they could get away with it. And you argue “oh, but if they paid me nothing I’d just go to another one.” Wrong. Because to maximize profits, they all want to pay you nothing. Corporations exist to maximize profits while reducing risk for investors. It’s part of their entire function to find ways to cut costs as much as possible, and that includes finding ways to pay you nothing.
Unions are your defense against that. You think all a union does is strike? If you pay union dues, a lot of that is spent on lobbyists in various governments reminding your lawmakers that you have rights as a living human being that a corporation should not be able to stomp all over. Unions hire lawyers so that if you’re fired for bullshit reasons, the union can stand up for you against your boss. They’re called unions because workers are uniting to pool resources so that they can stand up to these corporate overlords with more money than God. Unions exist because you might not have the words, resources, or time to fight workplace injustices all by yourself. That’s the whole fucking point.
And if a business shuts down because a union is striking, it’s because the business was abusing people and didn’t deserve to be in business anyway. Don’t make excuses for the corporations. They already have trillions of dollars and a couple million lawyers to do that for themselves. They don’t need your help.
The erasure of labor history from US history curriculum has caused so much fucking damage to this country.
Bosses: If you don’t like how we do things, don’t work here.
Workers: *Go on strike*
Bosses: Wait no not like that
A lot of union folk very literally fought and died for the workers’ rights we have today. Like no joke, bosses would hire goons to straight-up murder unionizing and striking workers.
All the most basic workers’ rights we have today were all paid for in blood. And conservatives have never stopped trying to take them all away again.
NEVER FORGET THAT LABOR DAY IS ACTUALLY ABOUT. I know people who legitimately think it’s like a secondary mothers day - you know, for going into labor.
But it’s about workers rights and the people who campaigned for it to be a holiday knew this fucking day would come.
If you are in the US and about to celebrate a 3-day weekend, thank a goddamn union worker.
Minneapolis sailor. Sailing is my passion. So is writing. I think POB and E.B. White were on to something. I hope you enjoy the posts. A 'rhumb line' isn't a que for grog, but rather a loxodrome. All clear, right?
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