Antisemitic Censorship

ART SPIEGELMAN — THE COMPLETE MAUS — PENGUIN BOOKS GB — 2003

This book is rather old and yet it is brought back to the limelight of the educational stage by the decision of some school councils or other educational authorities, local so far, to ban the book from high school libraries. That decision is typical censorship in the country that pretends they are the champions of democracy and freedom of expression. What is freedom of expression if the freedom to circulate what has been freely produced is negated or at least limited?

But what is so fiery about this book that some Parent Teacher Associations (PTAs) collect their tomahawks or hatchets and get on the warpath against this book, which is decades old and had never been confronted with such narrow-mindedness because censorship is always narrow-very-narrow-mindedness.

The book is the story of a Jewish family from Poland confronted in the late 1930s and during the Second World War with the final solution, the genocide of the Jews in Europe under the responsibility of Hitler, but not only Hitler far from it, because after the war, in modern Poland, the Poles considered the presence of Jews had been solved by this final solution. Very few people (not only Jews, but also gypsies, political activists, Christians, gay and lesbian people, and of course all sorts of…