Arkansas wants to ban all classroom mentions of Howard Zinn (teachers, get your free books!)

Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/03/05/the-people-rule.html

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Book banning. Yes, we are descending into a fascist state.

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Don’t these people get the Streisand Effect? The censors have just motivated me to purchase and read Zinn’s books.

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And any TV station/Cable channel that shows "ROOTS’ should lose their license for at least a year ! !

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I hate to break it to ya mike, but this has been going on for A While.

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I suspect they don’t care. As long as they can prevent students in their states from being exposed to these dangerous ideas by others, they’re happy. They probably consider the kind of person who would choose to read a book (much less a Zinn book) to be a “brainwashed liberal” who is already beyond their power to influence.

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Yeah, isn’t that the priest’s job? To read The One And Only Book and tell them what to think about what’s in it?

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All true Americans should know that there are only two books worth reading!

/sarcasm

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Even though Zinn’s dead, isn’t this effectively a bill of attainder? You can’t write laws targeting specific individuals by name.

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Hell, banning, or at least attempting to ban books (or whatever) is as Amurcan as apple pie, doncha know?

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I would love to read a “Zinn’s” take on the current cluster-fuck that America is sinking into. Sadly I doubt if he would be surprised.

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Just another title for generations of banned book club members to read.

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Whiny cry-babies (apologies to actual babies everywhere).

Seriously, whilst I’m not familiar with his work, either Zinn’s ideas are a valid reading of history so should be taught or they’re not so teaching them and exposing their flaws should be easy. The fact that you think you can get away with banning them indicates it’s more likely the former rather than the later…

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Yeah and this lot we have now want to burn the authors along with the books.

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It has been an age since I read this particular book, but the arguments were sound, and what I remember the most were his discussions of bias in journalism.

It’s been since the nineties, so I may have a few wires crossed, but it feels an awful lot like he predicted “fake news”.

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He certainly had his finger of the pulse of fake history, and tried to combat it.

This book was required reading when I was in high school, and one of the few required reading books that I think should damn well be required reading.

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Hear that whirring spinning sound from about six feet under the earth? That’s Zinn’s take on this.

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