Author: Derek Webb

The Turner Diaries is a book published in 1978 by William Pierce, who used the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald for credit. The book is a white supremacist manifesto and is heavily cited to be known as one of the most racist and offensive books published in the US. The plot follows a man named Earl Turner, who is part of a white supremacy group in the near future that plans to overthrow the government and murder anyone who is non-white. This was an interesting book to read, but it definitely was a little difficult to read, just for the source material and the topics discussed in this book. A lot of the things that are talked about or mentioned in this book are things that people still believe and follow to this day. The book is set in the near future and one of the things that they talk about is the price of gas was rising, so that was something that the book predicted. The level of violence in this book is very high, there are constantly riots, shootings and beatings. The main characters are usually committing some acts of domestic terrorism and there is rarely any consequences for their actions. In fact, the Organization wins at the end of the book and they succeed in destroying the government and murdering non-whites. This book is extremely dangerous and should not be shown in any context, as it promotes white supremacy, anti-Semitism and showcases many violent ideas and concepts that are very illegal and evil.

For this week, the forbidden text that I read was the Unabomber manifesto, titled Industrial Society and Its Future, by Ted Kaczynski. The author, Kaczynski was well known for being the American domestic terrorist known as the Unabomber. The Unabomber would mail packages that would contain bombs inside them and he claimed 3 lives and injured many more until his capture in 1996. This manifesto was released a year before, in 1995 and in it he talks about how we are all caught up in an “Industrial Society” and that we all need to destroy the machines that rule over us and return to a pre-industrial society. I can see why this book is considered forbidden, as the whole legacy of the Unabomber is very negative and heavily looked down upon, however there are some points that are brought up in this manifesto that people still believe today. For example, the belief that society is constantly watching everyone and making sure that they are following in line is pretty false, unless you are someone of power or a celebrity. Another point that is brought up in here is the fact that we are letting technology control every aspect of ourselves and not allowing people to have their own opinions is very accurate and is probably going to get worse as the years go on.

What really happened to Malaysia Flight 370 and will we ever find out?

For my research paper I had many options but finally decided to research the unsolved mystery of Malaysia Flight 370, an airplane that disappeared with 227 passengers onboard in 2014. This case is still unsolved to this day and there are many theories and possibilities people have came up with to try to figure out logically what happened to this airplane. The search for the plane was the most expensive search in aviation history, lasting several years and costing millions of dollars. This case is one of the most known unsolved mysteries and a lot of people are interested in it. The sources that I am going to use are books, websites and possible documentaries, if located. Since this case is so recent, it happened less than 10 years ago, some of these sources might be tricky to locate, however I should be able to locate enough sources to back my claim. In this paper, I am going to break down the case piece by piece and try to figure out a logical way to why this plane disappeared and where it could possibly be found. Some of the facts that we do know are that the plane disappeared from voice contact on March 8, 2014, less than an hour after takeoff. The search for this plane started in March 2014 and ended in January 2017, lasting around three years long. The entire seabed of the Indian Ocean and South China Sea was scoured and mapped, with no prevail. Around a year later in 2018, the search was picked up again by a private marine exploration company, however they found no traces of Flight 370. The disappearance of Malaysia Flight 370 is one of the most unique and interesting unsolved mysteries ever recorded and that is why I am using it for my paper.

This week’s text is the Anarchist Cookbook, written by William Powell in 1971. The entire book contains different instructions for the manufacture of homemade explosives, as well as how to synthesize your own illegal drugs and the identification of weapons and how to properly use them. The book itself is not a very long read, as it is all just mostly “recipes” for illegal paraphernalia. I definitely had a good time reading this book, it was very interesting to see all of these different methods and viewpoints on how a normal person could construct these devices or drugs in their own home. The author clearly has a vast knowledge of this stuff and it was unique that he added some of his own personal experiences into the content, particularly with the drug related recipes. It was kind of strange that this guy knew so many people that were involved with all of this illegal business, but it added a touch to the novel that definitely made it stand out a bit more for me. This book is not for people that are in militia groups, just “normal” people that could be considering violence against higher powers. This book was only banned in Australia, which is surprising considering how our government treats books and movies like this, they tend to get banned or removed completely. Honestly there isn’t really much else that can be said about this book, it’s literally just instructions, no hidden metaphors or deep meanings behind anything in here. The book was written in the early 70’s and it is still pretty relevant to our time now, much of the stuff that is discussed in the book is still around. I don’t know how useful this book will be to my life, however I do know that this was an entertaining read for me and I enjoyed it very much.

S.C.U.M Manifesto, or better known as the Society for Cutting Up Men is a short novel published in 1967 by Valerie Solanas. The novel is extremely feminist, describing how men are the worst thing to happen in the world ever and how they should all be wiped off the face of the earth. The author, Valerie Solanas, was a radical feminist and wrote this text as something serious to her, even though it has been categorized as satire. This novel was a very entertaining read for me, there were many times throughout this novel where I was laughing because of how absurd the content in here is. A lot of the views and opinions that Solanas writes about were just so insane for me and it kind of felt like she was overexaggerating a little bit. The idea of S.C.U.M was that it was a sort of organization for women to rise up and destroy the patriarchy of society. There was a lot of talk about crippling the economy and stopping any man who tries to get in their way. The topic of a large group of women rising up and attempting to break down the modern world by means of screwing with the economy sounds like something out of a futuristic dystopian book or movie. Finding out that Solanas has had a very negative view on men for her whole life, since she was sexually abused by her father at a young age kind of makes sense for her viewpoints on men, however to broadly say that every single man in the world is responsible for her trauma and upbringing is very untrue and is not a great outlook to have. Many of the statements that she makes against men in the Manifesto are from her lack of a male figure to look up to and therefore she holds a serious grudge against every single individual in the male race for reasons that are unfair. Her belief that men have caused much more suffering than good is kind of accurate, however there are many achievements that men have made that have made life much easier for everyone, including Solanas. One of these achievements is the printing press, without it Solanas wouldn’t have been able to sell this hilarious manifesto to the world for everyone to see. Valerie Solanas was clearly a very troubled and broken person who decided to write about her extreme hatred and disgust towards the male population and this manifesto was very interesting to experience.

The second volume of Maus continues right after the events of Volume I, with Vladek and Anja getting transported to Auschwitz. They are given prison uniforms, all of their hair is shaved off and their forearms get tattooed with identification numbers. The prisoners are given crappy bedding, terrible food and they get almost zero sleep. Their days consist of grueling hours of labor and exercises and some of the prisoners die of exhaustion. Vladek gets special treatment from the guards because he knows English and can teach one of the head guards English. In return, he is given good food and better clothing. In the second chapter we find out that Artie is trying to deal with the pressure of writing the book and he thinks that whatever he does, it is nothing compared to what the people at Auschwitz faced. He eventually gets over it and continues to write the story, using recordings and notes that he made while talking with his father. Vladek tells Artie that Anja was taken to another camp, Birkenau, which was used to hold prisoners that were waiting to be killed. Vladek finds his way over to Birkenau and tries to talk to Anja, however he is beaten by guards and put in the hospital. Vladek describes how he was inspected by Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, but nothing further happened. After this, the prisoners are taken from Auschwitz to Dachau, but Vladek gets sick and is taken to Switzerland to be traded as a prisoner of war. He gets rescued by American soldiers, who take him to Poland where he is reunited with his wife. The last time that we see Artie and Vladek, Vladek is very sick and mistakes Artie for someone else.

Maus is a graphic novel by Art Spiegelman that is broken into two volumes, Volume I and Volume II. The book details the life of Art Spiegelman’s father, named Vladek who was a Jewish mouse during WW2 in Europe while Hitler was in total power. The characters in this story are portrayed as animals, the Jews are mice and the Nazis are cats. In the beginning of Volume I, Art goes to visit his father to hang out and ask him questions for the book that he is writing about his dad. We see Vladek’s early years, he falls in love and eventually marries. Vladek’s marriage doesn’t seem to be working out as he discovers that his wife, named Anja has been in contact with communists. Anja gets sick later and Vladek has to take her to a hospital, where he sees his first Nazi swastika flag. After this, Vladek gets drafted to the Polish army to fight on the frontlines with a group of other Jews. He later gets captured and taken as a prisoner of war by the Nazis and since he is Jewish, he is treated much worse than the other prisoners, such as being forced to sleep in tents and is given less food. He is transported to a Nazi work camp, while the living conditions are better, they are forced to dig the entire day. The Nazis take Vladek and the other Jews on a train back to Poland, but they don’t drop them off at their desired location, so Vladek has to find another way back home. He succeeds and his family is happy to see him after months. Vladek owned a factory and the Nazis seized it, so now he has no job. Later, the Nazis start to round up Jews and send them on trains to the concentration camps. Vladek is lucky and goes to a ghetto at first, then he is relocated to a village called Srodula. This place becomes the Jews permanent ghetto. The Nazis would come to this place and try to round up Jews, however Vladek and his wife had a very good hiding spot where no one could find them. Vladek and his wife bounce around from one hiding spot to the next, but they are eventually caught and taken to Auschwitz.

Mein Kampf is a combination of two volumes, each published at different times. Volume I was released in 1925 and Volume II in 1926. The two volumes have been combined into the complete book that we read and talk about now. The first volume is an autobiography of Hitler’s youth and adulthood until that time. The second volume is what most people know Mein Kampf as, a hateful manifesto for the Nazi movement. Before reading this, I didn’t know that the first half of this book was an autobiography, I thought that it was all just the manifesto. The introduction goes much into Hitler’s childhood and the ways that he was raised, including his religious beliefs and opinions on certain things in the world at the time. Reading this introduction was not very fun, as it was very long and overdone with a lot of repetition. It seems like the author was kind of fanboying over Hitler to a sense and making him seem much greater than he was at the time. Nowadays we all know Hitler as the evil madman who started a world war and sentenced millions of people to their deaths, however Hitler was not that person when this text was published. Hitler was not a really great writer and most of this book is run on sentences. Hitler rants about numerous things quite a bit in this book and these rants go on for a very long time. The introduction to this book would have been much more helpful if it wasn’t so long and drawn out.

Mein Kampf is split into two volumes, Volume I and Volume II, I was assigned to read the first six chapters of Volume II. The chapters are split into random sections that talk about his master plan and the strengths and issues of Germany. I’m going to be honest here, I didn’t understand all of the text that I was supposed to read, it was worded in a weird way and it wasn’t super coherent for me, so this text was kind of a challenge for me. From what I did understand was that this was sort of the start of his “manifesto” for the Nazi movement. These chapters don’t really have titles that explain what’s going on, they more just jump around to different topics throughout the chapters. In the first couple chapters there was a lot of talk of Marxism and Hitler’s hatred of Karl Marx, who he called a filthy Jew. Marxism is mentioned more times throughout the other chapters, however the topic is very prevalent in the first couple. In these chapters, Hitler is basically laying out ground rules for the citizens of Germany, explaining the roles of the two different genders and his apparent sexism towards women. This is seen in Chapter Three, when he mentions that women aren’t true citizens of Germany until they marry and they are really only allowed to be housewives and maids. This particular section of the chapter really shows a side of Hitler that many people probably didn’t realize, everyone is familiar with his hatred of Jews but not really his sexism of women. These chapters also go more into depth of his hatred for Jews, he talks about how Jews were he cause of most of the world’s problems and how they don’t want to fix them, very similar to the Protocols of Zion. Hitler was obviously inspired by the Protocols and he references them many times throughout Mein Kampf.

The novel, The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest is a 1928 novel written by Felix Salten and the book tells the story of Bambi and his life from a young fawn to adulthood. This character is highly popular, as there has been a movie about Bambi released in 1942 by Disney. There is a huge contrast between the book and the movie, the book has a lot more violence and has more mature themes than the kids movie. The movie kind of just throws away most of the themes that made the book interesting in favor of tale that kids will watch. I’ve never seen Bambi at all, but I know that if I was a kid and I watched Bambi, I probably would’ve liked it. Many sources say that this book was supposed to be an allegory for how Jews were treated in Europe during the time that this book was written and I can definitely see that. A lot of this book revolves around the animals hiding from dangerous forces and trying to survive and live a decent life and I can understand that that’s what the Jews in Europe faced. From what I understand, Felix Salten was born as a Jew, so this book probably reflects some of the experiences that he faced being a Jew. There was even a sequel to this book, titled Bambi’s Children and it was published in 1939 by the same author. In the movie, the main theme is that love will be forever and it will never die, however the book says that being alone is how you survive, so there is a pretty big contrast between the book and movie. Overall, Felix Salten was pretty smart to write a book about the persecutions and dangers that the Jewish people faced and then disguise it as a story about animals in the forest.

The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest is a 1928 novel by Felix Salten that tells the story of Bambi, a young deer trying to survive and find his way in the world of the forest. The book was later turned into a 1941 Disney animated movie of the same name. The book is much more mature and violent than the movie, with several key characters getting killed in brutal ways. At the start of the book, Bambi is born to his mother, who teaches him about other life in the forest and to always stay away from human hunters, who they refer to as “He” or “Him.” As Bambi gets older he meets other deer related to them and starts a relationship with one of the deer, named Faline. Bambi has an encounter with one of the hunters and he barely escapes alive. The second encounter with the hunters doesn’t go as planned, with Bambi’s mother getting killed and one of his close friends disappearing and is presumed dead. At some point Bambi is wandering around and he meets a stag, who is referred to as the “old prince” and this stag takes Bambi under his wing and shows him how to evade the hunters and to spot their traps. Later on Gobo, Bambi’s friend who was presumed dead returns to the group and tells them all how he was taken in by a human and nurtured back to health. Gobo tries to explain to the other animals that he doesn’t need to hide anymore because the humans trust him. This obviously doesn’t go well, a few chapters later Gobo sees a hunter and thinks that it’s the one that rescued him but instead he gets shot and dies. There isn’t a really climactic ending to Bambi, it just kind of ends and I was a little disappointed about that. There’s like a brief fight between a fox and dog, but other than that not much happens. Overall, I thought this book was pretty solid with some good characters and an interesting story as well.

For my library assignment, I was tasked with picking two books on something that interests me and that somewhat relates to the Forbidden Texts theme. It was a little challenging, but I finally settled on controversial cinema and the use of violence in movies. I don’t think that topic exactly counts, but we are going to be watching some controversial movies throughout the semester and some of these movies were based off of books that were forbidden/controversial. The first book that I chose was Controversial Cinema by Kendall R Philipps. This book talks about what makes certain movies controversial, such as the violence, sex and language used in these movies. It mentions censorship and how certain movies get censored by governments of various countries and what makes these movies get the censorship. The second book that I was able to pick out from the first book’s bibliography was titled Violence and American Cinema by J. David Slocum. This book goes more into detail on the violence shown in movies starting from the golden age of cinema, so about the 1920s to the 2000s and how much the violence has changed. As the decades passed by, violence in movies started to get more extreme and graphic in nature and many people were not pleased by this. All of this relates to controversial cinema because violence is one of the major factors that determined whether certain movies were controversial. Take A Clockwork Orange, directed by Stanley Kubrick. The film was released in 1971 and it received an X rating upon release for all of the violence, sexual and non-sexual. Nowadays the violence in the movie isn’t that bad compared to what we have today, although the assault scenes are still pretty bad. The movie has been looked over and received an R rating now. The film Robocop, released in 1987 had to be edited 10 times to receive the R rating because of all the extreme violence in it. Movies have been controversial for many different reasons and finding out why they were banned was quite the read for me.

For my library assignment, I was tasked with picking two books on something that interests me and that somewhat relates to the Forbidden Texts theme. It was a little challenging, but I finally settled on controversial cinema and the use of violence in movies. I don’t think that topic exactly counts, but we are going to be watching some controversial movies throughout the semester and some of these movies were based off of books that were forbidden/controversial. The first book that I chose was Controversial Cinema by Kendall R Philipps. This book talks about what makes certain movies controversial, such as the violence, sex and language used in these movies. It mentions censorship and how certain movies get censored by governments of various countries and what makes these movies get the censorship. The second book that I was able to pick out from the first book’s bibliography was titled Violence and American Cinema by J. David Slocum. This book goes more into detail on the violence shown in movies starting from the golden age of cinema, so about the 1920s to the 2000s and how much the violence has changed. As the decades passed by, violence in movies started to get more extreme and graphic in nature and many people were not pleased by this. All of this relates to controversial cinema because violence is one of the major factors that determined whether certain movies were controversial. Take A Clockwork Orange, directed by Stanley Kubrick. The film was released in 1971 and it received an X rating upon release for all of the violence, sexual and non-sexual. Nowadays the violence in the movie isn’t that bad compared to what we have today, although the assault scenes are still pretty bad. The movie has been looked over and received an R rating now. The film Robocop, released in 1987 had to be edited 10 times to receive the R rating because of all the extreme violence in it. Movies have been controversial for many different reasons and finding out why they were banned was quite the read for me.

This post is about the overall context of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is the biggest antisemitic production of all time and probably one of the most hateful books ever written. The book spreads many lies about Jews and most of these lies are still being spread around today. The text is all entirely fiction and the Elders and the conspiracies that the text talks about never existed. The book first originated in Russia in 1903 as mini stories in the newspaper, later on it got published as a full book a few years later. The book was assigned to students in Germany to read and study after the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933. Hitler also used this book as propaganda for the Nazi party and referred to it in many of his speeches. The exact origin of the Protocols themselves in unknown, however the intention of them has always been to portray Jews as conspirators against the state. In today’s world, the Protocols are still being taught in Arab and Islamic classes as being the truth and with access to the Internet, the Protocols have spread all around the world. Many people don’t understand that they are incorrect and spread lies, so they come to believe that everything said in the Protocols is true.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was first published in 1897 and details the specific plans and rules that the Elders of Zion will carry out and enforce on the Jewish nation. The actual Elders of Zion are this large group of men who all know each other and basically govern the European continent and decide its fate. The Elders are all very secretive and the whole order has been kept pretty secret, until the text was published. The individual Protocols are all a bunch of smaller rules and testimonies combined into a single Protocol. A majority of these rules and testimonies are very negative, usually criticizing people in a society or certain things and practices that people in a society achieve and follow. These Protocols have a lot of topics that are against modern society, for example one of them talked about how the Elders respect and follow communism, which in today’s society is very frowned upon. A lot of the rules talk about how the population will all be killed during an apocalypse and that only the Jews will be safe from it. They talk about wanting world power and how they own most of the economy of the world and if they don’t achieve world power, they will destroy the economy and make the whole world suffer. The Elders are very power hungry people and these Protocols reflect that in a huge way.

This gospel tells the tale of Judas Iscariot, one of Jesus’s most well known disciples. Judas was the disciple who betrayed Jesus and handed him over to the Romans to get crucified. The gospel tells of how Judas slowly realizes that Jesus isn’t telling him enough and is handing him false information. The gospel is split into scenes, in each scene Judas tries to get answers from Jesus, but receives nothing in return. The last scene is Judas finally betraying Jesus and letting him die. Most of this text is private conversations that Jesus held with Judas, in which Jesus tries to understand what’s going on with Judas and why he is acting so strangely around him. This text is a religious text, so it’s no surprise why some people weren’t huge fans of it. It also revolves around the most controversial disciple, the man who got Jesus killed by the Romans. Again with the Gospel of Mary, I can see why some people might have gotten offended by this writing, however I am not one of them. I am not a huge religious person and I look more towards the truth in these cases and the truth says that Judas Iscariot was the individual who betrayed Jesus. Some people nowadays probably still don’t believe that and that’s fine, people can believe whatever they want to believe. Another thing about this text that stood out to me was that I feel like the author is kind of biased against Jesus and Judas. There is a section of the text in which Judas and Jesus have private one on one conversations, but who would know what they were talking about then, also if they even held private conversations like that. Alright that’s all I have to say.

The Gospel of Mary is a manuscript written a very long time ago, around the second century BCE. This text has said to have disappeared, with only one copy appearing roughly fifteen hundred years later. This text details the life of Mary of Magdala, who was one of Jesus’s disciples. It tells about how she was believed to be a prostitute and how she was one of the only disciples that truly understood their Savior’s words and messages. This text portrays a very interesting look on Christianity, saying that Jesus’s teachings were a path to spiritual knowledge and that Mary took upon prostitution. This text was highly controversial, as it brought a new meaning to Christianity, very different than what people had been studying and believing for the several hundred years before this book vanished. The book does give an interesting insight into the “original” Christianity religion, however there are many pages missing from the original copy, so we may never know what the Gospel is truly about. My thoughts on this text are that I can see why this may be considered forbidden or banned, it gives a whole new meaning to the Christianity religion and most people were not ready to experience this yet. Usually in history, most texts detailing certain religions are not looked upon too fondly for some people. Religion is a shady topic for most people, it has been the cause of many wars and conflicts in history. Even today, there are definitely still some people who don’t truly believe this text is accurate, even though it was written while Christianity was barely considered a “true” religion. There is no doubt in my mind that this book was controversial when it was released. I can understand why this text was banned or is considered forbidden, however I think that it should still be around so others can study it and discover new insights into Christianity and religion itself.

This blog is for the Forbidden Texts FSEM. In this blog, I will be adding posts about the different forbidden texts we read and my thoughts and opinions on them. I hope whoever is reading this enjoys my blog.