#boyne

[dgalevisuals]

Rolling hills near Boyne Falls, October, 2022

[alchemisland]

O’rion

Irish tyrant  Big iron for try hards  My contents a hit parade  Your oeuvre not worth its paper Your countenance like hit grenade. Boyne maps Orion  All my toil and trying fruitless  Like burnt Eden, smile toothless  Tore out Ruth’s book, I’m ruthless  Routes to my roots with each toot Die in my boots.

[untilthenexttee]

BOYNE Golf: Paying Homage to Donald Ross Continues at The Highlands

Four more revamped holes are now open at the Donald Ross Memorial, part of the Midwest’s largest golf resort destination. Harbor Springs, MI – As part of a multi-year transformation project to renovate northern Michigan’s Donald Ross Memorial at The Highlands, four additionally renovated holes are now open at the BOYNE Golf facility built to honor the legendary architect. The one-of-a-kind…

[heartmindandsnow]

Break out the Jimmy Buffet, it was mid to high 50s all weekend.

[esoutherngolf]

The Rebirth of the Par 3 Golf Course

The Rebirth of the Par 3 Golf Course Golfers everywhere are rediscovering the joys of Par 3 golf courses, and it’s easy to see why. Many golfers, including those new to the game, want to enjoy the playing experience but also want faster, more affordable alternatives. With their shorter holes and more accessible layouts, these pint-sized links offer a fun and challenging experience that’s perfect…

[ortut]

Robert Boynes - Non and Anon, 2019 (Acrylic on canvas, painted timber, diptych)

[bitterkarella]

Midnight Pals: Pyjamafication

John Boyne: hey it's me, John Boyne Boyne: author of 'the boy in the striped pyjamas' Boyne: [whispers] a fable Boyne: and have i got an offer Boyne: for you!!!

Boyne: so i wrote the boy in the striped pyjamas Boyne: [whispers] a fable Boyne: to educate people about the holocaust's littlest victims Boyne: the sad children of concentration camp commandants

Boyne: and i wrote a sequel 'all the broken places' Boyne to educate people about the holocaust's other littlest victims Boyne: more sad children of concentration camp commandants

Boyne: but Boyne: there are so many atrocities out there Boyne: how can i help children understand them all in the same non-threatening, family-friendly way? Boyne: well, my new series of genocide education easy readers answers exactly that question…

Boyne: teachers are already so excited that they've dubbed the process 'pyjamification' Boyne: and what's pyjamafication, you ask? Boyne: Boyne: um we don't need to get into the details about that

Boyne: you can start with 'the boy in the striped osnaburg shirt' Boyne: it's about the wonderfully innocent child of a plantation overseer Boyne: who befriends a boy toiling in the cotton fields Boyne: but our child narrator is so innocent he doesn't even know what slavery is

Boyne: see, he doesn't see color Boyne: he doesn't care if you're black, white, green or purple Boyne: he just sees Boyne: human beings Boyne: damn, from the mouths of babes am i right?

Boyne: or pick up 'the boy in the striped war bonnet' Boyne: its about the wonderfully innocent child of a cowboy Boyne: who one day befriends a boy on a reservation Boyne: but our child narrator is so innocent he doesn't even know what small pox is

Boyne: or pick up 'the boy in the striped keffiyeh' Boyne: it's about the wonderfully innocent child of a 22 year old IDF general/tik tok influencer/bulldozer operator

Boyne: who one day befriends a boy in an open air concentration camp Boyne: but our child narrator is so innocent he doesn't even know what apartheid is

Boyne: one day the boy in the striped keffiyeh is mysteriously killed by mysterious carpet bombing of unknown origin Boyne: who can say what caused it? Boyne: i guess we'll never know

Boyne: but whether we're talking about auschwitz or gaza or rwanda Boyne: there's one thing we can learn from the fabulous stories of these strange and exotic fictional locales! Boyne: and that's Boyne: 'sometimes bad things happen and it's just no one's fault'

[clarabowlover]

Corinne Griffith - As Mary Boyne In

The Unknown Quantity (1919)

[vox-anglosphere]

Not everyone celebrates but 1690's Battle of the Boyne was decisive.

[febookworm]

If I had a coin for every historical novel set in WWI with gay soldiers that I've read, now I would have three coins.

Which is not much, but it's quite a coincidence.

[werewolfetone]

My favourite figure in irish history? the guy from munster who somehow ended up fighting with the ulster united irish army (which was not only almost entirely presbyterian but also made up of people who had quite literally grown up hearing first hand about how awesome fighting under our great king billy was at their grandda's knee) in 1798 and, upon taking command of his regiment, exclaimed, in front of all his men, something along the lines of "lmao let's KILL them just like the true stuart king did with those orange cunts in 1690 🫡" thereby pissing off so many people so much that it was recorded word for word for posterity

[iliveinprocrasti-nationn]

For those interested, here's my essay on the inaccuracies within John Boyne's "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas" and the damage the book/film do to Holocaust education. The essay is formatted as a hypothetical letter to a person who might have the ability to make positive change in response. All credit for this essay belongs to me, and I have included my bibliography at the bottom.

Dear Dr. Miguel Cardona, 

It’s been 90 years since Adolf Hitler came to power and the Holocaust began. In that time, myths, fallacies, and outright denial of the genocide have spread past the fringes of societies and moved into the mainstream. Study after study finds that knowledge about the Holocaust is not only waning, but false beliefs are becoming more common (Schoen Consulting) (Alper). Much of the ignorance propagating these beliefs is beginning in schools, and, though introducing the subject at its most honest is not appropriate for young ages, beginning education early is critical to students with no connection being able to understand the historical event. Unfortunately, John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, one of the most common books used in early Holocaust education, has instead been found to create more fallacies about the subject about which it’s supposed to educate. As a result, Boyne’s book works against the teaching of this part of history. I ask you and The Department of Education to make a statement and discourage the use of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in early Holocaust education. 

The inaccuracies in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas begin in the characters. As a 9-year-old German boy and son of a high-ranking Nazi official, Bruno might have been preparing to join the Hitler-Jugend, known also as Hitler Youth, though it’s more likely he already would have been a member. In addition, he would have been entrenched in academic propaganda where “The Jew [was] held up to the children of Germany as the target for this racial hatred and vindictiveness” (Kunzer, 146). The apparent case of Bruno not even knowing what a “Jew” is (Boyne, 95) adds to the falsehoods creating the character. Though this is an extreme example, inaccuracies like this aid in the common myth that Germans didn’t know the events occurring or the actions against Jewish people. In reality, propaganda against Jews was baked into every aspect of society and easily observable at the time, such as in Kunzer’s report. Germans knew that the Jewish people were being removed from society, and most supported it or were at least ambivalent. There would have been no friendship between Shmuel and Bruno, and certainly not one based off Bruno’s ignorance when history has made it clear he would have seen the Jews the way almost all Germans did: as the enemy. 

It’s also highly unlikely that Shmuel, as a 9-year-old Jewish boy, would be alive in Auschwitz. Though no specific camp is specified, Bruno’s perspective has the characters solely referring to the location as the mispronunciation “Out-With”, such as on page 28, suggesting the camp being Auschwitz despite the setting descriptions being inaccurate to that location. Officially, records found about 23,000 young people were registered in the camp (Fate of children in Auschwitz), with about 500 under 15 being liberated by Soviet Soldiers and most having had only been in the extermination camp a few months (The fate of the children). Children in extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau were often only spared for one of two reasons. One, they were deemed able enough to be used for labor (which was used both for construction and production and as another method to kill the prisoners within the camp), or, two, they were used for the human experiments which took place within the camp (Children During the Holocaust). Even then, it’s likely Shmuel would have been sent to the gas chamber upon arrival. The lack of historical accuracy involved in Shmuel’s character creates the idea that there was any sort of childhood within Auschwitz. The children who were spared were not children, but numbers. The falsehoods take away the brutality of the Holocaust, padding it and making it gentle - not to make it acceptable to young readers, but instead to rewrite it.  

I understand my allegations of the damage The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas can and has done to modern youth’s understanding of the Holocaust might seem like extrapolation, but multiple studies have found children believe fallacies which stem directly from this book or its film adaptation. The majority of studies on impact seem to be done in England, but their findings are concerning nonetheless considering the book and film’s widespread use in America. In one study, Dr. Michael Gray looked at 298 eighth grade-equivalent students in four English schools “who had not previously studied the Holocaust in history at secondary school level” (Gray, 114). 12.8% of students directly referenced The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas when talking about their previous knowledge about the Holocaust (114), with some students mentioning the film’s “great insight” (115) and others mentioning the fictionality while saying many events are still factual (116). This seemed to be a trend; the fictionality was acknowledged, but many aspects in the story were nevertheless upheld as truth (116-117). Even with the book's identification as "A Fable" (Boyne, 1) it was also found some pupils believed it was true (116, 117). From misconceptions about deportations (119) to having complete misunderstanding about the roles of Sonderkommando (120-121), The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas seems to have wrought havoc on many students’ understanding of the Holocaust. 

The most worrying impact of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is the Nazi sympathy it seems to induce. The finale of the book and film are likely the primary sources as the ending sees Bruno killed after mistakenly going into a gas chamber with Shmuel and several other prisoners. These final chapters, 19 and 20, focus not on the camp or the purposeful murder of Jewish people, but instead on the grief of Bruno’s family and their new victimhood as a byproduct of the system from which they benefitted. The entire focus is taken from the Jewish people forced into the gas chambers with the goal of extermination and instead shifted onto the Nazis, looking solely at their sadness – the camp is depicted victimless until a Nazi’s son is the victim. This perhaps is what creates results seen in studies like the University College London Centre for Holocaust Education’s study on students’ knowledge of the Holocaust (Foster) which included a section on the impacts of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. The study noted students saying things such as “...it doesn’t matter who was the bigger victim, they were all still victim of Hitler’s control in some shape or form” and “Yes, it is too easy to feel sorry for the Jews in the film” (Foster, et al., 93) which were directly fuelled by the book or film. To place Jewish people and Nazis as equal victims of the Holocaust is to distort the history. The intentionality of targeting the Jewish people (and others, such as Romani people) needs to be understood to teach students to recognise the scapegoating and dehumanisation that can precede similar disasters. Despite the subject matter, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas causes students to disengage entirely with the Jewish people impacted and instead turn their sympathy towards the Nazis, erasing the victims from their own genocide.  

John Boyne is not unaware of the criticism of his book which has come from sources like Maus author Art Spiegelman (Lapin) and the Auschwitz Museum and Memorial (Auschwitz Memorial). In response to this criticism, Boyne told The Guardian, “...my novel, which, of course, was a work of fiction... therefore by its nature cannot contain inaccuracies, only anachronisms, and I don’t think there are any of those in there” (Flood). I have already pointed out numerous inaccuracies within the work. In addition, the allegation that historical fiction is somehow immune to inaccuracy is so flagrantly false that I struggle to understand how one could even make that statement. Though I could go into the myriad of ways historical fiction can absolutely be inaccurate, Dr. Michael Gray articulated it better when he said “...any author or film maker who chooses to use the Holocaust as their context, especially one who sets the film around a commandant and Auschwitz, is, whether they recognise it or not, producing a Holocaust story” (Gray, 125). It doesn’t matter what Boyne believes or how he views the falsehoods in his book when historians, impact studies, and a myriad of other sources prove the book incorrect as well as harmful. An author, even of historical fiction, cannot negate the facts - especially when their chosen setting has come to define a genocide.  

Dr. Cardona, John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas contains inaccuracies which actively work against the education it claims to bolster. Discouraging the use of this book in Holocaust education in favor of options like Susan Goldman Rubin’s The Cat with the Yellow Star: Coming of Age in Terezinor Anne Frank’s well known The Diary of a Young Girl is to eliminate a creator of many of the Holocaust myths which historians and Jewish groups work to combat. Thank you for your consideration. 

Sincerely, 

J

Bibliography 

Alper, Becka A., et al. “What Americans Know About The Holocaust.” Pew Research Center, Jan 2020. Accessed 29 Oct 2023. 

“Auschwitz-Birkenau.” My Jewish Learning, https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/auschwitz-birkenau/. Accessed 15 Oct 2023.  

Auschwitz Memorial [@AuschwitzMuseum]. “We understand those concerns, and we already addressed the inaccuracies in some books published. However, “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas” should be avoided by anyone who studies or teaches about the history of the Holocaust.” X, 5 Jan 2020, https://twitter.com/AuschwitzMuseum/status/1213807345932931072. Accessed 3 Oct 2023.  

Boyne, John. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Black Swan Edition, David Fickling Books, 2007. https://archive.org/details/the-boy-in-the-striped-pijamas/mode/1up. Accessed 22 Oct 2023.  

“Children During the Holocaust.” My Jewish Learning, https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/children-during-the-holocaust/. Accessed 15 Oct 2023.

“The fate of the children.” Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, https://www.auschwitz.org/en/history/fate-of-children/the-fate-of-the-children/. Accessed 15 Oct 2023.  

“Fate of children in Auschwitz.” Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, https://www.auschwitz.org/en/fate-of-children-in-auschwitz/. Accessed 15 Oct 2023.  

Flood, Allison. “The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas author defends work from criticism by Auschwitz memorial.” The Guardian, 7 Jan 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/07/john-boyne-defends-work-from-criticism-by-auschwitz-memorial. Accessed 22 Oct 2023.  

Foster, Stuart, et al. “What do students know and understand about the Holocaust? Evidence from English secondary schools”. University College London Centre for Holocaust Education, 2016, https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1475816/14/Foster_What-do-students-know-and-understand-about-the-Holocaust-2nd-Ed.pdf. Accessed 29 Oct 2023.

Gray, Michael. “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas: A Blessing or Curse for Holocaust Education?”. A Journal of Culture and History, vol. 20, no. 3, 2014, pg. 109-136, https://gcedclearinghouse.org/sites/default/files/resources/The%20boy%20in%20the%20striped%20pyjamas.PDF. Accessed 22 Oct 2023.  

Kunzer, Edward J. “‘Education’ Under Hitler.” The Journal of Educational Sociology, vol. 13, no. 3, 1939, pp. 140-147. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2262306. Accessed 15 Oct 2023. 

Lapin, Andrew. “Art Spiegleman, speaking to Tennesseeans, says ‘Maus’ controversy is ‘about controlling’.” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 7 Feb 2022,  https://www.jta.org/2022/02/07/united-states/art-spiegelman-speaking-to-tennesseeans-says-maus-controversy-is-about-controlling. Accessed 3 Oct 2023.  

Schoen Consulting. “Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Study.” Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, 2018, https://www.claimscon.org/wp- content/uploads/2018/04/Holocaust-Knowledge-Awareness-Study_Executive-Summary-2018.pdf. Accessed 29 Oct 2023.  

[ltwilliammowett]

The fiery end of HMS Boyne

HMS Boyne was a second rate, ship of the line with 98 guns and a crew of 720 men that was launched in 1790 and was as flagship of Vice Admiral John Jervis in the Caribbean for some years. After five years, however, she returned to England and was at Spithead on 1 May 1795. The ship was at anchor while the ship's Royal Marines conducted gunnery exercises at various positions. And since it was just very early in the morning breakfast was being prepared for the officers and therefore it is believed that the chimney of the officers' mess stove, which ran through the decks, set fire to the papers in the admiral's cabin. It is quite possible that the Marines accidentally caused the fire.

Engraved commemorative coin - Obverse: Engraved on a smooth surface starboard broadside view of a battleship. Inscribed below: 'BOYNE'. Reverse: A foul anchor. Legend: 'CHARITY, NEWLYN. ROBT DALE'. (HMS 'Boyne' was Sir J. Jervis' flagship in the West Indies in 1794.) (x)

The fire was not discovered until the flames were ripping through the quarterdeck and it was too late to do anything, because the guns were all loaded and the fire ignited them, causing the fire to spread rapidly, and within half an hour the ship was in flames from one end to the other.

The loss of HMS Boyne, by Thomas Elliot ( active 1790-1810) (x)

The other ships in the Spithead, realizing what was happening, cut off their anchors and headed for the Isle of Wight for safety. Fortunately, all but 11 of the 720 men were saved. But the fright had no end, as the heat of the fire set off the loaded guns, one of the shots managed to hit HMS Queen Charlotte at some distance, killing two sailors. And worse came to worse as the flames pierced Boyne's anchor cables and the helpless ship drifted toward Portsmouth until she was intercepted by the sandbar opposite Southsea Castle and finally torn apart by an explosion triggered by the fire that had reached the powder magazine.

The Blowing up of the Boyne, a 98 Gun Ship, at Spithead, May 1st 1795, by George Thompson, 1800 (x)

The explosion, however, had not completely torn her apart and the wreck posed a danger to shipping and was therefore blown up on August 30, 1838 in an attempt to clear it and again in a final attempt on June 24, 1840.

Today, the Boyne buoy marks the spot where the ship was blown up. Some metal objects from the ship are located on a gravel mound.

[heartmindandsnow]

Dedication is getting up at 430am to catch laps all day after driving 3 and a half hours, even when it's only 50% terrain bc of a warm spell that wiped out most of the base.

[madbirdwoman]