#Be it fascism or misogyny or even political views that I agree with but can become dogma and conspiracy theory in the wrong hands

[the-busy-ghost]

Am re-reading Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and I know it's not a new or original thought but it's just striking to me again how young George (younger) and his brother Robert must have been during the tennis match and Black Bull mob scenes.

If the 'famous session' refers to the 1703 session of parliament (or even if it refers to the previous year's sitting which Queensberry also oversaw), and if old Dalcastle married in 1687 (or later), then at most George could have been 16 and his brother 15, and it's probable that both boys are younger.

I don't remember too many of the details from the first time I read this book so will have to finish it before I make any further judgement. However I don't think it detracts from Robert's culpability or nastiness in any way to take into account his probable age in the earlier portion of the narrative. I think makes for a more interesting reading when forcibly reminded that he's a young teenager. Even taking into account different social mores and expectations placed on children in both the period in which the novel is set, and the early 19th century when it was written, it seems to me that that's an element that will still have particular significance for readers in the 21st century, regardless of one's personal experience with extreme forms of Presbyterianism.

[self-loving-vampire]

Politics in Fiction

Often, I see various arguments about politics in fiction (this most often happens specifically around video games for some reason). These arguments are rarely satisfying to me because I feel like I both agree and disagree with both sides at once.

One side says that some fiction has always been political, which is true but also not really what the other side is complaining about.

The other side is also prone to making many claims I do not agree with, like that including minority characters is always political pandering.

So there are actually many points I want to address on this topic and I hope I can separate them into readable chunks properly.

It is fine for fiction to be political

I do not dispute that many fictional works have political messages and themes. I also don’t think that this is inherently a bad thing.

The better Fallout games are political, for example. They often focus on the affairs of various societies and how they are (or should be) managed or governed, and their world is richer and more interesting for it. 

The central choice in Fallout New Vegas is basically about which faction should control the city and its nearby dam, which results in various different policies and consequences.

Political fiction can be good, it can help develop a setting or provide meaningful and memorable decisions.

However, as with all fiction, it has to be smart and nuanced about it. I will explain more below.

Sometimes things are not actually that political

One claim I have heard is that Star Wars is about “resisting fascism”. I don’t entirely see that in the movies as I remember them (though it might be more apparent in expanded universe stuff).

The bad guys in Star Wars are an authoritarian empire, yes, but at least in the movies themselves there doesn’t seem to be anything uniquely fascist about them, and not much is said about their ideology or policies in the movies either. They feel like a generic evil empire.

I know it has been long since I watched the movies, but I never really understood what the emperor’s motivations were beyond just personal power. Why did he want personal power? I don’t know. He barely feels like a real character.

And on top of that, Star Wars does not actually discuss or criticize fascism or even authoritarianism as an idea all that much. It’s just bad guys to fight in a way that feels superficial to me.

While on this topic, not all deep themes are political in nature. I know some people believe the personal is political, I don’t (for reasons I may explain in a different post). Sometimes I see works that deal with personal issues but that are treated as dealing with political ones, they are not the same thing to me.

I feel like people on both sides do this, too.

For example, there was a recent controversy about how Bloodlines 2 will let players choose their pronouns and how this was "too political” or “pandering to SJWs”.

Some people seem to just treat the very existence of LGBT characters in fiction as a political move, but to me they are just characters. 

Everyone in my Dungeons and Dragons settings (except the player characters, if they wish) is either bisexual or asexual, not because I am trying to make any kind of statement but because those are the states that are easiest for me to imagine and work with.

Sometimes the politics are not what you think they are

Because everyone has different views and experiences, people can look at the same story from a different perspective and take an entirely different message from it.

It is fine if your interpretation is uncommon, it is even fine if your interpretation is different from what the author intended.

But you should keep in mind that your reading is not the only valid one.

I most often see people on the left do this. They will claim that a piece of media is leftist, and often there may be some valid argument for why it may be, but then treat their interpretation as fact and try to shame and attack others for thinking differently without ever considering why they might have read the story differently.

For example, during the backlash to the backlash surrounding Bloodlines 2, I saw people asserting as fact that vampires are an allegory for the upper classes being parasites and therefore the people complaining are not welcome.

That did not seem right to me. All kinds of people write vampire stories and intend different meanings for them, there isn’t a universal to work with (not even when it comes to the physical powers and traits the vampires have).

Sometimes vampires are meant to represent corrupting yet irresistible sexual predators.

Sometimes they are meant to represent disease.

Sometimes they are just hot but troubled supernatural boyfriends.

Bram Stoker himself was a monarchist, and the vampires in the VTM setting are not all wealthy either. Some of them even live in the sewers and look too monstrous to be around humans. Not everyone is a Ventrue and not all Ventrue are bad, especially by the standards of the setting.

It is possible to do politics so badly that it ruins everything

I think there may be another reason why certain people may not notice that their favorite media deals with social issues and politics: That sort of thing is much more noticeable when it is done very poorly, which further convinces those people that adding politics to media is bad.

At some point social issues can stop being interesting worldbuilding or philosophical dilemmas and just become a ham-fisted allegory for a current real world issue that just hits one side on the face with an opinion they may not agree with.

For example, remember when Deus Ex: Mankind Divided pissed absolutely everyone off with that “Augs Live Matters” sign?

This has been said before, but good political stuff is vague and timeless: It deals with general principles that can be applied in multiple contexts. For example, 1984 was about extreme authoritarianism but not any one authoritarian group.

When fiction follows current issues/movements/political labels too closely, it risks being reduced to being about that specific issue instead of the things that lie underneath it.

On top of this, a lot of fiction that is deliberately aimed at being political is just badly written in that it tries to tell you how to think instead of letting you think. It is like those political cartoons that label everything and that have messages that can be summarized as “my side is correct and my enemies are dumb and evil” but do not actually tell you why that is.

I don’t like political cartoons even when I agree with them. They do not inspire deep consideration or persuade people, they just give the groups that already agreed with the message some short-term pleasure at how much better than their opponents they are.

People want interesting fiction that allows them to explore issues and come to their own conclusions. They don’t want propaganda that treats them with contempt and won’t change their minds.

If you want to see what extremely bad political fiction looks like, just check out that dying TERF webcomic known as Sinfest. In the webcomic, transgender people are portrayed as literal misogyny zombies and children are sent to “gender camps” to be forced to take hormones and re-educated.

The social metaphors in Sinfest are detached from reality yet so heavy-handed that they probably need cranes to lift their hands high enough to masturbate, and masturbate is all the author does in the comic.

If your primary aim is to make propaganda rather than to make interesting, thoughtful, and heartfelt stories then you will most likely make very bad fiction. We can see that happening here.

In my opinion, the best stories are personal or deal with timeless questions or core principles rather than just repeating current talking points or moralizing.

[loudlytransparenttrash]

The Fascism of Feminism

Feminism is in a lot of ways like fascism which is why I found it quite amusing and ironic to see feminists marching around with anti-fascism signs. 

Your average fascist will disregard any scientific argument unless the conclusion supports his existing belief. The ideology comes first and the fascist looks for anything to back it up, no matter how trivial, unreliable or discredited. Much like today's feminists and their ideology, right? 

Fascists attempt to rationalize their beliefs and portray them as truth by twisting the facts or fabricating them altogether. A fascist might, for example, cast blame for unemployment and work discontent on immigrants "stealing" their jobs. Feminists similarly cast blame for their lack of employment and work discontent onto the evil, sexist, misogynist “patriarchy” (men) who are keeping them down and out while ignoring the fact that their gender studies degrees doesn’t take them very far. Both feminists and fascists are quick to cast blame on someone else for anything that goes wrong in their lives.

There are many forms of fascism, people seeking to impose their will on others, some are obvious, while some masquerade as something far less sinister. Feminism belongs to the latter. Who can argue with the pursuit of equality and justice for all in society? 

Their cause appears worthy at first glance, but scratch beneath the surface and their true agenda reveals itself to be something more sinister and hateful. The perpetrators of this form of fascism have suffered no repression in their lifetime yet seek revenge on modern men for past oppression, to consign men to their status as second class citizens. Equality is the last thing these feminists want. 

Like all fascists they want ultimate control. Their objective is to unconditionally support women, and to attack and vilify men at any given opportunity. Their ultimate goal is to repress and undermine masculinity, to feminize boys and men. There is no rationale underpinning their philosophy. This form of fascism like all others is built on scapegoating, fear, subjugation, and control. Men are demonized and persecuted by feminists, their culture is not merely pro-women but anti-men. 

Men are their scapegoats, portrayed as cruel, aggressive, war mongers, wife beaters, paedophiles and sex obsessed neanderthals, while they are the innocent victims in a cruel, aggressive, destructive society created by men. The many women who deny their oppression and victimhood? Well these women are just trying to impress their torturers and they really have internalized misogyny by being manipulated by men. 

Feminists seek to create a society where women have the freedom to say and do as they please, while men are restricted and controlled in their behavior. One rule for them, and one for us. This is manifesting itself right now, in the law courts, our colleges, in employment, in domestic situations, in the media, and in society as a whole. Anyone who disagrees with the irrational, biased rhetoric propagated by feminists is met with derision and spite, and is obstinately dismissed as a misogynist. 

There is no freedom of speech or expression in a fascist society and there isn’t with feminists. These women are committing hate crimes, propagating their own brand of dictatorial ideology. It is vital that we stand up to the tyranny of feminist fascism, to prevent it entering mainstream culture any more than it has. It’s time to look at the issues closely related to feminist campaigning, providing gender balance on subjects such as domestic violence, dispelling feminist myths, while analyzing the behaviour of men and women in 21st century America.

There are a growing number of feminist organisations and ‘charities’ in the U.S and U.K, all with varying degrees of hostility and bigotry. This form of fascism is growing at an unprecedented rate due mainly to the rise of the internet, and their influence has strongly grown. 

Anti-male and anti-white rhetoric is reaching out to a wider audience, brainwashing young impressionable, often vulnerable women like never before. Feminist are grooming naive young women into viewing men as their enemy in society, a symbol of their fears, failures and perceived repression, disseminating fear and anti-male propaganda in the process. 

The rhetoric on these feminists is similar in nature to racism, religious extremism, homophobia, and anti-semitism, yet this form of stealth fascism appears acceptable to the authorities, even though the impact on society and on men is equally harmful. 

Misguided feminist campaigners immerse themselves in this self-centred, narrow world of campaigning, seeking out cases of perceived sexism and injustice towards women, while their grip on reality becomes ever more tenuous. They’re not interested in asking men what they think, they just want revenge on innocent men targeted simply because of their gender. There are no principles or ethics underlying their objectives, it’s a case of unconditionally supporting women who agree with them, while attacking the behaviour of men, demonstrating an appalling level of arrogance in the process. 

These women show no remorse or guilt for their actions, as they are too self absorbed to understand the hypocrisy they display. The accessibility of the internet has allowed men an insight into the minds of these feminists, and very shocking and disturbing it is too.

It is not healthy for a man to view these sites, and it’s certainly not healthy for a woman to immerse herself in the narrow-minded world of feminist campaigning. It will impact on their relationships at home and in the workplace. These feminist views are negative enough to drain anyone’s sou and it harms their social perception. 

Equality and gender politics is a subject which can only be studied synchronically. Historical examination is only clouding people’s judgement. The fact that women couldn’t vote a hundred years ago is irrelevant to new generations of men and women, and references to this past oppression will give rise to hostility and revenge. 

Most oppression throughout history has in fact related to class, not gender, and the vast majority of men have been treated far worse than women, and had been afforded less protection than many women higher in status. Industrialisation is built on the exploitation of working class men, and many couldn’t vote because they were considered illiterate and uneducated. America’s wealth and freedoms, which these feminists take for granted is built on the exploitation of men, NOT women.

It is important to consider the psychology of the modern feminist campaigner. Many members of feminist groups and women’s organisations suffer from delusions of persecution. Many have emotional problems, suffering from anxiety, stress, depression and they want someone to blame, yet they fail to look within themselves for the source of their problems and failures. 

Paranoia is rife. They seek scapegoats for their personal failings and emotional problems like any fascists, racists or homophobics do. The mindset of the feminist fascist is much the same. Many unsuccessful or unhappy people project their own failings onto different social groups in society, sub-consciously blaming others for their own personal issues. It’s a common psychological process and feminists are no different. 

This scapegoating invariably leads to persecution. Many of these feminist campaigners have an irrational fear of men, and want to create a more feminized society where men are demasculated and controlled. They attempt to hijack every issue, and are only capable of viewing these issues from a self-interested, narrow-minded perspective. 

These feminists are not interested in men’s and anti-feminist women’s opinions or understanding their emotions, they just make narrow-minded assumptions, feeding off each others ignorance, hate and paranoia. 

Leaders of feminist groups, especially the more accessible social network sites frighten and manipulate young women into seeing men as the enemy, exploiting their fears and fuelling their paranoia. Every man is a potential killer, rapist, sex offender or paedophile in their eyes, and this irrational fear is inherited by young impressionable women who may think the causes are just. 

It’s a form of grooming which needs to be urgently addressed. Many influential feminists appear to revel in creating a barrier between men and women, fortifying it at any given opportunity, failing to understand the dynamic between men and women as a result of their own sexual orientation. 

These humorless, profoundly negative women need a war, a fight to give their life meaning. No matter how powerful women become in society, these feminists will always pursue this agenda. If these campaigners are so intelligent and so useful, why don’t they contribute to society instead of consuming much of their time seeking out perceived sexism on the internet? How useful are these feminists in society? They certainly don’t help society by propagating hate, and I doubt they help the majority of fair-minded women. 

They seem to have so much campaigning time as a result of their misanthropic tendencies but seem unable to put their rhetoric into practice. They are destructive, not constructive people. Their motivation is negative, not positive. Healthy women do NOT become feminists. Most women are NOT feminists. Women are more likely to succeed in life if they haven’t been brainwashed with stifling feminist dogma. It gives them an excuse for failure, a reason not to try, and a persecution complex. Most women will grow out of feminist campaigning by their early/mid twenties, as they realise that sitting at a computer, developing a persecution and victim complex does nothing to further their career, or their emotional development.

Some feminist organisations campaign vociferously against men’s playful, gentle ‘sexism’ which often involves complementing women on their physical appearance, celebrating the female form as art has always done, yet they seem oblivious to their own brand of harmful, spiteful, sadistic sexism, intended to make men feel inadequate, useless, and humiliated. 

They believe women are viewed as sex objects in the media, yet men’s magazines are far less harmful than women’s gossip magazines, which show nasty undercover photographs of women with cellulite, or without make-up intended to humiliate the celebrity and comfort the lesser attractive readers.  Their agenda is bitchy and spiteful, an attack on women, not a celebration.

The campaign against men’s magazines by feminists groups is a prime example of their controlling, fascist agenda. They believe that photos of semi-naked women cause men to act violently towards women. This clearly demonstrates their contempt and lack of understanding of men. By their own terms, violence by women towards men must result from sexual images of men in girl’s and women’s magazines too then? Or does this psychological phenomenon not affect women? There are many semi-naked images of boy bands and sports stars in these publications. Maybe the content in women’s magazines creates a profoundly negative perception of men which we find offensive? Do they consider this? 

Clearly some women are intolerant of men interacting with women in a sexual way. This could easily be construed as heterophobia. Who decides what is pornographic, art, or fashion? Feminist extremists? Just because we don’t like something that doesn’t mean it should be banned. I’m sure many people are offended by hunting magazines in supermarkets showing carcasses resulting from ‘sporting’ endeavours. Some supermarkets have felt compelled to remove men’s magazines from their shelves as a result of legal threats and bullying by these feminist organisations. They even claim that female supermarket workers are being sexually harassed by being in the presence of these magazines...

Unfortunately the irony seemed lost on them. Many women and girls watch sports or are fans of their favorite artists because they are sexually attracted to them, they have half naked posters of athletes or actors or singers on their walls and throughout their phones but when men do this they are considered shallow and sexist. 

These feminists never campaign when lesbians letch over other women and view them as sex objects and when women latch over men and view them as sex objects. Attacking men is their only motivation. These feminists drown in the bile of their own hypocrisy. They believe women are exploited by men. In fact, men are exploited by women for children, money, power and status. 

Maybe these feminist campaign groups who like to pretend they know everything about the behavior of men should visit a modern hen night or nightclub to observe women’s behaviour. The hypocrisy is staggering.

As we have seen for many years and it has never been more blatant today, feminism is an anti-democratic organisation which believes that only women should be at the centre of politics, only a woman should be in power, which clearly demonstrates a desire for self-righteous control, and not equality. 

[leftpress]

Trump and everyday anti-fascism beyond punching Nazis

The goal of everyday anti-fascism is to increase the social cost of oppressive behavior to the point where those who promote it see no option but to hide.

Photo: Mobilus in Mobili 

January 23, 2017 |  Mark Bray

Either change their views Or change your friends If you have a racist friend Now is the time, now is the time For your friendship to end

— Racist Friend, The Special A.K.A.

Much attention has been directed toward the anonymous avenger who slugged the white supremacist “alt-right” leader Richard Spencer at the Trump Inauguration protest in Washington D.C., and with good reason. Yet the punch heard round the internet was far from the only anti-fascist action taken in DC this weekend.

In order to develop a broad anti-fascist agenda that aims to rip this weed out by the stem, we mustn’t overlook more seemingly mundane, even trivial, examples of what I argue amount to everyday anti-fascism that rely on developing an anti-fascist outlook that can hopefully stem the tide of bigotry unleashed by “everyday Trumpism.”

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EVERYDAY FASCISM

If we want to promote everyday anti-fascism, we must first be clear on what everyday fascism can look like (admittedly it can take many forms), and who the everyday fascists are. Although the alt-right makes a lot of noise, those who self-identify with that rather new label are few.

Yet as Trump rose to power, their ideas filtered through the campaign to ignite reactionary passion among many white Americans who felt alienated about the loss of their “place in the sun.” A country that they imagined would remain white, Christian, patriarchal and heteronormative with an eternal manufacturing economy is rapidly disappearing.

In this context, Spencer and the alt-right have made Trump their figurehead in the movement to push back waves of (albeit incomplete) progress that American social movements have made in establishing societal taboos against explicit manifestations of racism, sexism and other oppressive behaviors that have been dismissed as “political correctness.”

This has taken many forms — from Trump and his supporters dismissing his boasts about sexual assault as mere “locker room talk,” to his disdain for the Geneva Conventions and general opposition to torture, to his comfort with labeling Mexican immigrants as rapists, to his outrage at being named the Time Magazine “person of the year” rather than the “man of the year.”

Much of Trump’s popularity stemmed from the relief that many Americans felt in hearing someone in an unquestioned position of authority and prestige say the very things that they had been thinking for years, but that were considered too taboo by society to utter or act upon. Especially after Trump’s election, the strength of that taboo was damaged, as more than 867 “cases of hateful harassment or intimidation” were reported within the first ten days after the election.

When we think about everyday fascists, we must bear in mind that the fascist regimes of the past could not have survived without a broad layer of societal support. Over the years, historical research has demonstrated that the process of demonizing the marginalized required the privileging of the favored, making many the explicit or implicit allies of Mussolini, Hitler, and other leaders.

If fascism required societal support for the destruction of “artificial,” “bourgeois” norms such as the “rights of man” in developing its hyper-nationalism, then today we must be alert to the ongoing campaign to delegitimize the ethical and political standards that we have at our disposal to fight back. This is evident in many of the arguments of the far right, but I found one useful articulation of it in the opening of an article from a crappy, generic far-right blog:

One of the best things about Donald Trump’s glorious, GLORIOUS election win is how it proved that all the main smears that SJWs [Social Justice Warriors] and “journalists” throw at wrongthinkers — Sexist, Racist, Islamophobe etc — have lost most of their power. After all, Trump was hit with these slurs non-stop during his presidential campaign, even by “respectable” media outlets, and still ended up beating Hillary Clinton decisively. It’s about time too, because not only are smears like Racist and Sexist overused, they’ve basically become intellectual poison.

After Trump’s victory, we have a dangerous mix of mainstream conservatives who don’t want to appear racist and alt-right “race realists” who all accuse the “left” of so over-using the term that it is rendered meaningless — in other words, no one is racist anymore (or we’re all racist now?). There is a major difference between the previous paradigm, where the left accused the right of being racist, and then the right accused the left of being the real racists because they focused so much on race, and a developing paradigm where the alt-right and those they have influenced try to drain the power of the accusation.

The everyday fascists are the ardent Trump supporters who “tell it like it is” by actively trying to dismantle the taboos against oppression that the movements for feminism, black liberation, queer liberation and others have given their sweat, tears and all too often blood to establish as admittedly shoddy, and far too easily manipulatable, bulwarks against outright fascism.

These social norms are constantly contested and are unfortunately subject to re-signification in oppressive directions, such as when George W. Bush sold the war in Afghanistan as a crusade for women’s rights. Yet the fact that politicians have felt the need to engage on the plains that popular resistance have established means that they left themselves open to political attacks on grounds that they at least tacitly acknowledged. A major concern with Trump and the alt-right, however, is that they hope to drain these standards of their meaning.

Liberals tend to examine issues of sexism or racism in terms of the question of belief or what is “in one’s heart.” What is often overlooked in such conversations is that what one truly believes is sometimes much less important than what social constraints allow that person to articulate or act upon. This issue is at the center of questions of social progress or regression and its contours are established through the seemingly infinite networks of human interactions that compose our society.

While one should always be wary about painting large groups of people with a broad brush, it is clear that ardent Trump supporters voted for their candidate either because of or despite his misogyny, racism, ableism, Islamophobia and many more hateful traits. When “Americans for a Better Way” mailed letters to five mosques in California calling Muslims “a vile and filthy people” and threatening genocide during the height of the presidential campaign, we can see how the broader foundations of everyday fascism embolden those who attempt to terrorize the marginal.

EVERYDAY ANTI-FASCISM

When leftists think of anti-fascism they tend to focus on the movements around the many Anti-Fascist Action groups popularly abbreviated as “antifa.” They have undoubtedly play tremendously important roles in resisting the far right around the world and protecting the vulnerable. Here, however, I am interested in the more subtle forms of everyday anti-fascism that deprive the far right of their bases of support in popular opinion. In order to understand what I mean by everyday anti-fascism, let’s first take a look at what I call an anti-fascist outlook that provides their foundation.

At its core, anti-fascist politics are about denying fascists a platform in society to promote their politics. This can be done by physically confronting them when they mass in public, by pressuring venues to cancel their events, by shutting down their websites, stealing their newspapers, etc. At the heart of the anti-fascist ethos is a rejection of the classical liberal notion adopted from Voltaire that “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” After Auschwitz and Treblinka, anti-fascists committed themselves to fighting to the death to stomp on the right of Nazis to say anything.

In theory, American liberalism is allergic to the notion of “discriminating” against anyone based on their politics, and sees the role of government as that of referee in a game that all political tendencies are invited to play (despite the empirical inaccuracy of this dream). Unless they break the law, Nazis can be Nazis. That’s just their “opinion,” which is just as legitimate as any other in an imagined free market of thought. In contrast, anti-fascism is avowedly political in its determination to deny the legitimacy of Nazi opinions and take seriously the ramifications that such views can and do have in the world around us.

An anti-fascist outlook applies this logic to any kind of interaction with fascists. It refuses to accept the dangerous notion that homophobia is just someone’s “opinion” to which they are entitled. It refuses to accept opposition to the basic proposal that “Black Lives Matters” as a simple political disagreement. An anti-fascist outlook has no tolerance for “intolerance.” It will not “agree to disagree.” To those who argue that this would make us no better than Nazis, we must point out that our critique is not against violence, incivility, discrimination or disrupting speeches in the abstract, but against those who do so in the service of white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, class oppression and genocide. The point here isn’t tactics, it’s politics.

If the goal of normal anti-fascist politics is to make it so that Nazis cannot appear uncontested in public, then the goal of everyday anti-fascism is to increase the social cost of oppressive behavior to such a point that those who promote it see no option but for their views to recede into hiding. Certainly this goal had not been fully accomplished by a long shot prior to the rise of Trump, but his election and the growth of the alt-right (at least on the web) has made this task all the more pressing.

The anti-fascist outlook was put into action in many ways during the inauguration protest — from the more visible example of socking Richard Spencer to burning the Trump baseball caps of attendees at the alt-right “Deploraball,” to getting in the faces of Trump supporters heckling the Women’s March. Two signs I saw at the Women’s March epitomized this perspective. They read: “Make Racists Afraid Again” and “Make Rapists Afraid Again.” These slogans point to the fact that, while ideally we could convince all racists and rapists to change their ways, the pressing task for the protection of the vulnerable is to make it so that they think twice before acting.

To clarify, I certainly agree that changing hearts and minds is ideal and that it can happen. One striking example occurred with the case of Derek Black, the son of the founder of the Nazi Stormfront site, who disavowed white supremacy through conversations with friends at the New College of Florida.

But apart from the rareness of this development, one point should be remembered: that Derek Black’s white supremacist ideas and the anti-racist ideas of the New College students did not meet each other on an equal playing field. Derek Black was embarrassed about being a neo-Nazi and that fact only came out once others publicized it. Why was he embarrassed? Because Nazism has been so thoroughly discredited that he felt like he was in a tiny minority at odds with everyone around him.

In other words, the anti-racist movements of the past constructed the high social cost that Black’s white supremacist views carried, thereby paving the way for him to open himself up to an anti-racist outlook. Hearts and minds are never changed in a vacuum; they are products of the worlds around them and the structures of discourse that give them meaning.

Any time someone takes action against a transphobic, racist bigot — from calling them out to boycotting their business, to shaming them for their oppressive beliefs, to ending a friendship unless someone shapes up — they are putting an anti-fascist outlook into practice to contribute to a broader everyday anti-fascism necessary to push back the tide against the alt-right, Trump and his loyal supporters. Our goal should be that, in twenty years, those who voted for Trump are too uncomfortable to share that fact in public.

We may not always be able to change someone’s beliefs, but we sure as hell can make it politically, socially, economically, and sometimes physically costly to articulate them.

Mark Bray is a political organizer, historian, and the co-editor of Anarchist Education and the Modern School: A Francisco Ferrer Reader (PM Press, forthcoming) and the author of Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street (Zero, 2013). He is a currently a Visiting Scholar at Dartmouth College.

Related Stories on LeftPress:

► THE LIMITS AND POSSIBILITIES OF ANTI-FASCISM

► MASSIVE CROWD CONVERGES IN DC OUTSIDE OF ALT-RIGHT ‘DEPLORABALL’

► HOW TO CANCEL NEO-NAZI BAND, BLOOD & SUN SHOWS

[oltnews]

"What's going on now?" Philip Levin, 8, wonders after Charles Lindbergh won the 1940 presidential election in the HBO miniseries "The Plot Against America". Later, as the shadow of government-sanctioned anti-Semitism falls on his family and their Newark neighborhood, he will ask, "What does this mean?"Philip - whose name, in Philip Roth's book in 2005, was Philip Roth - is a sensitive and curious child, perhaps a novelist in the making, and more an observer of history than his protagonist. His questions have a double meaning: they cross the minds of all those who watch a story unfolding on television, and also of all those who feel caught up in the intrigue of history, especially in times of crisis.Like, say, now. From the point of view of the present locked, the road ahead seems even more forked than usual. Not only is the course of the coronavirus pandemic uncertain, but its possible social, political and economic consequences seem to point in extremely divergent directions: towards greater solidarity or an intensification of conflicts; far from inequalities deeply rooted or more deeply in authoritarianism; return to normal or through the mirror.Ultimately, we will know how it all turned out. But even then, we could be - we might already be - haunted by the feeling that things could have gone differently, for better or for worse. The real question Roth asked in "The Plot Against America" ​​is "What if?" In an era of great uncertainty, this can be a strangely reassuring question, but also a frightening one, if only because it may be worth remembering that uncertainty is nothing new.The world of Philip Levin in the early 1940s, for those of us looking at him from our position in the early 2020s, seems both familiar and bizarre. Clothes and cars, cigarettes, and household furnishings evoke a period of mostly benign nostalgia, a pivotal moment between times, when Americans listened to Franklin D. Roosevelt on the radio, and Pearl Harbor was just around the corner. the street.The ingenuity of Roth's novel and the most faithful television adaptation created by David Simon and Ed Burns lies in the way this easy familiarity is turned into terror. The series sometimes has an almost unbearable suspense because most of the stories set in the years before the Second World War are the opposite. The story is by definition without spoiler. (Unlike this article, which will leak information about "The Plot Against America" ​​and several other movies and TV series.) We keep arguing about what it means, but we pretty much agree on what happened next.But "The conspiracy against America" ​​is not history. His characters, an extended and surging family of lower middle class Jews, are trapped in an alternative timeline in which the unthinkable has become commonplace. A fanatic celebrity without political experience, operating on an "America First" platform (and perhaps in the service of an undemocratic foreign power) spoils the hopes of the Democratic Party for a third consecutive term in the White House. Admirer of Hitler (as was notoriously historic Lindbergh), the new president initiates policies that undermine the reputation and confidence of Jewish American citizens, who are exposed to open prejudice, stigma and, ultimately, violence . Someone checks the name of Sinclair Lewis' bestseller in 1935, "It can't happen here." Roth, Simon and Burns respond: But suppose it is.Counterfactualism of this kind has never found much favor in the historical profession. And it's not always welcome in popular culture either. Earlier this year, HBO has canceled "Confederate", a series proposed by the creators of "Game of Thrones" on what America could have looked like if the North had not won the Civil War. But there are a lot of puzzles in the air these days, as the notion of multiple timelines migrates from science fiction to more conventional, realistic narratives.Before Roth's “intrigue”, the most important work in American prose fiction to tackle an opposite past was probably “The Man at the High Castle” by Philip K. Dick, who also imagined that the fascism, rather than being defeated in the 1940s, had triumphed. The TV adaptation, which lasts four seasons on Amazon Prime, was one of the first examples of the current vogue in alternative history for film and television.Quentin Tarantino was the first to arrive. With “Inglorious Basterds” (2009), “Django Unchained” (2012) and “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood” last year, Tarantino, despite his taste for nihilistic violence, has become one of the main providers happy endings and lucky breaks, a master of anything optimistic. What if Hitler and the Nazi elite had been overthrown in June 1944 by two overlapping plots rather than by millions of American, British, and Soviet soldiers? What if the slaves of the pre-war South had recovered their reward directly from their oppressors, rather than waiting for the civil war? What if Charles Manson's supporters never arrived at Sharon Tate's on Cielo Drive in August 1969?What is happening is that the public is treated in a consoling fantasy, a momentary release from fatalism that weighs down on real historical knowledge. The hedonism of succumbing to this kind of dream is linked to the masochistic pleasures of the dystopian nightmare. The alternative past and the dystopian future are explicitly linked in "Watchmen", who ran on HBO last fall and wove the story that was both real (the massacre at the Tulsa race in 1921) and fanciful (the presidency of Robert Redford) in a wildly inventive criticism and passionately revisionist like the superhero.It is a commonplace where chronicles of the dark future - ecological catastrophe, technological domination, totalitarian politics - project the anxieties of the present. "The Handmaid’s Tale", in print and television (two novels by Margaret Atwood; three seasons on Hulu by Bruce Miller), can replace the many stories that combine allegory and warning. This is what life could look like if you don't pay attention to it, and what it already looks like if you look at it carefully.The authoritarian Theocratic Republic of Gilead in "Handmaid" is not supposed to be another world, but an at least probably plausible extrapolation of the one we already inhabit. Misogyny, religious extremism and damage to the environment are already common threads in the tapestry of reality. They were present when Atwood wrote the first novel in the early 1980s, and also when Miller highlighted them brighter and bolder in the late 2010s.It's not hard to imagine a path from here to there - from America to Gilead - and some of the mind-blowing and scary fun of the movie "The Handmaid’s Tale" is what it suggests we, the citizens of a democracy, transformed into their, subjects and officials of a clerical-fascist police state. History is not played as a simple matter of good and bad, but rather as a series of political and ethical puzzles. How is the nature of state power changing? Does human character change with him?These are the kinds of questions that drive "Years and Years", a British mini-series created by Russell T. Davies and aired on HBO last summer. Maybe he was just a little ahead of his time. Catching up on its 10 episodes last month, I found the story almost unbearably relevant, which may or may not be a recommendation.The approach is more linear than the built-in flashbacks and digressions from the last seasons of "The Handmaid’s Tale". A recognizable now - Brexit, climate change, President Trump, Sino-American tensions - turns in sometimes almost imperceptible increments into an increasingly alarming situation so. A populist demagogue (played by Emma Thompson) begins as the semi-comic figurehead of a vague protest movement until she is inevitably, inevitably, elected Prime Minister. Anti-immigration policy and the specter of Russian interference in a Western election sparkle on the screen. The economy is collapsing. When the global pandemic arrives, it's almost an afterthought.All of these events - as well as developments in digital technology that hardly seem like science fiction at all - are refracted through the experiences of the Lyons family, a multigenerational and multiracial clan living primarily in Manchester. Lyons are sometimes hard hit by conflicts and global disasters, but they also go through the usual domestic troubles of marriage, adultery and divorce, childbirth and adolescence, sibling rivalry and problems by right.Like the Levins at Newark, they don't all respond consistently or in the same way, and aren't easily classified as heroes and villains. Each family member represents a slightly different mix or sequence of compromise and resistance, wishful thinking and panic, cowardice and grain. Most of them believe that everything will be fine in the end.Which turns out - big spoiler here - to be true. Optimism is justified in a highlight that I found both exciting and frustrating. Exciting because of the way some characters find the strength and ingenuity to achieve a great victory against the forces of repression and xenophobia, and frustrating because their triumph seemed much less realistic than anything in previous episodes. When videos of blatant injustice go viral in the world, the world awakes from its sleep, snatching the possibility of an engaged democratic future from the jaws of tyranny and cynicism.It would be nice to believe it, but history often speaks of the voice of Marlo Stanfield in "The Wire": "You want it one way, but it's the other." This is the disturbing message from "Watchmen" and "The Plot Against America". We think of stories of superheroes - the genetic material of "Watchmen" - one way: like stories of just and disguised vigilantes fighting crime outside the bounds of the law. "Watchmen" suggests another path, drawing a subtext of racism and the ideological bad blood that had been there all the time.The modern super-heroism in this tale finds its origin in the massacre of the Tulsa race, an act of terror in the real world which cost the life of a prosperous African-American district, to be euphemized (like a "riot") and treated, at best, as an unfortunate sidebar in the textbooks. Placing it at the center of the story blurs both the familiar landscape of comics and the folklore of the cultural war that underlies it. Law and order, rebellion and obedience, liberals and conservatives, black and white - none of these words mean exactly what we thought they were doing.This dislocation is both exhilarating and terrifying, a description which also suits "The Plot Against America", although the scrupulous naturalism of its methods is a world away from the phantasmagoria of the "Watchmen". Roth took exquisite care to replace a single thread in American tapestry and to limit the Lindbergh presidency to a single episode. Like "Years and Years", his book ends with a return to normality, a return to the familiar chronology signaled by references to later events - the death of Roosevelt in power; The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy - it will happen as we have always thought. Halfway through his term, as the country turns upside down in his own version of Kristallnacht, Lindbergh takes flight, paving the way for a special election that will bring Roosevelt back to power."The nightmare was over," says young Philip Roth. Its effect on him is recorded with a frightening factual reality: "I will never again be able to resuscitate this feeling of imperturbable security first nourished in a small child by a large protective republic and its fiercely responsible parents." In other words, the Philip Roth we know of, who turned that youthful security into a confident assertion of American Jewish identity - and turned these parents into comic but nonetheless heroic embodiments of American-Jewish normality - would have written his books in another way.It's disturbing, but Simon and Burns' version goes further, transforming Roth's subtly furious false memory into a bubbling and ambiguous allegory. In the heartbreaking final episode, we are not looking at an imagined past but an alternative present and a possible future. The series ends with a cliffhanger, a moment of lady-or-the-tiger non-resolution that turns Roth's speculative history into a political challenge. Maybe everything will be fine and maybe not. History is a nightmare from which none of us can wake up. Imagining it differently is not so much a challenge to the truth as a protest against necessity. It should not be so. It doesn't have to be that way. https://oltnews.com/once-upon-a-time-in-america?_unique_id=5e9e64d317fd8

[gyrlversion]

SARAH VINE: The spoof snowflake who made a fool of the Lefties

Twitter, it is has to be said, is not known for its subtlety or sense of humour. With, that is, one notable exception: Titania McGrath.

For the uninitiated, Titania Gethsemane McGrath is a radical vegan, woke poet committed to feminism, social justice and armed, peaceful protest. She works to expose racism, bigotry and misogyny. As she herself confesses: ‘I was born woke. My wokeness is innate. It flows through me like a magical elixir, keeping my soul perched and poised for the fight.’

Woke, for those of you born before 1990 who may, understandably, be unfamiliar with the term, is to be terribly earnest (or pretentious) about how much you care about social issues, particularly racism.

I first came across this bespectacled, earnest-looking blonde on Twitter last summer, when someone on my timeline re-tweeted something she’d said.

I wasn’t really paying attention and took her words (something offensive about people who voted Brexit, as I recall) at face value. I was about to get all wound up about it (as one does on Twitter) until the friend messaged me to say it was a parody account to send up the modern obsessions with gender fluidity, identity politics and cultural appropriation.

For the uninitiated, Titania Gethsemane McGrath is a radical vegan, woke poet committed to feminism, social justice and armed, peaceful protest

I felt a bit stupid — and I wasn’t the only one. Countless Twitter users have since been fooled by Titania — who has nearly 200,000 followers — and agreed with or railed against her earnest pronouncements. Twitter was taken in, suspending the account briefly following complaints last December. Even satirical magazine Private Eye recently featured a tweet by Titania McGrath in Pseuds’ Corner.

The ‘woke’ tweets that duped so many

I have always stood up for minorities. As such, it is essential that we respect the wishes of the minority of UK voters and overturn Brexit.

So what if Shamima Begum joined ISIS when she was 15? My sister got caught stealing a croissant on her gap year in Marseille. TEENAGERS MAKE MISTAKES.

I’ve been accused of living in a woke ‘echo chamber’ and that my opinions are out of touch with regular people. But I’ve asked around my close friends and they all agree this isn’t the case.

I’ve been forced to muzzle my dog, because although it identifies as a cat it keeps bloody barking.

White people: stop trying to help destitute Africans. I’m sure they’d rather starve than perpetuate negative racial stereotypes.

Dieting is fat-shaming yourself.

Straight men should be in a zoo.

The media’s coverage of ISIS is underpinned by deep-seated Islamophobia. If it isn’t, how come they never say anything nice about them? 

Luckily Titania was reinstated, her brush with the internet patriarchy having only served to strengthen her resolve in the face of Big Tech fascism.

This week we finally learned the identity of the person behind Titania. She isn’t even a woman (or, as she would put it, a non-binary feminist icon). She was unmasked as Andrew Doyle, 40, a former private school teacher with a doctorate in early Renaissance poetry from Wadham College, Oxford.

Mr Doyle drew on his academic background when setting up the account, using the name Titania, the queen of the fairies in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

‘She is named after the queen of the fairies because I think all of this “woke culture” is an utter fantasy world,’ he said. ‘The people who promote this hyper-inclusive culture are fantasists.’

For many of us, the modern millennial world is a minefield, a social battleground where, at any point, one could unintentionally blow oneself up. Many rail against it, others retreat to the sidelines. The genius of Doyle is that he takes it down in a way that is extremely witty — and clever.

Such is his success that yesterday ‘Titania’ published her first book, ‘Woke: A Guide to Social Justice.’

Thus, in Titania, we find all the arrogance (‘I cannot but help come to the conclusion that I am the only living artist worthy of note), and entitlement (‘beyond the provision of DNA and a modest trust fund, I cannot see what purpose my father has served’) of today’s self-styled social justice ‘keyboard warriors’.

She also exposes the unconscious bigotry (it is not racist to hate someone on the basis of their skin colour if that person is white) of the woke brigade.

This week we finally learned the identity of the person behind Titania. She was unmasked as Andrew Doyle, 40, a former private school teacher with a doctorate in early Renaissance poetry from Wadham College, Oxford

Oh, and let’s not forget the hypocrisy: ‘I was the only child of two barristers. I learnt only that my private education and frequent family holidays to Montenegro and the Maldives were merely a ruse by which my parents could distract me from my oppression.’

The secret of the character’s success is, of course, her plausibility. Social media is awash with people spouting nonsense, from the mad to the merely misinformed. Her Twitterings were just the right side of believable.

Indeed, there are many occasions when she is indistinguishable from the likes of prominent figures such as left-wing journalists Owen Jones, writer Laurie Penny or columnist Afua Hirsch (who once argued Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square should be removed because it was a symbol of white supremacist patriarchal oppression).

Or, as Titania herself would put it: ‘If you don’t think exactly the same way as me, then you’ve clearly got a lot to learn about diversity.’

One of Titania’s most convincing attributes is her lack of self-knowledge, a tendency to take for granted the privileges that come as standard for her generation — and an inability to see things from anyone else’s point of view.

‘People are far too sentimental about the elderly,’ she writes. ‘I am no longer helping them cross the street. They opted for Brexit, so as far as I’m concerned they can take their chances with the traffic. Remember too that these are the people who fought in the second World War. How can shooting at Germans be anything other than xenophobic?’

Statements such as these are, of course, absurd and funny. But they also sail close to the wind. Compare the above with the comment of the former Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg (the original virtue-signalling politician) in 2017 that older voters were to blame for Brexit and that, now they were dying off, a second referendum should be held in order for the younger generation to return the correct result, i.e. Remain.

Or look at Prince Harry’s speech on Wednesday. He said: ‘You may find yourselves frustrated with the older generation when it seems like they don’t care.’

The world today is now so obsessed with maximum political correctness that it’s hard to distinguish between reality and parody.

Just as Bridget Jones was the embodiment of the anxiety-ridden Nineties feminist, a creation whose diary entries encapsulated all our hopes, fears and failures, so Titania McGrath is her millennial successor, a girl every bit as lost and confused, every bit as accurately observed — and equally, catastrophically, hilarious. 

The post SARAH VINE: The spoof snowflake who made a fool of the Lefties appeared first on Gyrlversion.

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[anautisticdragon-blog]

Noel Plum -- Alt-Right Exemplar

I wondered if I was a bit hard on Noel Plum based on my own life's position and his attack against me for my vulnerability. I'm a sufferer of autism and PTSD, I haven't gone outside my door in decades. In Noel Plum's world view, a person like myself should only be charitably aided when people feel like it. What someone means when they say this is that the care for individuals in need (such as myself) should be optional so that one can choose NOT to. That cut to the quick. If he'd ever spoken with a social worker in his life, he'd have known of countless cases where people are simply too sick to work. If their lives depended on the generosity of others from charity? Consider that most people aren't generous, that's why we have social constructs of aid for the needy in the first place. The average person doesn't choose to be moral or ethical, but the government of the land they live in does. I'm thankful for that every day and I don't take that for granted. I never do. I appreciate all the help I've had from the government, from social workers, who've actually given me the strength to go on living. I've been a good friend to some people I care about, I'll occasionally write things and I'm slowly working on improving my artistic talents. I never really had a chance to develop these in school due to my problems. School had too much of a barrier to entry for me, being extremely focused around mentally healthy extraverts as the baseline. That's something we really could fix, but that's a topic for another time. I like making art for people. I enjoy writing. I love being a good friend. I think that these are contributions that I can make. In Noel Plum's world, I shouldn't be allowed to make them as I can't support myself financially. I should be a homeless bum. He doesn't say that explicitly but he does say that I should be reliant on charity to survive. We've all seen how well that works in countries without social systems where people do have to rely on charity, right? Those people die on the streets. It's fucking awful. Noel Plum wants that life for me. I clearly had an investment in viewing him negatively considering my position, so I thought that when I had a clearer head I'd go back and take a gander again. I'd have another look. Has my opinion changed? Mmmmm... No. I'll frame this by saying that I'm very much into armchair psychology, I tend to read journals and PhD-level theses as a past-time. I can't help myself. As someone with a mind outside of the norm I feel compelled to understand it, to understand myself better. I've come across all manner of creepiness through my readings, too. Such as the cargo cult of NLP (look it up), a group of people who twisted the concepts of CBT into something nasty and, frankly, quite psychotic. Noel Plum uses NLP in a lot of his videos, it's obvious in how he talks, how he frames things. Still, let's take a more obvious example to show you what I mean. On his Twitter, he calls himself a 'pseudointellectual moron' not out of irony but to invoke pity. That if he's being self-deprecating he probably doesn't have a lot of ego. The idea here is to have people think of him as the underdog hero, it's a very clever play. It's also the exact play that alt-right sociopaths (MRA ones, especially) tend to use. I spoke of this in a prior post. The sociopaths of the alt-right like to weave a tale for their herd of a secret, underground resistance movement where only the coolest people are invited. It's a clever play to the desire for exclusivity that very desperate, weak-willed people find appealing. Conversely, this is how cults happen. That love of exclusivity is toxic. The alt-right is essentially a Nazi cult lead by sociopaths who're fashioning this cult-like atmosphere to keep it going. It's tearing itself apart because the sociopaths involved never seem to agree with one another. Are they about conservative viewpoints? Are they white nationalists? Are they white supremacists? Do they believe in gassing all those icky non-whites? Et cetera, ad nauseum. Sociopaths are great at manipulating the crowd, sure, but cooperation is beyond them. This is why, by comparison, the left has always been more unified. The reason why is obvious, yeah? The left isn't about personal power. So what would be appealing about that to sociopaths? This is why left wing cults don't really exist. It's why you don't see left wing people banned for toxic behaviour, nor do you see left wing subreddits removed. I mean, yeah, there's the occasional blip but it's nothing like the constant cavalcade of atrocity we oppose. If Noel Plum is, indeed, the kind of person he presents himself to be on his Twitter then certainly he'd be lacking self-esteem, right? He'd be the kind of person that gets bullied for their views, that has to deal with trolls and harassment. Yeah? He'd be a little nervous, anxious, and unsure. It'd be a good thing if it were true, as that kind of person is harmless. Often a puppy dog who's kind and caring, the very opposite of a bully. There are lots of wonderful people I know on the left who're like that. So... is Noel? Well, his latest tweet at the time of writing is this: "So how about rather than 'fuck me' how about you go fuck yourself and take a long walk off a short pier you cunt." Well then. Here's the tweet, if you're curious. The rest of his tweets read like that, too. They're all hyper-aggressive bouts of bullying, with him as a rabid attack dog who'll try to harass and torment anyone who so much as even dares to speak dissent. Typical alt-right, really. Lots of fascism, racism, misogyny, and pseudo-science. That about sums up the alt-right. And there are people who actually believe in men like this, sadly. It's unfortunate because, as I've said before, I don't think that thse are innately bad people. They're just desperate to be a part of something. They're likely lonely, they want attention, they need to feel validated in some way. These people are just prime fodder for sociopaths like Noel Plum to manipulate. By offering them a form of faux validation, their reciprocation is that of undying loyalty to his cause. Again, this is how cults happen. There's no magic, here. There are a lot of unseen people in the world who long to be someone, so they're not just toiling in the shadows as a nobody any more. That mindset can result in a very weak will, one that's easily abused and exploited. I'm not unfamiliar to that, myself. I just have the fortitude to be self aware, often thanks to the amount of self-interrogation and introspection I do. I suppose my autism can be blamed for that. One of the rarely noted side effects of autism is extreme introspection which does tend to lead to heightened self awareness. After a while, the plays of people like Noel Plum and his ilk become painfully obvious. There's a world out there of that happening, in politics, in corporate structures, in academia even. I'm baffled by how anyone can wonder why I'm more than a little jaded about the human race. What's frustrating is that these people need help. Rehabilitation should be the path, here, rather than ostracising them. Yes, individuals like Noel Plum -- with their sociopathy dials set to 11 -- can't be helped. The people who follow them, however, absolutely can. They just want to be seen, they want to be validated, they want to feel important. That's why they're doing this, they don't really believe in the alt-right. And unfortunately, the more we attack them, the more their allegiance ot something truly terrible solidifies. I think it's more important to raise awareness of the sociopathic puppet masters who spearhead the alt-right with their toxic bullshit. In a recent video, I saw Noel Plum talking about how he didn't call... oh, who was it? I think it was Kristi Winters. Anyway, he was complaining about how he didn't say she looked like a man. The wording he used in that particular video fascinated me, though. It was a bit of a slip. He spoke of 'playing the game.' What game, Noel? What game are you playing? Do you think that the lives of people are a game? Are people your pawns? I've often heard people on the left say that the alt-right treat this like a game they're playing for fun, that they fuck with people to feel superior. It's one thing to hear someone on the left insinuate it, it's another thing entirely to see someone on the right openly admit it. Someone who's genuine about issues rather than just doing something for their own amusement and benefit shouldn't be framing what they're doing in the context of 'playing a game.' That should never happen. It's a very sociopathic mindset. Anyway, long story short? He'll often pull interesting things in his videos to try and look much more sympathetic. He'll start off the video with a fake bout of being flustered, or confused (such as where he put his webcam), or sick in the attempt to make himself look much more vulnerable and sympathetic. These are all emotional plays to the crowd. You don't see left wing 'Tubers (potato!) doing this, do you? You don't see Mike Rowlands or Captain Andy fishing for sympathy. No, they just get right to the point. Noel Plum uses framing too well to have not read up on NLP. He's that particular kind of skeevy. And on the kind of desperate, weak-willed people he courts, this is incredibly effective. Those with at least some empathy but a lower level of self awareness will, very unfortunately, be caught off guard by these acts. They'll believe in this BS 'vulnerable underdog' schtick he puts on. He's a showman, I'll give him that. You know who else was a showman? Hitler. Yeah, I Godwin'd. Don't give a shit. I mean, I already Godwin'd this in the bloody opening image. I think that at this point in history we're at a place where 'If you see a Nazi, say Nazi!' is more relevant than ever before. There's no point in pussyfooting around this. Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, knows that the alt-right is a neo-Nazi movement at this point, there's no hiding it. So what does that make their ringleaders, then? I'm not being manipulative, here, either. I'm being overt. I'm not subtly trying to fuck with your feelings. I'm just pointing out the bloody obvious. I tried to give Noel Plum a fair go, the man makes me sick. His videos actually make me feel ill. Just the amount of sheer, shameless manipulation present in each and every one of them. The way he tries to get cushy with the viewer in order to gain their sympathy? It's grotesque. "Hey, let's be friends! Now let's all hate women, non-whites, and non-binary gender people... TOGETHER!" No thanks, Noel. You can stick that rhetoric where the sun don't shine. Honestly, I'm tempted to up the ante, here. 'If you see a monster, say monster.' I see a monster. Just one that thankfully has no power. Humanity is, at least, smarter than that. Hm. I actually feel a little more optimistic, now! And then I remember that Trump is the president of the United States. Fuck...

[cabiba]

Most people are aware of the influence of Karl Marx and his ideological compatriots in building 20th-century totalitarianism. But there is another tradition of thought, dating from the early 19th century and continuing through the interwar period, that took a different route in coming to roughly the same conclusions regarding the place of the state in our lives.

As opposed to Marx’s “left-Hegelians,” these thinkers are part of the “right-Hegelian” movement who dispensed with the universalism of Marx to applaud nation, race, and war as the essence of life.

These thinkers also loathed commercial society and capitalism in particular. They saw enterprise as soulless and culturally destructive, lacking in the higher meaning that only centralization and planning could provide.

Instead of trying to create some mythical future based in some fantasy of a new socialist man, they sought to beat back capitalism by clinging to the old order of government power, privilege, hierarchy, nationalism, and racist control. Their imagined future looked like the pre-capitalist past they idealized.

These five thinkers appear in chronological order. In the prehistory of the alt-right, I mapped the big thinkers. Here we have some more minor and eccentric players in the evolution of an anti-capitalist right.

Johann Fichte (1762-1814) was the philosophical founder of German idealism, writing and teaching a generation before George Friedrich Hegel, and the first of a long line of obscurantist philosophers whose ideas somehow land with one solid political application: build a huge state led by one heroic dictator. It was he, and not Hegel, who first posited a meta-narrative of historical waves that could be characterized as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.

In politics, he was a huge fan of Napoleon, but found himself devastated by the crushing victory of France over German territories, which motivated his “Addresses to the German Nation” (1808), the most influential lecture series on education to appear in the modern world. Here was the first complete outline of what German nationalism should look like.

The new education system should have “an absolutely new system of German national education, such as has never existed in any other nation.” The purpose is to educate a “new race of men” with a system that “must first be applied by Germans to Germans.” Its goal is to inculcate “the true and all-powerful love of fatherland, the conception of our people as an eternal people and as the security for our own eternity.”

Part of the point is to train for work so that “no article of food, clothing, etc., and, so far as this is possible, no tool is to be used, which is not produced and made” inside Germany. In other words: autarky. Germany should aspire to be “a closed commercial State” that rejects “our idolatrous veneration of coined metals.”

His template for what became fascist (right-Hegelian) thought is entirely predictable: statism, nationalism, loathing of the merchant class, and protectionism, spiced up with the inevitable doses of misogyny ("active citizenship, civic freedom and even property rights should be withheld from women, whose calling was to subject themselves utterly to the authority of their fathers and husbands”) and anti-Semitism (granting rights to Jews requires we "cut off all their heads in one night, and to set new ones on their shoulders, which should contain not a single Jewish idea”).

John Ruskin (1819-1900) is inexplicably revered to this day as an aesthete, artist, and champion of small crafts, whereas in truth he was an absolute hater of commercial capitalism, laissez faire liberalism, and the modern world. A hugely influential thinker of the Victorian period, he romanticized a mythic England from the past, in which art and good taste prevailed over commercial frenzy and wealth-making. “I was, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school,” he said. In his view, he completely agreed with his friend Thomas Carlyle that the forces unleashed by Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment generally had destroyed the artistic sensibilities of generations, and they needed to be recaptured through a strong planning state.

His most political book is Unto This Last (1862) which took aim at the division of labor itself. Riffing off the Parable of the Vineyards, he finds it outrageous that the vineyard owner himself was in a position to decide pay at all.The entire book is a long and tedious screed against merchants for their lack of loyalty, their obedience to impersonal market forces, and absence of a moral reason for existence. The merchant, he said, is “the man who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.”Like other critics of classical political economy (he compared it to “alchemy, astrology, witchcraft”), he denied that exchange alone could produce any value or profit. “It is only in labor there can be profit,” he declared. He had a particular beef with John Stuart Mill, and critiqued his price and wage theory, showing near-zero competence in economic theory at all. For Ruskin, economics was not a science but an aesthetic. He summed up his outlook on political economy as follows: “Government and cooperation are in all things the laws of life; anarchy and competition the laws of death.” It's no wonder that Ludwig von Mises said that Ruskin was "one of the gravediggers of British freedom, civilization and prosperity."

Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927) is an exceedingly strange figure in the history of politics and ideas: a British-born German whose influence bled into Germany and back again to his home. As son-in-law to the famed composer Richard Wagner, he became a dear friend and fanatical admirer of Adolph Hitler and the most aggressive proponent of virulent anti-Semitism ever to come out of England.

He had decided early in life to locate the source of all political and economic evil in the Industrial Revolution, preferring his own made-up vision of what he called “Merry Old England” consisting of a beautiful aristocracy, hard-toiling and thrifty peasants, and patriotic citizens dedicated to preserving the language and race against the commercial forces of modernity. Under these conditions, unlike the demographic mess unleashed by capitalism, women were submissive to the wills of their fathers and husbands, devoted only to furthering the superior race.

His weird 1899 book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century became a bestseller, many times over, throughout the Continent. Heavily influenced by the racial typologies that were increasingly popular, he described the Jews as mindlessly materialistic and the source of most evil in the modern world.

The Jews, he said, caused the downfall of Rome, for example. He argued that Jesus cannot possibly have been a Jew since all good in the world emanates from the pure Aryan race. Instead, he was “of exceptional beauty, tall and slim with a noble face inspiring respect and love; his hair blond shading into chestnut brown, his arms and hands noble and exquisitely formed.” It was in this book that he laid out his theory that a Jewish plot was afoot to wipe out the Aryan race and turn all Europe into a race of “pseudo-Hebraic mestizos.”

His book, which was printed in eight editions in the first ten years of its publication, and eventually sold as many as 250,000 copies by 1938, catapulted him into the status of a celebrity intellectual. And so his every utterance became gospel for his followers, even his proclamation that the Great War, which he believed the Jews had started, had led England “totally into the hands of the Jews and the Americans” and capitalist machinery.

It was in the midst of his fame that he reached out to an emergently powerful Hitler. Hearing that both Hitler and Joseph Goebbels could be counted among his fan base, he wrote Hitler in 1923:

“Most respected and dear Hitler ... It is hardly surprising that a man like that can give peace to a poor suffering spirit! Especially when he is dedicated to the service of the fatherland. My faith in Germandom has not wavered for a moment, though my hopes were – I confess – at a low ebb. With one stroke you have transformed the state of my soul. That Germany, in the hour of her greatest need, brings forth a Hitler – that is proof of her vitality ... I can now go untroubled to sleep ... May God protect you!”

After Hitler’s conviction of high treason following the Beer-hall putsch, Chamberlain stuck by him and kept hope alive. Hitler was touched, and, following Hitler’s release from prison, Hitler paid a visit to Chamberlain in Bayreuth in 1927, accompanied by Goebbels. Chamberlain assured Hitler that he was certainly “the chosen one,” thereupon lifting Hitler’s spirits. The leading Nazi in-house philosopher, Alfred Rosenberg, was perhaps an even greater fan of Chamberlain. An ailing Chamberlain died in 1927, never knowing of the Nazi attempt to deal with the “Jewish problem” he had dedicated his life to exposing.

Giovanni Gentile (1874-1944) might be the most clownish and ridiculous of all the figures mentioned here, but he was a big shot in his time. He aspired to be the Marx of fascism, a leading theorist of the idealist tradition who finally put together the essential pieces of a thorough-going non-Marxist statism. His writings enjoyed some degree of fame in America in the interwar period, working on his own writings and ghost-writing for Benito Mussolini who was frequently solicited for American-published academic writings in the 1920s.

Most familiar to American readers was Gentile’s 1922 book The Reform of Education published by Harcourt, Brace, and Company. The book contains the usual call for education to be compulsory, militarized, and nationalistic, rooted in a view of the heroic enterprise of nation building. For the most part, the book consists of pseudo-scholarly blather of the insufferably ponderous sort, but it does contain his theory of the state, as a kind of warm up to the educational material:

A nation can under no circumstances exist prior to the form of its State ... a State is always a future. It is that state which this very day we must set up, or rather at this very instant, and with all our future effort bent to that political ideal which beams before us, not only in the light of a beautiful thought, but as the irresistible need of our own personality. The nation therefore is as intimately pertinent and native to our own being as the State, considered as Universal Will, is one with our concrete and actual ethical personality.

And so on for 250 pages. Despite the relentless statism of his vision, and his love of centralized power and planning, Gentile’s writings lacked some features that characterized other works in this genre. It is mercifully free of racism, perhaps because of his region of origin. He was Sicilian, and thereby belonged to a people who had been demonized by American thinkers as dysgenic since the 1880s. Indeed, if it is possible to talk this way, Gentile was a relative liberal among the fascists of the period, having criticized German anti-Semitism and having met his death at the hands of an anti-fascist mob having returned from arguing for the release of anti-fascists from prison.

Nonetheless, his signature contribution, signed by many Italian intellectuals, was the “Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals.”

The opposition of individual and State is the typical political expression of a corruption so deep that it cannot accept any higher life principle, because doing so would vigorously inform and contain the individual's feelings and thoughts. Fascism was, therefore, a political and moral movement at its origins. It understood and championed politics as a training ground for self-denial and self-sacrifice in the name of an idea, one which would provide the individuals with his reason for being, his freedom, and all his rights. The idea in question is that of the fatherland. It is an ideal that is a continuous and inexhaustible process of historical actualization. It represents a distinct and singular embodiment of a civilization's traditions which, far from withering as a dead memory of the past, assumes the form of a personality focussed on the end towards which it strives. The fatherland is, thus, a mission.

Reading his brand of fascism, you can see why it went down easier with the American public than the English or German models. It was no more or less than the celebration of the state as the center of life, and a proclamation of the death of old-world freedom and democracy. In short, Gentile struck a chord in US political life for his description of the prevailing ethos of the New Deal itself.

TS Eliot (1888-1965) seems like an implausible candidate for inclusion in this gallery of rogues, simply because this paragon of civility and erudition is so widely championed in the annals of anti-liberalism. The American-born Anglophile is the author, after all, of the most famous and revered poem of the 20th century, "The Waste Land" (1922). Its impenetrable narrative captures the post-WWI despair of the English-speaking world, giving the impression that it was not only the war that civilization should regret but the whole of what life had become in the age of mass commerce. Nothing is salvageable, and everything is corrupt.

C.S. Lewis, who regarded Eliot’s work as nothing short of “evil,” said of this poem: “no man is fortified against chaos by reading the Wasteland, but that most men are by it infected with chaos.” What is that chaos? It is the dark longing for some long-dead past and a conviction of the irredeemability of the present, an attitude which is anathema to the classical liberal tradition that sees hope and wonder in what freedom can achieve. It is not a stretch to see Eliot’s literary contribution as part of the entire Modernist literary project in England to put down and condemn everything that capitalism had done for the world. For Eliot in particular, the cost was the integrity of culture itself.

In "Notes Toward a Definition of Culture," Eliot takes hard aim at the entire liberal/Hayekian view of culture as a spontaneous evolution extending from the gradual emergence of norms, tastes, and manner of a free people. For Eliot, the right kind of culture must emanate from an elite, chosen from excellent educational institutions. Everything about industrialization wars against culture, even the advances in publishing. “In our time,” he declared, “we read too many new books… We are encumbered not only with too many new books: we are further embarrassed by too many periodicals, reports and privately circulated memoranda.”

A growing amount of scholarship has taken Eliot to task for his sympathies for the Eugenics movement and his consistent worry about the rising birth rates among the lower classes in English culture. But this should not be surprising at all. It is but a small step from regretting the advance of mass consumerism to decrying the rise of mass population expansion made possible by prosperity.

In the end, the problem with Eliot is not nearly on the scale you find in the other writers in this tradition. He nowhere defends totalitarianism or anything like it, though you do pick up a hint of authoritarianism. But what he represents is an underlying problem that is universal among this strain of anti-capitalist writers.

The problem comes down to an intractably aristocratic snobbery that feeds a deep suspicion against freedom and tempts intellectuals to imagine that if we only constrained that freedom and replaced it with wise controls over our social, cultural, and demographic destiny, we might be saved from the decay and corruption into which the liberalism of the 18th century plunged us. Despots thrive off just such convictions.

The Fork in the Road

What you find in this tradition is a very different template from Marx and his school for criticizing the freely evolving society celebrated by the liberal tradition of Adam Smith and Frederic Bastiat. The non-Marxist version has no fundamental objection to religion, nation, family, and even property, provided everything is directed toward the single goal of fortifying the collective.

What they share in common is a conviction that the freely evolving commercial society is unsustainably corrupt; society does not contain within itself the capacity for its own self-ordering; and human relationships are not capable of achieving universal harmony absent conscious design by states, powerful leaders, and intellectuals.

Their vast influence over the bloody politics of the 20th century is strangely forgotten, and the tradition of thought they represent papered over during the Cold War, which rerendered the only political conflict as the West vs. Communism. The ideas of a rightist form of totalism was lying in wait for the moment to re-rear its ugly head.

Knowing this helps us understand the new politics of our time. Freedom is threatened from two ends, the right and left. The idea of liberty really does represent a third way, a path lit by the hope in the kind of civilization that can be built not from the top down but from the bottom up, not through the force of power but by voluntary associations of regular people who aspire to live better lives.

(A final note of recognition that this essay would not have been possible without the breadcrumbs left by Ludwig von Mises in his masterful 1947 essay, "Planned Chaos.")