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militant-holy-knight · 5 years ago

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What Would Greta Thunberg’s World Look Like?

A hypothetical scenario of the consequences if we adhere to Greta’s demands to the letter

As someone critical of Greta Thumberg’s take on climate activism, it’s very frustrating to see so many of her detractors go for low blows, ad hominen attacks, meme her to death or outright dismissing her altogether on the grounds she is just a child, instead of countering her words in an intelligent manner. It’s understandable since, the energy necessary to refute bullshit is magnitudes greater than to produce it. I won’t really go on whether climate change is real or not, if China is worse than the USA or that she is being used as a convenient prop. Let’s for the sake of amusement agree with what she says and do exactly as she demands.

One thing you need to know is that even among climate activists, Greta is something of an extremist herself because she alleges the Paris Accords signed in 2016 are insufficient to halt climate change, even though it stipulated that carbon dioxide should be decreased by 20% and the increase of renewable energy sources by the same percent. While admittedly many places in the West can afford these changes, it’s still insufficient in a global scale specially in the third world like Africa and Latin America. Despite all that, she says the world leaders should do so much more to improve the environment. While Greta herself doesn’t have an specific answer for that question, her Swedish countrymen have came up with an answer: eco-fascism essentially. The Angry Foreigner gives more details on that.

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But let’s say you do just that: what will happen next? Nothing short of famine and world wars.

It’s possible that dozens or hundred of thousands (at the very least) would die of hunger or malnutrition-related diseases, because the only way to feed a population of over 7 billion people is through a heavily mechanized agriculture that highly depends on fossil fuel. This food needed to several parts of the world would require ships, which also require fossil fuel and in Greta’s point of view cause pollution, so that would mean getting rid of it too. This probably wouldn’t affect the so-called breadbaskets of the world like Brazil (a larger exporter of beef, coffee and soybeans), but even more European countries that are significantly richer than us that rely on importation would be heavily affected by this measure. This could easily lead to riots, upheaval and chaos.

However, this would likely be followed by war from it’s immediate neighbors. It’s an objective, undeniable fact that natural resources served as a too common cause of war between any group of people. So many examples in history to illustrate the point, but take the Axis invasions during WW2. Today, people are inclined to see it as an struggle between good and evil, life vs death, freedom vs tyranny, but it was far more complex than that. Japan didn’t necessarily invade China because it wanted to create purely Asiatic empire to stand up against the West, but because also because they had too many mouths to feed and an very poor agriculture to address this so the occupation of China made sense. Likewise, though Hitler had expressly genocidal reasons for wanting to destroy them, he justified the invasion of Poland and the Soviet Union on grounds of gaining living space for his exorbitant population. This doesn’t excuse their actions, but it helps explain why they did it.

Issues like these were addressed following WW2 given that Japan and Germany now suffer from the exact opposite problem with an extremely aging population that isn’t reproducing enough above the replacement level. However, this isn’t the case in the third world which is incidentally less developed than the aforementioned two, like China, India and the Islamic world as a whole, but are going into a near demographic disaster. At any point in time, these countries would have without hesitation invaded their nearest neighbors to gain control over their food production, but the only thing preventing that is relief aid from the West (as well as the overbearing eye of NATO to intervene in case of any hostilities). Now can you imagine this scenario in a global scale?

Of course, this raises another disturbing question: What happens when countries disobey Greta’s laws? If the world leaders want to be serious about enforcing these rules to ensure humanity’s survival, they can’t simply write strongly worded letters disapproving dissident actions - they have to be prepared to commit mass murder and provoke regime changes to make rogue states comply with with their policies. Who gets to make this decision? How can we make people to put aside their own problems to work for a common good? How can we stop infighting to take place? How can we solve famine?

This is the main problem I have with Greta - she doesn’t offer any tangible solution to the problem or the proposed measures are so impractical and impossible to enforce. But then again, I don’t blame her or anything. She is just a child with mental disorders and she most definitely didn’t think about the long-term consequences of her demands. At least she has an excuse, which I can’t say the same about the virtue-signaling activists who are older than her and push the same things.

Environmental problems are a legitimate concern, specially regarding reliance on fossil fuel because trust me, climate change will be the least of our problems as soon as we run out of non-renewable sources. We need to find a solution as quick as possible but we most certainly don’t need patronizing and demonization at the expense of those negatively affected.

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penzanews · 4 years ago

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Historical facts about World War II must not be distorted or hushed up

PenzaNews. Increasingly frequent attempts to distort history and to revise the role played by the Red Army in the routing of Nazism are connected with the strengthening of Russia. This was stated by President of Russia Vladimir Putin at the 43rd meeting of the Russian Pobeda (Victory) Organising Committee which took place via videoconference on May 20.

“We celebrated Victory Day only recently, on May 9, but we always say that we must not forget about these issues and continue to help our veterans after May 9 as well. We will mark one more important date soon, June 22, the horrible day when the Nazis treacherously invaded out homeland. This year we will mark 80 years since the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. It claimed millions of lives, and nearly all our families remember their losses and their heroes to this day. This personal connection is what defines our people’s sincere commemoration of the war and war veterans in Russia. It is only logical that the list of amendments to our renewed Constitution, which were wholeheartedly supported our nation, includes a provision on commemorating defenders of the Fatherland and preserving the historical truth. As you are well aware, we have always paid special attention to these issues. Regrettably, the ranks of the great generation of victors are thinning out. But this is only increasing our responsibility for preserving their legacy, especially now that we are witnessing increasingly frequent attempts to slander and distort history and to revise the role played by the Red Army in the routing of Nazism and the liberation of European nations from the Nazi plague,” the head of state said.

He stated that the reasons are clear, and attempts to hamper the development of this country, regardless of its name, be it the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union or Russia, were made in different times and historical epochs and under different political systems.

“These approaches and principles remain the same. There is one principle or rather, one reason for containing Russia: the stronger and more independent Russia becomes, the more consistently it defends its national interests, the greater the striving of foreign forces to weaken it, to discredit the values uniting our society and sometimes to slander and distort what people hold dear, the things that are instilled in the younger generations of Russians and which help them acquire a strong character and their own opinions. This is why all kinds of Russophobic individuals and unscrupulous politicians are trying to attack Russian history, to promote the ideas of revising the results of World War II and to exonerate Nazi criminals,” Vladimir Putin said.

“We cannot but respond to these actions in a suitable manner. As I have repeatedly said, we will rely on facts and do everything possible to ensure the continuity of historical memory in Russian society, so that decades and centuries from now, future generations will cherish the truth about the war and display a sacred and grateful attitude towards its heroes, as well as to their ancestors,” he added.

Although large-scale and mass celebrations are essential, we have to prioritise systemic work here, President of Russia stressed.

“We have to continue to declassify new archive records and to allow researchers to use them. We must provide people with new opportunities for learning about the destinies of their relatives, as well as their combat and frontline experiences. We must expand such projects as No Statute of Limitations, which makes a substantial contribution to exposing the vile deeds of Nazi criminals against this country’s civilians and which implements important educational programmes. They must be presented more broadly at Russian schools and universities. On the whole, it is of paramount importance that we ensure well-coordinated actions, methods and positions of all state agencies and public organisations linked with studying and preserving the history of the Great Patriotic War and also dealing with education and teaching patriotic values. We must not act separately while addressing these issues, where efficiency and success depend solely on joint work and concerted efforts,” Vladimir Putin said.

Speaking of the importance for Russian citizens of such a historical period as the Great Patriotic War, Professor Martin J. Sherwin, Department of History & Art History, George Mason University, emphasized its enduring importance.

“Whether it is the Soviet Union or Russia the Great Patriotic War is an enduring monument to national historical pride,” the expert told PenzaNews.

“How will it be understood and used is the historical question. Will it be celebrated to promote democracy or dictatorship? It is essential to democracy that independent historians have the opportunity to research, write and publish their work. But a nation’s history cannot be assigned to one group and so all sorts of people will promote their views,” Martin J. Sherwin added.

Therefore, in his opinion, it is essential that the work of serious independent investigators is available to the public to counter the efforts of politicians and others to distort history in the service of their ambitions.

“A just society requires agreed upon standards of behavior. Banning fascism, xenophobia, and racism are therefore appropriate because they are forms of political behavior that undermine fairness, decency and virtue,” the American researcher said.

In turn, Lewis Siegelbaum, Jack and Margaret Sweet Professor Emeritus of History, Michigan State University, called the events of the Great Patriotic War inviolable.

“The memory of the Great Patriotic War is as close to being sacred as anything I know of in contemporary politics. It has been fostered, shaped, and reinforced by Russia’s educational system, mainstream political figures, and the legacy media. Many of the themes – patriotic heroism and sacrifice, unique dimensions of loss, bonds of camaraderie, etc. – were forged in Soviet times and have been perpetuated since 1991,” Lewis Siegelbaum said.

From his point of view, the experience of professional historians is of great importance in describing the events of the Second World War, but they should not have sole responsibility for writing the history of this period.

“Novelists, film directors, and visual artists, among others, can also evoke and make meaningful aspects of the war that historians rarely touch,” the expert explained.

At the same time, Lewis Siegelbaum noted that attempts to distort and rewrite history take place throughout time.

“There is nothing new about politicians’ attempts to rewrite history by falsifying facts. Is it happening more now than in the past? Perhaps, although I don't know how one would measure that,” the historian said and added that social media have played a role here generally not for the better.

“It is and always has been important to actively oppose any manifestation of neo-Nazism, aggressive nationalism, racism, and xenophobia. Once naively thought to be relics outdated by the enlightened practices of democratic polities, these perversities have gained new adherents owing to the dynamism of neo-liberal capitalism that has marginalized and delegitimized collective identities that made sense in the past,” Lewis Siegelbaum said.

Meanwhile, Jacques Sapir, Director of studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris, Head of the Center for Research of Industrialization (CEMI-EHESS), Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that the Great Patriotic War is certainly a major fact in Russian representations today.

“It has deeply marked every family. With 26 to 28 million deaths, it is naturally a major trauma,” the historian noted but added that the significance of the Great Patriotic War varies across age groups.

Thus, according to him, the generation born in the war and post-war years, who knew the veterans well, associate the pride of Victory primarily with suffering and loss, while their today’s descendants – young people under the age of 30 – have a more abstract sense of pride.

Answering the question about the increasing attempts to distort the events of those times, Jacques Sapir stressed that history is the domain of historians.

“But, there is history and memory, two quite different things. And, the latter is invariably instrumentalized by politicians. However, any instrumentalization carries with it the possibility of a desire to rewrite history, to erase certain events, to glorify or, on the contrary, to denigrate certain actors,” he said, stressing that all the falsifications take us away from reality.

In his opinion, no country can do without a national narrative, and therefore a form of instrumentalization – turning an event into an instrument of political influence.

“But, once that is admitted, it is still necessary that this national narrative does not turn into a national novelization. If the victory of Stalingrad, and next year we will commemorate the 80 years of Operation Uranus, the Soviet counter-offensive, was brilliant, it should be remembered that it was preceded, from June 1942 to September 1942, of a series of defeats. However, not wanting to face the mistakes of the past is to condemn yourself to repeat them,” Jacques Sapir said.

Nick Cull, Professor at Master of Public Diplomacy Program, the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, shared the opinion on the inadmissibility of distortion and concealment of historical facts.

“As a historian who has looked at issues of propaganda and memory in international politics, I see great significance how events are remembered by states and their publics and great significance in the things that are allowed to slip from memory too,” he said.

“There are some countries where the Great Patriotic War, World War Two remains a central historical experience and a source of reference points which politicians regularly invoke. This is certainly the case in Russia as in the UK and USA. My wish would be that as well as remembering our own internal suffering, resolution and bravery we all would also remember the positive aspects of working together to defeat a common enemy and the sacrifices of our allies. […] I wish that Americans in particular knew more about Russia’s war. Visiting the National World War II museum in New Orleans I found it is easier to learn about the suffering of ordinary people in Germany and Japan during the war than in Russia. It is a little different in Britain. The alliance with the USSR is remembered in part because of the role of British sailors in the Arctic supply convoys and in part because it is in the nature of the British character to seek out a counterbalance to American remembering the war as a solo effort,” the historian said.

In his opinion, professional historians have a vital role to play as a reality check not allowing politicians to stray from the truth.

“But it is a perpetual struggle and not always welcome from the general public who love their myths. Historians have also to hold other historians to account as there are always some willing to distort in the name of ideology. We have seen this in the west with the few historians like David Irving who strayed into Holocaust denial,” Nick Cull explained.

At the same time, in his opinion, one role of professional historians is to remind the world that the Holocaust was not the only atrocity of that period.

“All the combatant powers have to face their own misdeeds. Britain mismanaged the Bengal famine, the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and something terrible happened in the Katyn Forest and these things too must be reckoned into history,” the professor stressed.

“My preference is not to idealize the past but rather to come together and focus on the vision of a better future. This is actually what worked during the Great Patriotic War, and helped the world come together at its end,” he added.

Source: https://penzanews.ru/en/analysis/67129-2021

Photo: Kremlin.ru

#ww2 #worldwar2 #wwii

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thelastsoviet · 7 years ago

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Jordan Peterson and his misunderstanding of Leftist Politics

Professor Jordan Peterson, he of the great internet fame, darling of people he despises has posed a very interesting question to those on the left. In a recent talk he gave as well as a YouTube video for the Big Think he talked about how left and right-wing movements turn toxic, hostile and murderous. He made an interesting claim though: the idea that, definitionally, it is very easy to parse the parts of right wing ideology that are toxic and murderous, and that they, fundamentally, usually come down to racial superiority doctrines. In other the words the conception of and defense of the creation of ethnostates. The idea that one tribal group is genetically superior to the other. However, he has stated that what ideas and ideologies on the left produce murderous results is less clear. How there is not one thing that you can point to in leftist doctrine determines how “bloody minded” a particular leftist movement is. He also said that it is incumbent upon those in leftist circles to find a way to identify their dangerous whack-jobs in order to filter them out. This will be an attempt to do just that. This is just an initial offering it may be expounded upon later.

Peterson talked about things like diversity, inclusion, and egalitarianism as being a sort of bad cocktail for what is problematic about left-wing ideologies. However, Peterson overall seems to have a poor grasp of leftist politics in many respects. That’s fine however, this is not his political movement. These terms are more buzzwords than anything. They tend to be filled in by any person who espouses them with their own political talking points. The true source of issues when it comes to murderous leftists is something wholly at different here. If he really wants to get into these issues he needs to see that the same issue that makes left wing movements murderous is the same thing that makes right wing movements the same. The best reference point here is something that can best be described as the Purity Doctrine. This is an obsession over concepts of purity that one must conform to. Trying to be the purist version of whatever ideology they happen to ascribe to. To that end it is necessary to understand the neuroticism which comes with a purity obsession.

When a person, or group of persons, sets themselves an ideology in opposition to something; that is to say that they exist for the purpose of opposing something rather than working toward a goal for themselves this neurosis comes baked into the very substructures of the groups identity. It is this problem which then bleeds into the ideology going forward to that end it becomes murderous. This is because the offending ideology or race is treated as a contagion which must be eradicated and removed and so any taint of that idea or person must be eliminated. This was seen in the Nazis with their obsession with racial purity and the Aryan ideal. This was seen in the Communists with their persecution of any deviance from their interpretation of Marxist Orthodoxy. Critical thought was not to be tolerated and to that end must be purged from that doctrine, the Nazis did this as well, they just added a racial superiority doctrine to this idea.

I think this comes specifically to Jordan Peterson’s point and something that needs to be countered. He asked a question that was that “Why don’t the Communist doctrines of the 20th century have the same stigma attached to them as the Nazi regime of Germany?” This is a strange question to ask because the answer is rather obvious and it has to do with their proposals and the ideal involved in the slaughter. Both regimes were equally murderous this is true. However, the reason for why the killing was done is what matters here and why the Nazi doctrine is so much more stigmatized than the Communist doctrines which crisscrossed the world. The differences in ideology are what matter here, or more accurately, the differences in rhetoric utilized by the different sides.

The Nazi’s have a proposal which was not present under Communist conceptions. The idea of an inherited racial hierarchy which defined a person’s ability to rise in society and supported an inherently unequal distribution of power and directly advocated for the elimination of whole populations based merely on an accident of birth. The idea being that who you are as a human being was defined entirely by your birth circumstance and that this was unalterable. In other words, if you were born Jewish it didn’t matter that you had lived in Germany your entire life, spoke German, had German friends and were personally loyal to the German state. You were inherently untrustworthy and underhanded and a blight on society for no other reason than circumstances which were entirely out of your control and had almost nothing to do with you. This central founding conceit of Nazi doctrine is where the inherent revulsion lies and it’s not hard to see why. The idea of a racial caste system that places a specific ethnic group as the pinnacle of human achievement, not because of any individual effort or because they have succeeded in their society, but simply due to the accident of birth is something anyone not belonging to that specific racialized group will find inherently repulsive. To quote one of the most famous fascists of the last century “It was clear that we were the superior race. But they couldn't accept that. They wanted to be treated as equals when they most certainly were not… We did not choose to be the superior race. Fate handed us our role.” The fact that the Nazis laboured and killed on behalf of making the world more unequal and stratifying society to place themselves on the top is what makes them repulsive.

Contrast this with the rhetoric used by the Communists. The Communists always stated that their goals lay in universal human brotherhood and the redressing of wrongs done by the powerful. The issue became that those principles were applied to the idea of killing those who had become successful in any system other than the workers paradise. They set themselves up in opposition to the capitalist system rather than shooting for a vision of their own and thus fell victim to a Doctrine of Purity. That any who died did so for a worthy cause which was to help bring about the socialist utopia was taken as a given. This is the difference between the regimes which should be patently obvious to anyone with competent observational skills. The point comes in sympathy for a cause that espouses ideals which seek to help the disadvantaged. This is where marketing becomes a big part of this. Communist doctrines have always been able to sell because they appeal across societal lines. They market the idea of equality to those whom have never been able to succeed in the system as it is constituted. This makes their system a lot more palatable and easy to say that if policies were just gotten right that the utopia would follow. This is the origin of the “that wasn’t real communism” comment. That if the world would just conform to their expectations of it that they would be able to create a paradise for all. This sounds very good, equality and helping others is an easily marketable idea that reaches everywhere and to that end it helps the Communists have a much better image than the Nazis. The fact that the communists laboured and killed on behalf of trying to make society less unequal and stratified and to place the idea of equality as the pinnacle of human good is what gives them a marketing boost the Nazis don’t get.

Professor Peterson seems flabbergasted that anyone would perpetuate an idea like Communism as it has proven so murderous and horrible in so many nations in the past. But it is the philosophy that undergirds it that makes it so seductive to so many and helps with its public image in many ways. Communists have always stated that they work to help the common man by eliminating the structures that disadvantage people in society which most people agree are worthy goals. The extreme right wing on the other hand works to stratify society and place communities in boxes and judge their whole worth based entirely on their genetic makeup and birth circumstance. This is not an inherently marketable position to anyone outside of the specific group which is being touted as the superior evolved human. Communism, absent relevant historical data of the results of these regimes, sounds like a great idea and something that humans should work towards on a fundamental level. Far right philosophy on the other hand has revulsion baked into the very ideology as it openly embraces killing and removing whole groups of people. The universalizing tendency of Communism and the exclusivizing tendency of Fascism directly oppose one another but one is inherently more sympathetic than the other. This short piece should be an opening idea as to why Communism despite its disastrous results in many societies has less stigma attached to it that the Fascist regimes of other nations.

#jordan peterson #left #leftist #right #right wing #fascist #communist #marx #marxism #politics

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nebris · 8 years ago

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The Philosophical Fascists of the Gay Alt-Right

Jack Donovan — a 42-year-old skinhead icon and right-wing extremist — lived the gay life once. It was in the 1990s, after he left his parents’ blue-collar home in rural Pennsylvania to study fine art in New York, when he danced go-go in gay clubs hung out with drag queens and marched for gay pride. But then he dropped out, learned how to use tools and work as a manual laborer, studied MMA, and decided he wasn’t gay — just “an unrepentant masculinist.”

“I am not gay because the word gay connotes so much more than same-sex desire,” Donovan announced, under a pseudonym, on the first page of 2006’s Androphilia: A Manifesto: Rejecting the Gay Identity, Reclaiming Masculinity (echoing, probably unintentionally, the speech Tony Kushner wrote for Roy Cohn in Angels in America). “The word gay describes a whole cultural and political movement that promotes anti-male feminism, victim mentality, and leftist politics.” He appropriated a new term, androphile, to describe a man whose love of masculinity includes sex with other men.

Gay men are remarkably prominent — if not exactly abundant — in the alt-right universe. Take the infamous Milo Yiannopoulos, who powered a meteoric rise and fall on the sheer cognitive dissonance between his flamboyant self-presentation and callous politics. (When Out magazine profiled Milo, the story’s writer Chadwick Moore “came out as a conservative.”) Or artist turned reporter Lucian Wintrich, who joined the White House press corps when Trump-cheering blog Gateway Pundit (edited by a gay man) received its first credential. But even those men seem relatively mainstream when you compare them with Donovan, who has contributed to “dapper white nationalist” (and friend) Richard Spencer’s journal, advocates for a form of “anarcho-fascism,” and founded a chapter of a masculinist “tribe” called the Wolves of Vinland, which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a hate group. (One member recently served time for burning down a historically black church.) Which makes sense when he shows me photos from their neopagan fight-club rituals, which sometimes involve nooses.

To hear Donovan tell it, his sexuality is a nonissue. It’s a point echoed by several of his peers, who don’t see their political views and sexual identities as contradictory but complementary. “Masculinity is a religion, and I see potential for androphiles to become its priests,” Donovan wrote in Androphilia, “to devote themselves to it” in a way that men who understand their manliness through women — in quantifying the number they’ve slept with or measuring “men’s rights” against “women’s rights” — can’t. And so androphiles like Donovan have found common ground with the gender-traditionalists and male-advocacy groups elsewhere in the messy carnival of the new right, where reactions to women range from outright hostility to benign disinterest.

And they’re not interested in queer solidarity, either. “Apart from Camille Paglia, of course, I can’t think of any interesting lesbians,” gay white nationalist James O’Meara told me in an interview. Or as Donovan said, “I think most of them are so married to feminism that I don’t think that’s even an option.” To say nothing of trans issues, which most gay alt-righters rejected (“I know three transgender people in our movement,” Counter-Currents editor Greg Johnson offered, before arguing against the designation. “White nationalism should be straight but not narrow,” he said, inadvertently repeating a slogan popularized by an anti-bullying LGBT nonprofit.) Donovan sees himself as a member of the earliest generation of gay men who could be free to ditch the “victim mentality” of queer politics. In Androphilia, he praises activists who fought to decriminalize gay sex and to combat institutional indifference to AIDS “It would be remiss not to credit the Gay Rights Movement for fighting against this sort of oppression, intolerance, and intentional negligence,” he writes, but “having achieved relative tolerance for same-sex-oriented people in mainstream culture, and having brought an end to police harassment and widespread discrimination, the Gay Rights Movement has turned to nitpicking.” He isn’t against identity politics. He’s loud and proud about his race and his gender — traits that, unlike his sexuality, do not make him a minority. “Ten out of ten minorities agree that being a minority can really blow,” he explains in “Mighty White,” an essay defending white nationalism in those who fear losing, or in some contexts have already lost, majority racial status.

Donovan — whose partner of 20 years is a Trump supporter of Mexican descent — supports white nationalists, but denies belonging in their ranks. “I just think that’s a silly goal,” he says of the so-called white ethnostate. Whiteness, he points out, “is an American approximation of nationality,” which doesn’t make as much sense as, say, German nationalism — which he became familiar with when he delivered a speech praising masculine violence at a far-right German nationalist convention near Leipzig in February. Violence is a component of Donovan’s “gang theory of masculinity,” an idea he became so enamored of that he felt he could not actualize as a man until he had a gang of his own. Enter the Wolves of Vinland, a club started near Lynchburg, Virginia, by brothers Paul and Matthias Waggener, a pair of avid bodybuilders who love blackmetal bands (a.k.a. National Socialist Black Metal bands). The sons of an Orthodox priest, the Waggeners have said in interviews that they experimented with drugs, satanism, and “gangster shit” before discovering neopaganism, also known as “heathenism,” which became the foundation of their club.

“The rest of the Wolves are not homos, and we don’t consider ourselves a white-nationalist or alt-right group,” Donovan clarifies by email. White nationalists and the alt-right do, however, seem to consider them kin, judging by the frequency of pro-Vinland programming in white-nationalist and alt-right media. One thing those groups share is an intellectual foundation of gender and race essentialism: “Our women are females, they’re females, and our males are masculine, and we don’t look for sameness between sexes,” Paul Waggener told Greg Johnson in an interview. To be masculine, a man doesn’t need to have sex with women — although he should probably be stronger than women, and hold his own in brawls, and have tactical skills, and provide. And he should be brave, which is why Donovan gets so irritated when he’s accused of homophobia. “That’s a construction. That’s a silencing word and it’s meant to emasculate,” he says. “When you say someone’s phobic, you’re saying that they’re afraid. That’s why they call men phobic constantly — they’re transphobic, they’re homophobic, they’re afraid of women.” Political correctness “is just a way of calling a man a coward.” (When it comes to language, Jack is more sensitive about ideology than sexuality. He still doesn’t like the word gay but occasionally uses it for conversational expediency and punch lines about “being gay” with his boyfriend about their new pet dog.)

Who feels fear, and why, and whether their fear is rational, seems to be at the heart of the mainstream’s tension with the alt-right. If a man gives a speech called “Violence Is Golden,” is that scary? What if his audience includes white nationalists? And if he’s gay, does that change, well, anything? Not really, says historian Jim Downs, author of Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation. “If you look at every movement, you’re going to find these moments” of unexpected orientations and identities that seem anomalous within a movement. But if enough people join a club, inevitably, some won’t be straight. “There were gay Nazis,” Downs points out. “But follow where the story leads you: They get massacred.” What seems safe at one moment can be taboo a moment later, and traits that are liabilities in one context can be elsewhere. As recently as 2004, Republicans bragged about opposing gay rights to rally the base, while supporters like John Kerry avoided the topic. Today, longstanding opponents of gay rights are the ones who avoid the question — or set aside long-held beliefs in the name of pragmatism.

“I think gays can be particularly useful to the alt-right,” Alternative Right editor Colin Liddell told me. “Our movement is a revolutionary and taboo-busting movement, and gays have the right ‘psychological equipment’ for that. And, because of their lack of immediate family, gays often have a stronger feeling for their ‘wider family.’ The left has successfully displaced this sentiment to the fake ‘gay community’ or to leftist causes in general, but the true wider family for gays is their particular tribal or ethnic group.”

Donovan seems to be living proof of that theory — but not, perhaps, by choice. When I ask if he’d like to have children, he replies, “If I did, it would be with a woman.” He’s jealous of the “multigenerational experience” that straight couples can have just by fucking. Their DNA becomes entwined, playing out together for generations, even after they’re dead. The tribe lives on. “I’ve been really lucky,” he continues. “The guy I’m with, he’s my family. We just got a dog together, and we’re being gay for the dog.” He laughs. “I’m very lucky and, I think, very unusual in that sense. I think a lot of homosexual men end up being alone. I think it’s very unstable and very lonely. It’s not something that’s — like — if I met a young man who would say, ‘Hey, you know, I’m questioning,’ I’d say, ‘Don’t.’ I would advise them, unless there is no other way, I would say, ‘If you have the choice between men and women, be straight.’”

http://nymag.com/thecut/2017/04/jack-donovan-philosophical-fascists-of-the-gay-alt-right.html

#Fascism #gay men

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