#Nazism vs white supremacy

[a-very-tired-jew]

Ya'll need to understand that Nazism does not equal White Supremacy.

Ya'll need to understand that Nazi does not mean "generic bad person". I know that here in the USA our history classes tend to overlook the actual ideology of Nazis and summarize it as white supremacy, but that's not the case. The Nazis even split Europe up into races with them at the top of hierarchy. Hence why they could dehumanize the neighboring countries and attack them.

But at the end of the day Nazi's blamed Jews for the corruption of the other races, all of societies ills, and everything bad. Full stop.

A lot of this has been "whitewashed" for one reason or another. Hell, if you go to Brittanica right now you'll see that the one way they describe Nazis is "an evil person who wants to use power to control and harm other people especially because of their race, religion, etc."

Notice how that doesn't mention anything about antisemitism and their reasoning. It's brushing under the rug that Jew hate placed a key and central role in Nazi ideology.

White supremacy doesn't do that. It blames everyone who does not fit its description of "white" as the source of perceived problems.

For example:

The Nazis killed queer people. We know this. However, they blamed Jews for this "corruption".

White supremacists would blame racial minorities in general or a specific one for the "corruption". They would not place the blame solely on Jews.

There are overlaps, of course, in Nazi ideology and white supremacy, with many of the former being adopted by neo-Nazis who are white supremacists of a specific flavor.

But you need to understand that they're not the same.

So when you go around justifying a pogrom, denying that it was a pre-planned attack on Jews, and even say that "They deserved it"... well you're not a white supremacist.

You're a Nazi.

And you sure as shit wouldn't be one to punch a Nazi nowadays. You just want to punch a "bad person".

[aronarchy]

Full article:

This article appears in our Spring 2023 issue.

Für eine deutsche Übersetzung klicken Sie hier.

Responsa is an editorial column written by members of the Jewish Currents staff and reflects a collective discussion.

All images are excerpted from Cacti, a 2023 photographic series by Rasha Al Jundi, with illustrations by Michael Jabareen. These images were taken in significant locations around Berlin—including at memorials to the Holocaust and the Berlin Wall—with figures in keffiyehs inserting themselves into the frame, to protest the way Palestinian voices have been silenced in contemporary Germany.

Sometime in the 2000s, a group of mostly Turkish women from an immigrant group called Neighborhood Mothers began meeting in the Neukölln district of Berlin to learn about the Holocaust. Their history lessons were part of a program facilitated by members of the Action Reconciliation Service for Peace, a Christian organization dedicated to German atonement for the Shoah. The Neighborhood Mothers were terrified by what they learned in these sessions. “How could a society turn so fanatical?” a group member named Nazmiye later recalled thinking. “We began to ask ourselves if they could do such a thing to us as well… whether we would find ourselves in the same position as the Jews.” But when they expressed this fear on a church visit organized by the program, their German hosts became apoplectic. “They told us to go back to our countries if this is how we think,” Nazmiye said. The session was abruptly ended and the women were asked to leave.

There are a number of anecdotes like this in anthropologist Esra Özyürek’s Subcontractors of Guilt, a recently published study of the array of German Holocaust education programs dedicated to integrating Arab and Muslim immigrant communities into the country’s ethos of responsibility and atonement for Nazi crimes. As Özyürek shows, those who pass through these programs often draw connections their guides do not intend—to nativist violence in contemporary Germany, or to the bloody circumstances they fled in Syria, Turkey, and Palestine. For many Germans, the anxieties these historical encounters stoke for migrants are, in Özyürek’s words, the “wrong emotions.” One German guide who leads concentration camp tours recalled being “irritated” by members of immigrant tour groups voicing the fear that “they will be sent there next.” “There was a sense that they didn’t belong here, and that they should not be engaging with the German past,” the guide said. To be really German, they were supposed to play the part of repentant perpetrators, not potential victims.

This expectation has become the basis for what scholars Michael Rothberg and Yasemin Yildiz have called the “migrant double bind.” In this paradigm, the core of contemporary “Germanness” is found in a certain sensitivity to antisemitism, conferred through a direct, likely familial relationship to the Third Reich. Migrants and racialized minorities are expected to assume the per­petrators’ legacy; when they fail, this is taken as a sign that they do not really belong in Germany. In other words, in a paradox typical of the upside-down dynamics surrounding Jews, Arabs, and Germans in contemporary Germany, a questionably conceived anti-antisemitism has become the mechanism for keeping Germanness Aryan.

These dynamics are largely absent from the mainstream story about memory culture in Germany, which in recent decades has cemented its reputation as a paragon of national reckoning. For The Atlantic’s December 2022 cover story, poet and scholar Clint Smith traveled to Germany to see for himself what the country’s atonement process might teach the United States about confronting its own history of racist atrocity. In the piece’s final line, he appears to give the Germans an A for effort: “It is the very act of attempting to remember that becomes the most powerful memorial of all.” Smith is far from the only one to come away impressed by Germany’s example; from Canada to Britain to Japan, observers have looked to Germany as a model for how to contend with their own nations’ crimes. As Andrew Silverstein reports in this issue, Spanish memory activists seeking to jump-start their country’s internal reckoning with the violence of Francisco Franco’s fascist dictatorship have adopted the German practice of installing “Stolpersteine,” or remembrance stones, in the street.

Germany’s commitment to memory is undeniably impressive; no other global power has worked nearly as hard to apprehend its past. Yet while the world praises its culture of contrition, some Germans—in particular, Jews, Arabs, and other minorities—have been sounding the alarm that this approach to memory has largely been a [self-centered] enterprise, with strange and disturbing consequences. German Jewish poet and public intellectual Max Czollek’s polemic against German memory culture, De-Integrate!, came out in English this year and is reviewed in this issue by Sanders Isaac Bernstein. The book draws on German Jewish sociologist Y. Michal Bodemann’s concept of the “Theater of Memory,” a coinage meant to describe the role of German Jews in a narrative that is less about making amends to victims of genocide than about redeeming perpetrators and their descendants. As Bodemann wrote in 1991 of the expectation placed on Jews in the recently reunified German state: “Irrespective of their personal orientations, beliefs or histories, Jews in their bodily presence were to represent the new German democracy and as such execute ideological labor.” Jews have played this part all too well, Czollek argues, allowing Germans who once shrank from expressions of nationalism, afraid of what they might do with it, to feel that they have earned its return. The result is a[n]… explosion of nationalist sentiment, which Czollek sees in events ranging from the disturbing 2017 success of the right-wing populist party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in parliament, to the seemingly more benign flag-waving fervor around Germany’s hosting of the 2006 World Cup.

That these post-unification desires for national identity play out against Germany’s immigrant population—especially Arabs and Muslims—is unsurprising. As the number of asylum seekers from the Middle East surged in the 2010s, so did the far-right violence against them; the deadliest such attack to date occurred in 2020, when a gunman killed nine people with migrant backgrounds in the city of Hanau, explicitly targeting locations he assumed to be frequented by non-Germans. In a manifesto he called for the “complete extermination” of many “races or cultures in our midst.” Although the German state has denounced such extremism, it allows nonwhite ��Others” into its polity on highly limited, subordinate terms. As we write this, the Berlin police have once again cited antisemitism concerns to issue preemptive bans on protests in support of Palestinian prisoners and in honor of Nakba Day, when Palestinians mark their expulsion by Zionist forces during the State of Israel’s founding. (Recently, the police admitted that those arrested at last year’s banned protests were targeted for wearing keffiyehs or displaying the colors of the Palestinian flag, reminiscent of similar crackdowns on the flag within Israel.) What is clear is that Germans tightly control the shape of both Jewishness and Palestinianness within their borders—a state of affairs that belies the supposedly humanizing effects of Holocaust memory.

We are neither the first to discuss these dynamics nor are we directly in their blast radius. But we write in solidarity with German Jewish leftists who—because yesterday’s Germans massacred them and today’s Germans erase them—have been marginalized in their attempts to organize, as well as with minoritized populations who face state-sanctioned repression under the guise of responsible historical stewardship. We write to alert our American readership to the ways in which Germany has become a primary political battleground in the fight over what Jewishness means now—and how that affects Palestinians across the globe. And we write in an attempt to speak directly to Germans, to share how these matters have struck the editors of one Jewish magazine dedicated simultaneously to Jewish life, Palestinian freedom, and Holocaust memory—a magazine where W.E.B. Du Bois published his 1952 dispatch from the Warsaw Ghetto and where Nazi hunter Charles R. Allen Jr. penned exposés on Reich members harbored by the US government. In short, the current state of German memory culture appears to us as a double-sided coin of farce and tragedy.

Germany took its time becoming an icon of remorse and reconciliation. Initially, as the nation rushed to rebuild after the war, the zeitgeist, especially in West Germany, tended toward denial: The novelist W.G. Sebald credited the country’s remarkable regeneration to “the well-kept secret of the corpses built into the foundations of our state, a secret that bound all Germans together in the postwar years.” In this period, both East and West Germany had to contend with the horrifically awkward fact that support for the Nazi Party had remained high among the general population until Hitler’s defeat rendered it unspeakable. West Germany responded largely by sweeping it under the rug, “rehabilitating” most Nazis and reintegrating them into society. East Germany did not run from the legacy of the Nazis, committing to frequent public commemoration of their crimes, but it largely followed the practices of the Soviet Union—the young country’s chief political and economic sponsor—by memorializing victims of fascism in general, rather than specifically acknowledging a genocide of Jews. It also welcomed former lower-ranking Nazis into the fold of the republic’s newer antifascist identity. Later generations of Germans, including some radicals of the 1960s and ’70s, washed their hands of the problem in a different way, forging a guilt-free political identity out of the fact that they were born after the rise of Nazism.

Beginning in the 1980s, however, amid a growing worldwide interest in memorials and the rise of “memory studies,” German activists began to push for more acknowledgment of the Holocaust. In the face of a reticent conservative government, leftist organizers staged dramatic actions, like occupying concentration camp sites and hosting a symbolic archaeological “dig” on the grounds where Gestapo headquarters once stood, to push Germany to provide public education in such places. During the reunification process at the end of the decade, what had begun as a grassroots effort became official state policy.

This national embrace of memorial was not without self-interest: To show itself fit to enter the community of Western European nations, a new, reunified Germany set out to prove, over the next two decades, that it had sufficiently repented. Germans even coined a new word—Vergangenheitsbewältigung—to name the process of “coming to terms with the past” that has become a linchpin of German national identity. Seeking to bolster its claim to penitence, the newly reunified country trumpeted a “Jewish renaissance” driven largely by immigration from the former Soviet Union—an influx of Jews that, as the scholar Hannah Tzuberi has put it, became the “most valuable guarantor of [Germany’s] democratic, liberal, tolerant character.” In 2005, the nation made this commitment visible and material by erecting the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a vast field of stark concrete slabs in the center of Berlin. (The memorial was largely the result of lobbying by Lea Rosh, a German who swapped her first name, Edith, for a Jewish one, and who was later criticized for stealing a tooth from the Belzec concentration camp to put in a column at the memorial.) As a result of this extensive performance of public contrition, “Germany is finally equipped to assume the leadership of the EU; for even beyond its economic hegemony, it has its cards in order also from the human rights viewpoint,” the historian Enzo Traverso remarked sarcastically in Jacobin last year. “Today [Holocaust memory] has become the sign of a new political normativity: market society, liberal democracy, and (selective) defense of human rights.”

But Germany’s performances of repentance have their limits. They do not extend, for example, to the genocide the German colonial army committed in Namibia against Herero and Nama people between 1904 and 1908, killing tens of thousands. Germany did not officially apologize for those bloody acts until 2021 and has not agreed to pay meaningful reparations to descendants of the victims. If the new German identity relies on isolating the Holocaust as a shameful aberration in national history and nullifying it via solemn remembrance, there is little room for the memory of colonial violence in the nation’s self-mythology. Genocide scholar Dirk Moses named this approach the “German catechism” in a 2021 essay that sparked heated debate. “The catechism implies a redemptive story in which the sacrifice of Jews in the Holocaust by Nazis is the premise for the Federal Republic’s legitimacy,” wrote Moses. “That is why the Holocaust is more than an important historical event. It is a sacred trauma that cannot be contaminated by profane ones—meaning non-Jewish victims and other genocides—that would vitiate its sacrificial function.”

Accordingly, Germany now sees its post-Holocaust mandate as encompassing not a broader commitment against racism and violence but a specific fealty to a certain Jewish political formation: the State of Israel. Germany has relied on its close diplomatic relationship to Israel to emphasize its repudiation of Nazism, but its connection to the Jewish state goes even further. In 2008, then-chancellor Angela Merkel addressed the Israeli Knesset to declare that ensuring Israel’s security was part of Germany’s “Staatsraison,” the state’s very reason for existence. If asked why it is worth preserving a German nationalism that produced Auschwitz, Germany now has a pleasing, historically symmetrical answer—it exists to support the Jewish state.

To that end, in recent years, Germany’s laudable apparatus for public cultural funding has been used as a tool for enacting a 2019 Bundestag resolution declaring that the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement targeting Israel is antisemitic. Although the resolution is technically nonbinding, its passage has led to an unending stream of firings and event cancellations, and to the effective blacklisting of distinguished academics, cultural workers, artists, and journalists for offenses like inviting a renowned scholar of postcolonialism to speak, tweeting criticism of the Bundestag resolution, or having attended a Palestinian solidarity rally in one’s youth. A network of antisemitism commissioners—a system explored in this issue in a feature by Peter Kuras—has been deputized to monitor such offenses. These commissioners are typically white, Christian Germans, who speak in the name of the Jews and often playact Jewishness on a public stage, posing for photo ops in yarmulkes, performing Jewish music, wearing the uniform of the Israeli police, and issuing decrees on who is next in the pillory. When they tangle with left-wing Jews in Germany, canceling their events and attacking them as antisemites in the pages of various newspapers, they suggest what Germany’s antisemitism commissioner Felix Klein has said directly: That the Jews are not being sensitive enough to what antisemitism means to the Germans—that, in fact, these Jews do not understand antisemitism at all. In a perverse twist, the fact that the Germans were the most successful antisemites in history has here become a credential. By becoming the Jews’ consummate protectors, Germans have so thoroughly absorbed the moral lessons bestowed by Jewish martyrdom that they have no more need for the Jew except as symbol; by the logic of this strange supersessionism, Germans have become the new Jews. This is not only a matter of rhetorical authority on Jewish matters but is also often literal, as this self-reflexive philosemitism has led to a wave of German converts to Judaism. According to Tzuberi, “The Jewish revival is desired precisely because it is a German revival.”

If Jews are negated by this formulation, Palestinians are villainized by it. Last year, when the German state banned Nakba Day demonstrations, only days after the murder of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, police justified this suppression by claiming, in a familiar racist trope, that protesters would not have been able to contain their violent rage. Indeed, in Germany Palestinian identity itself has become a marker of antisemitism, scarcely to be spoken aloud—even as the country is home to the largest Palestinian community in Europe, with a population of around 100,000. “Whenever I would mention that I was Palestinian, my teachers were outraged and said that I should refer to [Palestinians] as Jordanian,” one Palestinian German woman speaking of her secondary school education told the reporter Hebh Jamal. Palestinianness as such has thus been stricken from German public life. In The Moral Triangle, a 2020 anthropological study of Palestinian and Israeli communities in Germany by Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor, many Palestinians interviewed said that to speak of pain or trauma they’ve experienced due to Israeli policy is to destroy their own futures in Germany. “The Palestinian collective body is inscribed as ontologically antisemitic until proven otherwise. Palestinians, in this sense, are collateral damage of the intensifying German wish for purification from antisemitism,” wrote Tzuberi.

The ever-vigilant Germans are correct that antisemitism is on the rise in Germany—but its source is right-wing, white Germans. As in the US, the data affirms that no other group comes close to perpetuating the same amount of anti-Jewish activity. The AfD still sits in parliament, where they have pushed to curb Holocaust memorialization. The Covid-19 pandemic has sparked a loud, conspiratorial anti-vax movement that blames you know who. Meanwhile, more and more right-wing extremists are filling the ranks of the German police, the armed forces, the intelligence services, even the Bundestag. This does not seem to worry Germany’s antisemitism crusaders. For them, this is nothing compared to BDS, which makes Palestinians—and Muslims more broadly—the focal point of conversations about antisemitism. Officials speak casually of the “imported antisemitism” arriving with migrants from the Middle East. As Özyürek argues in Subcontractors of Guilt, the Germans have “offload[ed] the general German social problem of antisemitism onto the Middle Eastern-background minority.” The commendable liberalization of citizenship laws in Germany, which made it easier for immigrants to obtain German citizenship, has contributed to these dynamics, sparking an anxiety about Germanness that has re­sulted in the aforementioned “migrant double bind,” in which white Germans (or “bio-Deutsch” as they’re revealingly called in German) reinscribe their belonging through a specific performance of anti-antisemitism. The method of repudiating a racist past has become a mechanism for extending it into the future.

Germany is not the only place where anti-antisemitism efforts have gone utterly awry. In fact, Jewish communal organizations across the globe have pursued similar measures with similarly illiberal results. For the philosopher Elad Lapidot, author of Jews Out of the Question: A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism, such campaigns are inherently limiting. Lapidot argues that the well-intentioned desire to combat the idea of Jews as a distinct race with inherent biological characteristics has resulted in a taboo on discussing Jews as sharing any characteristics at all, whether religiously, culturally, politically, or otherwise. “The Jewish collective posited by anti-antisemitic discourse constitutes existence without essence, community without qualities,” he wrote in Tablet in 2021. “Anti-antisemitism tries to fight antisemitism by denying that Judaism exists.” It is only fair to acknowledge that, globally, it is Jews who are most often the drivers of this self-effacing work, as well as of the pro-Israel politics that almost always accompany it; if the Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland, the largest federation of Jews in Germany, were the primary agents of anti-antisemitism policy in Germany, things would likely be no better. But there is something worth examining in the particular fervor with which Germans have taken to the task, an annihilative echo in how the substance of Jewishness and Palestinianness is being actively drained through the pageant of anti-antisemitism. Only Germans—their guilt, their shame, their overcoming, their secret pride—are three-dimensional figures in this schema.

German philosemitism is thus revealed as another vehicle for supremacy, preferable precisely because of its anti-racist veneer. Germany’s crushing embrace of the Jewish community within its borders, with or without the participation of Jews, secures the German self-image as a moral arbiter while casting the country’s guilt onto Arabs and Muslims. This works similarly on an international level, where Germany’s Staatsraison is linked to protection of the Jewish state. Not for nothing did Mathias Döpfner, CEO of the media and technology company Axel Springer, recently synthesize, without a hint of irony, the phrase “Zionismus über alles”—Zionism above all. These words allude to the erstwhile first line of the German national anthem, “Deutschland Über Alles,” now officially stricken from the song due to its association with Nazi Germany. We might refer to this form of displaced nationalism—in which Germans enact their national aspirations via Jews and the State of Israel—as replacement supremacy: a process by which national supremacy is preserved through its projection onto a surrogate state.

The implications of this analysis are obviously threatening to the German national self-conception. We are aware, moreover, that these conclusions will be difficult to countenance in Germany in part because they incorporate a critique of the Israeli state—a position that is already profoundly marginalized. Even Czollek, who has made his name by calling out German nationalism, has actively refused to incorporate criticism of Israel into his schema, a position that has surely helped secure his warm reception in German cultural life. It will take bravery for German citizens and leaders alike to begin re-interrogating the contours of German memory culture—not in spite of what they owe to the Nazis’ victims, Jewish and otherwise, but because of it. Such a reexamination may begin to restore some meaning to Jewishness, and some humanity to individual Jews, in the German psyche. It might also do the same for Palestinians, whose families remain under the yoke of Israeli oppression even as their identities are erased by German policy. Only by undertaking such an effort could Germany hope to offer a powerful repudiation, not just of its own nationalist impulse, but of the ethnonationalist project that it currently protects in Israel. After all, the Jewish supremacy that currently resounds from the hilltop settlements to the halls of Knesset is in part a German legacy, a perverted lesson of the Shoah.

All of this will require a different mode of engagement with memory and its prescriptions for the present. In Reconsidering Reparations, the philosopher Olúfémi O. Táíwò offers an alternative to turning to a fixed idea of the past in order to determine what justice looks like now. Instead, Táíwò calls for a “constructive view” of reparations that “respond[s] both to today’s injustices in distribution and the accumulated result of history’s distributive injustices.” He asks: “What if building the just world was reparations?” This forward-looking framework requires above all an attunement to the structure of supremacy, and an awareness that its targets and its expression might expand or change. In the ’80s and ’90s, Germans called for a reckoning. They organized candlelit vigils, formed historical research groups, and occupied Nazi-era buildings in order to ensure they were preserved as evidence. Today, an inclusive German people must harness that spirit anew, grabbing these processes away from the state and state-funded institutions if need be, and rerooting them in the fight against supremacy in all its guises. The work of remembering is never complete. In a process fixed to a receding past, this may begin to feel like an albatross; Germans might understandably be tempted to declare themselves finished. Yet perhaps there is not only obligation but also release in discovering that memory can be a terrain of world-building, too.

This responsa is indebted to Emily Dische-Becker, Ben Ratskoff, Michael Rothberg, and Jürgen Zimmerer.

"Accordingly, Germany now sees its post-Holocaust mandate as encompassing not a broader commitment against racism and violence but a specific fealty to a certain Jewish political formation: the State of Israel. Germany has relied on its close diplomatic relationship to Israel to emphasize its repudiation of Nazism, but its connection to the Jewish state goes even further. In 2008, then-chancellor Angela Merkel addressed the Israeli Knesset to declare that ensuring Israel’s security was part of Germany’s “Staatsraison,” the state’s very reason for existence. If asked why it is worth preserving a German nationalism that produced Auschwitz, Germany now has a pleasing, historically symmetrical answer—it exists to support the Jewish state.

...

A network of antisemitism commissioners—a system explored in this issue in a feature by Peter Kuras—has been deputized to monitor such offenses. These commissioners are typically white, Christian Germans, who speak in the name of the Jews and often playact Jewishness on a public stage, posing for photo ops in yarmulkes, performing Jewish music, wearing the uniform of the Israeli police, and issuing decrees on who is next in the pillory. When they tangle with left-wing Jews in Germany, canceling their events and attacking them as antisemites in the pages of various newspapers, they suggest what Germany’s antisemitism commissioner Felix Klein has said directly: That the Jews are not being sensitive enough to what antisemitism means to the Germans—that, in fact, these Jews do not understand antisemitism at all. In a perverse twist, the fact that the Germans were the most successful antisemites in history has here become a credential. By becoming the Jews’ consummate protectors, Germans have so thoroughly absorbed the moral lessons bestowed by Jewish martyrdom that they have no more need for the Jew except as symbol; by the logic of this strange supersessionism, Germans have become the new Jews. This is not only a matter of rhetorical authority on Jewish matters but is also often literal, as this self-reflexive philosemitism has led to a wave of German converts to Judaism. According to Tzuberi, “The Jewish revival is desired precisely because it is a German revival.”"

[jewelleria]

Did you edit the rest of the photos from the post on zionism vs kahanism? Was nice seeing indian and other jewish poc rep 🥺

hi! yes i removed them because i was trying to create a separate post—i didn’t want my pinned post to be too long, and most of my asks these days are just ashsoles who insist that zionism is white supremacy and nazism in disguise blah blah blah. but here you go! have some beautiful israeli joy!

[selkiesstories]

Nice post on the Anti-Semitism in HOTD and while I don't think it was their intention to do that, I can't deny that their progressive politics (both GRRM and Condal/Hess) makes them susceptible to adding those anti-sematic tropes because most sects of socialism (both Communisms and Fascism) are imbedded deeply with anti-Semitic and Anti-Christian doctrine. The Soviets, the Chi-Coms, and the Nazi - even the British as well - have both anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic ideologies baked into their cultural make up, some till this very day.

I could say that the portrayal of the Greens are just as filled with Anti-Catholic tropes as Anti-Sematic, but anyone who studies history knows that both go hand in hand in a lot places in Protestant dominated areas of both the past and present West.

To add to your post, I would say that Daemon exemplifies the Nazi trop of the Uber-Mensch - Super-man - who believes in the supremacy of himself due to his race and holds no religion but the idea that he is his own god and cannot be judged by the moral constraints of the "Normal People". GRRM and his rewriting deification of Daemon in later editions of Westrosi history has veered dangerously close to these Nazi tropes.

And while his aim was to write a character "in equal parts heroic and villainous" - his nihilistic writing and philosophies along with his progressive politics have set him on the path to the Fascistic fetishizations that we're starting to see from the left-wing in the West in the revival of Nazi authoritarianism and attitudes under a different more 'compassionate' guise. As wells as the moral good being relative and self-principled rather than the divine ideals of Jerusalem wed to the philosophy of Athens, and the civilized social orders of Rome.

With all the current day bullshit of "Anti-Zionism" - which we all know what they really mean, even if they can't admit it to themselves - it's hard not to see the anti-Semitism in a lot of things. But I do think that GRRM, Condal, and Hess's bullshit politics make them incredibly vulnerable to falling into Anti-Jewish storytelling based on progressivism being built entirely on anti-Semitism and Ant-Christian values.

They wouldn't even question it.

Oh I definitely don’t think it was intentional if only because I think the show runners have only the most shallow knowledge of history if that. Doubtless what little they know is of the-why should we learn about Henry VIII just because he’s a white man?- variety. I agree that they lean towards the ideological purity of the Communist rather than the racial purity of Nazis, and because most of academia never fell out of love with Stalin the way they did with Hitler this is seen as a good thing. (Obviously ideological vs racial purity is an oversimplification since the two got hopelessly muddled but it’s a good starting point) The rest of s2 certainly made it plain that Condal & Hess have never heard about Ravensbrück or really anything about women and Nazism besides the tired “the Nazis were misogynistic”.

I didn’t really get into Daemon but you’re right, maybe at some point I’ll do a post on the Aryan tropes I’ve noticed with them.

Personally I find it fascinating that Nazism is so often conflated with Christian nationalism since historically it was very much not the case. There were places that is was such as the Ustaše in Croatia, but Nazism very much downplayed Christianity to the point where Wilm Hosenfeld wrote in his diary in 1944 that the youngest German soldiers had no real concept of Christmas. There’s probably a great paper on Nazi anti Christianity as an expression of Nazi antisemitism especially if you can work in the overlap with antisemitism and anti Catholicism vis-à-vis Protestantism as Christianity to Catholicism’s Judaism.

Thanks for the ask!

[elbiotipo]

Not to add anything further to the "party" you had yesterday but I think the points they were trying to make is that even if you are from South America you're still white and benefit from whiteness in a racist society; and also it seemed tou were lumping all Americans together while disregarding the specific problems Black and Indigenous people face in the US, just because they live in a "first world country".

Example for better understanding: Messi has much more privilege than Mbappe despite one being from South America and the other being from Europe for very obvious reasons.

I told myself that I wouldn't argue again, but this is true, and I do thank you for pointing it out. Even as frustrating as the latest conversations have been, I do not want to dismiss the fact that minorities in the United States are victims of racist oppression, or that white people in Latin America do not also have privilege because of the racism that exists in our societies.

However, to add your your example, Mbappé is French and European, thus citizen of a first-world nation, and also, like Messi, someone of a high socioeconomic status. This does grant someone like him different privileges over people of the third world, and one expects people from the first world to have the conscioussness of their status and why do they have the socioeconomic wealth and power they hold. Concepts such as privilege do not only go through race or ethnicity, they are multilayered through many factors.

This is why a "Whites vs. PoC" conception is massively flawed, and a poor way to see the world in my opinion, especially with as arbitrary as a concept race is. In fact, to divide the world between "white countries" and others is a major goal of nazism and white supremacy, and thus such thinking is, in my opinion and as harsh as it sounds, its mirror image.

One could argue that a first-world/third-world dichotomy also has its flaws, but it is in my opinion more comprehensive.

This is the last post (again) I'm gonna do about this, because you did make a good argument and I want to end this with a little more nuance. Thank you for your ask.

[batmancomicanalysis]

Psycholinguistic problems with "white" for ethno-conservationists

1. Taken literally it's just a shade on the colour spectrum (and not even an accurate one: virtually no ones skin is as white as a sheet of paper, albinos possibly excepted) and thus trivialised (“white” isn’t even capitalised), stripped of history, biology, territory, culture and ethnicity

2. Although it represents masculinity in the yin-yang dichotomy and has historically been linked to political (European colonialism, monarchy) and religious (God, light) power, white has become increasingly feminine-coded archetypally, associated with beauty and bridehood (white woman, white wedding dress), surrender and peace (white flag), civilisation, sterility, neuroticism and masochistic violation (morality, cleanliness, purity, innocence), guilt, fragility, cold (snow, ice), vanilla (blandness, boredom), absence, nothingness and emptiness (blank canvas), receptivity and recessiveness (artistically and phenotypically)

3. Its literal opposite is the now masculine-coded (and always mysterious and dangerous) black, which implies necessity, equality (or even black supremacy) and ultimately symbiosis/death, potentially enflaming a black-white neurosis for white racialists (white women and black men are polar opposites in this linguistic duality, potentially implying greater attraction and the relative androgyny of white men) when no such inherent duality exists between Europeans and Africans, nor is politics accurately understood exclusively or even primarily as a conflict between Europeans and Africans, which a “black and white” view of race encourages

4. It's potentially inclusive of non/anti-Europeans with light pigmentation (for instance, Noel Ignatiev and Tim Wise have claimed to be white while advocating for "the destruction of whiteness")

5. It's a term that has been heavily demonised: people (and even white racialists subconsciously) have been reflexively conditioned to associate the racial-political category of white with evil, catastrophe and defeat (Confederacy, Nazi Germany, Neo-Nazism), as though its ultimate destruction is a historical, biological and metaphysical good and an inevitability

Its contemporary status as a negative exonym is revealed by the fact that opponents of European ethnic preservation affirm the framing of “white vs everyone else”, claim that “whiteness” is inherently evil, aim to abolish "white privilege" and label their enemies “white supremacists”.

Also, do yellows or browns approve of being called yellows/browns, or do they prefer "Asian", "Latin", "Arab" etc.

This collection of points makes “white nationalism”, “white identitarianism”, “pro-white” (all American concepts in origin, thus less relevant for non-American Europeans) etc. counterproductive as self-identifying labels.

[shehasaudacity]

It’s so disgusting how certain groups of people are being coddled in society. Every group of people both have good and bad within them. But certain groups are just seen as the “true” victim even though they’re not. I hate that I have to bring up religion but I’m tired of seeing my religion being seen as “supremacist” and filled with hatred when it’s the complete opposite. This whole majority can out right over rule a minority is such a false equivalence. If you actually put things into perspective the religion that mostly makes up the world both belong to Abrahamic religions. Moreover, looking at the majority vs minority argument, there are clear instances of minorities using their power and resources to subject the majority population. Especially when the minority are clearly being uplifted both in a domestic country and internationally. The point I’m trying to make is, as a Hindu and seeing my religion being compared to white supremacy and Nazism is such a nonsense thing I have heard considering that the people who are Hindus are one of the most persecuted people in the world. Just because of religious differences and actual supremacy coming from Abrahamic religions. Whenever, Hindus point this out, they are labeled as “racist, supremacist and have racial/ religious slurs thrown at them”. How is pointing out actual historical facts considered racism? It’s actual racism that you would deny the struggles of one group to coddle another. You aren’t a social activist. You are a manipulator who runs with a narrative. Some people might not understand the history and struggles that Hindus face, but you should not be vocal on the issue. I had a couple of Professors who would clearly mislabel Hindus as “supremacists” because it’s become a new trend to do so. Hinduphobia is so deep rooted in our society and in our educational institutions to the point where Hindus are being silenced and I’m not okay with that. We should have the right to speak out just like any other group.

[skaldish]

Hey - i am looking to become more of a spiritual person and I did some research into my lineage which led me to norse paganism. I've seen some pretty disconcerting search results about nazi's. i've seen some blogs that are very blatantly homophobic, transphobic, racist, misogynistic. i am very concerned about continuing this journey... but i came to your page and noticed you had pronouns and nazi's not welcome so i was curious if you could help me steer clear of troubled water?

TOPIC: Navigating White Supremacy in Heathenry

I certainly can! Nazism in Heathenry is a pretty extensive topic but I can definitely give you the lowdown to get started:

Where It Came From

The blending of Norse Paganism with pro-Aryan concepts began with Neo-Völkisch movement of the late 19th century, continuing into the rise of Nazi Germany. This time period produced Else Christensen, a Dane who espoused a lot of Nazi ideals. She immigrated to Canada in 1951 and connected with the New York branch of the American Nazi Party, where she acquired notes on a new religion called “Odinism.” This religion was originally intended for the American Nazi Party before that idea was scrapped.

Christensen greatly expanded on Odinism and founded the Odinist Fellowship in 1969; this is where a lot of “racialist” ideals come from in Heathenry. Once established, she taught Odinism in the United States, particularly to prison inmates during the 70′s and 80′s. Before imprisoned for drug trafficking in 1993, she gave her membership notes to Stephen McNallen, who used them to build the Asatru Folk Assembly.

Heathenry that espouses “racialist” and “ethno-nationalist” views is called Folkish or Neo-Völkisch Heathenry. Because this is the first form of Heathenry to really be popularized in America, it’s the most common. Many Heathen books and resources are Folkish in nature or cite Folkish resources in their work. This is further confounded by the fact that European Heathens are now very suspicious of American Heathens and keep their material to themselves. Not many books by European Heathen authors are available in English, and the ones that are require digging deep for. Fortunately, not all Heathen books written by Americans are Folkish.

How to Navigate This

Unfortunately, all this this means you really have to be your own navigator in your Heathen practice. This is very different than, say, a Protestant approach, where you lean on authorities for guidance. Not so much in Heathenry.

While no book or resource out there is going to be truly unproblematic, you can definitely arm yourself with tools to navigate troubling material and grow your Heathen practice:

Google your authors. I can’t stress this enough. Learn about an author’s lineage, affiliations, and reputation. If you need to, type in “[author name]+controversy” into Google search.

Seek a wide variety of resources. There’s no right, true, or best way to be Heathen. Anyone or anything saying so is probably selling something. You can get started with some resources by visiting my pinned post and clicking on “Resources.” That’ll take you to a bank of resources I and others have vetted.

Recognize dogwhistles. I have another article called Discerning Dubious Heathen Resources you can find in my pinned post. It discusses the kinds of shady behavior I’ve personally witnessed in books and articles. It also contains a list of Folkish “dogwhistles.” A dogwhistle is a kind of coded language used to signal alliance with a belief.

Be cautious of dogmas. Is a resource saying you have to do X to be Heathen? Does it suggest Heathenry has a certain look, or has values you must follow? Stuff that’s more Folkish in nature has a habit of focusing on how Heathenry should be.

Don’t let communities, people, or resources prey on your resentment for Christianity. I’m not sure what your personal relationship is with Christianity, but I’m putting this here anyway. Many American Heathens come from Protestant backgrounds. Sometimes they’re resentful of this upbringing. A healthy community won’t encourage you to define your Heathenry by how much it opposes Christianity. Communities that do keep you in a place of anger, which makes it easier for you to believe in the “us vs. them” ideals found in Neo-Völkish Heathenry. You deserve to move past Christianity, not make it your “enemy.” If you need to heal from Christianity, I recommend seeking out a professional that can help you with that.

Some Closing Statements

Here are some extra random thoughts to make navigating Heathenry easier for you. Not sure if it’ll all make sense to you right now, but it’s worth saying:

Sonnenrad, or the Black Sun, is a Nazi symbol created for Nazis by Nazis. It’s based off actual historical Norse motifs known as “sun wheels”. The Black Sun has made its way into Heathen circles but is not Heathen itself.

The word “Folkish” can’t be reclaimed because it was never ours to begin with. It’s name is a callback to the Germanic Völkisch Movement. If you want to describe an ancestral Heathen practice, just say “ancestral practice.”

The word “Odinist” can’t be reclaimed either, nor is it a fancy word for “Odinsperson.” It distinctly describes the Neo-Völkisch designation.

The Nine Noble Virtues were created by the Asatru Folk Assembly and contain Neo-Völkisch beliefs. They’re not universal or ancient Heathen values by any means.

Speaking of ancient, calling Ásatrú an “ancient religion” is misinformation. The word was coined in the 1970′s and describes reconstructed Heathen practices. The ancient Norsepeople didn’t have a word for their practices. Likewise, there are no surviving pre-Christian Heathen lineages.

The Poetic and Prose Edda are historical texts that preserve stories about ancient Norse Pagan gods and heroes, but they aren’t scripture. Hávamál is not scripture either, though some Heathens do find spiritual value in it.

Controversy over Loki only really exists in America. This is due to the fact we live in a very culturally Christian society. Loki is absolutely beloved in countries all over Europe and isn’t regarded as an “evil” figure.

Heathenry is an open practice and therefore can be practiced by anyone.

I think that’s it for an overview! Like I said, it’s a big topic. Let me know if you have any more questions and I’ll do my best to answer! @yumsauce 

[enigma-boi]

White Fascism is only a form of fascism, not the alpha and omega of fascism. While its true that White Fascism is the more widespread, insidious and most powerful form of fascism because of white supremacy, any ethnic or religious group has the ability to become fascist and form their unique forms of fascism. Because fascism is a pliable ideology that can me morphed and plugged into where needs fit regardless of the ethnic makeup, dominant religion or economic system of the group doing fascism. Umberto Eco discusses this in Ur Fascism

This is why even forms of White Fascism are different from each other, such Nazism vs Falangism. The needs and ideaologies differed enough between the German and Spanish fascists that even with their shared base the two forms of fascism are unique.

So again. Literally ANY group regardless of background has the -potential- to be fascist, because fascism isn't exclusive to white people. And that means yall can stop being like "You can't call Imperial Japan a fascist state! The Japanese are POC who were brutalized by white people so to say that they're fascists is obscenely offensive."

[favoritefightingfrenchgoth]

 huge masterlist of leftist (mainy, some lib) videos, some docs, some articles, divided by topic: that i will edit and add more to later:

Far Right/Alt Right/Fascists:

Charlottesville: The True Alt Right (Goes over the entire Charlottesville rally while using footage/images from the rally and march, including footage from the Nazis that they had livestreamed, how the Nazis began assaulting antifascist protestors, responses to the incident, and how ALL of them are Nazis)

The Cult of Tradition (Goes over the myths and truths of the Founding Fathers/ colonizers, slave owners, American Revolution. Argues against the defenders of statues and monuments)

Philosophy of anti-fascists

Decrypting the Alt Right, how to recognize a fascist + Debating the Alt Right + How to Never Lose a Debate with a Fascist + The Alt Right Playbook series

Handmaids Tale: Spotting Fascism (shows clips from the show including gore),

How to lose an argument

Fox News keeps breaking its own rules

Why the Alt Right is Wrong + What the Alt Right fears + The Lies of Red Ice TV (don’t go into comments, full of Nazis) and part 2

Pewdiepie and the rebranding of white nationalism + The PewDiePipeline: how edgy humor leads to violence    Part 2 + Pewdiepie is a Nazi + Pewdiepie and the problem with (fake) racism + Pewdiepie mask off + Pewdiepie doesn’t understand hate symbols

How Cultural Marxism became the Far Right’s scapegoat + Hbomberguy’s Cultural Marxism 

Debunking the Alt RIght: Pool parties +  + The Golden One: A measured response

How PragerU is lying to you    Part 2    Part 3 + Brexit: PragerU vs Reality + PragerU - Big Joel + Dennis Prager is a dick to Holocaust victims + PragerU is conservative junk food + PragerU and Poverty: Misinformation Amateur Hour + PragerU and Justice: a conservative nightmare + PragerU and Marriage: a conservative fever dream

Guns in the Third Reich: A response to Shapiro + others  + Ben Shapiro and the politics of Imagination + Leftist’s response to Ben’s 10 tips 

The Easy Answers of Youtube Conservatism

Who’s at fault for the refugee crisis? + Stochastic Terrorism and Christchurch

Is Black Panther Alt Right? (No)

Fox News: How to whitewash an atrocity

Getting Sweaty about globalism

The West + Does the West hate itself? + Why do They hate The West?

How societies turn cruel

Were the Crusades defensive? (No) 

Stefan Molyneux’s Fall of Rome + Stefan Molyneux, Star Wars The Force Awakens + Stefan Molyneux, The truth about the truth about Wonder Woman + We don’t talk about Elliot Roger - response to Stefan Molyneux + Stefan Molyneux, Aboriginal Australian History and ‘White Guilt’

Racists only have one solution

Trump

Jordan Peterson and The Story of Jordan Peterson + Peterson doesn’t understand Nazism + PhilosophyTube’s Jordan Peterson & The Meaning of Life  + Peterson is not profound + Peterson is everything he criticizes and can’t read + The wasteland of Jordan Peterson

Taking feminists out of context + Power fantasy, male objectification, & lady fanservice + Anita Sarkeesian and the people who hate her + InnuendoStudios Why are you so angry? series

Do women destroy civilizations? (No)  + She-Ra broke the brains of Anti-SJWs + Does Intersectionality destroy Individuality?

Anti feminism (Ableism abound) + Anti feminism (Warning: Lauren Southern) + Anti feminism (guy uses ableist slurs) + Anti feminism vs facts  + Red Pill: Strange Art of Men’s Rights Activism and part two + Women in video game history - The Serfs + Lauren Southern is wrong about tradition

Why Paul Joseph Watson is wrong about everything

The Serfs Steven Chowder

Outrage News + Soyboys: A measured response

How to fall down the Anti SJW rabbit hole

Stonetoss and how hate speech spreads

Sargon of Akkad can’t read (Anti feminism, racism) + Sargon’s petition: a measured response + #FreeSargon: a measured response + Big Joel’s Sargon of Akkad + On Sargon

Joe Rogan Gateway into the Alt Right  and part 2  + Pakman gobbles Joe Rogan

FarradaySpeaks - My descent into the alt right pipeline

Dave Rubin gets Orbed + Dave Rubin: Lazy Propagandist

Can women chess? (Yes)

What is virtue signalling?

Bolsonaro & Brazil’s struggle for truth & memory + Bolsonaro & Latin American Fascism + Why Pinochet Apologists Are Wrong (RIP Allende) + Venezuela: The True Face of the Opposition and this + Bolivia is descending into Dictatorship, here’s why and part 2 + Joanna Hausmann is lying about Venezuela (also, German name, south american heritage... 👀👀👀)

Snowflakes-- The Right's War on the Individual

Sports

Hats off to Tim Pool + Tim Pool completely unraveled and backfires bad (self own)

Debunking Steven Crowder on Universal Healthcare

Cuphead: The Fake Outrage

The Boy Who Cried Racist

Denial as a tool of the radical right

The Limits of Logic - Examining Right Wing Logic Through Star Trek and Wittgenstein

Refugees and Human Rights and Part 2 (ties into far right) + Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Laws

Was Hitler a Socialist? (No) + Were the Nazis Socialist? (No) 

I can go a bit over Nazis not being socialists also bc I have gotten into arguments about this topic.

 Nazis cuddled up with monopolists/big business, protected private businesses, the English word “privatization” was invented to describe their economic policy by the magazine The Economist. They were always anti socialist and anti communist and combined it with antisemitism often using the phrases “Jewish Bolshevism” and “Jewish Marxism”. 

Quotes from Hitler’s Mein Kampf, (there’s much more than these, he got very angry over Marx and other Jewish leftists, equating Judaism and communism/Marxism) warning: some antisemitism:

“In the years 1913 and 1914, I, for the first time in various circles which today in part faithfully support the National Socialist movement, expressed the conviction that the question of the future of the German nation was the question of destroying Marxism.”

“While the Jews in their Marxist and democratic press proclaimed to the whole world the lie about 'German militarism' and sought to incriminate Germany by all means, the Marxist and democratic parties were obstructing any comprehensive training of the German national man-power.”

“Marxism represents the most striking phase of the Jewish endeavour to eliminate the dominant significance of personality in every sphere of human life and replace it by the numerical power of the masses.” 

Hitler on coopting leftist language and symbolism to get the workers on their side:  “The fact that we had chosen red as the colour for our posters sufficed to attract them to our meetings. The ordinary bourgeoisie were very shocked to see that, we had also chosen the symbolic red of Bolshevism and they regarded this as something ambiguously significant. The suspicion was whispered in German Nationalist circles that we also were merely another variety of Marxism, perhaps even Marxists suitably disguised, or better still, Socialists. The actual difference between (National) Socialism and Marxism still remains a mystery to these people up to this day. The charge of Marxism was conclusively proved when it was discovered that at our meetings we deliberately substituted the words 'Fellow-countrymen and Women' for 'Ladies and Gentlemen' and addressed each other as 'Party Comrade'. We used to roar with laughter at these silly faint-hearted bourgeoisie and their efforts to puzzle out our origin, our intentions and our aims. We chose red for our posters after particular and careful deliberation, our intention being to irritate the Left, so as to arouse their attention and tempt them to come to our meetings – if only in order to break them up – so that in this way we got a chance of talking to the people.

“First of all they appealed to their followers to ignore us and keep away from our meetings. Generally speaking this appeal was heeded. But, as time went on, more and more of their followers gradually found their way to us and accepted our teaching. Then the leaders became nervous and uneasy. They clung to their belief that such a development should not be ignored for ever, and that terror must be applied in order to put an end to it.”

Here’s a 1923 interview transcript with Hitler saying the “Socialist” in National Socialist isn’t about socialism  and how he tried to redefine socialist in a nationalist and a “by Aryan people, for Aryan people, while everyone still has private property and stuff” way.  Here he also kinda goes over this in Mein Kampf.

Nazis who were left economically only are Strasserists, Strasserists in the Nazi Party were killed in 1934′s Night of the Long Knives with George Strasser being killed while Otto Strasser had been in exile from 1930. In 1933, Nazis came up with Reichstag Fire Decree + political prisoners (mainly communists and socialists) were rounded up and were put in the first concentration camps)

Canada’s 10,000 person Antia Riot - Battle of Christie Pits

Manufactured Milkshake hysteria + Revenge of the milkshakes + The Ballad of Andy Ngo

Free Speech:

Freeze Peach + The fatal effects of Hate Speech + Ur-Fascism, Free Speech, and those who forgot

The Snowflake Generation? A Response

It’s Just a Joke + Just be nice you nerds

The Marketplace of Ideas: Germany vs USA + Why Political Correctness kinda rules + Steven Crowder and the silencing of dissident media + The Serfs on Deplatforming

Race:

America is racist + Is the 2nd Amendment racist? (Yes in its implementation)

Systematic/normalized racism + Race, Law, & Politics - PhilosophyTube and Part 2

Implicit bias + Group Bias & Black Pigeon Speaks

The danger of white moderates + Friending and forgiving racists - Kat Blaque + Be honest, you don’t care if they’re racist + Jeffree Starr and performative activism

What is race?  + What is white supremacy? + White identity + History of whiteness  Also this +  'Humans Are Not Equal': The Dishonest History of Race  Genetic Betrayal: The Truth About Race  Behind The Misconceptions of Race

Why we have a black history month

Book Chat: "Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race"  + Robin DeAngelo’s wonderful paper on white fragility

What is Blackface? + Blackace: A cultural history of a racist art form + Montage from the ending of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled + The New Jim Crow Museum 

Racial comparisons

Quebec Mosque Shooting: Manufacturing a conspiracy

The fate of the frog men (Pepe) + White supremacist propaganda vs truth + Do racists “just love their country”? (No)

Moderate Muslims and terror attacks

Abusing statistics (immigration) + The Bell Curve (isn’t real) + The Great Replacement isn’t real +  Germany’s demographic demise: a response

Immigration and the fall of Rome + Stefan Molyneux’s Native American Genocide

The Many Lies of Lauren Southern’s Borderless

The killing of Trayvon Martin

on alllivesmatter + on privilege

Shaun’s response to “People of color: You are not oppressed”

European histroy is not white history + Does the Left want to destroy history? + Is Philosophy Just White Guys J3rk!ng Off? + A white man’s war? A response to NoBullshit (People of color and women fighting in MY WW2? More likely than you think)

LGBT (mainly T) stuff: 

What is gender? + There are more than two human sexes + Bill Nye vs Pseudoscience and part 2 (Bill said trans rights!!!)

Transphobia in the UK + Transphobia: an analysis by PhilosophyTube + Ben Shapiro’s weapons grade bad takes + Joe Rogan is an idiot and a transphobe  + Debunking Trump on LGBT rights

Debunking trans athletes myths (8 video playlist) + Is Trans Inclusion a Threat to Cis People in Gendered Spaces? (No)

Why Trans Roles for Trans Actors?  + Trans male visibility

Kat Blaque’s monologue on cis nonsense: “Cis people please stop doing this” + Kat Blaque’s take on JK Rowling

What is a TERF? (Don’t go into the comments!!!) + The Transphobe’s Paradox + Why is the trans suicide rate so high?

Red Scare:

Red Scare and xenophobia + racism + Why they still need their big lies about socialism

“Socialism no food”  CIA even said Soviets eat abt the same as Americans , short video going over food shortages

Animal Farm is commonly used in schools to teach about the evils of socialism/communism like mine did:

George Orwell was a socialist anti Stalinist writing about the dangers of authoritarianism. The pig named Snowball (Trotsky) was depicted as good: he wrote the original commandments, was at odds with Napoleon, and he was forced to flee after being attacked by Napoleon’s orders. But Orwell was also a snitch that happily gave out a list of suspected communists to the govt while dying of TB so

McCarthyism

Smith Act trials of Communist Party leaders, domino theory and containment, Eisenhower doctrine, Kennedy doctrine, Johnson doctrine, Reagan doctrine.

CIA funded anti-leftist propaganda campaigns like this

The American Govt often supported coups, wars, and other interference against countries that tried to implement socialism, had strong leftist movements, otherwise just elected leaders that were leftist, many from Operation Condor: Chile, Argentina, Vietnam, Brazil, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia (1971 and 2019), etc

COINTELPRO targeted American leftist, Civil Rights/Black Power, antiwar, Native American rights, and environmental protection movements among others. The FBI targeted and threatened MLK. Spied on and kept files of Einstein and Helen Keller. The FBI drugged and then murdered Black Panther Fred Hampton. Etc

Socialism/Communism:

Before their revolutions, Russia and China were pre-industrial, agricultural, largely illiterate societies whose masses were peasants spread out over truly vast expanses of land. From their revolutions, they rapidly industrialized, became largely literate, and became world powers. With the Soviet Union even flourishing and doing great from their planned economy (5 year plans) while the rest of the world was suffering from the Great Depression. 

Important to note so I don’t get accused of being a Tankie: Soviet Union + China also did terrible things, for example there was the persecution/oppression of minorities under Stalin (like Cossacks, Jewish people, his govt was kinda antisemitic), Stalin would also have his political opponents killed (mostly anti Stalinist comrades), they weren’t good on LGBT rights: Lenin decriminalized gay sex in 1917, Stalin recriminalized it in 1936, Stalin reversed a lot of Lenin’s gender equality policies, Mao getting citizens to smelt their own steel and iron wasn’t smart or efficient,  etc. Critical support.

Modern day China is state capitalist. China has the second highest number of billionaires in the world just behind the USA. And Former Soviet countries are now also capitalist with Russia #4 on the list of most billionaires.

Cuba

Cuba has a literacy rate of 99.7%, one of the highest in the world thanks to the Cuban Literacy Campaign of 1961 right after the Cuban revolution. Universal, famously high quality healthcare (doctors are their biggest export, plus they have medical internationalism) and education. Almost half of parliament members are women, Cuba has made great strides in gender equality. Cuba is a direct democracy, while the US is more of an oligarchy, with people mainly winning elections based on their wealth or the wealth of their supporters.

Cuba’s biotech industry is considered the best in the world among developing countries, and has generated important innovations in cancer research, HIV/AIDS research. Cuba created the world’s first vaccine against meningitis B.

Discrimination against LGBT people is illegal in Cuba. It is legal in 30 US states. Cuba has healthcare for all, including trans people, and allows trans people to legally change their gender without surgery. From my understanding, the rights and treatment of LGBT people aren’t perfect but better than US.

Assata Shakur:  “Revolution is a process, so I was not that shocked to find sexism had not totally disappeared in Cuba, nor had racism, but that although they had not totally disappeared, the revolution was totally committed to struggling against racism and sexism in all their forms. That was and continues to be very important to me. It would be pure fantasy to think that all the ills, such as racism, classism or sexism, could be dealt with in 30 years. But what is realistic is that it is much easier and much more possible to struggle against those ills in a country which is dedicated to social justice and to eliminating injustice.”

Book  Another Book The Cuba Libre Story 

Who Did Che Guevara Murder? + Che Guevara: Homophobic racist?

Majority of East Germans miss socialism warning: article is biased red scare stuff. Krupp und Krause, a nice pro East song from West Germany that also explains surplus value. Ich suche die DDR, a nice pro East rock song from Feeling B, which was a band of former East Germans, saying they are looking for the GDR and it had been stolen. Two members are now in the famous rock band Rammstein, the whole band is leftist.

People who actually lived through the Soviet Union miss it, while young people who haven’t say the Soviet Union collapse was good. Far majority of Soviet citizens voted to keep the Union in 1991.

Human nature & socialism + Why the web is communist

In defense of socialism + “X Socialist Country has failed!” is a stupid argument

Authoritarianism in socialist countries

Soviet Union through the eyes of an American + Socialism gives a better quality of life + Soviets had a better record of training women in STEM than modern USA + Space race meme

But how come revolution? + How to defeat your boss + A Beginner’s Guide to Overthrowing Capitalism + The Socialist case against billionaires

Intro to Anarchy + PhilosophyTube’s series on Marx +  What 'To each according to their need' Means + Private vs Personal Property + V For Vendetta - What is Anarchism? + Was the CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) a living heck?

How would anarchism work irl part 2 part 3 part 4

Witchcraft, Gender, & Marxism + Black Rad Leftism vs Black Liberalism

Internet archive with Marxist texts + Easy direct action + Speech Synthesis: Bernie Sanders reading Communist Manifesto, Alex Jones reading Communist Manifesto + Communist Maniesto Summary video with quotes

Black Panthers

The good man himself, President Thomas Sankara

Sankara declared the objectives of the “democratic and popular revolution” to be primarily concerned with the tasks of eradicating corruption, fighting environmental degradation, empowering women, and increasing access to education and health care, with the larger goal of liquidating imperial domination. During the course of his presidency, Sankara successfully implemented programs that vastly reduced infant mortality, increased literacy rates and school attendance, and boosted the number of women holding governmental posts. On the environmental front, in the first year of his presidency alone 10 million trees were planted in an effort to combat desertification. 

Socialism in America doc

Albert Einstein? Socialist.  “Why Socialism?” Video Summary and Quotes

“Production is carried on for profit, not for use. There is no provision that all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find employment; an “army of unemployed” almost always exists. The worker is constantly in fear of losing his job. Since unemployed and poorly paid workers do not provide a profitable market, the production of consumers’ goods is restricted, and great hardship is the consequence. Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all. The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals which I mentioned before..

...I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.”

Stephen Hawking? Socialist. “If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.”

Martin Luther King Jr? christian socialist. an interview with him about a year before his murder, he goes over wealth equality, slave reparations. mainly 16:30 to the end

he supported labor strikes, unions, workers. 

‘You are reminding, not only Memphis, but you are reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages.

...“Do you know that most of the poor people in our country are working every day? And they are making wages so low that they cannot begin to function in the mainstream of the economic life of our nation.

...”If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she, too, will go to hell.”

“This will be the day when we bring into full realization the American dream—a dream yet unfulfilled. A dream of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few; a dream of a land where men will not argue that the color of a man's skin determines the content of his character; a dream of a nation where all our gifts and resources are held not for ourselves alone, but as instruments of service for the rest of humanity; the dream of a country where every man will respect the dignity and worth of the human personality.”  AFL-CIO Convention, December 1961

In a story published a week before his assassination, King told Jose Yglesias in the New York Times magazine, “In a sense you could say we are engaged in the class struggle.” The civil rights movement had not cost a dime, he said, but the movement to uproot poverty and inequality throughout the country would “be a long and difficult struggle, for our program calls for a redistribution of economic power.”

Paul Robeson was a socialist and supported the Soviet Union, saying (since the Union had Article 123, banning racial discrimination)  "In Russia I felt for the first time like a full human being. No color prejudice like in Mississippi, no color prejudice like in Washington. It was the first time I felt like a human being.. Where I did not feel the pressure of color as I feel in this committee."

When asked why he didn't move to Russia, he replied: "Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here, and have a part of it just like you. And no fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear? I am for peace with the Soviet Union, and I am for peace with China, and I am not for peace or friendship with the fascist Franco, and I am not for peace with fascist Nazi Germans. I am for peace with decent people." Here he is singing the USSR anthem and Warszawianka

Muhammad Ali on the Soviet Union: Ali had just returned from a twelve-day visit to the Soviet Union at the invitation of the Soviet Ambassador to the United States to promote the upcoming Moscow Olympics. Ali prayed in Uzbekistan with Soviet Muslims. He sparred with Soviet heavyweights in training for the Olympics. He met with Brezhnev at the Kremlin. 

When he returned to the United States he reported back that “they give a man free medical and hospital care, low rent and a job . . . I never felt so free of being robbed.” He expressed disbelief that so many Americans were afraid of war with the Soviet Union. “It’s hard to believe that such a peaceful country wants war.”

Helen Keller? very into socialism.  (also unfortunately she was into eugenics)

also js bc I was taught differently as a kid: how she’s portrayed is super ableist. for example: she could always communicate, she and the household had home signs and anne sullivan was just there so she could get an education. 

Famous leftists/ leftists in history:

Rory McCann, Liam Cunningham, Danny Devito, James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, Kwame Ture, W.E.B. Du Bois, civil rights activist James Farmer, Frederick Vanderbilt Field was disowned by the Vanderbilt tycoon family for being a communist, King Camp Gillette creator of the Gillette company/razor, Leslie Feinberg,

Victor Gruen architect who first designed American shopping malls (hated the modern ones), Woody Guthrie, activist and co-creator of the NAACP Florence Kelley, pioneer of the birth control movement Antoinette F. Buchholz Konikow, Rage Against the Machine, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, Albert Schatz who discovered a treatment for tuberculosis,  suffragette and founding member of the ACLU Rose Schneiderman, feminist activist Mary Heaton Vorse, editor who compiled slave testimonies George Rawick, 

feminist activist that helped change NY labor laws Theresa Malkiel, writer and abolitionist Lysander Spooner (published pamphlets with legal defenses for escaped slaves, would offer legal services for free, supported John Brown),

Capitalism+Liberalism:

What’s wrong with capitalism part one  Part two + Noncompete’s why capitalism sucks and part 3 + Why do you work 8 hours per day? + How rich countries rob the poor + Your democracy is a sham

1960 Harvest of Shame documentary, covering plight of migrant farm workers living with atrocious conditions and no living wage. As one worker says at 41:32, "Sure you can get a job, but if you can’t live on what you make, what good is the job?”

Abolish the Monarchy! +  Why does Britain Still have a Queen?

How Privatization Fails: Railways + Influencing an election + You are expendable + Misinformation for fun and profit + Manufacturing Consent: How the Media Distorts Reality: Summary of Michael Parenti and Noam Chomsky + Manufacturing Consent Full Noam Chomsky Documentary

Venezuela: myths and Argument ad Venezuelum + The Myth of Capitalism - Dr. Michael Parenti

UN investigating the US for extreme poverty UN report on horrific US inequality and poverty UN condemns Trump admin for exacerbating poverty levels + The American Dream is rapidly becoming the American Illusion says UN expert + Doc Priced Out: LA’s hidden homeless

Stranger Things has some bad politics in it + What if they threw a purge and noone came? + Marvel sucks, Disney sucks (their workers lives)  + HBO’s Watchmen and Liberalism + Forrest Gump - What are American values? + TV Show ‘Cops’ Copaganda + Bob’s Burgers and Class Conflict

White Working Class? Part 1: Class, Culture, Capital +  White Working Class? Part 2: Race, Class, Migration + Landlords are Bad + Utopia + “Good” Billionaires 

Fake Materialism for Real Transphobes on leftist transphobes. “You want to unite the working class? You have to stand up for the whole working class. All of them! All of their struggles! Otherwise, you’re the one being divisive. You’re the one excluding people. Identity can only divide us if we choose not to care about the struggles of others. If we decide that the problems of others can wait, while we sort out the ones that we share: how can we expect people to extend class solidarity to us while we withold our solidarity from them?

Capitalism is built on white supremacy, it’s built on patriarchy, it’s built on cisheteronormativity, on ableism, on settler colonialism, on imperialism, it’s an interlocking and mutually reinforcing system. We don’t get to pick and choose! You either fight the whole thing or you’re fighting none of it! You’re giving quarter to it. And if you want to hold up the fight until everyone agrees to exclude one vector of oppression or another, until we dismiss the concerns of trans people or indigenous people or women or disabled people or whomever, then you’re no different than any other reactionary.”

50 ways capitalism is hurting you part one   Part two + PhilosophyTube on How to fix the housing crisis + Is Capitalism Voluntary? (No.) + Should the Rich help the Poor? (Yes and neither should exist) + Healthcare, Ethics, & Postmodernism + How to Succeed in Capitalism

Capitalist Entitlement + Woke Brands + Case study of Capitalism: Ukraine + Capitalism is great (not really) + Is Capitalism destroying healthcare? (Yes) + Overpopulation is a capitalist lie + Mental health under late stage capitalism

Pete Buttigieg + Trump and the problem with Politics + America never stood or freedom + How Unions died in America (Reagan) + Evo Morales on Trump and Obama + Whistleblowers in America

My First Job/Lazybones Manifesto + Second Job + Third Job

Destiny and the Liberal Mind Prison + Civility +  Kat Blaque’s Why Liberals annoy me + ThoughtSlime’s Are liberals our enemies? + Why Conservatives can’t stop lying

“Law & Order” And Civil Disobedience + What was Liberalism? Part one  Part two  Part three  Part four + The Dark Side of Liberalism (5 part series) + You can’t beat Trump: Frost/Nixon and the Liberal Lie

Sex Work + Sex Workers and Police, Prison Abolition 

Documentary “The Story of American Slavery” from the settlement of Jamestown on + Doc “Slavery and the Making of America” + Doc “Slave Catchers, Slave Resisters” + Doc “The Heritage of Slavery” 1968 w  Fannie Lou Hamer & Lerone Bennett, Jr.

Doc “Life of the Rez” goes over horrible conditions on Indigenous American reservations due to colonization, capitalism

Problems with American Police, Examples, Solutions, and BLM 1 hr, 43 minutes long Hasan Piker coverage. Contains videos and imagery of police violence and corruption, including murders. 

Parts of his coverage are not good: In at least 2 points in this almost 2 hr coverage, he refers to killer cops as mentally ill/”having personality disorders” and “sociopathic”. At one point refers to an AR-15 as an assault rifle, which is incorrect. + Why Police Brutality is hard to prosecute

Havin Fun + Keeping Hope Alive

Yakko's world but countries that were bombed by the USA after the fall of Germany are bombed

Yakko's World but each time the US invaded or coup'd the country (since the Cold War) it gets louder & more distorted / Yakko’s World but every country the US overthrew since 1945 makes it louder

[ardania22]

A while back, I made a post about the whole T Series vs Pewdiepie thing where I knocked both sides of the debate for dumb arguments. Specifically, I said that it was stupid to call Pewdiepie a Nazi or alt-right, considering how much good he was doing in his community. Yes, he was far from perfect, but I genuinely felt like it was far too short-sighted to “cancel” him.

Now, I’m not so sure.

There’s no easy way to talk about what happened in New Zealand yesterday. The whole attack is bound up in so much hate and vileness that anywhere you strike at it, you’re gonna burst a pustule and send black bile squirting everywhere. I’ve felt really shitty ever since I heard about it, in a way I don’t usually feel about these kinds of tragedies. Something about this one really just hurts. And I understand the desire to want to cast it out of mind, to place the blame back within our comfort zone, to say that it was just a “disturbed individual” whose actions aren’t representative of anything greater.

But we all know that’s a fucking lie.

The internet is a place where ideologies ferment and curdle into their worst possible conditions. It’s a noxious, nebulous web of tangled influences all feeding into each other, assisted by garbage algorithms that prioritize controversy and clicks over any semblance of justice or morality- especially on Youtube. The neo-Nazi community thrives there, and it drives people further and further down the path of bigotry and hatred. This attack was racism. It was white supremacy. It was Nazism. It was Islamophobia. And that kind of hatred doesn’t come from nowhere. It has to be learned, over countless hours and countless sources until no one cause can be pinpointed, but everyone ends up sharing the blame. Even if they didn’t want to, or realize that’s what they were doing.

I firmly believe that Pewdiepie is as horrified by this attack as he claims. I firmly believe he’s not a neo-Nazi, or alt-right, or anything of the sort. But I also know he’s made a handful of comments removed from those ideologies only by virtue of technicality. I also know he’s boosted and legitimized Ben Shapiro, an Islamophobic piece of shit who has stoked fear about Muslim communities countless times in the past. I also know he’s shouted out channels awash in reactionary content without bothering to consider the ramifications of that. And I also know that there are countless kids and teenagers in his audience who are getting exposed to these ideas through him. He is their role model. He is the first step, for many of them, in making this shit okay. Because if the most subscribed guy on Youtube is telling them Ben Shapiro is a cool dude, AND that the media is biased and doesn’t like him and shouldn’t be trusted... well, where do you think that leads?

Pewdiepie is one of the most influential people in the internet. He has power the likes of which none of us will likely ever see. And with that power comes incredible responsibility. He can’t just make an ass of himself like he used to in the past, when he was just starting out, and expect no consequences; his voice matters. His voice can push people. And the fact of the matter is this: it doesn’t matter whether he’s “intending” or not to boost alt-right voices and talking points. Because he IS. Intention means nothing when the outcome is clear. The alt-right has embraced him. They use him as a rallying point. People are exposed to those ideas through him. He is not the only cause of this hatred, not by a long shot. But he is part of the problem, whether he wants to be or not. And that matters.

And I know that Pewdiepie despises this hatred. I know he’s horrified at the attack that was carried out in his name. So if there’s even the slightest chance of this message ever reaching him, allow me to say this: you have done so much good for so many people. I know you didn’t ask for Nazis to be rallying around you. But they are all the same. And how you react to that going forward matters. You have the chance, right now, to completely purge every single bit of strength these shit-stained excuses for people draw from you. Shut them down. Speak out against them. Raise money for causes that rebuke them. Stop making jokes that speak to them. Stop giving platforms and exposure to the voices that radicalize them. You have become an unwitting first stop for many on the pathway to bigotry, and you have the power to change that. You have the power to make this internet a better, more loving, more accepting, less hateful place.

And more than that- you have the responsibility to do so.

There’s a lot of anger and a lot of sorrow in the air right now. Let’s all try to be a little more loving, and a little less accepting of those trying to divide us. Islam is valid. You are valid. You are all loved. Let’s all pray for a brighter sun to rise tomorrow.

[queeranarchism]

fascist vs. nazi

In case you wonder when it is factually accurate to call someone a fascist or a nazi, here’s a handy explanation:

Fascism is an authoritarian hyper-nationalist movement that dates back to Mussolini. It can have many forms but it generally strives to recover a mythical past of national/male/white supremacy, glorifies war, seeks to suppress political enemies and unions and follows a leader figure. Very often minorities become scapegoats. In fascism without any visible nazi influences, the main focus of that scapegoating is cultural and the focus is on the perceived failed ‘integration’ of minorities who need to learn ‘our national values’. It often presents these minorities with an ‘assimilate or leave’ ultimatum and seeks to prevent further immigration into its country.

For the record: fascism in all its forms is bad, it is deadly, it is a threat. It needs to be smashed.

Nationalsocialism is an authoritarian hyper-nationalist movement that dates back to Hitler. It has all the same common characteristics of fascism and it is a form of fascism. It also combines scapegoating with scientific racism, the idea that the targeted minority is inherently genetically a threat that can not be removed through re-education, integration, etc. Racial purity, through the exclusion and killing of minorities (perceived ‘lesser races’) and the exclusion and killing of people with disabilities, LGBT people, people with addictions, etc (perceived ‘pollution of the white race’) is a goal of nationalsocialists. For nationalsocialists the assimilation of minorities is not an option. They see assimilation as a threat because it further pollutes their precious ‘white race’.

So a nazi isn’t always someone who openly supports Hitler, most nazis are smart enough not to do that. A nazi is someone who combines fascism with the pursuit of racial purity.

So a modern example of a fascist movement is the identitarian movement, which focusses on the perceived ‘islamisation’ of Europe as a cultural threat, not a racial one. A modern example of a nationalsocialist movement in Blood & Honour, which explicitly names the ‘pure blood’ of ‘the white race’ as the thing it claims to defend. 

Of course fascists and nazis mix and mingle a lot and exchange ideas. Nazism is a form of fascism after all. A lot of movements start our presenting themselves as ‘nationalist’, become more explicitly fascist over time and eventually openly embrace the basic ideas of nazism.

Mussolini and Hitler influences each other as well. And in practice, there are hardly any fascists who do not to some extend believe that some people are inherently racially inferior, even if they don’t openly admit it. Many people in the identitarian movement even believe in the myth of ‘white genocide’, which is a classic nazi myth based on the pursuit of racial purity.

But for the record: if you wanna pinpoint the moment when an openly fascist movement becomes an openly national socialist movement: it’s when they start using the word race in their theories, start talking about how many children members of minorities have compared to white people, start arguing that we should ‘rethink eugenics’, start wanting to deport people regardless of how ‘integrated’ they are.

I hope that clears things up.

[el-smacko]

To be fair, Wolfenstein sells the lie that the US was ever anti-fascist, which it wasn’t. It was anti-Nazi and pro-fascist and the two fascist states fought because they had competing nationalisms, Nordicism vs. White Supremacy. Honestly, you would think it would be more obvious since the US put Japanese Americans in concentration camps, committed nuclear genocide on Japan and installed US capitalism during occupation—to say nothing of the whole being virulently anti-communist thing postwar. Like selling the US as anti-fascist good guys is historical revisionism that helps fascists because they get to say things like “Nazism is an obsolete historical ideology, of course I’m not a Nazi, my grandfather fought the Nazis in WWII,” and get away with being a fascist. It was good that the Nazis lost the war, obviously, but the resulting capitalistic US fascist imperial hegemony dedicated to resisting global communist efforts was not ideal. We should be celebrating American anti-fascist activists and militants rather than rewriting the US military as somehow not an imperial fascist tool.

Wolfenstein, for those who don’t know, is a videogame series with soon to be eleven entries in the series, all of them entirely centred around killing Nazis ever since the very first game in 1981.

‘way to make it political’ buddy do you know what series this is

[itsclydebitches]

I'm not talking about faith though. Christianity specifically has rules and teachings against LGBT people. Keep religion and faith as a concept. Don't keep this one because it actively destroys peoples lives and when you have God on your side, then shit, nothing can change your mind. You can't educate this many people to altar their way of thinking or teaching their children the same. They are the majority. They can't lose power. So fuck them. It's harmful, get rid of it.

There are most definitely problems---I’d never deny that---but as said, I honestly don’t think the problem is Christianity itself. It’s the people using Christianity as an excuse for their bigotry. Do some Christians have rules and teachings against queer people? Sadly yes. But plenty of others have rules and teachings that not only support our community, but actively push against those who would do us harm---many of whom are friends of mine. Their faith is a form of activism, not murder. To put it in the most simplistic terms possible because I don’t consider myself Christian and am far from an expert in these doctrines: preaching that the Bible says God hates queer people vs. preaching that the Bible says to love everyone, regardless of difference. Ultimately the issue is not with the Bible itself, but in how people choose to interpret it. And as @thewhitehairedwitchgirl so rightfully pointed out, this happens with every possible system, not just religion. Science isn’t debatable in the same way an ancient, translated text is and we still have people insisting that vaccines cause autism, despite all the evidence to the contrary. People will support their prejudices in any way they can. Somehow manage to get rid of Christianity? Those prejudices would just pick up something else for support. We could have a new Bible delivered down from on high with text reading “GOD WANTS YOU TO LOVE QUEER PEOPLE THIS IS NO LONGER DEBATABLE WHY WAS IT EVEN DEBATABLE IN THE FIRST PLACE??” and bigots would still find a way to discredit, twist, or outright ignore it. Because the problem is with them, not the system as a whole. 

Ultimately I think we are talking about faith because faith is the one of the good things that comes out of supporting a system that is still horribly flawed. Why don’t we attack Christians in the same way we attack Nazis? Because there is no good in Nazism. None. Much of Christianity is worth defending and fighting for, even if much of it is also far from perfect. White supremacy is not. 

All of which isn’t to say you need to fight for it, anon. You obviously have a lot of anger and hurt towards Christianity---with good reason---and you don’t have to let go of that just because other people, people without that trauma, have a different perspective. I think of it as being a little analogous to an actual abuser. They want to change, they have a therapist helping them, they have friends and family who still support them, they might even radically improve themselves someday... but none of that means the people they abused have to interact with them again or forgive them for what they did. In the same way, we can have people supporting aspects of Christianity and working on its continued improvement while accepting that people hurt by the religion in no way need to adopt those viewpoints as their own. 

[dailynewswebsite]

Donald Trump is hardly the ‘Republican Jesus’

U.S. President Donald Trump staged a go to in entrance of St. John's Church June 1 in Washington after authorities cleared protestors from the world, prompting the bishop overseeing the church to precise outrage. (AP Picture/Patrick Semansky)

It’s but unknown how U.S. President Donald Trump’s makes an attempt to place himself because the Christian candidate of selection will affect Christian voters in the US — and the way Democrats’ makes an attempt to talk to Christians could sway earlier Trump voters or these not publicly declaring their intentions.

‘Republican Jesus: How the Proper has Rewritten the Gospels’ (College of California Press)

“Dems need to shut your church buildings down, completely,” Trump tweeted in early October. Just a few days earlier, his son, Eric Trump, declared that his dad “actually saved Christianity.”

These statements match a wider sample: Trump has referred to as himself “the chosen one,” proclaimed that God is “on our aspect” and warned that Biden will “damage the Bible, damage God.”

The Trump administration and its Christian supporters have been utilizing Christianity to attract battle strains on this high-stakes election. This Republican political technique that makes use of Christian language to solid Trump as a divinely appointed protector of Christians warrants extra scrutiny than it’s obtained.

In my e book, Republican Jesus, I determine key tendencies in the way in which at the moment’s right-wing influencers interpret the Bible: they view Jesus as a prophet of free-market capitalism who opposes taxes and is in opposition to any regulation that helps social welfare applications, protects employees or prevents discrimination.

Sister Quincy Howard, centre, a Dominican nun, protests President Donald Trump at Saint John Paul II Nationwide Shrine, June 2, in Washington, after the president staged a go to to a church with a bible after authorities cleared the world of protesters. (AP Picture/Jacquelyn Martin)

Greater than faith

The Trump administration and their Christian supporters promote a type of Christianity that students name “Christian nationalism.” That’s an ideology that isn’t nearly faith, however “consists of assumptions of nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy and heteronormativity, together with divine sanction for authoritarian management and militarism,” in line with sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry.

They’ve demonstrated with survey information that about half of Individuals help some type of the concept that America is, and must be, a Christian nation. Christian nationalists are particularly keen on boundaries — not simply partitions, but additionally social boundaries that solid liberals as outsiders.

These sociologists say about 20 per cent of Individuals are “ambassadors,” an overwhelmingly white group that insists the U.S. has at all times been and should stay Christian. One other 30 per cent are “accommodators,” who lean towards supporting Christian nationalism however maintain considerably extra ambivalent views (for instance, they are saying that “Christian values” ought to affect society however would possibly permit that non-Christians additionally advance these values).

When pro-Trump Christians use the language of Christianity beneath siege, their foremost goal is to courtroom the votes of those “accommodators.”

Company backing

As historian Kevin M. Kruse argues, “the assumption that America is essentially and formally a Christian nation originated within the 1930s when businessmen enlisted non secular activists of their combat in opposition to FDR’s New Deal.” These corporate-funded conservatives claimed that the social security internet breaks the commandment to not steal — that the federal government steals taxes from people to reward the indolent.

They solid Christianity because the free-market antidote to “pagan stateism”: a menace they created to conflate progressive types of Christianity with communism, socialism and Nazism.

Dogmatic adherence to free-market capitalism and restricted authorities is the frequent thread within the historical past of the American Christian proper. By this logic, anybody who favours a extra regulated type of capitalism assaults Christianity.

Within the Civil Rights period, some non secular conservatives insisted that the desegregation of public colleges was authorities overreach and a risk to non secular freedom. Since Roe vs. Wade, they’ve characterised abortions as the federal government robbing unborn residents of their rights.

Politics of exclusion

On Sept. 26, Rev. Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham and among the many most influential pro-Trump evangelicals, hosted an enormous prayer march that drew hundreds to Washington, D.C.

The printed’s chorus was “this isn’t a political occasion, however a prayer occasion.” But audio system repeatedly invoked the parable that America was based as a Christian nation because the march proceeded on a path by way of the Nationwide Mall (with no social distancing and restricted masks).

U.S. President Donald Trump with Rev. Franklin Graham after a funeral service for Billy Graham, in Charlotte, N.C., March 2018.‘ (AP Picture/Chuck Burton)

It was scheduled simply earlier than Trump’s announcement of a conservative Catholic choose who has ties to a charismatic and secretive Christian group as his Supreme Courtroom nominee later that day.

Each speaker was a vocal Trump supporter, Vice-President Mike Pence made a “shock go to,” and marchers wore each “Make America Nice Once more” and “Let’s Make America Godly Once more” hats and chanted “4 extra years!” Tony Perkins, president of the Household Analysis Council, prayed for regulation enforcement as a result of “lawlessness has been unleashed” in America — an indictment of the Black Lives Matter protests.

A political technique

It might be apparent that American Christian Democrats and a few Christians are outraged by pro-Trump Christians. However as an American educating Christianity at a public college in Canada, I’ve famous that plenty of my college students and colleagues who determine as “evangelicals” or “conservatives” are equally outraged by how Trump’s high evangelical advisers cherry-pick and deform biblical verses to justify xenophobic immigration insurance policies and restrictions on the federal government’s position in regulating well being care, environmental safety, gun management, employment and the social security internet.

Whereas conservative Christians outdoors the U.S. are likely to share the identical “household values” positions (conventional marriage, pro-life) as conservative American Christians, they’re much less usually inclined to agree with their financial conservatism.

The Christian nationalism and financial conservatism advocated by Trump could be perplexing to Christians unfamiliar with the American Christian proper’s historical past of studying the Bible as a blueprint for unfettered free-market capitalism on the expense of the poor. Within the New Testomony, in spite of everything, Jesus calls on the wealthy to promote their possessions and provides them to the poor, and speaks of loving one’s neighbours and enemies.

To some who advocate Jesus’s platform of social justice, advancing totally different views within the language of Christianity can warrant being referred to as a “pretend Christian” or a deluded devotee of the “cult of Trump.” I warning in opposition to these labels, nonetheless, since such exclusionary rhetoric diverts consideration from how the American proper is busy redefining what it means to be “Christian” for their very own political agenda.

The Rev. William J. Barber speaks throughout a rally protesting in opposition to President Donald Trump’s insurance policies in Washington, in June 2019.

Shaping the election?

Democrats’ efforts to problem the suitable’s try to personal Christian identification and values might be important within the ultimate days of the marketing campaign. Within the vice-presidential debate, Kamala Harris acknowledged: “Joe Biden and I are each folks of religion” in response to Mike Pence’s insinuation that Democrats are attacking Christianity. If it weren’t for the eye the suitable’s influencers obtain, Harris wouldn’t have needed to make this assertion.

The Poor Folks’s Marketing campaign: A Nationwide Name for Ethical Revival is asking for “coming collectively to confront the interlocking evils of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, militarism and the warfare economic system, and the distorted ethical narrative of non secular nationalism.” Christian activists Rev. Dr. William J. Barber and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis helm this motion organized on the idea of values. It’s supported by interfaith our bodies like The Islamic Society of North America and the Motion Centre on Reform Judiasm.

In the meantime, the mainstream media, politically average and liberal Christian leaders and progressives on the entire should maintain the Christian proper accountable for his or her exclusionary doublespeak and their extremely selective readings of the Bible and American historical past.

Tony Keddie receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Analysis Council of Canada.

from Growth News https://growthnews.in/donald-trump-is-hardly-the-republican-jesus/ via https://growthnews.in

[khalilhumam]

Donald Trump fakes history in order to divide us

Register at https://mignation.com The Only Social Network for Migrants. #Immigration, #Migration, #Mignation ---

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/donald-trump-fakes-history-in-order-to-divide-us/

Donald Trump fakes history in order to divide us

By Tom Wheeler “Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children,” Donald Trump said in his pre-Independence Day rally in front of Mount Rushmore. He reprised the same themes on the White House lawn the following day. In the midst of a national catharsis on race and social justice, in front of a monument to great American leaders, and then on the lawn of the iconic symbol of American leadership, Trump chose a dog whistle message to stoke the “us vs. them” that has become his stock in trade. It wasn’t a new message, just new venues. At his last rally in Tulsa, Trump used similar rhetoric–“They want to demolish our heritage”–to describe the ongoing debate over removing statues to Confederate figures. This time he doubled down. In the first quote above, he made four specific assertions that he attributed to a “left-wing cultural revolution.” Let’s look at each of those claims, especially as they relate to the matter that continues to haunt the nation: the symbolism of Confederate statues and the naming of military bases for Confederate figures. “Wipe out our history.” The statues of Confederate soldiers may be part of our history, but not in the way Donald Trump sees that history. These men were traitors, and their celebration is a reminder to Black Americans that the oppression for which they fought is still alive. A few years ago, I was making a presentation in a former slaveholding state based on my book “Leadership Lessons of the Civil War.” When I referred to those who fought for the Confederacy as traitors, you could feel the air being sucked from the room. Afterward, some who had been in the audience confronted me over the statement. But the judgment is unassailable. To take up arms against your country is a traitorous act. Erecting statues is just a way to obfuscate that reality while celebrating what caused it. In a similar manner, naming American military bases for generals who fought against America helps keep that traitorous tradition alive. “Defame our heroes.” Donald Trump’s least favorite word, it would seem, is “loser.” He frequently weaponizes it against those with whom he disagrees. It is particularly strange, therefore, that the “heroes” he seeks to aggrandize are the losers of the Civil War. The veneration of those who led the insurrection we call the Civil War is the exception to the old rule that history is written by the winners. And that was exactly why the statues were erected: to rewrite that history and send a message that the cause that drove the treason continued. You do not find statues of Erwin Rommel in Germany. On the battlefield, he was a strategic genius on par with Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson (whom he studied). Recognizing the rotten core of Nazism, Rommel participated in the attempted assassination of Hitler (which cost him his life). But statues are not erected to celebrate national shames. Even if the individual may have been a genius, using that genius for the wrong purpose is nothing to memorialize. “Erase our values.” The values celebrated by the memorials whose loss Trump mourns are not those of bravery or strategic brilliance, but of continuing oppression. According to the American Historical Association, the Confederate monuments erected in the Jim Crow era of the late 19th and early 20th century were “part and parcel of the initiation of legally mandated segregation and widespread disenfranchisement across the South.” The monuments were symbols of white supremacy whose purpose was intimidation, a reminder that the so-called Lost Cause was not over and a reiteration of the racial oppression that it was all about. “The Civil War wasn’t about slavery,” the refrain of Lost Cause supporters goes, “it was about states’ rights.” That “state right” was the perpetuation of human bondage. “Indoctrinate our children.” I have written two books about the Civil War. One was about the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, the other about the battlefield leaders on both sides. Without a doubt, until President Lincoln finally found the general he deserved in Ulysses S. Grant, the South had the best battlefield leaders. Their battlefield behavior was often brilliant. The cause for which they fought, however, was despicable. So, how do we rationalize that contradiction? It is the nuance of this conversation that our children need to understand. The purpose of history is to tell the story of previous decisions–including their imperfections–in order to inform our lives today. The tactical skills of the generals on the battlefield is worthy of study. The decision that put them on that battlefield, however, forever stains their memory. It is history’s relevance to today that must be understood. History is the story of how humans, when confronted with challenge, acted imperfectly. It is precisely this multifaceted and imperfect history that our children should learn. We owe the next generation an appreciation of what it means for ordinary citizens to rise to hero status–as well as how to define hero status. It was particularly telling that on his way to Mount Rushmore, Donald Trump helicoptered over Native American demonstrators. The Original Americans were protesting what was happening on their sacred land. Had Trump truly cared about history as something more than a campaign stunt, there was another message he could have delivered. It could have been an inclusive message. It could have been a message to challenge us, rather than divide us. It could have been the story of Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. Accompanying General Grant was his aide, Lt. Col. Ely S. Parker, who was a Seneca Indian. When Lee entered the McLean house for the surrender, he saw Parker and commented, “I am glad to see one real American here.” Lt. Col. Parker responded, “We are all Americans.” It is a message that is as valid today as it was then, but it is lost on a man who wants to use history to divide us.