#cw nazis

[doomdoomofdoom]

Putting this under a cut since it's an image of Nazi book burnings, including a saluting crowd, and I assume not everyone wants to see that.

In May 1933, students all across the country were called upon to purge their University libraries of "ungerman" books. Public burnings were held on May 10th. We will never know the full extent of what was lost that day.

Since this is the transgender website: Among the burnt books were over 10,000 pieces from the very first research center on gay and transgender people. Both books from the institute's library and ongoing research documents were taken, along with a bust of the Institute's founder, Magnus Hirschfeld. The bust was broken and prominently displayed during the burnings. Hirschfeld himself was thankfully not in the country.

Mentions of trans people disappearing from all US government sites is not a coincidence. They're the canary in the coal mine.

[foone]

I want you to think about this as a writing exercise, not a poll about your personal morals/politics.

So imagine you find a crashed time travel attack drone. It's got enough fuel left for one last trip: you tell it when and where, it warps through time, and now it's got about the equivalent firepower of an helicopter gunship.

So you could shoot a person, a crowd, level a smallish building, take out an entire meeting room, sink a boat, crash a plane, or blow up a car.

Where, in all of time and space, do you think would be best to send this thing to change the past?

I was sorta assuming "for the better", but if you just want to see the world burn, feel free to suggest chaotic options.

Any ideas where you'd best us this power? I mean, the obvious one is blow up Hitler. Maybe fire on the Beer Hall Putsch? That'd get him and much of the Nazi leadership as well, and all before Hitler got national headlines.

But I'm wondering if there's was a meeting sometime in history with a bunch of particularly bad people where you could take 'em all out at once for a better "return on investment".

[anghraine]

Okay, so this is the Tarsus IV post I vaguely threatened alluded to a few days ago. I wrote most of it before last night's grumbling about movie Kirk, btw, so it's not a result of that; I was already thinking about what we know about Kirk and the Tarsus IV massacre from TOS, and what speculations and headcanons make the most sense to me in the context of TOS. I just waited until today to post it because I wasn't quite done yesterday.

Anyway, I was going over the finer details of "The Conscience of the King" to figure this out, and ended up with a ton of thoughts about the Tarsus IV backstory. So here are my (many) personal takeaways:

Firstly, there's a vague reference to some kind of local coup or uprising that put Governor Kodos in power, I think shortly before the food supply crisis. We don't get any details about the uprising from TOS, though the next to last version of the episode's script did mention Kodos setting himself up as a messianic figure once the coup succeeded. In any case, his power grab was certainly reinforced by the starvation crisis, as revealed by Spock's research:

"there were over eight thousand colonists and virtually no food. And that was when Governor Kodos seized full power and declared emergency martial law."

As far as we know in TOS, the crisis was set off by chance: an exotic fungus happened to destroy most of the colony's food supply, and it wasn't clear when relief would arrive. In fact, the Federation did send relief to the colony, per their usual practice, but it took them long enough to get there that the situation had become dire by then. Nearly all food was gone and the colonists were starving; the episode implies that some had even started committing suicide. Nevertheless, the Federation relief force arrived sooner than expected.

Kodos tries to argue in "The Conscience of the King" that the Federation's relief showing up so soon was just luck and he couldn't have guessed it would happen. But given what we know about the Federation as an institution, and given the urgent pressure the Federation puts on the Enterprise crew in multiple episodes to get food/supplies/medicine to some colony or another, it seems like there is a pretty competent, long-established Federation infrastructure for addressing crises like this. In reality, Kodos used the circumstances to justify something he already believed in and wanted to try implementing.

That thing was eugenics. This isn't ambiguous; the aired episode explicitly describes his atrocities as based on eugenics. The starvation of the colony gave Kodos the opportunity to put his theories into action.

He declared that half the colony would be executed, and the remaining food distributed among the other half. Moreover, the assignment of each colonist to either group was determined by Kodos's conception and judgment of genetic superiority. The genetically inferior half of the population, according to Kodos, was executed, and the genetically superior survivors (again, according to Kodos) were given all the food supplies. Kodos's exact words at the time to those slated to die included these lines:

"Your continued existence represents a threat to the well-being of society. Your lives mean slow death to the more valued members of the colony."

Kirk says of Kodos's full speech to those chosen for death:

"I remember the words. I wrote them down. [...] Are you sure you didn't act this role out in front of a captive audience whom you blasted out of existence without mercy?"

In the episode, Spock condemns Kodos in similar terms as "without mercy" and "ruthless," and is clearly horrified by what he's discovered:

"Children watching their parents die. Whole families destroyed. Over four thousand people. They died quickly, without pain, but they died."

The means by which Kodos had thousands of civilians killed isn't stated in the episode. As we see in the above quote, though, it seems to have been done very rapidly.

In an earlier draft, there's mention of some kind of re-purposed anti-matter chamber as the mechanism, and Kodos deliberately "sparing" Kirk while making him watch as the chamber switch was flipped. In that version, Kirk seems to be personally targeted for some reason, where in the episode as it is, he's just one of several random eyewitnesses who survived. I personally prefer the episode's version, which I think better fits a narrative around a mass-scale atrocity.

Anyway, there's another take on the massacre where the thousands of civilians slated for execution were gunned down with phasers, but I find that more difficult to reconcile with Spock's description, which sounds more mechanized and efficient to me. I do think there's reason to believe phasers or some other form of advanced weaponry did get used in the course of events, but not in the executions—more on that later.

As I mentioned in my poll, Kirk is established in TOS as being only 33 during "The Conscience of the King," and thus was only 13 when he personally saw all this (the episode repeatedly insists the atrocity took place exactly twenty years earlier—I think the emphasis on this time gap is important). There is no explanation in TOS of why 13-year-old Kirk seems to be the only member of his family who was present for this—and certainly the only one of the Kirks to personally see Kodos—though earlier drafts do have various explanations that make sense.

For instance, there was an idea floating around the drafting process that Kirk might have been a young midshipman stationed on Tarsus IV during the massacre, not a child. His exact age in TOS was up in the air until the second season explicitly established his then-current age as 34. So that idea is not at all canon, but did internally make sense, since there'd be no reason for his relatives to be posted with him.

There's also a fairly late script in which Kirk's father was among those killed. I believe Kirk Sr was already envisioned as a Starfleet officer at that point, and had been assigned to a post on Tarsus IV some time earlier, which is how a boy born in the Midwest ended up living in a remote colony as a child. However, as I understand, the writers were forced to remove the reference to Kirk's father getting killed because higher-ups didn't want to nail down Kirk's history too much in S1, in case they later wanted to take his family in a different direction.

IIRC, TOS never did do anything with Kirk's parents and we're never even told in the show if they're currently alive or dead, much less told anything about their roles during the massacre. His brother Sam Kirk was envisioned as 10 years older than James (I think the new shows shrink this, but that's irrelevant to the TOS production process), so it also made sense that Sam wasn't there, since he'd have been in his 20s and early in his own career elsewhere. (Sam and his family are mentioned in both earlier and later S1 episodes, so "they hadn't invented him yet" isn't the reason for his absence.)

Beyond all that, another detail I find interesting is that Kodos's speech announcing the impending massacre is preserved in some kind of audio file that Kirk has access to on the Enterprise. Kirk gives "Karidian" a copy of the exact words of this speech and orders him to read it aloud, and has the computers run a vocal comparison between that reading and the original recording. The computer analysis strongly indicates that both speeches were delivered by the same person, but lacks 100% certainty—perhaps due to vocal changes over the last 20 years, perhaps to a difference in the quality of the recordings or some other reason.

However, we don't actually know who recorded the original speech; since so few survivors ever got near enough to even see or hear Kodos in person, maybe the recording was done by Kodos himself or one of his people, and recovered later by Starfleet. The speech only addresses the colonists slated for death, suggesting that the 4000 chosen for survival had already been separated out. But it's possible that it was one or more of the colonists themselves who managed to record the speech.

Only nine of the survivors ever personally set eyes on Kodos (this seems to again imply that those selected for survival were mainly not present during the speech). There's a preserved photograph of him from that era, but that's all, and one of the reasons he's able to evade discovery for so long is because of the vanishingly few people involved who had ever seen him—this is not only canon but a major plot point in "The Conscience of the King."

I read on the wiki that there's a book about the whole thing, and in that version, Kirk never actually saw Kodos and just found a picture in a database, which honestly I think is stupid as fuck and makes no sense in terms of the episode as written (though very typical of corporate franchises watering down the horror of some element of an original, less sanitized story in later byproducts). In "The Conscience of the King," though, Leighton, Kirk, and Riley are explicitly stated to be among the nine survivors who saw Kodos personally.

It's never explained why they were among this small group of eyewitnesses, especially considering that Kirk and Riley would have been children at the time and Leighton was quite young.

Another intriguing data point is the fact that half of Leighton's face is very heavily damaged, and it does seem strongly indicated that this happened during the massacre. We don't know why, though, or how old he even was at the time—he seems older than 33-year-old Kirk, but they're good friends and rough contemporaries, so not that far apart in age.

There's also some interesting phrasing in the episode:

"There were nine eyewitnesses who survived the massacre, who'd actually seen Kodos with their own eyes. Jim Kirk was one of them."

This description is also from Spock after his research dive, someone unlikely to be loose with his phrasing. The general assumption, I think, is that the nine eyewitnesses (who I'm going to call the Tarsus Nine for convenience) were among those chosen for survival for eugenics purposes. The reason such a small number of them had ever seen Kodos is, presumably, that most people who'd seen him were deliberately assigned to the genetically unworthy group and killed. The Tarsus Nine were just the tiny fraction who flew under the radar.

That was my original impression, and it is possible, but there were some things I found puzzling about that scenario. For one, if the Tarsus Nine were separated with the other survivors, why are they persistently presented as the only eyewitnesses? If Leighton was separated into the survivor group, why was his face so heavily damaged in all this? Did he try to fight? Would he have been spared from death if he did? And the episode is clear that Leighton, Kirk, and Riley all heard Kodos's speech and witnessed the massacre in person.

Leighton:

"I remember him. That voice. The bloody thing he did [...] Jim, Jim, I need your help. There were only eight or nine of us who actually saw Kodos. I was one, you were another."

Kirk:

"But I remember. [...] I remember the words. I wrote them down. [...] All I understand is that four thousand people were needlessly butchered. [...] I saw him once, twenty years ago. Men change. Memory changes."

Riley:

"He murdered my father, and my mother. I know that voice, that face, I know it. I saw it. He murdered them."

I had been considering possible explanations for the uniqueness of these nine people as the only direct eyewitnesses among some 4000 survivors + the fact that the three eyewitnesses we meet would have been so young at the time (and Spock talks specifically of children seeing their parents die) + Kirk saying he remembers hearing the speech and that he only ever saw Kodos that one time + the Tarsus Nine knowing that nobody left alive except themselves saw Kodos as governor + their very accurate estimates of how many eyewitnesses survived + Leighton's facial scars.

And then I tripped over an ancient post (on livejournal of all things—I was linked to a post unrelated to the massacre and then followed another link) that collected some of the relevant Tarsus IV quotes and offered a very simple and elegant solution.

What if the Tarsus Nine weren't assigned to the "genetically more valuable" group? What if Kirk, Riley, Leighton, and the other six were in fact considered genetically unworthy and assigned to the group slated for death? What if they're the only direct eyewitnesses because everyone else was either removed from the massacre (and never saw the speech) or killed, and that's why there are so few of them?

me: oh damn, I didn't think about that and ... whoa, I don't think the episode ever does say what group they were actually assigned to. It's possible. Holy shit.

So, here's an alternate possibility/headcanon:

4000-odd colonists including the Tarsus Nine were gathered without any knowledge of the intended massacre. They didn't know where the other colonists were or what was going on beyond starvation and martial law. None of them had ever personally seen their reclusive governor. They were just waiting with their families to find out what was going on. Kodos came out to speak to them, at last, and delivered his speech to those slated for death (hence Kirk saying in TOS that he only ever saw him once, 20 years earlier). The "survival" group didn't hear it and never saw him. But Kirk, Leighton, and Riley did—because they were supposed to die.

Kodos's description of 33-year-old Kirk is, uh, let's say intriguing in that context:

"Here you stand, the perfect symbol of our technical society. Mechanized, electronized, and not very human. You've done away with humanity, the striving of man to achieve greatness through his own resources."

Kodos's murderous daughter Lenore, similarly, says:

LENORE: Are you like that, Captain? All this power at your command, yet the decisions that you have to make— KIRK: Come from a very human source. LENORE: Are you, Captain? Human?

It's likely that these colonists and other residents didn't all go meekly to their entirely unexpected deaths. If we go with the concept of Kirk's father as a Starfleet officer serving on a post on the colony, some of these people were in Starfleet and might well have still had weaponry of some kind. They were just as hungry as the rest, but I suspect would have fought to the death against an undisguised atrocity. I think others also would have fought back against Kodos's people, despite being starved and much less well-armed (if armed at all).

In all probability, none of them expected to win, but hoped to buy time for others, especially their children, to escape (hence the conspicuous youth of the eyewitnesses). The resisting residents would have been massacred by Kodos's troops as he took control of the situation, even before thousands of more people were sent to their executions, but I imagine this resistance created enough havoc for nine children and young adults to escape with their lives (Leighton's face getting seared in the process—perhaps by a phaser set to kill that barely missed him).

Most of the literal children among the Tarsus Nine had seen their parents killed as Kodos's people took control, as had other children who didn't survive (hence Spock's description of children watching parents die and of the nine eyewitnesses directly surviving a massacre). The Tarsus Nine may have seen the other colonists forced into the execution mechanism, whatever it was, either during their escape or if any snuck out afterwards to see. Regardless, I headcanon that the Tarsus Nine found each other and hid out together (I'm assuming they ended up cooperating because they're so accurate about just how many of them there were and because I'm guessing literal children wouldn't have survived alone).

We don't know a whole lot about what was going on psychologically with them at the time. But something else I've been thinking about is the interesting ambiguity in Kirk's statement to Kodos about the original genocide speech. Kirk says, "I remember the words. I wrote them down," which seems a reference to Kirk writing the speech down during the episode to force Kodos to read it. However, something I find fascinating there (/Spock fistbump) is that Kirk's statement that he himself wrote down the speech follows so directly from "I remember the words."

I think the implication is that he wrote down the exact words of the speech from memory (indicating that Kodos's genocide announcement that Kirk heard at age 13 is still seared into his mind). Or possibly, the causality is reversed: he perfectly remembers Kodos's speech because he wrote it down at some point in the past (likely not long after surviving the massacre). The former seems a bit more probable to me, but either case would suggest quite a lot about how deeply this affected him.

But whatever the Tarsus Nine were up to, they lasted long enough for Starfleet to arrive and take charge of the situation. We don't know the details of how that happened from TOS, either, though the fact that Kodos got the hell out of Dodge and left a burned body to be misidentified as him suggests that it was obvious enough what Starfleet's arrival was going to mean well before any fighting began.

Afterwards, well ... some of the Tarsus Nine maintained ties, for sure. Kirk and Leighton seem to be trusting friends; they address each other by familiar nicknames, Kirk knows Leighton's wife, and he regards Leighton's deception as something of a personal betrayal. Kirk is a bit vague on Leighton's professional life and dismisses his suspicions at first, so I don't think they're super close, but it's a trusting and familiar relationship in general.

Meanwhile, others among them lost contact. Kirk clearly has no idea that the Lieutenant Riley he knows on the Enterprise was a little boy among the other eyewitnesses, which seems probable enough. Riley likely ended up with caretakers who wouldn't have been all that keen on him being reminded of the horrific trauma he'd experienced. Him ending up on the Enterprise by sheer chance is a hell of a coincidence, but that's not unusual for Star Trek, let's be real.

A minor point: I'm guessing Sam Kirk had a hell of a week as the information about what was happening on Tarsus IV leaked out. I'm guessing from the outside, there'd be the official alert of the food crisis -> the colony's communications going dark -> Starfleet arriving and discovering what had happened -> their updates as they searched for survivors and those responsible -> their reports of finding the 4000 chosen for survival and the Tarsus Nine.

Moving forwards chronologically, we don't know that much about the longer-term effects on the Tarsus Nine apart from Kirk, though Riley is clearly haunted to some extent. Thomas Leighton has a respectable career, though his wife says after his death:

"At least he has peace now. He never really had that before."

As for Kirk, I think the next "version" of Kirk we know anything about via TOS is him as a very young man at Starfleet Academy. This Kirk is repeatedly described as bookish and solemn. In "Shore Leave" (which follows very shortly after "The Conscience of the King," though it's far lighter), we get this exchange:

KIRK: I know the feeling very well. I had it at the Academy. An upperclassman there. One practical joke after another, and always on me. My own personal devil. A guy by the name of Finnegan. MCCOY: And you being the very serious young— KIRK: Serious? I'll make a confession, Bones. I was absolutely grim.

Yeah, I wonder why.

Even as late as his time as an instructor at the Academy, when he was Lieutenant Kirk, he seems pretty recognizably "that" Kirk. He taught a notoriously challenging class (the subject not stated, but implied to be philosophy) and was known as a demanding teacher. In "Where No Man Has Gone Before," his friend and former student Gary Mitchell says:

"Well, I'm getting a chance to read some of that longhair stuff you like. Hey man, I remember you back at the Academy. A stack of books with legs. The first thing I ever heard from an upperclassman was, watch out for Lieutenant Kirk. In his class, you either think or sink."

Mitchell jokes about how he only passed by orchestrating the campaign of a "little blonde lab technician" to distract Kirk from his usual severity. And even this was not a fling; Kirk's relationship with the lab technician reached the point that he almost married her. So even that suggests someone who was taking every part of his life deadly seriously.

The personable, dutiful-but-easy-going charm and good humor of Kirk in much of TOS seems to not have been much in evidence for many, many years of Kirk's life. And even by the time we meet him, this runs much less deep than his powerful sense of responsibility and his commitment to the ideals of the Federation and his own philosophical convictions. We often see his outwards charm switch off like a light when it doesn't serve his purposes.

This is especially apparent in "The Conscience of the King" itself, which includes one of Kirk's most cold-blooded charm offensives—he can't immediately reach Kodos, so instead he deliberately charms Kodos's nineteen-year-old daughter Lenore in order to dig up information on him (not realizing Lenore herself is a murderer). There is a chasm between this calculated charm and his manner when he finds Kodos and drops the front:

The last thing I wanted to say about "The Conscience of the King" and this particular backstory for Kirk is that, after all of this, what exactly is the point of the backstory revealed in this episode? It's Star Trek, there usually is one, even when it's executed badly or clumsily. What is it gesturing at?

There's a repeated emphasis on the twenty years between the present moment and Kodos's atrocity. He is now an old man living a normal life, and doesn't seem to be a particular threat to anyone. One of the major subplots involves Spock trying to figure out what the hell happened twenty years earlier, then trying to convince McCoy of the threat, then Kirk and Spock and McCoy having this fraught discussion about it.

Spock is not dispassionate; he is horrified by both the past atrocity and current threat to Kirk, and quickly reaches a point of certainty about Karidian's/Kodos's identity and what should be done about him. Kirk is more anxious and unsure about getting it wrong and about his own motives, despite simultaneously wanting to just kill this guy on the spot. McCoy doesn't want to believe at pretty much every turn, and even when he does, is wary of acting out of potentially questionable motives so long after the fact. It leads to this great scene between all three:

SPOCK: Why do you invite death? KIRK: I'm not. I'm interested in justice. MCCOY: Are you? Are you sure it's not vengeance? KIRK: No, I'm not sure. I wish I was. I've done things I've never done before. I've placed my command in jeopardy. From here on I've got to determine whether or not Karidian is Kodos. SPOCK: He is. KIRK: You sound certain. I wish I could be. Before I accuse a man of that, I've got to be. I saw him once, twenty years ago. Men change. Memory changes. Look at him now, he's an actor. He can change his appearance. No. Logic is not enough. I've got to feel my way, make absolutely sure. MCCOY: What if you decide he is Kodos? What then? Do you play God, carry his head through the corridors in triumph? That won't bring back the dead, Jim. KIRK: No, but they may rest easier.

Of course, the matter of "oh hey, we keep finding elderly people who committed atrocities some 20 years ago and we've got to navigate how to deal with them now in a way that honors their victims" was not at all metaphorical at the time. In the 60s, the architects of atrocities who made their escape twenty years earlier and were discovered as ostensibly normal aging people were just literal Nazis.

While the Tarsus IV massacre is on a much smaller scale, obviously, Erin Horáková has a good explanation of the topicality here:

In “The Conscience of the King”, we learn that Kirk is a survivor of a colony-world genocide that occurred during his childhood. As an adult, Kirk attempts to determine whether an old man, now an actor, is actually Kodos, the mass murderer who perpetrated this genocide. “Conscience” is a complex, shifting episode made in the wake of the arrest of aged Nazis in South America by Mossad agents (again, it’s subtextually important to this episode that Kirk is played by a Jewish actor).

For further context, plenty of people involved in TOS had themselves fought in WWII, so "what do we do about elderly Nazis" was not a distant issue. Also, while Roddenberry himself was unfortunately antisemitic (a quality presumably related to "Patterns of Force" ever seeing the light of day), there were a lot of Jewish people working behind and in front of the camera on TOS, most famously including both William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy (both are/were Jewish actors from Jewish communities, though this tends to be much more present for many fans with Nimoy—it's hard not to think that is at least partly related to their physical appearances). So the whole premise is complex and fraught in real world terms, as well, which I felt was also worth mentioning as a significant element of what's going on here.

[shyjusticewarrior]

So I work retail. When they no longer need someone they called for, they say "cancel [employee name]" on intercom. And it got me thinking what if the batfam did that.

Tim: Cancel Red Hood.

Duke: Damn, what'd he do? Naziism?

Jason: What- I have killed nazis. I'll kill one right now!

[velvetvexations]

tbh we should call people who call others "theyfab" what they are: channers. like, sorry you clearly just switched sites and didn't bother to also stop using the Neonazi Cesspool Website Lingo, but it clearly identifies you as a 4chan (ex-)user.

No, but see, then it's bad because you're calling trans women - it's always "trans women," like all trans women, anything you say about a trans woman is about All Trans Women - Nazis. Like idk I wasn't calling anyone a Nazi. Most people on 4chan aren't Nazis but most of them are cool with slurs and you're using a slur that was coined on 4chan so I don't actually think there's anything wrong with speculating about you being an active participant in 4chan culture at some point in your life. If I call you a 4channer and you get hyper-defensive about how not-a-Nazi you are and always have been, that's very concerning!

[whirlpool-blogs]

hi have we talked about gale recreating russelsheim as some kind of headfucky experiential therapy. bucky on his hands and knees on the floor while gale fucks him from behind, a gun pointed to the back of john’s head. he’s calling him terrorflieger and schwein and john is shaking so badly his ankle bones are rattling against the floor but he’s whispering, eyes squeezed shut, that’s me, that’s what i am. and then at the end of it all, gale pulls the trigger and there’s an empty click at john’s head and john cries out so loud it’s like he really is dying. and then gale pulls him into his arms and says, see, you’re alive, you’re alive

[meyerlansky]

>vent about antisemitism in the hbo war fandom last night

>wake up and check activity page

>"oh a few new likes on my mota gifsets from a blog i don't recognize! ...and they followed and unfollowed very quickly. hm."

>check their blog

>literal neonazi shit two posts down

this is what i'm fucking talking about. if you're going to participate in a fanbase for a piece of media that deals directly with wwii in europe, you need to get way better at recognizing neofash propaganda, especially the flavor that valorizes the american war machine and uses media that does the same valorizing—like every hbowar installment—to further their rhetoric. you need to be thinking much more critically about the ways groups like this are using rising antisemitism to disseminate genocidal beliefs to people who otherwise wouldn't find those ideas palatable. you need to be a lot more fucking careful. there is a neonazi presence on this website, and fascist groups WANT images like those in the post i'm talking about to spread without commentary to solidify their ideas in public discourse. you need to be able to recognize it when you see it, and you need to be not only prepared and willing but ACTIVELY SEEKING to shut it the fuck down immediately.

in terms of practical things you can do to learn to recognize fash and nazi propaganda, this document is a good starting point, though it's from 2021 and some of the entries are dated. online fash iconography co-opts things—like the american war machine, as mentioned—that will make it easier for nonfash people to digest, and can be very quick to shift to stay ahead of the public awareness that it IS in fact fascist. staying aware not a one-and-done thing. you have to keep doing it.

[anarchotolkienist]

I watched an introduction to the World of Darkness setting Hunter, which makes the case that it's a game about being a punk - the isolation that comes with being one of the few people who see the oppression of the world for what it is and doing something about it, when noone can be trusted to help you and you are the only people who seemingly care which can then cash out as hating the humanity you're supposed to protect because they feel complicit, and so on. I sort of get it, for an experience of really annoying 90s hardcore who takes The Scene and Punk, Man, way more seriously than it deserves, but I also feel like it's way closer to the Nazi Punk experience than any normal ones.

The whole experience of the world being that it's run by monsters who only seem human even through they aren't, that you can't fight back against except by cleansing it (the title is even, probably (?) by accident, the title of the pre-eminent neo-Nazi serial killer novel) but you'll be seen as a murderer, finding connection with other people who have Seen it online and only online (what is Hunter-net but Stormfront? However much I dislike the punk scene, normal punks hardly go about finding their political community on a forum, they do so at gigs and in bands, parts of the scene. Only the Nazis really prominently featured the forum as an organising tool). Like the theming to me really strongly implies that you're a neo-Nazi in a world where neo-Nazism is just kind of ontologically correct (because there actually is a conspiracy at the top to keep the blood-sucking élite and their influence secret and it is partially based on what kind of human runs the show - the universe has oil companies that are massively destructive, not because they exist in a social structure, but because they're run by an evil cult to the Lovecraftian entity the Worm, and that sort of thing). It's kind of hard to imagine the endgame of the Hunters being a popular revolution establishing different structures and ways of living with one another (any kind of left-wing revolutionism), rather it seems to be a cadre of murderers Who Have Seen the Light rising up in cell structures until they eventually manage to purge the government of the inhuman beings that corrupt it and use it to cleanse the world of the impurities that prey on people.

I don't think that any of this was in any way intentional, so I don't really know where I was going with this, other than I guess be careful how you imagine your radicalism and the things you fight against, because you might accidentally become a Nazi. It's happened before, and it will keep happening until the left takes Fascism seriously as a force that we have interactions with ideologically.

[recreationaldivorce]

Hey guys quick question what's that on the plane behind you.

[max1461]

The thing about the Nazis is like. You know, at some level you don't expect evil people to actually look evil. Like you just think "nah they probably looked like regular guys, I mean this isn't a movie, awful people just look regular in real life". And then, no, they all actually look like the slimiest motherfuckers alive. Like look at these people:

Like, I didn't cherrypick here! These are like, the top fucking guys!

[elierlick]

90 years ago today: On May 6th, 1933, Nazis stormed, looted, and burned Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, Europe's center of queer and trans culture. I colorized these gruesome photos to point out this wasn't that long ago. People alive today can remember these events. We will not go back.

[onbearfeet]

Misunderstandings with Roommate Cryptid

*RC enters the kitchen as I am washing dishes. He waves to get my attention as I have headphones on. I pause my podcast and remove the headphones.*

RC: I'm going to bed.

Me: Yay! Sleep well.

RC: Did I do something to upset you?

Me: ???No????

RC: You're not wearing the Bluetooth headphones I got you for Christmas.

Me: ... OH.

RC: Do you not like them?

Me: No, ha, it's because of Nazis.

RC: ....sorry?

Me: No, you see, I'm listening to a podcast about extremist groups, and I heard you getting out of the shower, and I thought, "Shit shit shit, he's gonna walk out in the middle of some asshole quoting Hitler or something," so I panicked and grabbed the nearest pair of headphones. Which happened to be these.

RC: OH.

Me: I love my new noise-canceling headphones. Which is why they were on my bed and not in the kitchen.

RC: Makes sense. Glad you like them. Sorry about the Nazis.

Me: Pretty much everyone is.

[anghraine]

Christmas/Hanukkah was kind of wild, but mostly really fun.

For context, my current household includes me (agnostic grey-ace white lesbian raised Mormon); J, my best friend since middle school (Jewish atheist cishet dude); Kh, his girlfriend and my best friend from grad school (a bisexual, South Asian-American Muslim woman); and J's own best friend from grad school, Ash (agnostic Evangelical-raised queer white woman, all other details redacted). This is the first time we've all been together at this time of year, and after spending hours of Christmas Eve doing Christmas-type stuff w/ my parents, we all wanted a respite from 24/7 Christian stuff that all of us have visceral associations with and everyone wanted to support J in celebrating Hanukkah in whatever way seemed right to him.

So J lit his menorah, we got Chinese-American takeout, and J decided what he really wanted to do afterwards, all things considered, was watch Raiders of the Lost Ark.

me: for the Nazi punching?

J: for the Nazi melting. And explosions. It's the Festival of Lights, after all :D

Kh made some joke about the scene being lit when some of the Nazis ended up getting doused in gasoline and lit on fire (I'd forgotten that part!), and we were like... does that count as foreshadowing??? And of course we eventually got to the highlight of the film, the Ark melting the Nazis' (and the one French collaborator villain's) faces right off with undead spirit fog. And then it morphs into a pillar of flame piercing the stormy heavens (the Ark was earlier described as a radio signal to/from God), all while sparing Indy (who properly has his eyes closed and insisted on Marion doing likewise)

me: Huh, looks like God had some opinions on all this!

J: ♪ Hava nagila ♪

[dernisseznirp]

Ich hab Grad den gruseligsten Wikipedia Artikel gefunden :)))

[velvetvexations]

im white so idk if I'm overstepping here, and I know others have said this more coherently, but every time I see people compare being a man to being white it feels so?? Especially when it's a trans man like, what, does that mean race is equally binary and also transitioned to? I wish people would just say that being a trans man is, idk, like being ace or bi, in terms of being just as invisible aside from needing a joke, a scapegoat, or at BEST tolerating when needing an in to divide the queer community (which, btw, is none of these demographics’ fault). Even then i tfeels a bit....overly simplified?

I d k it just always feels kind of obnoxious, esp now that white CIS people are getting in on this like???

I think that's just normal, honestly. It can be present in different groups to different extents for various reasons but people tend to prioritize their own suffering and feel offended when others come close to infringing their oppression copyright. There's a bit in Maus* where the author is baffled by how racist his Holocaust-survivor father is towards Black people that I think about a lot. Intuitively, going through oppression yourself should make you a turbo-progressive, but humans are more complicated than that.

*if you can stomach a pretty harrowing depiction of the Holocaust, Maus is a true work of art and I heavily recommend it; it's less about the Holocaust itself (although it goes through the period in exhaustive detail) and more the author's relationship with his father

[whirlpool-blogs]

read here

Rating: E

Tags: Truth Serum, accidental/forced love confession, Torture, Gale is emotionally split open like a ripe peach, and John absolutely does not have a good time, fuck or die blowjob, Blood and Injury, Hurt No Comfort, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat

@crowthis @thebuckys ❤️

and thanks to everyone who interacted with this fic's WIP posts along the way :)