#eternal italian fascism

[ananke-xiii]

i love how media have been saying that "fascism is on the rise" for like... almost over a DECADE now? meanwhile in 2018 when the centre-right coalition won the elections in italy my friends and I were like: they're gonna come for us as soon as they find out that we have books at home.

[peoplesrazor]

Part Two. Link to part one.

This is about things Lily does that could be considered part of Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt. I'm going to be fair as possible and none of these are a reach. Also, I'm going to skip anything that has to do with nations and militaries. Again, I don't think Lily is as strong as she thinks I do, or else those would be included.

Also, unlike Lily, I'm going to acknowledge that these were written about a very special type of person in a very special kind of nation going through some unusual times. I have a feeling that's why she didn't use the correct name of his list. Can't have people looking up what a blackshirt is, can we? Else they might wonder what someone posting on tumblr might have to do with the Italian military in WW2.

So, again, this isn't one for one and feel free to take it with a grain of salt. Lily, you can take it with a spoonful of sugar. I hear it makes the medicine go down.

The rejection of modernism

This is my weakest point, as Eco was talking about people of the past feeling everything that came after the Age of Reason as depraved. Then again, he wasn't trying to link online discourse to fascism either. Lily does keep claiming older works were somehow superior.

Disagreement is treason

I shouldn't have to point out how Lily treats anyone who disagrees with her, even her fans.

Fear of difference

Here it is, this is the one I hinted at in the last post. This is that othering I was talking about. I quote: The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. "No one should listen to my critics, they are dirty stalkers and transphobes and you are too if you disagree with me," says Lily.

Appeal to social frustration

This is the appeal to the middle class. You know, all that rent talk and inflation stuff she's been spewing. @sillylilyposting has a post about this and other points on this list as well.

The obsession with a plot

Frankly, the rest of this list wouldn't be possible if she wasn't. Basically, we can't just be critical of her work, we have to be part of a larger obsession with attacking her because of...well, take your pick: She's a woman. She's a transwoman. She's indigenous. She's indigenous but not brown enough. She's indigenous, but makes her puppet too brown. Or we are just plain stalkers.

Make no mistake, by constantly parroting those plots, not only does she stop her fans from speaking out, not only does she make them afraid of being painted with that brush, she also makes it okay for them to attack and belittle us, cause we are the bad guys, right?

Once again, I want to acknowledge that those things do happen, and that Lily has likely experienced, at least transphobia. To have Lily Orchard, of all people, be the one transgender person I've ever met, spoke to, or heard of who hasn't experienced it is, frankly, ridiculous. I'm just saying that's not the motive of every critic and pretending it is, is just another form of othering.

I'm going to skip Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It's there, but I feel that's more on the fan's end. This would be them coming into anon asks and attacking people. Here is an example, of such a post sent to @that-one-kiddo-in-the-back but be forewarned it's not pretty and could be triggering. This could be Lily, but it's just as likely to be a fan who feels they can't just stand by and also feel they can attack us, because hey, we ain't one of them, are we? See fear of difference above. There's that othering again. You'll see it if you do look at the post more clearly. Being told they shouldn't be allowed to be who they clearly are because they are critical of Lily.

I'm going to skip Everybody is educated to become a hero as I feel it's too closely linked, in this case, with my last point about her fans.

Machismo and weaponry

I could skip this one. It does require a bit of a modern reading. Let's point out the obvious connotations, though. Lily does seem to dismiss women creators more often, and she does seem to be a bit more, let's say unsavory, in her attacks on Ant, a bisexual man than on others. So, I'm going to leave this here.

Selective populism

Okay, going to copy this word for word. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People. Now if you read this and think, wait, everything Lily says about fandoms and so on seems to go against this happening, you're correct.

But does she not want current fandoms to be "the Voice of the People," because that would be a bad idea.

Or is it because it's not her voice that is "the Voice of the People."

I'm presenting this as food for thought, and not a definitive take. Something I'll repeat at the end, but especially for this point. That's why I made sure to copy the whole thing.

Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak

Last but not least. First, I've accused Lily of this before. She's totally not responsible for SU having it's reputation ruined in one post and totally has the most popular video, if you trimmed down the videos that are about theories or whatever on SU, in another post. She's beaten up Courtney and been beaten up by Courtney. And so on.

She's more familiar with Newspeak at this point than Orwell.

Also this direct quote from the definition of what this is: All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.

Okay, so, I'm going to assume I don't have to point out the lack of critical reasoning Lily is pretty much famous for. That is, aside from straight up lack of media literacy, what we have been talking about. Lily does leap from point a to point z without much critical thought sometimes.

Again, this is food for thought and most of this is not a one to one comparison. I would have never just made these points so blatantly had Lily not invoked the Umberto Eco trap card on us. I just wanted to point out how controlling behavior is easily fit into this model.

You can read more about Umberto Eco's work and see the actual list here.

[communistkenobi]

This is going to be an extremely messy post, but I’ve been grappling with the argument that “fascism” is nothing more than an exceptionalised label for the cyclical political crises of capitalism, as opposed to an actual historical force in and of itself - just as capitalism has cyclical economic crises which are necessary for its continued functioning, fascism represents the political crises of capital, a bulwark against class consciousness and socialist organising which threaten capitalist rule. Fascism does this by instead emphasising a racial or national consciousness, using white supremacy and the promise of property to divert people away from class consciousness. In Anatomy of Fascism, Paxton talks about how important the promise of property ownership to Italian peasantry was to establishing fascist rule there - class mobility up into the middle classes was used in concert with racial/national politics to stop people from identifying with the proletariat (“homeowners are too busy to be communists,” to paraphrase that American housing developer I forget the name of atm). This is especially weaponised against Jewish people, who are framed as having no national affiliation and are thus eternal outsiders to the bourgeois Christian homeland.

I have encountered a lot of definitions of fascism. The most productive and evocative definition I’ve found is Cesaire’s - colonialism come home. He was speaking of Europe when he said this, saying that Hitler was only doing what Europe did overseas. But what does this mean for settler colonial states? There is no “home” for colonialism to return to for countries like the United States or Canada, because this colonial process has to constantly and at all times maintain itself upon indigenous land in order for the state to continue to exist. The colonialism is always home, always domestic (while also obviously being exercised globally through imperial domination and violence, especially in the case of the United States). Are these states essentially fascist in conception? If this conclusion is true (which I’m leaning towards yes), is “fascism” a useful analytical category at all? If we speak of the political processes of capitalism when we speak of fascism, can we simply just call it all capitalism? It would be like if we called all periods of economic crisis “collapsism” and partitioned these periods of depression or economic instability into exceptional circumstances divorced from the history of capitalism (which we already have done with The Great Depression in the 1930s, or the 2008 Financial Crash - these are exceptional periods where something ���went wrong,” where the system “failed”). Sitting with this conclusion for a moment, calling these processes fascist is to divorce them of their material history, to decouple them from the violence and exploitation inherent to capitalism, and to ensure that any analysis of fascism does not conclude with a call to abolish capitalism - for if fascism is merely an interruption of normal capitalist democratic functioning, then preventing future fascisms does not require the abolition of the current economic and political system.

I’ve been engaging with this essay recently, which calls liberals the “left wing of fascism,” and argues that liberalism, far from providing an alternative to fascist rule, instead provides a stabilising quality to it, acting as a stop-gap to the more destabilising right-wing bourgeois elements of capitalism. And despite these conclusions I still find fascism a useful label, both because I think it has a lot of strategic value to engage with particular historical periods (such as right now) as fascist - fascism as a label has widespread recognition, if not widespread understanding - and also because it provides a neat shorthand for the historical process of capitalist political decay. 

Anyway I’m talking this all out publicly because I’m in the process of reviewing a lot of literature on the subject for my PhD, and I keep coming to this conclusion - that fascism is not “real” in the sense that it cannot be divorced from capitalism itself, and in fact is a necessary process to the continued functioning of capitalism - but I’m having a hard time seeing what analytical limitations this conclusion produces. I have so far been the most persuaded by post-colonial and Marxist accounts of fascism, but I wonder if multiple definitions of fascism are still strategically or analytically useful to use in concert with one another, even if I disagree with them

[dailyanarchistposts]

Editor’s Note: Teodoro Antilli was active in the Argentine anarchist movement during a period of severe repression. In late 1909 a state of siege was imposed, many anarchists were imprisoned and their presses, offices and cultural centres were ransacked and closed. Antilli was involved in the publication of the anarchist paper, La Battala, but was arrested in May 1910 along with hundreds of others amid renewed attacks on the anarcho-syndicalist FORA (Selectiol1 58). In 1913, Alltilli was imprisoned for publishing an article accusing all assistant prison governor of raping an anarchist prisoner. He was involved in the general strike ofjanuary 1919, which was ruthlessly suppressed. Over 700 workers were killed, thousands more wounded, and over 50,000 imprisoned in what came to be known as the “Tragic Week.” All anarchist papers, including Antilli’s, were banned. In 1921, another 1,100 workers were massacred during the anarchist rebellion in Patagonia. Antilli and his next paper, La Antorcha, supported the actions of Severino Di Giovanni, a militant Italian anarchist refugee from fascism who began a campaign of illegal actions, including bank robberies and assassinations, in face of this brutal reaction. The following extracts, translated by Paul Sharkey, are taken from Antilli’s Salud a la Anarquia! [Here’s to Anarchy!] (Buenos Aires: La Antorcha, 1924, reprinted in El Anarquismo en America Latina, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1990)

WE SHOULD, IT OCCURS TO US, OFFER a full explanation of our notion of “social struggle” as opposed to “class struggle.” As we see it, they are a s different as n arrow is from wide and the eternal from the ephemeral. Suggesting actions of differing scopes. In fact, someone locked into the class struggle is ill equipped to understand comprehensive social struggle.... If I accept that there is only class struggle, success for me will b e enough. My quarrel is with the propertied and the capitalists. If I join forces with other workers like myself and set up, say, a cooperative, the class struggle will be over as far as we are concerned; we shall have won, as indeed the cooperators and socialists contend. Yet the state of society will not h ave been changed and the class struggle will be over a s far as we are concerned because we h ave made ourselves capitalists, the inner circle of a business that visits its exploitation on outsiders, making every one of us, in equal measure, an exploiter, instead of our being split into exploiters and exploited ... If I extend this to thinking about the entire social system as a “class struggle,” then all that is required is that my class should dictate to the other class, in which case I too shall have emerged the victor.

“Social struggle,” as we understand it, is not just setting a course for revolution and extinguishing the existence of the bourgeoisie; it is also, since we hold that the social also means the sociable, the elimination of all imposition, especially political imposition, by one man upon another; we see humanity as having fought for countless centuries past to achieve a genuinely free society; we plunge into these raging waters and, let there be no mistake about this, we accept all the consequences and, chiefly, the Revolution. Social struggle, therefore, is something humane and all-embracing; the aim is not merely to change society, but that society should be hospitable for men, and every source of oppression or tyranny banished, which is to say, a genuinely free society...

The term “social struggle,” as we employ it, i s that all-encompassing. And we want this borne in mind lest it be confused with class struggle carried through to Revolution. We bring into the Revolution a social struggle as well ... Class struggle carried through to Revolution has as its aim a “proletarian dictatorship.” Social struggle carried through to Revolution has as its object the freedom of Humanity and the ennobling of all of its members.

[krastbannert]

The Day of Days: Eighty Years After

It was a brisk summer night, almost like any other June night in England.

The terror of the Blitz was long over. Four years ago, the Battle of Britain long had been won. Two years ago in the Pacific the Americans had shocked the world with impossible victories at Midway and Guadalcanal.  A year ago, the last German forces had surrendered in North Africa, and the Communists of the Soviet Union had done the impossible and stopped the German war machine in its tracks at the gates of Stalingrad and Moscow before, finally, turning the tide at Kursk. A month early the British Army in India had stopped the Imperial Japanese Army in its tracks at Kohima Ridge, and for the first time in three years the Japanese were on the run. Just a day before, the American Fifth Army had liberated Rome, freeing the "Eternal City" from fascism after twenty years.

They were winning - just. The war was still going on, ever-present in their minds, but they could sleep soundly under a quiet, friendly sky.

But in the dark, in army camps and airfields and naval bases and offices across the southwest of England, the scene was very different. Men whispered to each other, prayers and jokes, trying to lighten the tension in the air, so thick they could cut it with a knife. John Ford - the famed Hollywood director turned Navy Field Photographic unit captain - supposedly told his wife he was going off for a little local skirmish. And in his private office, Dwight D. Eisenhower - Commander, Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force - typed the resignation he hoped he'd never have to give. If the unthinkable happened, if this gamble failed...they might never get another chance.

All at once, all across the southwest of England, just before midnight, the quiet was shattered by the roar of thousands upon thousands of piston engines, and thousands of men, some barely out of high school, clambered aboard planes and landing craft for a journey into the dark.

Eisenhower penned a short note, and ensured that a copy was given to every single one of the men under his command. It read, very simply:

"You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world."

It was June 6th, 1944, and after three years of begging by Josef Stalin, and a year of intense planning, brutal training, unparalleled deception, and massive buildup, the time had come to do the impossible.

The Allies were going to break the Atlantic Wall, or die trying.

It was a herculean task. The Germans had spent four years preparing for just this day, filling every beach from Cherbourg to Amsterdam with every kind of mine imaginable, dotting Czech hedgehogs and wooden posts tipped with high explosives along the shallow coastlines, and building bunkers with encased machine guns and artillery, pre-sighting mortars and artillery, digging trenches and building tens of thousands of pillboxes, and digging enough anti-aircraft positions to turn night into day. In command was Erwin Rommel, the famed "Desert Fox", a veteran of the brutal World War I Italian front, and one of the best tank commanders in the world who had fought across France and North Africa. Under his command were almost half a million German troops, including battle hardened veterans of France, Africa, and Russia.

Standing against them, over a thousand planes and gliders carrying over 23,000 paratroopers from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Behind them, thousands of fighters and bombers and almost seven thousand landing craft and ships carrying more than 160,000 men from thirteen nations.

The Day of Days began just after midnight.

At 00:48 on June 6th, 1944, the men of the 101st Airborne became the first of to make a terrifying jump into the dark.

It was the beginning of the single largest amphibious invasion ever attempted. Six hours after the paratroopers took the plunge, at 06:30 local time, the first men stumbled onto shore, and into the jaws of death.

Almost immediately, the entire plan fell apart. Fog, cloud cover, a lack of navigators, and brutal anti-aircraft fire forced many pilots to signal the paratroopers to drop outside their assigned zones, mixing units and men and causing absolute chaos on the ground. The weather in the channel was not much better: high seas swamped many of the landing craft and amphibious tanks, and strong currents pushed entire regiments out of their landing zones.

When the men finally made it to the beach, they faced a desperate run across the dreaded shingle: a nearly half-mile expanse of open sand and rock, with no protection at all from the waiting German defenders. Their fire support - the naval vessels waiting offshore, bristling with guns of all calibers - was of little help; the captains refused to close any farther than the extreme ranges for fear of counter fire. And the bad weather in the skies above prevented pilots from accurate close air support.

Over ten thousand men from both sides would have their lives ripped apart on beaches in just that first day.

On Omaha Beach alone, almost two thousand men were killed. Some didn't even get a chance to face the enemy - instead, they simply drowned, their heavy equipment weighing them down into the cold waters of the North Atlantic. The beaches themselves, its said, turned red with blood as men were killed by the dozen. At Gold, Juno, and Sword Beaches, the Canadians and British managed to make it off the beach, only to be forced into fortified towns, where they endured the brutality and chaos of house-to-house urban warfare. At Pointe du Hoc, between Omaha and Utah Beach, the U.S. 2nd Ranger Battalion were forced to scale a one hundred foot cliff under withering enemy fire, only to become totally cut off. When they were finally relieved after two days, only 65 of the original 200 men were left standing, and they were forced to use captured German weapons as theirs ran out of ammunition, resulting in some of their number being killed due to friendly fire.

The paratroopers faired even worse - of the more than 20,000 American paratroopers and aircrew who made the desperate flight across the Channel, it's estimated that more than twelve thousand were killed.

The carnage was unlike anything anyone in the Allied forces had seen before, unlike Operation Torch or El Alamein in North Africa, unlike the Miracle of Dunkirk or the Battle of Britain, unlike Guadalcanal and New Guinea, unlike Salerno, Anzio, and Sicily.

For this untold sacrifice, this bloody hell that almost two hundred thousand men endured, they had only managed to capture a few square miles, only two of five beaches were connected, and they had failed to capture a single major city or port. The Allies failed to achieve even one of their major objectives - save one.

After five years of war, the Allies had a foothold.

The mother of all Hail Mary's had worked.

By the end of D-Day, almost 160,000 men had crossed the Channel into Fortress Europe.

On D+6, the beaches were finally connected.

On D+7, the city of Carentan was freed by the 101st Airborne, the first major French town to be liberated.

By D+20, the port city of Cherbourg was taken, and the Cotentin Peninsula was free after four long years.

On D+50, the city of Caen was freed, and the objectives of D-Day had finally been completed. By this time, more than 1.5 million men from 15 nations had landed in Europe.

On D+70, the Allies landed on the beaches of Côte d'Azur, and in only four weeks broke the southern German front line, and liberated the entire south of France.

On D+76, the Falaise Pocket collapsed, and the Battle of Normandy was finally declared over in a resounding Allied victory.

Then, at long last, on D+80, General der Infanterie Dietrich von Cholitz, at 3:30 PM local time, surrended the city of Paris to General Phillipe Leclerc. After four years of occupation, the first Allied capital was free. The footage of that day has been called some of the most thrilling and ecstatic footage in history.

The march continued, and on D+89, the Welsh Guards marched into the Belgian capital of Brussels.

But the war was far from over - on D+193, the Wehrmacht launched Operation Nordwind; the Battle of the Bulge had begun. It would be Germany's last offensive, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.

On D+274, the Allies crossed the Rhine, and liberated the Netherlands, and then finally entered Germany.

On D+303, the U.S. 4th Armored Division stumbled upon a scene of unimaginable cruelty: it was a camp named Ohrdruf, part of the Buchenwald complex, the first concentration camp to be liberated by the United States. Allied intelligence services had long suspected what was going on, that their were camps across Europe for Hitler's "undesirables", and the Allies had even signed a declaration making public and condemning the killing of Jews in Poland, but no one was prepared to see the true scale of the atrocities. Eisenhower demanded that every single piece of the camp be photographed, videotaped, and documented, that everyone possible be brought to see it to impress upon them the reality of what the Germans had done. Hollywood director George Stevens was given the task of making movies describing the horrors of the Holocaust, movies that were later shown to the world at the Nuremberg Trials. The movies were said to be the moment that changed the course of the Nuremberg Trials.

Then, on April 30th, 1945 - three-hundred and twenty eight days after the 'Longest Day' - Adolf Hitler, the man who had been the head of so much destruction, who had started the most destructive war in human history and presided over the worst genocide mankind has ever perpetrated, commits suicide in a bunker in Berlin.

Three days later, on May 2nd, 1945, the surrender of German Army Group C goes into effect, and the Gothic Line that had long since stymied the Allied advance in Italy finally collapses.

And on D+336, eleven months after landing on the beaches of France, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel would sign the German Instrument of Surrender, and the German Wehrmacht laid down its arms.

The Reich that Adolf Hitler had once boasted would last for a thousand years had fallen after just twelve.

The War in Europe was over.

Eleven months after he wrote it, the promise Eisenhower made to his men - the destruction of the German Army, the end of Nazi tyranny in Europe - had finally come true.

It had been five and a half long, blood-soaked years since the war in Europe began, but at long last, Europe was free. It would takes years, even decades, to rebuild from the destruction, but finally, there was a tomorrow to live for.

Eighty years on, we still grapple with their sacrifice, and the choices they made afterwards in the world they built. But because of them, we were given a tomorrow to argue in - and a tomorrow to live for. All because thousands from across the world stepped onto a small, windswept beach, and seared the name of Normandy into history.

[onenakedfarmer]

UMBERTO ECO "Eternal Fascism - Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt" ["Il fascismo eterno"]

It would be so much easier for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying "I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares". Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and point our finger at any of its new instances - every day, in every part of the world.

[ivanaskye]

4 and 11?

4. Did you discover any new authors that you love this year?

...Ada Palmer...

Oh, actually, I really want to track down more of Dara Horn's fiction-- I read Eternal Life by her and was quite impressed (actually, that was also a potential answer to question 17 before). I also read her nonfiction People Love Dead Jews, which unfortunately was one of those cases where the best parts I had already read as standalone essays online (not that the rest was bad, just not as good).

11. What was your favorite book that has been out for a while, but you just now read?

Actually, I think technically my answer to this is Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years, a collection from 2013 edited by Jim Kacian, Allan Burns, and Philip Rowland. This was a library read that I should probably track down for my own collection, because amazingly for a collection of poetry, some of it was good.

...this sounds like faint praise, but I liked possibly a full third of the haiku and hated less than that, which is way above par for English-language poetry in my experience. It's probably because haiku is actually a good form (even if many of the poems included uh, weren't quite technically haiku, which even the introduction admitted!).

The oldest book on my list is The Periodic Table by Primo Levi, which I did mostly like, but unfortunately a few of its worst passages ended up standing out more than anything else to me.

I'm comfortable elaborating on this one because he's dead and also stably well regarded. Basically, you would really, really hope a Jew targeted by Italian Fascism and a survivor of Auschwitz would be a little more immune to what fascism posits. The very worst passage in the book is as follows:

"One is born worthy of trust, with an open face and steady eyes, and remains such for life. He who is born contorted and lax remains that way: he who lies to you at six, lies to you at sixteen and sixty."

Just. You would hope not to see that rhetoric from that source, you know?

[its-a-big-club]

It's already here

Fascism is one of those terms that's hard to pin down. Eco's Ur-Fascism, which remains a great read, points out that fascism is mutable and so many of the 'eternal' traits may be lacking. I'll probably post more about Nazi-style fascism which is a dark and cautionary tale but for the moment I'll say I don't actually think that's the dominant ideology of the Trump movement, Elon aside.

Italian fascism was a little more ideologically layered than German fascism. It had what looked like a class-conscious nod toward the struggles of the working class against exploitation of the rich, it was intended to address class exploitation, but it was ardently opposed to socialism because socialists (especially then, the cool ones still now) see the worker community as a global community and reject nationalism. So the Italian fascist solution (which obviously did *nothing* for workers and was just violent racist authoritarianism - the nod to popular interests is always a lie) was a corporate syndicalism where the government and private enterprise would directly become involved in each other, thus allowing government to act as a sort of mediator and reconciliation place for class conflict. In practice this meant an authoritarian state corporatocracy.

Anyways, I was watching the ultra-nationalist faux-populist guy get inaugurated after he proposed having the government own 50% of TikTok and had the heads of the largest tech corporations in the country in attendance and was thinking about this for some weird reason.

[lichromantic-reblogs]

"Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak"."

-- Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism” or “Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt” (in Italian: Il fascismo eterno, or Ur-Fascismo)

[tmisherewrites]

Chapter 6 Deep Dive: Day 1055 of the Insurgency

In this chapter, Crassus and his men travel to District 13 to find out what happened to his network. Crassus seeks to gain some standing with the youngest of his men before coming upon one of the slipperiest people in District 13.

Full spoilers below so if you'd like to read Chapter 6, I've linked it above. If you haven't read my fic They Will Come For You In the Night on Ao3, you can find Chapter 1 here.

Ur-Fascism

In this chapter, Crassus has a conversation with Moss, who is also born from a wealthy family, and attempts to recruit him to his side, to have a soldier who he can confidently say is loyal to Crassus.

He does this by essentially running through the fascist playbook and trying to appeal to Moss' sense of entitlement which is fostered when someone is raised in wealth.

For the conversation, I utilised Italian philosopher Umberto Eco's 14 properties of "ur-fascism" (or "eternal fascism") to craft Crassus' beliefs. I tried to focus on the beliefs that were shared by Coriolanus Snow's beliefs in TBOSAS in order to create a philosophical through line, connecting father and son.

If you look at the dialogue of that conversation, you can pick out quite a few of the 14 properties. The amazing @wadelock already figured most of them out if you want a cheat sheet in the comments, or try to figure them out yourself if you're ambitious.

Nihilism

This chapter introduces one of my favourite characters, Percy. I have a full name for him in mind but I kind of like the mystery of him just having a mononym like Adele, or Zendaya, or Madonna.

Percy is the personification of nihilism, the philosophical belief that there is no inherent meaning to life or existence. Fully embracing this philosophy can lead to despair for some, or if you're Percy, you just get a bit weird and don't really care about morality or consequence.

Personally, I'm more fond of the absurdist response to the meaninglessness of life but we'll get to the character who represents that philosophy when we discuss Chapter 14.

Quotes

We've got two quotes for this chapter.

The first is from the man himself, Umberto Eco. I wanted to include this quote specifically because like many things to do with fascists, it really doesn't make very much sense and there are more contradictions than consistencies but it is incredibly important to remember that fascists don't care about contradictions and inconsistencies.

If you've ever watched someone on the far-right argue one thing and then completely contradict themselves in the next sentence, I think it is crucial that we understand that to that person, the contradiction doesn't matter, or won't think of it deeply enough to acknowledge the contradiction, or embraces the contradiction in order to overwhelm and stupefy the person they're arguing with so that they feel like they've won the argument. It's a strategy as old as fascism itself. If you've ever seen someone do this in real life, I would love to know some examples you've spotted out in the wild.

The second quote is song lyrics. I quote two song lyrics throughout the fic as an homage to Suzanne Collins' extensive use of music and poetry in the series. The lyrics I chose are from the song Nazi Punks Fuck Off by American punk band the Dead Kennedys.

I chose this song because it's about how when fascists are let into spaces, they inevitably have a very destructive effect. So in the case of this chapter, it's almost as if the band are singing to Crassus and Moss, warding off the former and illuminating the folly of the ideology to the latter. As for the lyrics specifically, I think it is important to remember that if you're ever tempted by fascism or if you find yourself on the precipice of a fascist pipeline, that this ideology will not save you, fix your problems, or protect you. Fascism only has room for canon fodder, hence the choice to use "You'll be the first to go -- Unless you think"

Have you ever heard this song? There was a pretty good cover of it in the movie Green Room performed live by the actors which is pretty impressive in my opinion.

What did you think of Chapter 6? What would you have said to Crassus during that conversation?

[grandhotelabyss]

Romanticism lectures have got me thinking about looking at the past for poetic inspiration. One thing I get really frustrated with is how lots of the retvrn type people seem to have a genuine interest in the past and approach its people in good faith, while the left either treats an interest in it as vaguely gross or advances some sort of noble savage nothing-bad-ever-happened-before-colonialism view. Wordsworth/Coleridge and later Pound etc all ended up as conservatives. Is this inevitable?

The current left/right split you describe is real, but it's neither inevitable nor necessarily precedented. Consider the Futurist component in Italian fascism (granted that Italian fascism has ideological roots in the revolutionary left).

Let the good incendiaries with charred fingers come! Here they are! Heap up the fire to the shelves of the libraries! Divert the canals to flood the cellars of the museums! Let the glorious canvases swim ashore! Take the picks and hammers! Undermine the foundation of venerable towns!

On the other hand, today's leftist nonsense about "colonialism invented the gender binary" etc. is itself a set of bad-faith concessions to the conservatism of "the oppressed," even when this has its own avant-garde or Futurist coloration.

Airplane poems, rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr . . .tuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuh . . .rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr . . . Setting fire and death to whities ass. Look at the Liberal Spokesman for the jews clutch his throat & puke himself into eternity . . . rrrrrrrr

Left and right are always changing hands and switching sides. I wouldn't worry about politics per se, since what is inevitable is that politics is going to be pulled out from under you. I'd say if you're primarily interested in the arts, just don't advocate for mass slaughter or mass suppression of your fellow persons, and the politics will take care of themselves. This appears to be easier said than done, but it remains worth the effort.

The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world. Pull down thy vanity, it is not man Made courage, or made order, or made grace,          Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down. Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry, Pull down thy vanity...

As for artistic attitudes toward the past, I believe the position taken by Shelley and Wilde is more persuasive than that of would-be medievalizers from Coleridge through Ruskin to Pound. For Shelley and Wilde, the magic of the past, or of "culture" in general, is the effect of art, not some superior form of bygone social organization. Culture and politics come from art, not the other way around.

I know that you are fond of Japanese things. Now, do you really imagine that the Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence? If you do, you have never understood Japanese art at all. The Japanese people are the deliberate self-conscious creation of certain individual artists. If you set a picture by Hokusai, or Hokkei, or any of the great native painters, beside a real Japanese gentleman or lady, you will see that there is not the slightest resemblance between them. The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them. In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention.

If you want to see something as splendid as the Athenian drama or the Gothic cathedral in the future, you should make the best art in the present and hope it radiates out an effective magnificence in its effects—not to pine for a fantasy world before machinery or usura.

But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting: they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion. Hence all original religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of false and true. Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time.

Shelley and Wilde's politics are difficult to label. Generally on the left, but harder to specify beyond that. And not, I hasten to add, without flaw, as the destruction they wrought in their personal lives would suggest. "Anarchy" will probably serve as a label. (Not "anarchism," a one-word oxymoron guaranteed to produce something odious like CHAZ.) Anarchy in art doesn't point back to a cultural and political past, because what we love of the past never existed except in the dreams of artists, which is all of it that we can now see. Those dreams themselves, like our own present work, beckons, rather, toward the horizon where culture and politics will become art: a dream of order, but order spontaneous and without coercion, order that organizes chaos without thereby forfeiting freedom. To be truly inspired by the past, and at the same time to be a true futurist, is to lift this still-vital seed out of history's husk and sow it again in the present.

[romdocitizen]

Thanks to his hard-won lack of self-awareness, Mishima is oblivious to the conceptual fissures within Sun and Steel, such as the unresolved tension, if not hopeless contradiction, between ��seeing without words,” on the one hand, and fetishizing the ultra-erotic beauty of the doomed hero, on the other. The gaze is not a vector of pure libido; it cannot select its targets without language, culture, ideas about what makes something fuckable. You cannot immortalize a hero without representing him, whether in Homeric epic or in a maladroitly Photoshopped poster. Your body cannot disappear into the black hole of ecstatic annihilation and crystallize into an eternal monument at the same time. But Mishima’s peerless power is so totalizing that it apparently neutralizes contradictions by fiat, so that, for example, the most decadent vice of all—the aestheticization and eroticization of deadly violence—can be proposed as a manly virtue, and a philosophy that prizes experience above all else can enfold a vision of sex as the static communion of a calcified body and a desiring gaze. Who wouldn’t be tempted by the promise of a power that simply cuts through the Gordian knots of confusion, ambivalence, cognitive dissonance, all the things that might impel us to consult our self-critical consciences?

If nobody has enough to lose from a revolution to bother plotting its reversal, then it’s not a revolution at all—which means that any year of revolution is necessarily a year of counterrevolution, too. Sun and Steel is a transmission from the dark side of the moon, an artifact of that other 1968, the one Apple never tried to co-opt. That’s what everyone was worried about on the fortieth anniversary of ’68—co-optation, the neoliberal appropriation of the counterculture ethos, the commodification of dissent, the new spirit of capitalism. But all the while, this other beast was slouching along, knowing its time was not yet at hand but would be, in due course, and that a few more years of trickle-up economics would help pave the way. As the historian Timothy Snyder recently observed, with respect to the contemporary recycling of political ideas from the ’20s and ’30s: “Fascism is becoming a story oligarchy tells about itself.” Mishima, like the Italian Futurists before him, reminds us that sometimes, fascism is also a story that the avant-garde tells about itself.

- Elizabeth Schambelan, "In the Fascist Weight Room"

RIP Bookforum, have one of my fav pieces of literary criticism from the past few years in remembrance

[queerturnofphrase]

From Umberto Eco's list of features of Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism (bolding mine):

"The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy."

[hazardous-waste-containment]

Almost every individual element of Kahanism that would raise questions (albeit pedantic ones) about whether it can fully be considered fascist does arguably have a parallel in some other fascism.

The idea that religious law should inform the law of the state: The Polish Falanga thought that all of Polish society, from culture to government to law, should be suffused with Catholicism, while their revolutionary rejection of all other traditional institutions still distinguished them from Catholic conservatism. The League of the South wants independent Dixie to be governed by Biblical law, though they have a non-confessional membership policy, and in any case their political libertarianism and hesitancy about revolution puts their own fascism into some doubt.

The idea that the land was promised to the nation by God: The Romanian Legionaries saw the borders of Romania as divine and eternal, sanctified by the will of God as much as by the blood of the ancestors that fought for it. The same can be said of Afrikaner fascists.

The idea that the nation has a special mission in the world from God: This is the entire thesis of South African Christian Nationalism, purporting that God entrusted Afrikaners with a unique (Calvinist) religious destiny to realize an Afrikaner homeland in South Africa and battle the forces of Satanic evil.

A free-market capitalist economic policy: George Lincoln Rockwell promoted “free enterprise” as an authentically American economic system, though he still called himself anti-capitalist on the grounds that ‘capitalism’ was merely a Jewish perversion of true free enterprise (certainly he never would have identified, as Kahane did, as an “economic liberal”). Only other comparison might be the free-market economics of early Italian Fascism in power (1922-24), which was similarly presented as unleashing the nation’s entrepreneurial spirit.

The two features that can’t be accounted for this way are 1) Kahane’s outright rejection of secular nationalism, and replacement of ethnic solidarity with religious solidarity in a manner more like the Islamic ummah (even this the Legionaries toyed with in the Christian context, but never went as far), and 2) most importantly, when pressed for a specific political doctrine, Kahane suggested that a truly Jewish state would mean the resurrection of the Sanhedrin, possibly under a monarchy; this is pretty clearly reactionary rather than fascist.

At the same time, the mobilizing myth of Kahane’s politics roughly conforms to palingenetic ultra-nationalism, with a myth of decadence (a “spiritual Holocaust” brought on by the multicultural liberalism of the Jewish Establishment), a myth of the organic nation (the “authentic Jewish Idea,” what Kahane saw as the strong, heroic Judaism created at Sinai, though arguably this is more of an attempt at fundamentalism), and the myth of rebirth (the imminent renewal and salvation only to be found in the rule of Kahane and his party).

[beardedmrbean]

In Rome's Via della Scrofa, not far from the seat of parliament in the historic center, a stone tablet and a dried up wreath commemorate Alberto Marchesi, an anti-fascist resistance fighter executed by the German SS in the Adreatine Caves in 1944. The plaque hangs to the left of a wide archway opening up on the yellow building.

In a jarring juxtaposition,  a much smaller Plexiglas plaque to the right of the entrance indicates this is the headquarters of the neo-fascist Fratelli d'Italia party.

Neo-fascist parties have resided at Via della Scrofa 39 since 1946 — the MSI movement, the National Alliance, and now the Brothers of Italy, named after the first verse of the Italian national anthem. Party leader Giorgia Meloni made a point of keeping the office in the historic building which was once frequented by followers of former fascist leader Benito Mussolini.

Meloni says she has an unbroken relationship with history. Dictator Mussolini was "a complex personality," she has said in interviews. Even today, many Italians think not everything was bad under Mussolini.

Ambigious about past

Meloni does not clearly distance herself from fascism. In her autobiography, she writes she is aware she is navigating a political minefield. "We are children of our history. Of our whole history. As is the case with all other nations, the path we have traveled is complex, much more complicated than many want to make known."

She does, however, reject the cult of the leader common to fascism, she writes. But when Giorgia Meloni holds press conferences at the party headquarters, a fascist symbol is always in plain view — the logo of the Brothers of Italy.

It's a stylized flame in the Italian national colors, an eternal flame that burns figuratively at Mussolini's grave. "I have nothing to apologize for in my life. But in two out of three television discussions, I'm supposed to talk about history and not about current politics. I don't think that's right."

No Roman salute

Last fall, in preparation for the election campaign leading up to the vote on September 25, Giorgia Meloni sent out internal memos to party groups instructing them to stop making extreme statements, to refrain from making references to fascism and, above all, to refrain from the so-called Roman salute, a gesture with an outstretched right arm which resembles the Hitler or Nazi salute.

The politician who might soon be prime minister wants to move the party from the political fringes, from the extreme right to center right. Meloni is seeking to remould the party and pitch it as a conservative champion of patriotism that appeals to the middle class to form a coalition with other right-wing parties — Matteo Salvini's Lega and Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia.

"If she has made it this far in Italy, it's thanks to all those who have whitewashed her — from the media who insist on calling Salvini and Meloni center-right to Berlusconi and the Grillini, who brought her to power, and a disoriented center-left that underestimated and legitimized her," says Alba Sidera, a Spanish journalist who has for years researched the Italian far right. "Meloni did not suddenly appear out of nowhere. She has been preparing to become prime minister for years."

Pure populism

Born in 1977, Giorgia Meloni joined the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI) party's youth wing when she was 15 to take a stance against the far-left terror of the era in Italy. She later led the student branch of the far-right National Alliance, was elected to the Italian Parliament's Chamber of Deputies in 2006, and became Italy's youngest minister two years later.

At the age of 31, she took over the youth portfolio in Silvio Berlusconi's government. Ten years ago, Giorgia Meloni founded the Brothers of Italy, which she has led since 2014. In 2020, she also took over the chairmanship of the EuropeanConservatives and Reformists (ECR) party, which includes, among others, the Polish ruling party, PiS.

Meloni plans to head into the election campaign with the populist slogan "Italy and Italian people first!" She has called for more family-friendly benefits, less European bureaucracy, low taxes, and a halt to immigration.

She wants to renegotiate EU treaties and Italy's membership in the euro currency community. Her party rejects abortions and same-sex marriage. In terms of economic and foreign policy, the trained foreign language secretary is relatively inexperienced. She's spent most of her political career as a member of parliament and a party official.

Radical self-confidence

Meloni has kept her cool amid harsh criticism from the left-wing political camp. Ginevra Bompani, a writer, told La7 television that "Meloni is a real jerk.... she is surrounded by Nazis." To which Meloni replied on Facebook that she was tired of being portrayed as "the black lady."

Her opponents, she said, are only desperate because she is so successful. Associating her with Mussolini, Hitler or Putin is ridiculous, she said. "After all, I support Ukraine," the party leader said. In a TV interview, she told her critics to take a look at France and Germany, where far-right populist parties have been successful and no one turned that into a scandal. "Why should it be any different in Italy?" The German party Meloni referred to is the Alternative for Germany party (AfD), which however lost votes in the 2021 federal election, and hovered at just over 10% of the vote.

The Brothers of Italy leader is counting on Italian leadership to transform the EU into a loose economic union. French President Emmanuel Macron has been weakened by losing his majority in parliament, she said. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is not confident, Meloni said in a recent interview with Italian public broadcaster RAI, adding Scholz certainly does not have the same strength as predecessor Angela Merkel had.

That is precisely where she would come in, says Meloni, who is married to a television journalist and is paying close attention to her new, serious makeover.

[psychologeek]

"it's not war, it's genocide"

You say.

Righhhhht.

Those also aren't missiles, just friendly deliveries of candies. And there wasn't a massacre at 07/10, the nice Hamasniks just wanted to dance.

Also there aren't hostags - they were just chosen for a special vocation! That included a diet of 6 dates/1 pita a day. And no medication. And abuse of all kinds.

If you believe that, I have some warm ice to sell you.

~

Of whom, exactly? There's no targeting a specific group of people in attempt to eliminate.

(If it was, then it would have started with the Palestinians and Muslims who live in Israel. Wouldn't you think so?)

Genocides doesn't include multiple phone calls and flyers to warn ppl to leave unsafe areas.

You keep calling it genocide, while ignoring that if the target WAS to kill as many as possible, there are quicker and far more quiet ways to do so.

(Also less expensive with many and all sorts of resources, including people.)

~

But this isn't about it.

Like you said, this isn't about facts, or logic, or thoughts.

In short, you consider the opinion "Israel is evil (and shouldn't exist)" and specifically in this case, "genocide in Gaza":

"The cult of action for action's sake", which dictates that action is of value in itself and should be taken without intellectual reflection. - How, exactly, writing me (a random person) is helping anyone? What does it achieve? Will changing my mind help anyone, or is it just bad to have a different opinion? Or are you trying to make any statement?

Disagreement is treason - (something) is right, and everyone who doesn't think the same way is a terrible person that shouldn't exist.

Difference is bad - everyone who (isn't like me) is bad. Not specifically in your anon, yes specific in the ways we see pp people go on to random jews and harrasing them bc "free Palestine!" (How, exactly, beating up a schoolboy in the uk help to free Palestine?)

"The enemy" is both very strong and very weak - Israel committing genocide, but also can be stopped by not buying Starbucks (that doesn't even work in Israel) and going on a strike.

There's use of "Newspeak" - in which a massacre and sexual assault for the sake of killing people and provoking terror is "resistance", but fighting against those who did it, and who are STILL HOLDING HOSTAGES and still FIRING MISSILES, while trying to lessen civilians casualties is "genocide". In which refusing to allow refugees to cross the border is seen as a good thing (Egypt).

(there's more, but those are themes in your spesific anon)

I'm not saying that all I say is right, or all I say is wrong.

I'm not saying that I even have all the questions.

But those are things that's important to think and talk about.

~

Categories based on “Ur-Fascism” or “Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt” (in Italian: Il fascismo eterno, or Ur-Fascismo), by Italian philosopher, novelist, and semiotician Umberto Eco (1995).

I love your work and fics but because of your support of the genocide in Gaza Strip I am unable to truly continue supporting you.

I know that you believe that supporting the Palestinians is anti-semitic but if you learned about these topics you would know. Zionism is inherently anti-semitic itself, Zionism is a political philosophy that was first created in the 1600s by anti-Semitic Christians who believed Jews from all over the world should be expelled and gathered in one place. And then Theodor Herzl, an atheist, adopted Zionism to find a "suitable country" to colonize, and several countries were suggested: Uganda, Argentina, Cyprus, and Madagascar. But with Jews' rejection and with the support of Western politicians, Zionism secured their interests in the resources of the Middle East, thus Palestine.

Maybe if you learned what it was like to see through the eyes of people like Bisan Owda, Wael Al-Dahdouh, Motaz Azaiza, Hind Khoudary, or maybe even the six year old Hind Rajab who died after traveling through a "Safe Zone" with her family and being stuck in a car with their bodies for 12 days.

This is not a war. This is a genocide. I'm not asking you to change overnight, but knowing the full truth of what Israel is doing under the same excuses that you're telling yourself will help you understand what's really going on.

Thanks for the compliment? I think? 

Uh, ok, this isn't about my writing - this is about you complaining about my thoughts and experiences. Cool.

Support genocide etc.

A. I do not support genocide.

2B. What's happening in Gaza rn isn't genocide. It's war. And the use of that term is very disrespectful and dismissive to other places, in which there IS, actually, a genocide.

2C. That being said, I don't support war. I don't support death. And I really wish this wouldn't happen.

3. I Don't??? Think?? Supporting Palestine is antisemic??? 

I do think that pro-palestine rallies with chants like "Gas the Jews" and harrasing jews and Jewish place ARE antisemic, yes.

If you need that difference explicitly said, I guess you should look at the rallies and pro-p things you're talking about.

"But if you learned about these topics"

EXCUSE ME????

If I LEARNT ABOUT IT?

Because of course - my knowledge, as part of a minority group, of a subject that is INHERENTLY related to in-group topics, and the what I learnt from people in-group are obviously less relevant than what you, oh great saviour, has learnt through Tik-Tok.

"Zionism is inherently anti-semitic itself"

Do you even understand how ignorant saying that is??

Do you understand how much this is propaganda?

"I believe that (Jewish people right to self-determination and live peacefully) is a bad thing" - do you even hear yourself?? 

"Zionism.... was first created in the 1600s by anti-Semitic Christians who believed Jews from all over the world should be expelled and gathered in one place. "

No. Just don't.

Idk - maybe this is what they teach in America or idk where, right next to "jews, Muslims and Christians lived peacefully before the evil Zionists colonisers " (look up the massacres in Zfad, the massacre and ethnic cleansing of Habron, Gush Etzion, Gaza-several cleansing btw).

Anyway, Zionism in the older form (yearning to go back Home, Eretz Israel as the Jewish homeland, and a connection between God-People-Land) is one of the first things in the Jewish narrative.

Practically, the Jewish calander is SoLunal calander that based on the seasons, weather, and agriculture in the levant.

Religiously - jews prayed to go back to "build Jerusalem" every year since the 2nd temple was destroyed. We kept practicing traditions and Mitzvahs that are related to the connection to the spesific area.

(And there always, always been jews going to Israel.)

Herzel's thoughts and actions to create the Zionist movement came after he watched the Dreyfus trial and realised that jews will always be haunted and discriminated BECAUSE of their Jewishness. So if you want a place without this, you gotta make a Jewish state.   (There are many kinds of Zionism,  I go with this as a general and simple explanation.)

(more about why this is problematic undercut)

"You don't know what it's like" -

What. The. Fuck.

You said you came here via my fics. 

I'm sorry.

Did you miss the whole long AF a/n I wrote in the last months??

About my personal experiences with war?? 

Both current (the whole saga with physical/mental safety, the evacuation, losing my glasses, etc. ??)

And previous (being bombed and evacuation 1 as a kid. My first PTSD. Terror attack and PTSD number 2 (ft. dead babies. Fun times). Rockets, more rockets, war, friends hurt in terror attack, friends-of-friends DIE in terror attack, more wars, etc.

(And that's not even the reason I was suicidal since young teen).

"This isn't war, it's genocide"

I'm sorry, do you remember how it fucking started?? How it continues?? How there are still FUCKING ROCKETS AIMED AT Israel??

Yes. This is sad. People shouldn't die in war. 

In fact, I truly believe that death-machines and people should not be near each other.

**Which is why I'm so mad at the fact non one's talking or doing anything to make Egypt open the fucking borders and let ppl through without having to bribe their life out**

" the full truth of what Israel is doing"

Right.

You, who's purely immune to Propaganda, of course.

You sure knows much more then me - who, you know, the one who ACTUALLY LIVE THROUGH this, and actually familiar with the history of the country and conflict (no, it didn't start in 1948. Not even in 1918. It was way earlier.)

(And just as you mention - have you heard about Ellin (9) and  Eithan (5) Kapshiter? They were shoot in the car with their entire family.

Ellin was considered missing for 2 weeks, before her body was identified. That was a couple of hours after her family's funeral.

For some reason, I didn't see any "where's Ellin?" On Tumblr.

Oh, and do you remember Kfir and Ariel Bibas? Kfir just had his first birthday.

They are still held captive, btw. For some reason, I don't see anyone in the "ceasefire now" crowd talking about how CRUCIAL it is that Hamas bring back the people they, you know, kidnapped. That they should get medical attention and visits from the RC. 

In fact, in the last hostage deal, this was something Hamas refused to include.)

Calling it genocide is problematic in many ways. Including for the people who suffer from this war.

Calling it genocide allows the the activism to be mostly anti-Israel, instead of pro-palestine.

For example, focusing the efforts on "stopping Israel" and "Israel is bad" and "boycott Israel", instead of "how do we save lives" and "why Egypt not opening the borders".

Less "ceasefire now!" (Though a good target) And "defund Israel!"

More "release the hostages and let humanitarian aid in".

(not to mention that all those efforts, for some reason, never go to other places and other people who suffer. Never even go to Palestinian in refugees camps - in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria.)

Pro-tip:

If someone tells you "a (very important thing in a minority's group culture) was actually created by (A majority group) as a (bad thing)", then you have one of those options: It's a lie, reclaiming, and "yes but no" .

1. It's a lie - aka: Just bc you didn't know about it, doesn't mean it's not real. (Sort of like the term of "dark ages" - that come to portray the intellectual darkness in Europe between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance. Though it wasn't the same if you look at non-european history.)

And in a simpler example-  Pasta! Usually considered "Italian", but only got there at 4th century BC. Evidences in China during the Shang Dynasty (1700-1100 BC). There was also African form of pasta, made of kamut crop. 

2. Reclaiming (see "queer" - was used as a general term, then a slur, going back to an Identity.)

3. Yes, but actually no (take for example sign language (s) - languages, as community languages, started to form when schools-for-deaf became a thing. Residential schools, where the students lived together and worked together ehad to learn to communicate.

Then they learn sign language - of the area/country/etc.

It doesn't mean that "Hearing created SL". The languages were built from home-signs (look at the difference between simple words, like "eat" in different SLs - like brit vs. Japanese) , and gained depth through the creation of Deaf communities.