#it’s people who only view the holocaust like a moral story

[kazhanko-art]

I don’t actually want this, but a part of me wishes more westerners came from families that survived genocides and persecution sometimes. I wish more of them understood what it actually did to your family, the legacy it left, how much it hurts. I sure as hell wish they knew not to ask me shit like if hitler was worse than stalin, or if the holocaust was worse than the holodomor, and then telling me I’m not being objective and I need to admit one was worse when I say I don’t want to answer that.

It’s easy to be “objective” and add your ideology to it when it isn’t your personal story. It’s easy to tell someone to get over it when you didn’t grow up learning about your grandfather being shot at for picking up kernels of wheat off the ground, or emaciated villagers driven to madness by starvation pointing at your great aunt, a child at this time, and saying “мʼясо.” Hell, to some westerners that last story is funny, because it was never them, and it will never be them.

It’s not something people should know, but it’s hard to care about people’s theories and politics, after growing up to use everything edible you can, and make use of everything you have, because their theories and politics left scars that have stretched over time

[soracities]

Hey! It has been on my mind lately and i just wanna ask..idk if it would make sense but i just noticed that nowadays ppl cant separate the authors and their books (ex. when author wrote a story about cheating and ppl starts bashing the author for romanticizing cheating and even to a point of cancelling the author for not setting a good/healthy example of a relationship) any thoughts about it?

I have many, many thoughts on this, so this may get a little unwieldy but I'll try to corall it together as best I can.

But honestly, I think sometimes being unable to separate the author from the work (which is interesting to me to see because some people are definitely not "separating" anything even though they think they are; they just erase the author entirely as an active agent, isolate the work, and call it "objectivity") has a lot to do with some people being unable to separate the things they read from themselves.

I'm absolutely not saying it's right, but it's an impulse I do understand. If you read a book and love it, if it transforms your life, or defines a particular period of your life, and then you find out that the author has said or done something awful--where does that leave you? Someone awful made something beautiful, something you loved: and now that this point of communion exists between you and someone whose views you'd never agree with, what does that mean for who you are? That this came from the mind of a person capable of something awful and spoke to your mind--does that mean you're like them? Could be like them?

Those are very uncomfortable questions and I think if you have a tendency to look at art or literature this way, you will inevitable fall into the mindset where only "Good" stories can be accepted because there's no distinction between where the story ends and you begin. As I said, I can see where it comes from but I also find it profoundly troubling because i think one of the worst things you can do to literature is approach it with the expectation of moral validation--this idea that everything you consume, everything you like and engage with is some fundamental insight into your very character as opposed to just a means of looking at or questioning something for its own sake is not just narrow-minded but dangerous.

Art isn't obliged to be anything--not moral, not even beautiful. And while I expend very little (and I mean very little) energy engaging with or even looking at internet / twitter discourse for obvious reasons, I do find it interesting that people (online anyway) will make the entire axis of their critique on something hinge on the fact that its bad representation or justifying / romanticizing something less than ideal, proceeding to treat art as some sort of conduit for moral guidance when it absolutely isn't. And they will also hold that this critique comes from a necessarily good and just place (positive representation, and I don't know, maybe in their minds it does) while at the same time setting themselves apart from radical conservatives who do the exact same thing, only they're doing it from the other side.

To make it abundantly clear, I'm absolutely not saying you should tolerate bigots decrying that books about the Holocaust, race, homophobia, or lgbt experiences should be banned--what I am saying, is that people who protest that a book like Maus or Persepolis is going to "corrupt children", and people who think a book exploring the emotional landscape of a deeply flawed character, who just happens to be from a traditionally marginalised group or is written by someone who is, is bad representation and therefore damaging to that community as a whole are arguments that stem from the exact same place: it's a fundamental inability, or outright refusal, to accept the interiority and alterity of other people, and the inherent validity of the experiences that follow. It's the same maniacal, consumptive, belief that there can be one view and one view only: the correct view, which is your view--your thoughts, your feelings.

There is also dangerous element of control in this. Someone with racist views does not want their child to hear anti-racist views because as far as they are concerned, this child is not a being with agency, but a direct extension of them and their legacy. That this child may disagree is a profound rupture and a threat to the cohesion of this person's entire worldview. Nothing exists in and of and for itself here: rather the multiplicity of the world and people's experiences within it are reduced to shadowy agents that are either for us or against us. It's not about protecting children's "innocence" ("think of the children", in these contexts, often just means "think of the status quo"), as much as it is about protecting yourself and the threat to your perceived place in the world.

And in all honestt I think the same holds true for the other side--if you cannot trust yourself to engage with works of art that come from a different standpoint to yours, or whose subject matter you dislike, without believing the mere fact of these works' existence will threaten something within you or society in general (which is hysterical because believe me, society is NOT that flimsy), then that is not an issue with the work itself--it's a personal issue and you need to ask yourself if it would actually be so unthinkable if your belief about something isn't as solid as you think it is, and, crucially, why you have such little faith in your own critical capacity that the only response these works ilicit from you is that no one should be able to engage with them. That's not awareness to me--it's veering very close to sticking your head in the sand, while insisting you actually aren't.

Arbitrarily adding a moral element to something that does not exist as an agent of moral rectitude but rather as an exploration of deeply human impulses, and doing so simply to justify your stance or your discomfort is not only a profoundly inadequate, but also a deeply insidious, way of papering over your insecurities and your own ignorance (i mean this in the literal sense of the word), of creating a false and dishonest certainty where certainty does not exist and then presenting this as a fact that cannot and should not be challenged and those who do are somehow perverse or should have their characters called into question for it. It's reductive and infantilising in so many ways and it also actively absolves you of any responsibility as a reader--it absolves you of taking responsibility for your own interpretation of the work in question, it absolves you of responsibility for your own feelings (and, potentially, your own biases or preconceptions), it absolves you of actual, proper, thought and engagement by laying the blame entirely on a rogue piece of literature (as if prose is something sentient) instead of acknowledging that any instance of reading is a two-way street: instead of asking why do I feel this way? what has this text rubbed up against? the assumption is that the book has imposed these feelings on you, rather than potentially illuminated what was already there.

Which brings me to something else which is that it is also, and I think this is equally dangerous, lending books and stories a mythical, almost supernatural, power that they absolutely do not have. Is story-telling one of the most human, most enduring, most important and life-altering traditions we have? Yes. But a story is also just a story. And to convince yourself that books have a dangerous transformative power above and beyond what they are actually capable of is, again, to completely erase people's agency as readers, writers' agency as writers and makers (the same as any other craft), and subsequently your own. And erasing agency is the very point of censors banning books en masse. It's not an act of stupidity or blind ignorance, but a conscious awareness of the fact that people will disagree with you, and for whatever reason you've decided that you are not going to let them.

Writers and poets are not separate entities to the rest of us: they aren't shamans or prophets, gifted and chosen beings who have some inner, profound, knowledge the rest of us aren't privy to (and should therefore know better or be better in some regard) because moral absolutism just does not exist. Every writer, no matter how affecting their work may be, is still Just Some Guy Who Made a Thing. Writing can be an incredibly intimate act, but it can also just be writing, in the same way that plumbing is plumbing and weeding is just weeding and not necessarily some transcendant cosmic endeavour in and of itself. Authors are no different, when you get down to it, from bakers or electricians; Nobel laureates are just as capable of coming out with distasteful comments about women as your annoying cousin is and the fact that they wrote a genre-defying work does not change that, or vice-versa. We imbue books with so much power and as conduits of the very best and most human traits we can imagine and hope for, but they aren't representations of the best of humanity--they're simply expressions of humanity, which includes the things we don't like.

There are some authors I love who have said and done things I completely disagree with or whose views I find abhorrent--but I'm not expecting that, just because they created something that changed my world, they are above and beyond the ordinarly, the petty, the spiteful, or cruel. That's not condoning what they have said and done in the least: but I trust myself to be able to read these works with awareness and attention, to pick out and examine and attempt to understand the things that I find questionable, to hold on to what has moved me, and to disregard what I just don't vibe with or disagree with. There are writers I've chosen not to engage with, for my own personal reasons: but I'm not going to enforce this onto someone else because I can see what others would love in them, even if what I love is not strong enough to make up for what I can't. Terrance Hayes put perfectly in my view, when he talks about this and being capable of "love without forgiveness". Writing is a profoundly human heritage and those who engage with it aren't separate from that heritage as human because they live in, and are made by, the exact same world as anyone else.

The measure of good writing for me has hardly anything to do with whatever "virtue" it's perceived to have and everything to do with sincerity. As far as I'm concerned, "positive representation" is not about 100% likeable characters who never do anything problematic or who are easily understood. Positive representation is about being afforded the full scope of human feelings, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and not having your humanity, your dignity, your right to exist in the world questioned because all of these can only be seen through the filter of race, or gender, religion, or ethicity and interpreted according to our (profoundly warped) perceptions of those categories and what they should or shouldn't represent. True recognition of someone's humanity does not lie in finding only what is held in common between you (and is therefore "acceptable", with whatever you put into that category), but in accepting everything that is radically different about them and not letting this colour the consideration you give.

Also, and it may sound harsh, but I think people forget that fictional characters are fictional. If I find a particularly fucked up relationship dynamic compelling (as I often do), or if I decide to write and explore that dynamic, that's not me saying two people who threaten to kill each other and constantly hurt each other is my ideal of romance and that this is exactly how I want to be treated: it's me trying to find out what is really happening below the surface when two people behave like this. It's me exploring something that would be traumatizing and deeply damaging in real life, in a safe and fictional setting so I can gain some kind of understanding about our darker and more destructive impulses without being literally destroyed by them, as would happen if all of this were real. But it isn't real. And this isn't a radical or complex thing to comprehend, but it becomes incomprehensible if your sole understanding of literature is that it exists to validate you or entertain you or cater to you, and if all of your interpretations of other people's intentions are laced with a persistent sense of bad faith. Just because you have not forged any identity outside of this fictional narrative doesn't mean it's the same for others.

Ursula K. le Guin made an extremely salient point about children and stories in that children know the stories you tell them--dragons, witches, ghouls, whatever--are not real, but they are true. And that sums it all up. There's a reason children learning to lie is an incredibly important developmental milestone, because it shows that they have achieved an incredibly complex, but vitally important, ability to hold two contradictory statements in their minds and still know which is true and which isn't. If you cannot delve into a work, on the terms it sets, as a fictional piece of literature, recognize its good points and note its bad points, assess what can have a real world impact or reflects a real world impact and what is just creative license, how do you possible expect to recognize when authority and propaganda lies to you? Because one thing propaganda has always utilised is a simplistic, black and white depiction of The Good (Us) and The Bad (Them). This moralistic stance regarding fiction does not make you more progressive or considerate; it simply makes it easier to manipulate your ideas and your feelings about those ideas because your assessments are entirely emotional and surface level and are fuelled by a refusal to engage with something beyond the knee-jerk reaction it causes you to have.

Books are profoundly, and I do mean profoundly, important to me-- and so much of who I am and the way I see things is probably down to the fact that stories have preoccupied me wherever I go. But I also don't see them as vital building blocks for some core facet or a pronouncement of Who I Am. They're not badges of honour or a cover letter I put out into the world for other people to judge and assess me by, and approve of me (and by extension, the things I say or feel). They're vehicles through which I explore and experience whatever it is that I'm most caught by: not a prophylactic, not a mode of virtue signalling, and certainly not a means of signalling a moral stance.

I think at the end of the day so much of this tendency to view books as an extension of yourself (and therefore of an author) is down to the whole notion of "art as a mirror", and I always come back to Fran Lebowitz saying that it "isn't a mirror, it's a door". And while I do think it's important to have that mirror (especially if you're part of a community that never sees itself represented, or represented poorly and offensively) I think some people have moved into the mindset of thinking that, in order for art to be good, it needs to be a mirror, it needs to cater to them and their experiences precisely--either that or that it can only exist as a mirror full stop, a reflection of and for the reader and the writer (which is just incredibly reductive and dismissive of both)--and if art can only exist as a mirror then anything negative that is reflected back at you must be a condemnation, not a call for exploration or an attempt at understanding.

As I said, a mirror is important but to insist on it above all else isn't always a positive thing: there are books I related to deeply because they allowed me to feel so seen (some by authors who looked nothing like me), but I have no interest in surrounding myself with those books all the time either--I know what goes on in my head which is precisely why I don't always want to live there. Being validated by a character who's "just like me" is amazing but I also want--I also need-- to know that lives and minds and events exist outside of the echo-chamber of my own mind. The mirror is comforting, yes, but if you spend too long with it, it also becomes isolating: you need doors because they lead you to ideas and views and characters you could never come up with on your own. A world made up of various Mes reflected back to me is not a world I want to be immersed in because it's a world with very little texture or discovery or room for growth and change. Your sense of self and your sense of other people cannot grow here; it just becomes mangled.

Art has always been about dialogue, always about a me and a you, a speaker and a listener, even when it is happening in the most internal of spaces: to insist that art only ever tells you what you want to hear, that it should only reflect what you know and accept is to undermine the very core of what it seeks to do in the first place, which is establish connection. Art is a lifeline, I'm not saying it isn't. But it's also not an instruction manual for how to behave in the world--it's an exploration of what being in the world looks like at all, and this is different for everyone. And you are treading into some very, very dangerous waters the moment you insist it must be otherwise.

Whatever it means to be in the world, it is anything but straightforward. In this world people cheat, people kill, they manipulate, they lie, they torture and steal--why? Sometimes we know why, but more often we don't--but we take all these questions and write (or read) our way through them hoping that, if we don't find an answer, we can at least find our way to a place where not knowing isn't as unbearable anymore (and sometimes it's not even about that; it's just about telling a story and wanting to make people laugh). It's an endless heritage of seeking with countless variations on the same statements which say over and over again I don't know what to make of this story, even as I tell it to you. So why am I telling it? Do I want to change it? Can I change it? Yes. No. Maybe. I have no certainty in any of this except that I can say it. All I can do is say it.

Writing, and art in general, are one of the very, very, few ways we can try and make sense of the apparently arbitrary chaos and absurdity of our lives--it's one of the only ways left to us by which we can impose some sense of structure or meaning, even if those things exists in the midst of forces that will constantly overwhelm those structures, and us. I write a poem to try and make sense of something (grief, love, a question about octopuses) or to just set down that I've experienced something (grief, love, an answer about octpuses). You write a poem to make sense of, resolve, register, or celebrate something else. They don't have to align. They don't have to agree. We don't even need to like each other much. But in both of these instances something is being said, some fragment of the world as its been perceived or experienced is being shared. They're separate truths that can exist at the same time. Acknowledging this is the only means we have of momentarily bridging the gaps that will always exist between ourselves and others, and it requires a profound amount of grace, consideration and forbearance. Otherwise, why are we bothering at all?

[fierceawakening]

I am not Jewish, but this kind of story is absolutely what I grew up hearing. Especially the “the reason Palestinians didn’t leave was because other Arab countries didn’t want them,” said in a way that implied heavily that Israel treats them as full citizens which I now know is not true for most. (And assumed they’d agree that it made sense for them TO leave, when many if not most did not.)

It was easy to believe it, for me as an uninvested person. The Jews had just been through the Holocaust and knew what oppression was and why it was bad. Surely they could never oppress others! If they did at all it must be the growing pains of a just democracy.

None of that was true. It kind of makes sense that it wasn’t! In terms of individuals, a lot of traumatized people are a big mess at first. They lash out and mistrust. They see their experience everywhere because they can’t possibly have processed it yet and might not ever.

Why wouldn’t a traumatized country be a cruel one? At least at first?

But we want to think otherwise. We want to think that people learn right away, straightforwardly. That they set immediate boundaries and are unquestionably honorable because they’ve seen the worst.

I don’t know. But I think this was definitely how I was raised to see Israel, that its wars were short because it knew better than the rest of us only to repel its enemies, not take revenge. You war with them they shove you off in A WEEK.

None of it’s true! At all! But it feels bizarre to read “some people just have a colonialist mindset” as if we think the literal reality is okay because some people “are civilized” and others aren’t.

It was, yes, a version of that that we were fed. But it was explained in a way that seemed more plausible than just “Arabs are backward dirty nomads.”

Few people, at least on the political left, would swallow that pill uncoated.

I don’t know. Not sure what my point is here. I guess just that the way I hear people who assume Israel is good described just… seems cartoonish. There’s elements of what we were told in it.

But mostly we were just thinking of it like a story: those people had the plot happen to them, the climax happened last chapter, now they get to eat feta and oranges in peace. They’re happy. They have some bad memories but things are mostly good. That’s how things work.

(This is, by the way, why I agree with a lot of tumblr when it says “Judeochristian” isn’t a thing, that the American right made it up—*but yet, I also* think there’s more to the story.

Judeochristian as I was taught it ALSO MEANT Israel was inherently morally good. That it arose out of the same broad culture as US democracy, so it must be just in ways theocracies were not. It was a beacon of hope, because Judeo meant Like Us. [Ironically this is *true* but not actually *good.* We oppress black people. They oppress Palestinians. Like us, yes. Sigh. Don’t copy that part!]

I think people are going to misanalyze some things if they miss that that’s part of it.

It’s weird looking back on it now really, because Judaism says “this stuff happened” and Christianity says “and then this stuff happened and the sequel was kinda more important” and Islam says “and then THIS stuff happened and THAT sequel was really the big deal.”

So it’s… pretty obviously political that Judeochristian peels off the third book but considers it legit that there’s EITHER one OR two. What. Either iterating is okay or it’s rude. Pick one.)

[feckcops]

Total solidarity with Palestine is the only anti-racist position

“Centuries of colonial machinations, turning Palestinians into objects to be managed for the benefit of others, made it thinkable that a solution to European antisemitism could be found, not in the murderous wealth of Bavaria, but by ethnically cleansing these worthless people and building a new society in this barren desert. That Palestinians had a life before this erasure becomes their ‘narrative’, a story the natives like to tell …

“Racism ensures that, though sensible moderates never ask me to share the dinner table with Holocaust deniers and display polite restraint, Palestinians are expected to coexist constantly with people who lecture them about the ‘right to exist’ of the state built atop their burned homes. And Palestinians are usually expected to shut up about it, to show endless patience for the traumas of the people who murder them. Leftwing commentators explain to Palestinians that theirs is not really a colonial experience at all; they shouldn’t say that, since it might offend the coloniser.

“I have spent several years writing about rising antisemitism, thinking about its causes and the range of its deadly and destructive consequences. To think that opposing antisemitism demands even the slightest equivocation about settler colonialism in Palestine is like arguing that feminism in the Jim Crow American south should have entailed support for moral panics about black men raping white women. Both views (no matter how often they are endorsed by the ‘lived experience’ of Jews after centuries of slaughter or white women in a violent patriarchy: trauma is not a university) seek shortcuts to safety whose essential racism lies in making exiled and colonised Palestinians or lynched black men into collateral damage.

“In Palestine, settler-colonists armed to the teeth understand themselves as victims even as they pulverise others. The others – whether they march peacefully towards their old homes, or fire rockets at an enormous Iron Dome, or just mourn for their lost loved ones – are always the lurking, violent, dangerous threat. The dispossessed are, if they fight back, blamed for their own dispossession. They are chided, like children, for losing their temper with an abusive parent who should be allowed to beat up the child in peace.

“Palestinians are not unique in this condition; it is the crudest logic of racial violence everywhere. When slaves rebelled on plantations they too were terrorists, disrupting the serenity of the world. What gave them such a violent temperament, their masters asked, and made them so hostile to the peace that reigned while they were in chains? All that is safely in the past now, and academics celebrate the long-forgotten agency of the oppressed, seeking to be free. But in Palestine, it is not past – as indeed on American streets police lynchings are not really past either. The homes and health that Europeans have are like jewels and if others want them – migrants from elsewhere – those people are threats to be drowned at sea in their thousands. The whole world remains saturated by a colonial set of colour lines, dividing properly human lives from expendable ones.

“In this bind, the most sympathetic thing western journalists do is to focus on dead Palestinian children. They are helpless, blameless: pure victims against Israel’s grotesque claim to be the victim. This is how humanitarianism strips its objects of humanity. Palestinians deserve our support because in their abject weakness they do not (contrary to Israel’s charge) really threaten anything. Outsiders wince at resistance and stress the enormous inequality of arms: Palestinian weapons are barely weapons at all. To these supporters, Palestinians cannot be political subjects, people who fight for their freedom from domination as their allies from Algeria to Vietnam once did too. Given that the Israeli state and populace has as little interest as every other colonial society in surrendering their supremacy, the expectation that Palestinians should quietly go on dying in order to merit international support constitutes an insidious form of their dehumanisation. If bullish western rightwingers see them as savages to be managed, generous western liberals see them as dying exotic flowers to be treasured on windowsills.”

[estrellanesjohnchristian]

True Narratives and Testimonies



ESTRELLANES JOHN CRISTIAN

APR 30, 2024

True narratives are explanations about actual events or experiences that are often narrated in storytelling form. These stories aim at appealing to the reader’s emotions as well as providing them with truthful information. Testimonies, statements refer to people’s first person accounts or views regarding their personal happenings or observations.

True story: "Into the Wild" by: Jon Krakauer. Christopher McCandless left society behind and went to live in Alaska but Jon Krakauer gives us the chilling true account of what really happened to him. This book tells about the journey he took there, the difficulties he faced, and how everything ended up so horribly.

Testimony: Holocaust survivor stories – These reveal firsthand descriptions by witnesses who experienced Holocaust events; they talk about such things like fear, determination for survival among others.

1. Introduction: This is where we meet Christopher McCandless, the young man with aspirations of becoming a performer. It sets the stage by telling us about his relocation to Alaska and why he decided to abandon everything he had known until that point in life. However, it also gives additional information about what might have driven him into such a radical lifestyle change; like for instance what could make someone give up all comforts and start living on streets with no roof over their head?

2. Summary: The second part of this book is mainly focused on McCandless’ journey. He describes his travel experiences – places he visited, people he met along the way and difficulties faced during each encounter as well as sharing some thoughts about those experiences which can be quite enlightening for an individual who has never been exposed to similar situations before reading “Into The Wild”. With all said though one thing still remains undoubted — that while in wild nature alone without any support from civilization there are certain facts about life learnt through personal intuition rather than being taught through moral lessons or lectures given elsewhere among civilized communities

3. Evaluation: While all this was happening, McCandless could vent out his emotions and thoughts; he could share what he thought about his choices and how they touched him and the people around him. It can also enlighten us about freedom, liberty, and human spirit from the tales he tells.

4. Conclusion: The end of the book connects to McCandles’ story where he reflects on what the trip meant to him personally but not only this did it further more gave us a chance to think deeply about life lessons which we can derive from this experience so as apply them in our lives too; perhaps it also accounts for why his narrative still touches individuals even now.

[branded-perceptions]

When Socrates and Plato said that ignorance is the root of all evil, this was hinted at the ignorance towards or subjective devaluation of subjective blind spots' causal effects upon average life force.

Most mass insanities and individual insanities tend to be a result of lack of introspective knowledge and awareness: in general, most people would strive to act in more moral ways if they would know how to and, most importantly, if they would more habitually deploy serious self-doubt as everyone and every group tends to subjectively believe to be go(o)d🤥😷😇.

In essence most of what we describe as evil originates from a lack of self-doubt and thus lack of reasonable decision-making, doesn't it?

The trouble of each time is that these "know how to" are similar like the by fanhood biases as "hero" storytelled villain Daenerys Targaryen bent by in-group standards, narratives and in-group reinforcement which we construct our own minds with and thus tend to be incapable of looking behind it with more balanced views without drifting into blind negative nationalism as described by George Orwell.

If a population is and decision-makers are filled with more (communicated, debated, exchanged, publicly discussed) self-doubt about its own narratives then it in general makes more wise and fair decisions because there has never been and will never be a "perfect" or "good" social narrative of any type:

it is only considered as such within the familiarity entrainment of the minds carrying it,

but in often by its shared unfamiliarity partly disguised and devaluated objective causal realities' relation to our shared life force it always creates some blind spots.

As more sure one is about any narrative or group-identity as more unseen and dangerous these shared blind spots become as seen via Holocaust, war-crimes, almost all historic happenings

or C-19 vaccine side-effects as focal lense systematic causal effects of current bra(i)nde(a)d perceptions of big food and big pharma and agriculture

which all our worldwide disputes national identities and other fantasy elements tend to distract ourselves from.

Many Chinese, Russian, western, South American and worldwide population are familiar with series like Game of Thrones:

by explaining our globally shared insanity via metaphors of the to large parts of population known entertainment show characters we in such impersonal realm of international metaphors can collectively understand, compromise and cooperate to introspect and counteract these socio-psychological pattern that not just exploited average population in fictional Westeros but in the real world right now.

Statistically we avoid possibili-tease of all types of insanities by heaving such insanities into our conscious awareness via entertainment industries:

as more emotionally moving movies we make about these topics as more unlikely they become to actually happen because then already a large part of the population has at least unconsciously pondered about and via fantasy of movies "experienced" the downsides of the consequences of such actions and thus is incentivised to consider and prevent these and act more maturely.

In this sense the brutality of typical american blockbuster can serve an important function if we discuss the insanities and psychological dynamics of such movies: who would ever really want to wake up in such a world? Only those who have never watched its horrors. The brutality of movies helps us to remind ourselves about these.

One might argue that if there in culture of all conflicting parties had been popular and critical war movies of the wars before WW1 before the two world wars broke out then it might never have happened as sooner or later people would have tried to avoid it at all costs, collectively.

The next step of our conscious evolution is about for us to drift away from the "superhero" movie nonsense towards authentic stories highlighting how characters of average population and decision-makers handle and introspect of all possible worst-case scenarios:

All mistakes and "lessons" we collectively make with our culture and storytellings like I do here on this account regarding bra(i)nde(a)d perceptions we thus do not need to continue to make in actual reality to grow out and evolve out of it.

We as collective mind undergo stages of conceptual and behavioural development:

In the past social evolution was constrained by the drives of actual happenings

(as example, without the two world wars the majority would likely would still cheer for overt colonialism, "positively". We only stopped behaving in these insane ways after we experienced and memorised the previous devalued and neglected downsides of such group-behaviours)

whilst nowadays we can exaggerate and storytell aspects of actual happenings in ways that help us to evolve out of certain types of group behaviours by innovating our social organisation and checks and balances and public introspective communications before our insanely "normal" group-behaviours become exaggerated in actual reality.

For this to function geopolitically we as western civilisation need to also welcome, integrate and actively promote the entertainment industries and cultural stories and "opposing" but similarly valid perspectives of historical lessons

(who gets to decide the "narrative" of anything? Objective reality has no narratives or stories, just complex causation which we can measure as neutral ground explorable via thesis, antithesis and synthesis)

of other cultures like Russia and China to find overlapping aspects

to via goofy irony draw metaphorical parallels to our own misbehaviours of our western culture

instead of us only via our own vain western entertainment colonising the globe as if we would be the measure of reality which we surely are not similar like surely not any other culture.

This will be the task of Anthropology and the global universities' departments of sociology and psychology: with the new interconnected medial networks we need culturally engaging metaphors that playfully tease everyone around the globe to introspect about upon global harmonic coexistence focused morality in all sorts of situations regarding all sorts of possible worst case scenarios which we collectively can only avoid if we are conscious about their possibili-tease as clearly shown via C-19 side-effects:

it does not matter if you consider such "negative" scenarios or not, objective reality and its causation has existed before you

and anyones "confidently" conceited in-group stories' economic and cultural capital matrix that lacks proactive self-doubts

and will exist after you passed away, but many seemingly will never consider such insights and instead (and this is the root for almost all mass insanities in all of history) block out any opportunity for vulnerability, public introspection and social intimacy of via self-doubt driven reality testing and proactive problem-solving.

Humanity has to adapt and walk away from authority figures that behave these ways: the corona pandemic was a worldwide documentation and filtration of this where we have to evolve from past methods of punishment towards methods of shifting rewards:

simply incentivise each other to take less serious any decision-maker or "intellectuals"

and do not work for entrepreneurs and buy less from bra(i)nde(a)d companies

who while having the means to do otherwise repeatedly over extended periods of only time "positively" like a bunch of laughing killer clowns do not PROACTIVELY out of OWN MOTIVATION frequently consider, look at, initiate to discuss, publicly display and act with self-doubts towards any possible blind-spots of their actions and motivations' and mind constructs' interplay with causal effects relation to our global life force.

It is that simple, in the past we just never had the technologies to collectively document and use such insights.

The ideal society that would display not just the most justice but also the highest effectivity in problem-solving

is one where the average population and their decision-makers are enjoying to be full of "insecurities" and constant self-doubts

not destructive "confidence" or "goodness" as the latter attitude sooner or later inevitably detaches from reality testing for which every individual and especially every group-mind needs self-doubts because, obviously, no subjective mind is objective reality, our minds are just dreams and fantasy trying to navigate it while we tend to act like ("being vain") as if it would be the other way around: do you remember the medieval believe that everything in the universe would circle around not just our earth

but also around the "morals" of the church that judged it as more "evil" to curse on the name of the story of a god

(like metaphorically talking "bad" about the causal insanity of our modern day religion of bra(i)nde(a)d perceptions' fantasies)

than murdering someone (like metaphorically the by that disguised life-aversive causal effects of C-19 vaccine)?

Read the order of 10 commandments and ask yourself if that is the way how you would prioritise things.

We as society in general haven't really much evolved past that attitude of our conceited subjective ignorance (that we subjectively via our motivations infatuate ourselves in like 🔍"brand love") being centre of the universe, metaphorically:

Just look around and ask yourself how many of us do ever proactively out of own motivation without social rewards question themselves and their motivations' "positivity" to strive to gain more objective insights that one then bends ones own mind towards instead of bending insights towards ones own mind?

Watch sci-fi movies and how people 100 years ago dreamt about how our time could be:

did they envision a zombie crowd drowning in actually quite easily solvable life-aversive causal effects while cheerfully being distracted by peer-pressured obsessions with reputation managed bra(i)nde(a)d stories and brand names while watching stuff like Gary Vee content that like a psychotic mad priest hypes cult followers towards believing that the for himself profitable elitarian NFTs (which only a small percentage of the worlds elites can afford to use) would be "the biggest innovation since the fire" and "more significant than the printing press"?

Not kidding, that is a quote, and it is not a single incident nor misunderstood nor taken out of context nor an isolated insane person: statistically, it is a quite common attitude of not just our society but almost every society that has ever existed, which is also encapsuled by movies like Game of Thrones that obsesses so much with fantasies of power and medieval celebritism without really caring about enhancing the common life of the people they "rule" over via not much but manipulation, force, entitlement and fantasies that themselves loose any worth if they detach from causalities' relation to median life force which is why European medieval etymology of the word "mean"

[it relates to and means median (of a society or group), being mean (aversive boundary-setting opposed to the evil of hypocritical "go(o)d" fantasies), being common, average, meaning-making (purpose), balance of the incentivising direction of collective means (ressources) of a society, care, related to justice ... 🎶what do you mean Justin Bieber]

has evolved such matching double-entendre meanings.

Look at all the technologies we have and what we actually could do with it to enhance all our global average quality of life.

On which planet do such ALIENating motivators (and their obviously insane audiences) live where we "positively" distract ourselves and our motivated DIRECTION of social incentives from solving the to quality of life of average population mattering objective causal stuff that should but for some reason seemingly is not more important than our bra(i)nde(a)d symbolic references' reductionism of it in our by such fantasies (metaphorical UFOs: unidentified👽 flying🎈 objects🎅) obsessed minds that we assign our thereby due by it bent social reward steams🐟🐟🐟 psychotically reputation managing🎭 identities to?

Just observe the change of social attitude in the last scenes of movie Game of Thrones once Daenerys and the other power-hungry people weren't there anymore and the calm wheelchair dude Bran who has no interest in ruling was forced to become a rather symbolic "king" with more calmness and introspection while a larger and rather tempered and due brutality of past happenings wisened team started to do the "ruling" in more cooperative ways. That change happened within a few hours / days in that fictionary story just as it happened multiple times during real history: it was just a change of mind and attitude (📚open Johan Norberg), an out of past traumatising events of power-abuse motivated cultural "software-fix" of what people desire and aspire to. It could have happened earlier if people wanted to. It could have never happened at all. But that stark contrast between click-bait insanity and "boring" sanity and how that relates to average peoples' wellbeing is crucial to the message of that cultural metaphor this movie is and, most importantly, can be internationally.

[nbmsports]

'The danger never goes away': Christopher Nolan didn't intend for Oppenheimer movie to be so timely | Ents & Arts News

The world's first nuclear explosion happened on 16 July 1945, when a plutonium implosion device was tested in New Mexico.Now a new film about the so-called father of the atomic bomb, J Robert Oppenheimer, looks at how he came to create a weapon that would change the world and how it changed him.

Image: J Robert Oppenheimer on the test ground for the atomic bomb in September 1945 Decades since its invention, as Russia's war rages in Ukraine, the weapon's threat to the world is back in people's minds.Director Christopher Nolan, who also wrote the movie, basing it on the Pulitzer Prize winning book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin, told Sky News he never meant for his film to be so timely."I had a conversation with one of my teenage sons about what I was working on and he literally said to me - 'Does anybody really worry about nuclear weapons anymore? Is that really a thing in the world?' "To which I said, 'Well, maybe that's a reason for making the film but beyond that, it's just a very, very dramatic story about how our world changed forever'. Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

1:29 Actor Cillian Murphy and director Christopher Nolan speak to Sky News about their new film Oppenheimer "Two years later, he's not asking that question anymore and neither is anybody else for all the worst possible reasons, and that's symptomatic of our relationship with the threat of nuclear weapons and nuclear holocaust - it ebbs and flows with geopolitical shifts in a way that it shouldn't - I mean, the danger never goes away." More on Christopher Nolan To inhabit the role of Oppenheimer, Peaky Blinders star Cillian Murphy lost weight and perfected a new accent and also had to learn about quantum physics and grapple with Oppenheimer's morality."Actors love getting jobs and then they're dying to finish them, that seems to be the way," Murphy told Sky News.

Image: Tom Conti as Albert Einstein with Murphy. Pic: Universal Pictures "So, yeah, it was time for a holiday after that for sure, if you do anything for like 17, 18 hours a day and you're in that and you're on set all the time, naturally there will be a cost and then you feel at the end there's all this displaced energy and you're not quite sure what to do with it, and you start moving furniture around."Nolan interjects: "And have a sandwich".For the director, known for movies including Intersteller, Inception and Dunkirk - and who has a reputation for shunning digital effects and greenscreen - it wasn't recreating a nuclear explosion that posed a challenge.Instead, he says he found the casting process daunting. Spreaker This content is provided by Spreaker, which may be using cookies and other technologies. To show you this content, we need your permission to use cookies. You can use the buttons below to amend your preferences to enable Spreaker cookies or to allow those cookies just once. You can change your settings at any time via the Privacy Options. Unfortunately we have been unable to verify if you have consented to Spreaker cookies. To view this content you can use the button below to allow Spreaker cookies for this session only. Enable Cookies Allow Cookies Once Click to subscribe to Backstage wherever you get your podcasts"The ensemble - with Cillian at the heart of it as Oppenheimer - but then his interactions with this entire team of people coming together to pull off this, you know, impossible feat, that was a challenge for me."Doing these group discussions, these arguments, these interpersonal relationships and all of that, all of which came into such a kind of hothouse atmosphere with the Manhattan Project and everything they had to do in the years that they were there."That was something I'd never really taken on before."

Image: Emily Blunt and Cillian Murphy. Pic: Universal Pictures The extremely positive early reviews for Oppenheimer suggest Nolan rose to that challenge.But now, with promotion for the film interrupted by the US actor's strike, it remains to be seen whether audiences will have the appetite for a three-hour epic about the creation of the atomic bomb - the end of the world perhaps too close for comfort to be considered entertainment.Oppenheimer, which also stars Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Florence Pugh and Robert Downey Jr, is released worldwide on Friday 21 July. Source link Read the full article

[sbbarnes]

The Honest Spy by Andreas Kollender My rating: 4 of 5 stars "The Honest Spy" follows the espionage career of Fritz Kolbe, a German diplomat who spends the later years of World War II smuggling confidential information to the Americans. Kolbe narrates his choices during the war to two journalists post-war, a modern thread set between the story proper. Kolbe is characterized throughout as a decent man. He was never a member of the Nazi party or even slightly convinced by them. The only moment of doubt he has is when his best friend dies as a result of information he leaked. His driving motivation is love for a married nurse from the Charité called Marlene. She appears to be largely fictional, although Kolbe did marry a nurse from the Charité after the war. All told the bare bones of the narrative are compelling enough and Fritz's moral backbone is comforting to read about. So is his kinship with the young female photographer who understands how important his love story and the mundane details of his love life during the war are. Something I really loved was the contrast between how Fritz spends all day feeding the journalists and offering them drink after drink in contrast to the sections during the war when food is scarce, alcohol is stolen and the only good meals Fritz has are in Bern. Something I struggle with though is that this is such a German WWII story. The framing of Fritz's motivations is ideological; he is no Nazi and he never has been. He is disgusted by everything they stand for and believes Germanness is a far more cosmopolitan trait related to composers, literature, history of better men. He continually complains of the Nazis' senseless speeches and poor oration etc. This is ultimately an extremely comforting story for a German audience because it shows us not all Germans were convinced and there was civil resistance. While noble of course, I did feel slightly let down that not more attention was given to things like the Russian secret operative's astute commentary that Fritz's station in South Africa and his daughter's safe haven there are ultimately results of colonialism. Equally, there is a glut of this kind of story—the lone good German who didn't believe the party line—and very few stories humanizing Jewish, Sinti, Roma, LGBTQ+ etc. victims of the Holocaust and telling their stories of resistance. This book barely remembers these people exist in more than the abstract, which makes sense given Kolbe had little contact - but I believe he would have had more than zero contact. View all my reviews

[midrashic]

Thoughts on Erik's and Charles' philosophies and viewpoints? How they view humanity?

oh, anon, i’m so glad you asked.

An Important Disclaimer: i know that some people have a fixed understanding of their favorite characters and write them the same way every time, & i respect that, but that’s not me. to me, canon is like seeing the tip of the iceberg; there’s no way to predict the shape of the submerged portion. sure, you can extrapolate from what you can see, but humans are strange and inconsistent, if you tried to predict what a person’s entire existence is like from a comprehensive understanding of how they behave in the starbucks coffee line you will fail, and i apply this principle to fictional characters. i believe that canon can give rise to a whole host of equally valid characterizations. (this is not to say that all characterizations are equally valid; there’s “this person is selfish” and “this person is unselfish” and then there’s “this person is an alien infiltrator.”)

so i write erik and charles differently every time, and never consider one version “in-character” while another is not. i try to write them within the confines of how i understand their canon characterizations, for example i always write erik as someone who leaves charles behind on the beach, but sometimes i write the beach divorce as erik choosing morality for the first time and sometimes i write it as him giving up on morality forever, and i think canon opens up spaces for both these interpretations. so erik’s and charles’s philosophies are not something that can be pinned down with any degree of accuracy.

Another Important Disclaimer: i hate the original trilogy, so this answer only takes as canon the alt timeline movies. i don’t have a justification for this. i just don’t like them.

with that said, here is what i feel a version of erik & charles would believe:

i’m going to assume that you’ve at least heard the paradigm “erik is a cynic, charles is an idealist” before. that’s how most people understand their conflict. through this lens, people take a couple of things for granted: charles’s pacifism means that he values life above all else, erik’s violent tactics means he doesn’t. charles is a deontologist, who believes that morality is following a set of rules about what is moral and what is not; erik is a consequentialist, who believes that the right thing to do is what results in the best outcome, or that the ends, at least to some extent, justify the means. this is an age-old ethical conflict and sexy as hell. superhero stories are particularly rife with possibilities to explore ethical conflicts, and people love to take apart the trope of the violent consequentialist villain and the idealistic deontologist hero. [points at the steve x tony meta i used to write & reblog and clarifies before anyone comes after me that it didn’t claim that tony was either violent or a villain, but rather that he was one of the few consequentialist heroes in western media]

this is all valid as heck & i have in fact written these versions of charles and erik before. but there is also tons of meta out there written in the heydey of this fandom (i assume) about violent consequentialist villain erik and idealistic deontologist hero charles. stuff about how charles’s telepathy might affect his feelings that no one, no matter how terrible, deserves to die; stuff about how erik’s experiences during the holocaust means that his driving value, the only rule he takes as a moral absolute, is that his people must not experience genocide. if you wanted to dive more into these versions of them, that meta is out there! i don’t think this post needs to reiterate the great work that i’m sure was done.

so let’s think instead about a different conception of charles’s and erik’s values: a conflict between peace and justice.

this looks like charles taking up what we call in the real world respectability politics. he is aware that anti-mutant violence is a result of the way in which humans negatively perceive mutants. his is a campaign of changing hearts & minds, his goal is to move the norms of society far enough toward tolerance that the friends & families of bigots would react with disgust if they said anti-mutant things--much less got caught violently attacking a mutant!--that public disapproval would prevent overt discrimination and state-sanctioned violence. this charles focuses on the mind of the human as the point of change, this charles cares--above all else--about preserving mutant lives in the long run. this charles disapproves of mutants who do not, by the example of their lives, work to prove to humans that they aren’t so different: mutant criminals, unfriendly activists, and--worst of all--the pro-mutant terrorist.

the problem, of course, is that mutants shouldn’t have to be perfect to be treated as human. a policy where mutants are asked to be better to be treated the same is fundamentally unfair; and this injustice is what erik is first and foremost concerned with. violence erupts when erik takes justice into his own hands by punishing humans who do horrific things to mutants because they won’t face consequences any other ways. and erik is less concerned with the future, with incremental change, with the ends. he wants everything to be fair & just right now, and more important than winning hearts & minds is doing what he can to save mutants who, under charles’s policies, might be sacrificed at the altar of history. incremental change isn’t going to save the mutant who is experimented on today and dies tomorrow. ripping off the doors of the research facility is.

& this version of charles is fundamentally pragmatic. charles’s greatest desire is now to prevent genocide in the future. to that end, for the dream of human-mutant coexistence, charles accepts an imperfect now. incremental change, at heart, recognizes that the way things are now is wrong, but worries that if too much changes too quickly, reactionaries will take away any progress that was made. for this charles, radical change would be nice but is unrealistic; just because something is the right thing to doesn’t mean that it’s possible, or, perhaps, would necessarily lead to more good than harm. this charles is a consequentialist (to an extent); playing nice with humans and making political compromises and knowing that people will continue to suffer while change slowly takes place are all worth it, if it gets the job done.

& this version of erik is fundamentally idealistic. erik will fight for justice, even if it turns the humans against them further, even if as a result of his actions mutants are even more heavily persecuted, because it’s the right thing to do. and this might be baked into their histories: charles can see the future; erik, who was taught when he was young that he has no future, prioritizes the suffering around him now. erik is a control freak; if he can stop one mutant from getting hurt, he must. but charles, whose power means that he knows much better than erik that control and consent are complicated, views “doing all he can” as a slippery slope. what if he does control every mind in the world and wipe out all anti-mutant sentiment? do the ends justify the means to that extent? “can’t,” to charles, means more than whether he physically can or cannot do something; he can’t solve the human world’s hatred of mutants because it’s morally, psychologically, not in him. (this is why he is only a consequentialist to an extent. morals are complicated: for example, charles is often described as an “integrationist/assimilationist” to erik’s separatism, but he does teach an all-mutant school.)

as far as humanity--that’s a complicated topic. do you mean the “species” homo sapiens non-superior, do you mean the humanist idea that every person alive is part of a universal brotherhood and ought to take care of and respect each other, or do you mean whether charles & erik think of themselves as humans, as in the opposite of monsters? again, acknowledging that canon is not explicit on any of these subjects, and that a whole range of positions is possible for both of them (from “erik learning that he’s part of a new species confirmed all his greatest fears that he is a monster and his rejection of conventional morality is a kind of psychological self-harm” to “anti-humanist charles being like, ‘it's such a cliche, but the metaphor of people and snowflakes? it's completely true. exquisitely, utterly true... and just like snowflakes, when you take even the smallest step back, they become truly and utterly indistinguishable’"... you know, charles and erik who are both convinced they’re monsters would be a hell of a fic. lots of “when is a monster not a monster? oh, when you love it” vibes) means that these questions could fill up an entire other post, or even multiple posts. but lest i dive into a hole of meta and never find my way out, i’m going to stop here, after presenting two conceptions of charles and erik’s moral dichotomy for your consideration. but “philosophies and viewpoints” is a broad & bold question, and if you want to return to this issue, my inbox is always open.

[aplusblogging]

An Analysis on the History of Gender in the Horror Genre

This is one of my classmates’ final projects for Sociology. I loved it so much I asked for her permission to share it here. Hope you enjoy it too!

Transcript under the cut, since the auto-generated captions are mostly accurate but punctuation is good for comprehension.

TRANSCRIPT:

“My name is Davis Barelli, and in this video essay I'm going to look at the portrayal of gender through the lens of the horror genre.

Women in particular may have a reason to keep coming back to the genre, outside of a cheap thrill. In a study done by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, and Google, using the Geena Davis Inclusion Quotient—or the GDIQ—it was determined that women are featured on screen and in speaking roles more than men only in the horror genre. With the advent of the MPAA rating system in the '30s, the kind of horror we know today didn't re-emerge until the '60s.

Making female characters who would later become known as "Final Girls" the vessel for traumatic experiences allowed viewers—especially men and boys coming home from war—to see someone reacting to trauma in the way that they wanted to, but wasn't socially acceptable. Instead, the model for men to see themselves in was the macho, womanizing jock who goes outside to find the big bad, typically resulting in him being the first to die. While there was a lot of good in the survivors of these horror movies very commonly being female, a specific archetype of the female survivor made it clear what kind of girl it took to be the hero.

The Final Girl being portrayed in '60s, '70s, and '80s slasher horror as an innocent virgin stereotype was no accident, what with America experiencing the breakdown of the nuclear family and Christian morals thanks to the free-love movement of the '60s. This led to frequent themes of occultism, homosexuality, and hypersexuality in horror at the time. Characters who gave in to these evils were given a death sentence, as opposed to the Final Girls, who were rewarded for their abstinence with survival.

When films did stray from the norm by casting male leads in sequels in place of the Final Girl, a double standard emerged. Male protagonists were branded as "homosexual" for acting like the Final Girls before them, and the actors who portrayed them had their careers effectively ruined. Where the '70s gave rise to exploitation horror centered on violence against women, '80s niche horror had different scapegoats.

Cannibal Holocaust, released at the beginning of the decade and directed by Ruggero Deodato, tells the story of a group going to the Amazon in search of a missing film crew. They discover footage detailing the gruesome things the crew did to the tribe they encountered before they were killed. Not only is the portrayal of hostile tribes in the Amazon harmful to the actual tribes in the Amazon, but framing the main character of the film as a kind of white savior for not wanting the footage of the tribe distributed is basically rewarding him for the absolute bare minimum.

The other standout film of the '80s notorious for its subject matter is that of Sleepaway Camp. Sleepaway Camp tells the story of a young girl who experiences the death of her family during a boating accident and is sent to live with her aunt and cousin. She and her cousin go to the summer camp and it quickly becomes a bloodbath. The reveal at the end is that the young girl was the culprit, because she wasn't a girl at all, but her twin brother who was forced by the aunt to live as a girl. The narrative of trans people as dangerous, deranged villains pretending to be a different gender due to mental illness or against their will is deeply harmful to the LGBTQ people who were battling misconceptions at the time similar to this, and still are.

This energy evolved with the '90s, which shifted its focus to supernatural teenage hormones, with the likes of The Craft and many others. Looking at the villains of these movies, though, is a clear pointer to the ostracization of the "weird kid" in the '90s. This is most prominently seen in The Craft, where a girl with supernatural powers befriends a group of girls pretending to be witches. She bestows them with real powers and hijinks ensue. The film culminates in the ringleader��who, out of the group, is the least conventionally attractive—being put in an insane asylum for her misdeeds, while the rest of the group gets off relatively scot-free. This served as an unfortunate continuation of the narrative that girls who were weird were to be punished, but if you were pretty, you could get away with it.

With the 2000s filled with American-made J-horror and classic horror remakes, I'd like to skip forward, save for one movie.

In the 2000s a movie came out that caused a huge ruckus over how bad it was, but I think deserves a spot here for its portrayal of teenage girls in horror. Jennifer's Body, directed by* Diablo Cody, starring Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried, tells the story of Jennifer getting possessed after a botched human sacrifice because she lies about being a virgin. It was almost universally panned by critics, who called it a "sexploitation film lacking the all-important ballast of sincerity." Both Cody and Fox—who were gaining fame for Juno and the Transformers franchise, respectively—were already written off by critics, most of whom were men, before the movie had even been released. In reality, Jennifer's character was unique for being the mean girl who gets killed off, the big bad, and a revenge film-esque survivor, all in one. And her best friend, "Needy," was the sarcastic, dorky, sexually active Final Girl we never would have seen in classic horror.

The last decade has given rise to a genre dubbed "intelligent horror," ushering in an age with less mindless bloodlust and more nuanced characters and themes. Directors Jordan Peele and Ari Aster are arguably at the forefront of the intelligent horror genre; Peele's Get Out and Us giving people of color representation in a severely whitewashed genre. Get Out, especially, has received praise not just for the representation of people of color, but the very real, very prevalent issues of race and police brutality. One of the most important aspects is the depiction of the white savior character in the form of the protagonist's girlfriend, who is revealed to actually be a villain, showcasing the dramatization of the danger of performative activism and how that affects people of color.

Ari Aster, on the other hand, deals with themes of mental illness and family trauma, something unfortunately somewhat universal. While mommy issues and cults are nothing new in horror, Ari Aster's work frames both subjects very differently, especially in regards to the women in his films. Midsommar heavily focuses on Dani, the protagonist's, mental health and manipulation by others throughout the film, as she navigates grief unapologetically and realistically. This portrayal of grief in Midsommar from a woman's point of view is so important, because Dani is clingy, she's anxious, she's emotional, and she's human. As opposed to the polished, over-dramatic depiction of women and their emotions that are so commonly seen in horror.

Over the decades, horror and its portrayals of the human experience have shifted to continue being a compelling mirror for the issues of the time. But something that will always be current is that we can be scared.”

End of transcript.

*Jennifer’s Body was written by Diablo Cody and directed by Karyn Kusama

[masteroftheblade]

What are your favorite and least favorite animes? Why do you like/dislike them?

oh god here we go lmao 🤠👍 prepare for an entire novel as always lol

my favorite animes atm are Naruto, Dragon Ball, Attack on Titan, and Claymore. Overall, my favorite genre of anime is shonen (and in case you dont know what that is, its basically shows that are marketed to young boys. it'll have shit like superpowers and poorly written female characters). My least favorite genre is Shoujo (marketed at young girls). I honestly don't hate the entire genre, I just hate how much romance is in there since im pretty romance-repulsed. If there were more Shoujo series like Claymore, I'd probably be in love w/ it. I'll start talking about these shows individually, starting w/ Naruto.

1. Naruto.

Honestly, the only reason I started watching Naruto was because my friends peer pressured me into doing it, and it actually differed from what I expected it to be story-wise. The beginning of the show started off amazing; it had excellent world building, magic systems, interesting characters, and it attempted to address how messed up the whole shinobi system is. But then Naruto got on the front page of Shonen Jump, and everything went down from there. It started to focus more on cool fight scenes than the actual plot. I wont get too much into that, because you can literally find entire blogs dedicated to dissecting that, but Naruto killed itself w/ its own popularity. That said, I love the characters and world building and I can look past most of its flaws anyway.

Would I recommend reading/watching it? Yes, but only to say you did it for bragging rights. Don't go into watching Naruto if you want deep looks into imperialism and militarized governments, because you will get the complete opposite of that :P Also the best way to watch it is to watch it with friends.

2. Dragon Ball.

I only started watching DB about a month ago, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but I think its a garbage series. The fight scenes have little to no weight to them, because no matter what, the protagonist of that episode will always succeed in some way. For example, when Goku (a 12 y/o boy) was fighting Giran (a 10ft tall godzilla man) and was getting his ass beat until Goku just... randomly grows back his tail that was cut off earlier and wins. We are never told why he grew back his tail, and i think he only gets it back so he can have a cool fight scene in a later episode. Goku can literally be battling genocidal gods and he will still always win. The show also goes out of its way to sexualize/show a female character being harrassed. Every. Fucking. Episode.

That said, it is a fun show, and I really enjoy watching it. Like Naruto, I really love the characters and the world they are in, I just hate the way it was handled, and its painfully obvious that DB was made by a bunch of old men in the 80s. Unlike Naruto, however, I really appreciate how simple it is. It doesn't force a narrative about space genocide or whatever being bad, and I'm very thankful because that kind of narrative would be absolutely botched in this kind of series. It's also nice to have a show that doesn't take itself too seriously. Shows like AOT are amazing and important, but those shows can be overwhelming with their heavy subject matter. I would only recommend watching DB if you want to see some really good art/character design. Don't take the show seriously, and you'll have a good time.

3.Attack On Titan.

This anime was actually the first I've ever seen! I saw the very first episode when it aired in 2014, so I'm definetely biased in that regard, but I still try to look at this show in the most objective way I can. This show does almost everything right. The pacing, the characters, the art, the plot, you name it. It takes a concept that looks silly on paper and turns it into this grueling story about war, politics, and the trauma of being a soldier. It never treats it's characters like they're only one-dimensional, or like they are there just for one purpose only. These characters feel human in a way Naruto and Dragon Ball could never be. But there is one thing that has me concerned about this show, and its about the weirdly anti-Semitic undertones it has.

You probably heard the controversy already, but it really effected the way people on the outside of the fandom view the series. The show is heavily inspired by European culture, specifically that of Germany, and there are an ethnic group of people called The Eldians in the show that are pretty anti-Semitic in this kind of setting. The Eldian people have the capability of turning into Titans, and the Titans are what divided the world and killed millions. As a result, another group of people started doing the shit the Nazis did to Jewish people, basically making the Eldians into this weird allegory for the holocaust??? Which was kind of a shock to me when I first realized that was the angle they were going for. I genuinely did not expect that considering what the series started off as. The foreshadowing is there and all, I just didn't think they'd use real-world events as inspiration.

Now, this actually has the complete opposite problem Naruto and DB had. Naruto and DB had amazing ideas and concepts that went to shit, AOT's whole holocaust narrative was trash from the beginning.

The show could have easily had a different kind of social/political commentary without even going near the holocaust narrative. It comes off as kind of a half assed idea that people put way too much effort in, so it's kind of in this weird grey-area between "modern anime masterpiece" and "what the fuck were they trying to get across with this show?". If you asked me what the moral of the show was, I wouldn't be able to tell you.

Now, because of the fact that the Eldians can literally turn into man-eating beasts, this makes the comparison of Jewish people and Eldians very racist, and it doesn't help that Japan is still full of legitimate Nazis, making the whole situation look even worse. Since I am not Jewish, I wont speak for other Jewish people. There is a very heated debate on whether the show is racist, and frankly I don't think it's within my right to say if it is or isn't. What I will say, is that I really loved the show and appreciated the social commentary it provided, and I think a lot of people would benefit from watching it, but I think it's also important to listen to Jewish people's views on the show. For this reason, I specifically avoid reblogging AOT stuff, but I do love that show and I wont hate on people who do reblog stuff from it. It's definitely not a light watch, but it does provide a lot of thinking material.

4. Claymore.

This. Show. Was. Amazing. But. Underrated.

First off, this is a shonen show that is led by a majority female cast and a female protagonist, and all of those women are badass swordwielding lesbians and I love it. Second, the art style is beautiful. Third, the story is really interesting from so many angles, so much so I am not even going to mention what its about because you dont need to know, you just need to watch it and see what happens. The first season was an absoloute ride of a show, and if you love shows like AOT or Berserk, you'll love Claymore. Honestly, this show was what AOT should have tried to be. It also has its fair share of militarized imperialist commentary, but this is the only show on this list that actually fucking critiques imperialist ideals and has a main character that actively refuses to participate in that kind of oppressive system, choosing to fight it all together.

But the show got fucking cancelled right before the first arc even finished. You can thank shows like Naruto for that 🙃🙃🙃

10/10 Would reccomend, but just be prepared to be left on a major cliffhanger. You can try reading the manga, but it's kind of hard to follow since all of the warrior girls look the same.

[icantbelieveitsbrigi]

What's wrong with SNK? I'm not even trying to start discourse. I'm interested because I only watched the first 2 seasons and never got around to the rest.

Hey no worries! It's ok to ask questions :))

(I may have some info a little wrong, and this is getting typed up in a bit of a rush, but the overall theme is what's important here)

I was really off put by the series and stopped reading way back when chapter 98 or something came out??? I don't remember exactly- but it was when we got back story on the Titans...

Turned out the Titans are the Eldians, who spent thousands of years murdering and raping the world to produce more Titans... and then the titan people were put in what was essentially concentration camps?? They had arm bands and everything 😰 which... yikes... was Isayama alluding to like... the holocaust cuz...that is NOT the same...

There's a lot of subtle nazi-esque imagery and stuff, Eren is now... committing genocide??? The writing is miserable, Isayama has made some sus comments (mostly refusing to clarify what his personal political views are) and both heavy right wing and left wing fans have taken what they wanted from his seemingly "morally gray" story. (Some things just cannot be left up to interpretation...)

There's just...so much... the story is supposedly to hurt fans intentionally (end I'm tragedy) and I just...can't be bothered with that kind of a shit.

It's hard to find info on these matters (lots of opinion heavy articles, not a lot of facts), so I would recommend doing some thorough research and forming your own opinions on the matter!

Good luck!

[multiculturalliteraturethemes]

Author Bio

Hello to everyone reading this blog! I am Alexandra Gawronski, an English major at Grand Canyon University, who would like to share with you some of the knowledge I learned in my Multicultural Literature course. This blog is meant to help teachers and other students gain an understanding of themes in literature and culture. 

Multicultural literature is literature that shows aspects of life from the viewpoints of different cultures across the world. These works of writing show the reader what life is like outside of their own culture and demonstrates the values of these other cultures. Throughout this course, we have discussed works from ancient China, China during Confucius’ time, modern China, Native American authors, Africa, African American authors, Latin America, and Post-Holocaust Jewish authors. These pieces of writing each demonstrate different cultures, values, and beliefs that are held throughout the world. 

Global, in relation to literature, means that a work of writing can be translated and read across the world. These works, however, are not only understood by other people from different cultures across the globe but can also be related to. Although the works all display different values and beliefs, they all have one thing in common: they all show human nature. Although people from all over come from different places and act differently, we are all still human, share many universal morals, and have emotions. Although someone today may not be able to share the same insight as a person who bore witness to the Holocaust, we can still understand that kind of pain and sorrow that they felt because these are feelings that all humans have felt at some point. This makes literature global because people from across the globe can relate to it.

The blurring of national boundaries in 20th-century literature can best be explained as the mixture of two or more cultures. The “blurring” of two nations occurs in literature when values from more than one culture mix in order to show that these cultures have mixed and that they have a mixture of beliefs and values. A real-world example of the blurring of national boundaries outside of literature can be the marriage of two people from different cultures. When this happens, the two families of the couple are joined together and as a result, their views, beliefs, and values will mix and the family will no longer have just one national identity. 

20th-century literature portrays struggles with cultural identity by using stories to convey the intricacies of identity and how many do not exactly fit into the culture they were born into. In many cases, stories show a character being torn between cultural identities or disagreeing with the values of a culture that they are supposed to represent. In many pieces of Chinese literature, you can see women who are forced to submit to cultural norms in order to fit into their cultural identity, despite disagreeing with the way things are and the share of power that was held between men and women. 

[impressivepress]

What Charlie Chaplin Got Right About Satirizing Hitler

The Great Dictator—Charlie Chaplin’s masterful satire of Adolf Hitler—began filming in September 1939, right at the start of World War II. By the time it was released in 1940, the Axis had been formed, and Nazis were already occupying much of France.

The threat was not at all abstract: critic Michael Wood notes that the movie premiered that December, in London, amid German air raids. The following December, of 1941, would yield its own devastating threats from the air—this time on American soil, which would clarify for Americans the realness of this war by bringing it home.

It was, in other words, a strange moment to be making a comedy about Adolf Hitler—even a satire holding him to account, and even one in which Chaplin himself, who was at that point one of the most famous movie stars in the world, famous for playing the ambling, lovable Little Tramp, took on the role of Hitler. In 1940, Germany and the US had yet to become enemies; feathers, it was worried, would be ruffled by a movie like this. But Chaplin was already unwittingly bound up in the era’s iconographies of evil. His likeness, the Little Tramp, with that curt mustache and oddly compact face of his, had already become a visual reference for cartoonists lampooning Hitler in the press. And he was already on the Nazis’ radar: the 1934 Nazi volume The Jews Are Looking At You referred to him as "a disgusting Jewish acrobat." Chaplin wasn’t Jewish. But he was frequently rumored to be. And when he visited Berlin in 1931, he was mobbed by German fans, proving that his popularity could surpass even the growing ideological boundaries of a nascent Nazi Germany—hence their hatred.

Chaplin was aware of all of this—and of the fact that he and Hitler were born only four days apart, in April of 1889, that they had both risen out of poverty, and that they had enough points of biographical comparison, overall, to spook any sane person. Let’s not overstate their similarities: One of these men would go on to make the world laugh, and the other would go on to start a world war and facilitate the Holocaust. Humorously, that split would come to be echoed in The Great Dictator. Chaplin does double duty, playing the movie's two central roles. One, the character of Adenoid Hynkel, is a Hitler spoof by way of a short-tempered and preposterously powerful personality, a dictator of the fictional country Tomainia. And in the opposing corner, Chaplin offers us a variation on his classic Little Tramp, a Jewish barber who saves a high-ranking officer’s life in World War I and, after a plane accident and years of recovery in the hospital, wakes up to the seeds of World War II being sewn in his country.

The Great Dictator is a classic for a reason. It's startling in its depictions of violence, which stand out less for their outright brutality than for how memorably they depict the Nazis’ betrayal of everyday humanity. And it's renowned as well as for its resourceful and original humor, which combines Chaplin at his most incisive and balletic with raucous displays of verbal wit. This was Chaplin’s first sound film; his previous feature, the 1936 masterpiece Modern Times, was by the time of its release considered almost anachronistic for being a silent film in a sound era. Dictator avails itself of this technological progress, making perhaps its most successful bit out of the way Hitler speaks, the melange of rough sounds and brutish insinuations that have long made footage from his rallies as fascinating as they are frightening.

The Great Dictator understands Hitler as a performer, as an orator wielding language like the unifying, galvanizing power that it is. But it also understands him as a psyche. This of course means it’s full of what feel like sophomoric jokes, gags in which Hitler’s insecurities, his thirst for influence, his ideological inconsistencies (an Aryan revolution led by a brunette?) and zealous dependency on loyalty come under fire. It isn’t a psychological portrait, but nor is it so simple as a funhouse treatment of the coming war, all punchline and distortion.

It’s all a bit richer than that, which might be why The Great Dictator is on my mind this week, as we greet the release of Taiki Waititi’sJojo Rabbit, a movie in which Waititi himself plays Adolf Hitler, not quite in the flesh, but rather as imagined by a little Nazi boy who’s fashioned him into an imaginary friend. I’m not crazy about Waititi’s movie, which is less a satire than a vehicle for unchallenged moral goodness in the face of only barely-confronted evil. But it does, like Chaplin’s film, nosedive into the same problems of representation and comedy that have plagued movies since early in Hitler’s reign. Should we satirize genocidal maniacs? Can we laugh at that? And if so, can the line we usually toe between comedic pleasure and moral outrage—a mix that comes easily to comedy, in the best of cases—withstand something so inconceivable a mass atrocity?

That Chaplin’s movie succeeds where Waititi’s fails is a fair enough point, but comparing most comedians’ work to Chaplin’s more often than not results in an unfair fight. What matters are the things we can all still learn from Chaplin’s work, down to the fact that it so completely and unabashedly honors and toys with the public’s sense of who he is. This wouldn’t be nearly as interesting a movie if the Jewish barber hadn’t so readily recalled the Little Tramp. But because of this familiarity, The Great Dictator feels much the way movies like Modern Times did: like a story about the travails of an every-man who’s suddenly, with no preparation, launched headlong into machinery too great, too complex, too utterly beyond him, for it not to result in comic hi-jinks.

That’s the how barber’s first scenes out of the hospital, as beautifully staged and timed by Chaplin, feel: like watching the Little Tramp turn a corner and walk, completely unaware, into a world war. He sees "Jew" written on his barbershop, for example, but because he’s an amnesiac just released from the hospital, he has no idea why it’s there, and starts to wash it away. This is illegal, of course, and when the Nazis try to tell them so, he, thinking they’re run-of-the-mill brutish anti-Semites, douses them with paint and runs away. Much of the humor, at least in the clearly-marked "Ghetto," where the Barber lives, plays out this way: a terrifying game of comic irony in which what the Barber doesn’t know both empowers and threatens to kill him.

The Hitler scenes, by contrast, are a ballet—at times almost literally—of alliances and petty tasks. The highlight must of course be a scene of Hitler alone, having just renewed his faith in his plan to take over the world, dancing with an inflated globe of the planet, bouncing it off his bum, posing like a pin-up on his desk as the globe floats airlessly skyward. You can’t help but laugh. But that laughter doesn’t mute the brooding danger of it. You see the globe, the ease with which he lifts it up, manipulates it, makes a game of it, and realize that this is precisely what a dictator wants. It's a guileless and child-like vision, from his perspective, of his own power.

The Great Dictator’s famous climax finds these two men merging, somewhat, into one. It’s a rousing speech ostensibly delivered by the Jewish barber, who (for reasons best left to the movie to explain) has been confused for Hynkel by the Nazis and is called upon to speak to the masses. And then he opens his mouth—and the man that emerges is Chaplin himself, creeping beyond the boundaries of character, satire, or even the artificial construct of a "movie," as such.

The speech makes a case for humanity in the face of grave evil. "We think too much and feel too little," Chaplin says. "More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness." You’ll recognize this theme—"more than machinery we need humanity"—throughout Chaplin’s work, and it rings especially true here. Chaplin emerges, fully human, as himself, breaking free of the film’s satirical trappings, to deliver one from the heart.

It’s a scene that plays well on its own, as a standalone speech. For a long while, it was hard to find a version online that hadn’t been modified with dramatic "movie speech" music by way of Hans Zimmer. Youtube comments imply a recent upswing in activity, of people finding the speech anew in the Trump era, and that makes sense. But the scene plays even more strangely, more powerfully, in context, where it’s less easily lent to meme-able political messaging, where it has to brush up against everything else in the movie that’s come before.

It’s startling, frankly. The Great Dictator’s tone to this point never feels so earnest. How could it, what with its balletic Hitler and its foreign dictatorships with names like Bacteria. From the vantage of 1940, Chaplin couldn’t quite see where the war would take us, and it remains the case that some of the film plays oddly—but all the more insightfully for it—today. What’s clear from its final moments, to say nothing of much of the rest, is the power in this tension. Insofar as it can sense but not see the future, you could say that The Great Dictator is a film made in a cloud of relative ignorance. Yet look at how much it says, how far it goes. It makes it hard to make excuses for films made since, which often have the benefit of hindsight yet little of substance to say about what they see in the rear view. We know more, much more, about Hitler today than we did in 1940. Why should we let anyone get away with saying less?

~

K. Austin Collins · October 18, 2019.

[aowski]

De-Spiritualization

American Indian Activist Russell Means gave a speech in July 1980 at the Black Hills International Survival Gathering. He spoke from the perspective of his people, the Oglala Lakota, who lived in North America long before the Europeans came. He warns people, specifically his people, to beware of the Marxist alternative to Capitalism, because at the end of the day, both “ism’s” are materialist at their core. Both philosophies see the world as labor, material, and a means of production. Both philosophies use human beings to transform the natural world into products for gain, whether for personal profit or a collective progress. In either philosophy, human beings and the natural world are expendable.

There is an underlying pathology of Western thought that Russell illuminates to get at the root of these materialist philosophies:  De-Spiritualization.

Newton, for example, “revolutionized” physics and the so-called natural sciences by reducing the physical universe to a linear mathematical equation. Descartes did the same thing with culture. John Locke did it with politics, and Adam Smith did it with economics. Each one of these “thinkers” took a piece of the spirituality of human existence and converted it into code, an abstraction. They picked up where Christianity ended: they “secularized” Christian religion, as the “scholars” like to say–and in doing so they made Europe more able and ready to act as an expansionist culture. Each of these intellectual revolutions served to abstract the European mentality even further, to remove the wonderful complexity and spirituality from the universe and replace it with a logical sequence: one, two, three. Answer!

…

The European materialist tradition of despiritualizing the universe is very similar to the mental process which goes into dehumanizing another person. And who seems most expert at dehumanizing other people? And why? Soldiers who have seen a lot of combat learn to do this to the enemy before going back into combat. Murderers do it before going out to commit murder. Nazi SS guards did it to concentration camp inmates. Cops do it. Corporation leaders do it to the workers they send into uranium mines and steel mills. 

…

In terms of the despiritualization of the universe, the mental process works so that it becomes virtuous to destroy the planet. Terms like progress and development are used as cover words here, the way victory and freedom are used to justify butchery in the dehumanization process.

— Russell Means

Despiritualization is not secularization.  Secularization is a “disassociation or separation from religious or spiritual concerns” (Oxford Languages). One can have a relatively secular worldview and still maintain a sense of reverence, a sense of the sacred regarding the natural world and human life.  Despiritualization is the loss of a that sense. 

In both indigenous and Judeo-Christian traditions, creation flowed from the Spirit. The Torah opens with the story of creation: 

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. (Genesis 1:1)

In the Scriptures, the presence of the Spirit is symbolized by a dove. In Genesis  we first see that dove hovering over a formless Earth. It is as if the Spirit paused for a time, in awe of the life that was about to begin and grow upon the Earth. Eons later, human beings’ materialistic mindset and relentless drive for gain laid waste to Earth. We have desecrated the planet. It is as if we shot the dove, the Spirit of God, and watched as her wounded body fell into the sea. 

As Means points out, despiritualization also leads to dehumanization. Once you lose the sense of the sacred towards human beings, anything is possible. Human beings then become expendable fodder in the service of other goals: land acquisition, mineral rights, political power, or just more “breathing room”. 

In modern times, economics prioritized the agenda. The value of human beings,  their laboring ability, was determined by the market:

The Value or Worth of a man is, as of all other things, his Price. —Thomas Hobbes

This materialist, mercantile view of human beings gave rise to slavery. De-spiritualization cleaved the sacred from the human, leaving only economic value. Greed, combined with the European (White) sense of superiority, and the moral cover given by Papal decrees supporting a “Doctrine of Discovery”, resulted in chattel slavery.

Unfortunately, despiritualization led to things even worse than slavery. In the 20th century, dehumanization was used as a pragmatic (utilitarian) political tactic to create a common enemy. It leverages the existing resentments. During the Holocaust, it focused the anti-Semitism that existed across Europe at the time. It then progressed to policy (apartheid, revoking citizenship, rendering people stateless), and finally, according to Hannah Arendt, to “eradicate the [very] concept of the human being”. She goes on to say that once the concept of the human is lost, dehumanization can proceed apace to an industrial scale, so that during the Holocaust, “factories [were built simply] to produce corpses”.

In the case of the Holocaust, the usual and relatively slow stages of destruction (mining, industry, pollution, war, incarceration, and oppression) were skipped to get to the final goal of complete annihilation of a people. But as Russel Means points out, we too are presently struggling to survive against “the very industrial process which is destroying us all”. Carbon pollution, deforestation, and agribusiness are straining the eco-systems upon which we depend. 

It looks as though we are slipping on a banana peel on our way into the abyss. But there is another path: 

“There is another way. There is the traditional Lakota way and the ways of the American Indian peoples. It is the way that knows that humans do not have the right to degrade Mother Earth”. — Russell Means

At the margins of Christianity, saints and mystics recovered a sacred regard for creation: 

“Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs”. —St. Francis of Assisi

The answer to despiritualization is re-spiritualization. We must slow down and look. And not just look, but behold. We need to see again with awe and wonder.

Behold the beauty of creation. 

Behold the Earth, a blue marble in space. 

Behold the water of life on the Earth’s surface. 

Behold the thin blue haze that gives us the breath of life.. 

Behold the auroras that remind us of Earth’s invisible shield. 

Behold the pyramid of life atop which we sit and which we depend. 

It is the balance of cosmic forces that allowed life to be conceived on this planet. It is also the balance of natural forces on Earth, over which we have some control, that allows life to continue. If this balance should be lost, we would pass into oblivion. 

The Scriptures also challenge us towards a sacred regard of human beings.

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created them; male and female created he them.” (Genesis 1:27)

We are of the Spirit. But we are also of the Earth. Re-spiritualization requires that we remember both, for: 

Salvation lives in memory. —Lyle Enright

The COVID epidemic reminds us that humanity and all living things share this planet together. COVID arose from the very life processes we share with all living things. In sickness and in health, the Earth remains our only source of life. 

We need to rekindle empathy for the Earth which “groans in travail” (Romans 8:22) and for each other to “weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15). We have to allow ourselves the space to feel empathy. 

We also must stop and behold the sacred human of our brothers and sisters:

“The brilliant Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Lévinas (1906-1995), said the only thing that really converts people, the ultimate moral imperative, is “the face of the other.” … When we receive and empathize with the face of the other (especially the suffering face), it leads to transformation of our whole being. It creates a moral demand on our heart that is far more compelling than the Ten Commandments. Just giving people commandments on tablets of stone doesn’t change the heart. It may steel the will, but it doesn’t soften the heart like a personal encounter can.”  — Fr Richard Rohr

If we can behold the beauty and fragility of the Earth and the kindred, human face of the other, we are on the path to recovery of what is sacred. Then we might stop killing the planet and each other.

https://www.filmsforaction.org/news/revolution-and-american-indians-marxism-is-as-alien-to-my-culture-as-capitalism/

[hislittleflower-throughconcrete]

I know that tone is impossible to read on the internet especially since I’m anonymous but I mean this in good faith and with respect: that post you just reblogged grossly oversimplifies the factors which led to the holocaust and is disrespectful to victims of the holocaust

I appreciate how measured and fair this comment was.

Firstly, that post - when I saw it - had a string of reblogs that seemed superfluous (such as people saying “I’m jewish and this is why I hate generalizing groups of people”) and/or that I did not agree with. But those reblogs also helped to hash things out in a little bit more detail. I also know that anything about the holocaust and WWII could never be articulated in a tumblr post with as much detail, balance, and nuance that it deserves. 

The only things I can think of is that you believe it is disrespectful is comparing Jewish people to white people or rich people, or to compare Antifa groups to the mentality of the Nazi party. The post does not say the holocaust is happening again to rich, white people, that Antifa will put those people in camps, or that those people are suffering like holocaust victims. It says that generalization of groups of people, combined with toxic beliefs that “the other” is evil for simply belonging to that group, are toxic and wrong. Nevertheless, that sentiment (while true) is not the reason I reblogged the post in the first place.

I believe very strongly that no person is or has ever been evil (or perfect), and that painting people as one dimensional demons (or angels) in history prevents people from learning from past events and leads to the repetition of the same bad attitudes, beliefs, and decisions. I’ve had a five paragraph (okay, maybe 10 paragraph) essay rattling around in my head for a long time about that, but haven’t written it because life keeps getting in the way. The “thesis statement,” if you will, is that abortion, its proponents, its opposition, those who know what it is and does and those that don’t, and those who don’t give a damn, strongly mirror human injustices that have happened in the past, but because of the black and white portrayal of history, no one can identify with the “bad” side -those guys are “evil” and “inhuman”, right? I’m not evil. I have emotions and hopes and dreams, I love others. I believe that this thing is right, and my reasons for it being right are rooted in the desire to do good. How could I be on the wrong side of history or humanity then? Well, because history is often taught like a bedtime story, with heroes and villains. Even when told “objectively” (can anything be told truly objectively, especially textbooks marketed to public schools? I digress) one sees the actions and the results of those actions - not the humanity for all people involved, or the reasons that rattled around in their brains, how they justified their actions to themselves, and the messiness of everything. Usually one point of view is told, and it is of the “good guys” analyzing ~those~ guys, those evil creatures who killed countless jewish people or abused and treated slaves like property. Kids in classrooms internalize that they are the good guys, and it’s reinforced by the fact that they can’t identify with the bad guys because bad guys aren’t painted like normal people who love their mom, try their best to make a positive change in the world, care about the environment and would stick their neck out for a friend. If more people realized that they could be the “bad guy” portrayed in history books 200 years from now, even though they are not inherently evil and just believe incorrect things and make decisions based on those erroneous beliefs, that would be revolutionary. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

Sorry for my ramble, because I’m sure that that aspect of the post was the last thing to jump out at you, but that’s why I reblogged it. Please let me know if I didn’t address your concerns. TL;DR I don’t believe that in 10 years Bill Gates will be in a concentration camp, or that Kim Kardashian has it as hard as holocaust victims. I just care about people thinking critically about their beliefs, decisions, and morality.