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Because I don't believe in innocence, but I know how much we've lost
We got out of the house in the evening. It was just around sunset and there were smoky peach and pink streaks in the sky, so we walked the same loop of the Mystic River that we had discovered in June and checked up on the Hasenpfeffer in their late-lit silflay field; this time we took the boardwalk under the Fellsway (water lilies, ducks, spiderwebs on the streetlights like set dressing for a haunted house) and came up in Assembly Square, where we acquired perfectly serviceable non-booze milkshakes from Burger Dive before negotiating the construction tangle of I-93 on our way to Stop & Shop. Dinner was grilled cheese made short-order-style in my grandmother's skillet. We locked Autolycus out of the kitchen after he made repeated attempts to climb onto the stove where all the delicious excitement was taking place, but his unassuming confederate Hestia slipped the latch on the door and let him back in. He hoovered the floor just in case we had dropped any cheese crumbs. Just now he stuck his head directly under the kitchen tap in order to lick the last of the goat's milk out of my mug before I washed it. Gentlepeople of all persuasions, the only mooch that matters.
1. Here is one list of ways to help in Charlottesville right now. There are two fundraising campaigns already for victim relief and medical expenses. See also this list of local anti-racism organizations and this post by a Charlottesville resident. I donated to University of Virginia's Hillel and Black Student Alliance and to Charlottesville Pride, which I figure should cover a reasonable (and not necessarily mutually exclusive) swathe of people neo-Nazis hate.
2. Several of the same neo-Nazi groups responsible for the violence in Charlottesville have a rally planned next Saturday in Boston. There is a counter-protest already being organized. I will be out of town due to prior commitments at NecronomiCon Providence. Anyone who will be in town and feels that they can counter-protest safely, strength to your arm.
3. People on Facebook have been posting this wartime footage of swastikas being destroyed. The exploding one at the beginning is surprisingly cathartic. Don't bother with the comments, which are predictably full of anti-Semitic trash fire.
I don't know what emotions I'm supposed to feel. A lot of people are talking about shame, shock, grief; I seem to be feeling a high degree of anger and what I think must be outrage in that it is anger specifically against a thing that should not happen—and it feels personal, but of course it is personal, neo-Nazis don't chant "Final stop, Auschwitz" as a historical curiosity—but not at the moment a lot of surprise. I was more surprised by the election results in November and even then I didn't think it couldn't happen here, I just thought this time it wouldn't. I guess my baseline of things that happen here has just been revising itself downward ever since. White terrorism in America has been going on for generations. This is an especially grotesque and obvious manifestation, but I think it is so obvious in part because it uses Nazi iconography as well as Confederate flags, because it indulged in a form of terrorism associated more with ISIS than with lone-wolf postal shooters. It looks now like the Other, like the half-mythical villains of our last righteous war, like the new demons of the war on terror. Insofar as it looked like the Ku Klux Klan, so long as it wasn't physically wearing a white sheet and those pointy hoods we can thank D.W. Griffith for, I suspect to many (white) people it was hardly visible at all. I'm glad the so-called alt-right has crossed the streams in public: I'm glad they have made the shape of their hatred visible from space. You start throwing around Sieg Heils and Orrin Hatch, for God's sake, denounces you. (The man in the White House doesn't, because white supremacists are the one demographic he can't afford to alienate.) I will continue calling these people neo-Nazis because they are wearing fucking swastikas and quoting Hitler and I have no interest in granting them the plausible deniability of their attempted rebranding, but maybe we should also call them neo-Confederates or neo-Klan, so as not to enable the illusion of their racist, fascist ideology as a strain that infiltrated America from outside as opposed to a strain that has always been part of American white supremacy. My country didn't need Germany to invent lynchings or eugenics. These dreams of ethnic cleansing are homegrown. Terrorists, above all, whatever else we call them. Very definitely terrorists.
(I understand the above problem of definition is the reason terms like "white nationalist" or "white supremacist" exist, but even these have started to feel sanitized to me, as if they describe theoretical positions rather than active advocacy of racial violence: torches in the night, flags of lynching and genocide, deaths and injuries.)
On the other hand, there was a Charlottesville solidarity vigil held on Boston Common tonight and a kind stranger on the internet Photoshopped a panel of a peculiar vintage comic for me so that it now represents a black cat punching Hitler, so not all good in humanity is lost.
1. Here is one list of ways to help in Charlottesville right now. There are two fundraising campaigns already for victim relief and medical expenses. See also this list of local anti-racism organizations and this post by a Charlottesville resident. I donated to University of Virginia's Hillel and Black Student Alliance and to Charlottesville Pride, which I figure should cover a reasonable (and not necessarily mutually exclusive) swathe of people neo-Nazis hate.
2. Several of the same neo-Nazi groups responsible for the violence in Charlottesville have a rally planned next Saturday in Boston. There is a counter-protest already being organized. I will be out of town due to prior commitments at NecronomiCon Providence. Anyone who will be in town and feels that they can counter-protest safely, strength to your arm.
3. People on Facebook have been posting this wartime footage of swastikas being destroyed. The exploding one at the beginning is surprisingly cathartic. Don't bother with the comments, which are predictably full of anti-Semitic trash fire.
I don't know what emotions I'm supposed to feel. A lot of people are talking about shame, shock, grief; I seem to be feeling a high degree of anger and what I think must be outrage in that it is anger specifically against a thing that should not happen—and it feels personal, but of course it is personal, neo-Nazis don't chant "Final stop, Auschwitz" as a historical curiosity—but not at the moment a lot of surprise. I was more surprised by the election results in November and even then I didn't think it couldn't happen here, I just thought this time it wouldn't. I guess my baseline of things that happen here has just been revising itself downward ever since. White terrorism in America has been going on for generations. This is an especially grotesque and obvious manifestation, but I think it is so obvious in part because it uses Nazi iconography as well as Confederate flags, because it indulged in a form of terrorism associated more with ISIS than with lone-wolf postal shooters. It looks now like the Other, like the half-mythical villains of our last righteous war, like the new demons of the war on terror. Insofar as it looked like the Ku Klux Klan, so long as it wasn't physically wearing a white sheet and those pointy hoods we can thank D.W. Griffith for, I suspect to many (white) people it was hardly visible at all. I'm glad the so-called alt-right has crossed the streams in public: I'm glad they have made the shape of their hatred visible from space. You start throwing around Sieg Heils and Orrin Hatch, for God's sake, denounces you. (The man in the White House doesn't, because white supremacists are the one demographic he can't afford to alienate.) I will continue calling these people neo-Nazis because they are wearing fucking swastikas and quoting Hitler and I have no interest in granting them the plausible deniability of their attempted rebranding, but maybe we should also call them neo-Confederates or neo-Klan, so as not to enable the illusion of their racist, fascist ideology as a strain that infiltrated America from outside as opposed to a strain that has always been part of American white supremacy. My country didn't need Germany to invent lynchings or eugenics. These dreams of ethnic cleansing are homegrown. Terrorists, above all, whatever else we call them. Very definitely terrorists.
(I understand the above problem of definition is the reason terms like "white nationalist" or "white supremacist" exist, but even these have started to feel sanitized to me, as if they describe theoretical positions rather than active advocacy of racial violence: torches in the night, flags of lynching and genocide, deaths and injuries.)
On the other hand, there was a Charlottesville solidarity vigil held on Boston Common tonight and a kind stranger on the internet Photoshopped a panel of a peculiar vintage comic for me so that it now represents a black cat punching Hitler, so not all good in humanity is lost.
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More uncanny synchronicity: the paper Jenna and I will deliver in the Armitage Symposium is about the controversy at the previous NecroProv, and the metafictions that were inspired by it.
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I think it's the zeitgeist. I can't wait for it to be history.
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So do I; it's part of the reason I'm going to a weird fiction convention in the first place. But I don't see much point in fighting over the precise degree to which he was or was not racist by the lights of his time or ours or lambasting people who want to argue with his legacy as "Lovecraft haters." He would probably have been disgusted by me and he wrote things that resonate with me. It happens.
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Um, silver lining? I just might get the chance to finally fulfill my childhood dream of punching a Nazi.
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There is some denial involved. A lot of minimizing, a lot of just-a-man-of-his-time. I have seen people defending Lovecraft's defense of Hitler.
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Someone suggested to me on Twitter last night that we should start calling them the Alt-Reich.
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Oh, I hope so.
Someone suggested to me on Twitter last night that we should start calling them the Alt-Reich.
I've heard that use and I am amused by it, although I don't want them to feel flattered by the likeness. No thousand years for them. Not even twenty-five. Not even four.
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I think it was deliberately intended to evoke anti-Jewish violence, just as it was intended to evoke anti-Black violence. This was not accidental parallel evolution. This was conscious reproduction of terror tactics that worked the first time.
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See above: I think you saw clearly, exactly what was there.
My hope is that we can claw our way away from the abyss, and to a relative peace in this country, as we saw in the seventies.
I hope so, too. It would help to have a government that was on the non-terrorist side.
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Thank you. That gave me chills.
"Ne me parlez plus de paix et d'ordres / Je sais déjà vos chiens prêts à mordre."
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Je vous connais
je connais vos chaînes
vos murs d'injures
prisons, ghettos
de Soweto à tous les Harlems
sur notre blues se ferme l'étau
je vous connais
je vous connais par coeur
Je vous connais
je connais le cri
des trains de nuit
fonçant vers l'oubli
il valait mieux
ne pas appeler Sarah
à Varsovie en mai 43
je vous connais
par coeur
tous ce qui n'est pas vous
vous rend fou
je sens monter la peur
je sens tout près de nous
rôder les loups
vos croix gammées
vos cheveux rasés
pauvres enfants qui singez les grands
dans les métros vous jouez à tuer
ceux qui dérangent par leurs différences
je vous connais
par coeur
tous ce qui n'est pas vous
vous rend fou
je sens monter la peur
je sens tout près de nous
rôder les loups
je me souviens d'une nuit d'octobre
vous êtes entrée chez moi sans frapper
ne me parlez plus de paix et d'ordre
je sais déjà vos chiens prêts à mordre
je vous connais
par coeur
tous ce qui n'est pas vous
vous rend fou
je sens monter la peur
je sens tout près de nous
rôder les loups
je vous connais
je vous connais par coeur
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Thank you. I can read French in a self-crash-taught fashion (I needed it for academic articles), but not well enough that I can see errors rather than assuming the problem is my reading comprehension.
Still chills.
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Thank you. I can't get the Spotify to work (and the Soundcloud doesn't play in the U.S.), but I will look for it elsewhere. It sounds useful.
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I may take you up on that. I'm not having a lot of success finding it even to stream.
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I just listened to it. Thank you!
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This is comprehensive! I see their last entry was in 2013. I hope they're still on Tumblr somewhere; they have a lot to catch up on.
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http://act.indivisibleguide.com/event/stand-in-solidarity-with-charlottesville/search/
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Thank you! I hadn't seen that one announced, and I will try to be there.
I agree that Nazi-confronting is not traditionally a child-safe activity.
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NecronomiCon Providence sounds like a lot of fun.
I am amazed that Hestia was able to slip the latch to let Autolycus back in. A cat that dexterous would probably be able to punch Hitler.
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*hugs* if helpful.
I figure it is part temperament and part demographics. It still sucks.
NecronomiCon Providence sounds like a lot of fun.
It's held every two years, so the obvious solution is for you to attend in 2019.
I am amazed that Hestia was able to slip the latch to let Autolycus back in. A cat that dexterous would probably be able to punch Hitler.
Oh, man, she would murder him. She has very sharp claws and well-defined boundaries. Even we don't go around just picking her up.
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Meanwhile, our panel has morphed completely--S.T.Joshi (as you know, Bob) is off all programming, and the Brocks (Jason and Sunni) are not coming for another reason, so it will be a very different experience.
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I'm moderating "Erotic Lovecraftiana"! That should be interesting.
I hope your panel runs well even in morphed form. There are a lot of things happening around this convention that I have no idea how I'm going to get the time to see.