#nationalist martyr

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Germany Honors Martyr," Border Cities Star. June 8, 1933. Page 6. --- GERMAN youth organizations gathered the monumental black cross on Golzheim Heath, Dusseldorf, during the celebration in honor of Albert Schlageter, executed by the French for sabotage during the Ruhr occupation ten years ago. Altar fires are burning at the foot of the cross, which marks the spot where Schlageter was shot as a spy in 1923.

[andromerot]

feeling so righteous about having been calling ezio salò saint sebastianesque based on vibes only for months after actually finding out who saint sebastian even was today

[pissmoon]

What westerners dont seem to get is that when 'our glorious nation that fought nazis' becomes a part of national identity it can sooo easily turn into extremely dangerous self-righteous nationalism

[old-memoria]

I hope no one is excited for Navalny winning the Oscar 

[jewish-vents]

I, like too many of us, lost my entire friend group a couple months ago and I'm in a really fucking bad mood about it right now.

The literal leader of the whole group was Arab. I won't say from where, but not Palestine, he would have said so, but he told me where he is from. Several tragedies occurred in the world before 10-7, and in the group chat we broke from our usual unspoken commitment to not discussing politics to give statements of sorrow for the victims. The Irish nationalist never missed a chance to anyway. Then 10-7 did happen and I thought ah, this time I will lead this sharing of communal grief for the brutality of prejudice... but then I thought better of it. I said nothing. No one else did either.

I think the second he found out I was Jewish it was already over. He just came at me one evening and accused me point blank of being a Zionist. I tried to hold my ground and tell him that that is one thing I refuse to discuss with anybody, and he wouldn't take that as an answer, and I just stopped answering his texts until he stopped.

We didn't talk again after, not that we very much did before. I wanted it to just blow over, wait for him to cool off and realize he went way too far, maybe even apologize, but that never happened. I hoped, but I already saw the writing on the wall. Things mostly went back to normal, until he came at me again. Accusing me again. I defended myself again but he really wouldn't have it this time. He used every trick in the book, saying he has family at risk of dying and i don't (because they died during the shoah. as if he's not american too), saying that he was obligated to remove me unless i could prove I wasn't a "threat" in his words. I tried to placate but I knew this was it. He's already made up his mind. He told me that he "has Jewish friends", tokens and Good Jews I'm certain.

Im certain I'm the only Jew hes ever met who didnt roll over for him. I know he wanted me to denounce israel, my homeland, my people. Not that he'd believe me. I told him that I'm on the side of peace, that i detest violence and suffering, and he accused me supporting the "genocide of his people". he's literally afraid of pan-arab replacement

i will never trust goyim again. i will always be afraid. too many times in my fucking life have i done nothing fucking wrong and been punished, ostracized and abandoned.

ordinarily I'd be afraid that he or the rest of my traitor fucking neonazi ex-friends would see this but so what? theyve already blocked me. if theyve seen this blog, they've probably blocked it. and so what if they see it, you gonna tell all your friends about the threatening zionist you excised from your midst? gonna tell your friends about what a heroic little martyr you are, protecting your friends from that fucking jew?

you were a silverfish in your past life and I would i eat you again, centipede that i am.

.

[roscoe-conkling]

Diplomat, human rights crusader, and Irish nationalist Roger Casement was convicted of treason by the British government in World War I for attempting to solicit military aid from Germany for the Easter Rising, a planned Irish insurrection against British rule during Easter Week, 1916. Sentenced to death, support for clemency evaporated when diaries surfaced alleged to be his, revealing him to be homosexual. He was hanged at Pentonville Prison in London on August 3, 1916. Casement is revered in Ireland today as a martyr for Irish independence, with buildings and streets named in his honor, and monuments to his memory.

[renegadeurbanmediasource]

In a memo dated March 4, 1968, the FBI outlined its goals regarding Black nationalist groups, explicitly stating the need to prevent the rise of a leader who could unify and electrify the Black nationalist movement. The exact words were:

"Prevent the rise of a 'messiah' who could unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been such a 'messiah'; he is the martyr of the movement today. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and Elijah Muhammad all aspire to this position."

[0x28]

Today, 27 August 2024, we mark the 23rd anniversary of the assassination of Palestinian revolutionary and national leader Abu Ali Mustafa by Zionist occupation forces, using US-made and US-provided helicopter-fired missiles, in a bloody illustration of the alliance of Zionism and imperialism that is amplified today in the genocidal Zionist assault on Gaza, armed with U.S.-made and -sponsored weaponry. The General Secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Abu Ali Mustafa was targeted in his office in occupied Al-Bireh, Palestine, part of the systematic mechanism of assassination that continues to characterize the attacks on the leading martyrs: Ismail Haniyeh, Fouad Shukr, Saleh al-Arouri, and so many others. He has become a symbol of resistance, Palestinian unity and confrontation of the occupation, known by his famous words when entering Palestine: “We return to resist, not to compromise.” Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network salutes Abu Ali Mustafa, a popular, revolutionary leader of the Palestinian liberation movement, who remained committed to the Palestinian resistance, the Palestinian people and the liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea, until his last moment. He continued his work even though he knew that he was targeted, because he was determined to never abandon the cause of the people, resisting and struggling in the Al-Aqsa Intifada and developing the struggle after the devastation of Oslo…. Abu Ali Mustafa was a son of the Palestinian popular classes, born in 1938 in Arraba, Jenin, Palestine. He left school in the third grade and worked as a boy in the factories of Haifa before and during the Nakba and the Zionist colonization of Palestine. At the age of 17, he joined the Arab Nationalist Movement, founded by Dr. George Habash (al-Hakim), Wadie Haddad, Abu Maher al-Yamani (himself a labour leader), Basil al-Kubaisi, Ahmad al-Khatib, Hani al-Hindi and their comrades, and played a leading role in the ANM of the 1950s and 1960s. He returned to the occupied West Bank of Palestine in 1999 — to his place of birth, Arraba, Jenin. He expressed clearly that his return to Palestine was accompanied by a very clear commitment to resistance and liberation, including and particularly the armed resistance. In 2000, at the sixth congress of the PFLP, Abu Ali Mustafa was elected General Secretary of the Front.  His presence as a principled national leader in occupied Palestine was not a concession to the Palestinian Authority and the Oslo framework but served as a challenge to the so-called “peace process” — and this is why he was targeted for assassination. Over 50,000 Palestinians marched in his funeral in central Ramallah. As a response to the targeted assassination of Abu Ali Mustafa, the PFLP elected its general secretary Ahmad Sa’adat — today imprisoned in Zionist jails and one of the leadership figures of the imprisoned Palestinian resistance, alongside Abdullah Barghouthi, Marwan Barghouthi, Ibrahim Hamed, Abbas al-Sayyed, Hassan Salameh and over 9,500 Palestinian prisoners — and targeted the notoriously racist Zionist tourism minister Rehavam Ze’evi several weeks later on 17 October. Of course, Ze’evi was widely known and notorious for his demands for the complete ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The successful assassination of Ze'evi sent a clear message from the Palestinian resistance – that the Israeli assassination policy would not be tolerated and that an assassination of Palestinian leaders would be met with an equal response. This project remains critical today, as Hezbollah responds to the assassination of Fouad Shukr (Sayyed Mohsen), and as the entire alliance of resistance forces in the region awaits the coming response to the Zionist assaults on Yemen, the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, and the ongoing Zionist/imperialist genocide in Gaza.

[kindsoulbuddy]

The thing about praise and worship music at church is that

It’s catchy

Repetitive simple lyrics

It’s played on repeat every Sunday

So even though I’ve been deconstructing for years from evangelicalism, most days praise and worship music from my youth plays in my head.

So every once in a while I’ll sing to myself something joyful like “I got peace like a river I got peace like a river I got peace like a river in my soul!” 🎶

Or maybe “ Better is one day in your courts than thousands elsewhere!” 🎶

Or maybe something peaceful like “As the deer panteth for the water so my soul longeth after Thee…”🎶

Mostly it doesn’t bother me.

But then 90s/Y2K Christian pop music gets stuck in my head.

Like sometimes Rebecca St. James lyrics go through my head like this one glorifying purity culture:

“I am waiting for, praying for you darling! Wait for me too, wait for me as I wait for you! Darling Wait!”

Or you know just songs from DC Talk..

“What if I stumble, what if I fall? What if I lose my step and I make fools of us all?”

Or

“There’s no time to change your mind, the Son has come and you’ve been left behind.”

I think about the awful Rapture Anxiety I had for years and years…

And then i think about being in youth group and yes the fun times but also the moments when we had alter calls.

And the crying and sobbing. The speaking in tongues. The teenagers falling on their faces.

The sensationalized, sometimes violent “Human Videos” (just look up human videos on YouTube there are many).

Teens vowing to die for Christ.

When the Columbine shooting happened all we heard about were the apocryphal stories of students being martyred for Jesus.

I wondered “will a shooter come into our church today and ask us to deny Christ or be shot? What will I do if that happens??”

And what if I lose my salvation just because I had doubts? And what if I get possessed by a demon?

Not to mention purity culture and what it does to a young girl. (All kids suffered but we girls had to be modest and never cause any man to stumble by looking at our shoulder or something)

Abstinence class and signing a pledge to remain a pure virgin until my wedding night.

All the teenagers in every youth group were running around with raging hormones and couldn’t do anything about it. So a lot of us got married quickly. (I was engaged at 19, married at 21).

I mean I’m not even getting into young earth creationism or anti-gay rhetoric or pro life marches, etc..

But you can see that so much of my life (as good as it was for the most part, I was fortunate)was fear based?

And the thing is most of the people (congregation, I can’t speak for all the pastors and church leaders) at church didn’t mean for it to happen that way.

See, I was taught that there is freedom in Christianity. But why didn’t I feel free? That must mean my faith is weak, right?

It’s just so exhausting.

And I went to church regularly for my first 33 years of life. I volunteered, I taught Sunday school classes. I was trying to do it the right way.

Then Covid 19 happened.

I was forced to stop going to church for the first time in my life.

And honestly for years before this I was deconstructing. What really sped this process along was a certain Orange president and his very un-Christianlike followers.

And like Paul in the book of Acts, the scales fell off my eyes. I was blind but now could see. Really see.

The way my Christian peers were acting. The way they refused vaccines and even wearing masks. The cult-like behavior toward Donald Trump. The Christian nationalists.

And after a few months of no church…I realized I didn’t miss it.

After 2020, my deconstruction days really took off. I still don’t go to church (outside of a few weeks trying a gay-affirming congregation).

I used to compulsively pray.

And for hours i would pore over the scriptures trying to glean special meaning. Taking copious notes deep into the night.

(have OCD and I now realize that this brand of religion made my OCD symptoms so much worse.)

But it’s weird…

I have religious trauma. I’m learning about how I was literally in a cult. I’m still trying to unlearn stuff. I still get fearful sometimes about “what if I’m wrong?”.

But I still have good memories of growing up in church. Just like how I still sing old church songs in my head.

I’ve been to many churches, but I grew up in a small country church. I knew it like the back of my hand. It’s how I met some of my best friends and in turn, it’s how I met my husband of 17 years.

I can’t say I regret it. Like anything in life it’s complicated and complex.

I miss the social aspect of church too. I’ve never found another social space like it. I’ve tried! I can’t figure out any other “3rd place” that resembles it.

I’m not sure why i wrote so much down except to say i know a lot of people understand where I’m coming from.

In the meantime, I like to go on r/fundiesnarkuncensored, also i watch Fundie Fridays on YouTube…and I do quite a bit of reading on the subject of others who left the church. Recently I just read Tia Levings’ new book “the Well Trained Wife.”

I’m more at peace about it.

But I think my complex feelings and even some doubts will follow me forever.

[er1chartmann]

Thule Society

These are some facts and curiosities about the Thule society:

It was founded in 1910 by Felix Niedner, a philologist and historian from the University of Berlin.

It was immediately characterized by heated nationalism and intense anti-Semitism.

It was transferred to Munich on 18 August 1918, on the initiative of Rudolf Glauer.

According to the historian Peter Levenda, the Thuile was a ''mystical society inspired by the theosophical writings of Guido von List and Lanz von Liebenfels, that is, a mixture of oriental religions, theosophy, anti-Semitism, tales of the Grail, runic mystification and Nordic paganism.

On November 7, 1918, Kurt Eisner, a Jewish intellectual and supporter of the League of Nations, proclaimed the birth of a Socialist Republic in Munich, arousing the ire of German nationalists. On November 9, von Sebottendorff gave a passionate speech before the Thule, inciting the members to resist the Red Army, and he became the leader of the Munich Thule.

In February 1919 Eisner was assassinated in an isolated action by a former member of the Thule Society, Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley, who was excluded due to his partial Jewish origins.

The Thule Lodge risked disappearing during the socialist uprising of 1918-1919, when some of its most influential members, including Prince Thurn und Taxis, were murdered on the orders of the Jewish People's Commissars.

The ideological legacy of the Thule society was taken up by the National Socialist German Workers' Party.

Its press organ was the Münchener Beobachter which would change its name to Völkischer Beobachter, the official press organ of the Nazi Party.

Important Members

Karl Harrer: one of the founding members of the DAP, which later changed its name to NSDAP, better known as the Nazi Party.

Dietrich Eckart: who was defined by Hitler as ''the paternal friend''. He is defined as a martyr by Hitler himself in Mein Kampf.

Anton Drexler: first president of the NSDAP.

Rudolf Hess: He was appointed Reichsleiter and considered ''Hitler's dolphin''.

Alfred Rosenberg: considered with Hitler himself the ideologue of the Nazi Party

Hans Frank: future governor of Poland

Gottfried Feder: one of the ideological fathers of Nazism.

Wilhelm Frick: in 1943 he became Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia

Sources:

Wikipedia: The Thule Society.

If you don't like it go with your life.

❗❗I DON'T SUPPORT NAZISM, FASCISM AND ZIONISM, THIS IS AN EDUCATIONAL POST ❗❗

[thevoidscreamer]

To all the US-based Christian Nationalists…

You say the founding fathers made the US to be a Christian nation. So why, then, does our constitution not establish Christianity as our national religion?

You say the Bill of Rights was based on the commandments of your deity. So why, then, does the first amendment to the BoR say that congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion? Does the Bible say that no religions (and, by proxy, their gods), none at all, should be respected?

The US is not a Christian nation. It is not founded on Christian ideals. It is, in a problematic sense and for reasons we should not be proud of, Eurocentric. US-based Christian nationalists conflate Europeanness, whiteness, with their own faith. When they see cultures other than White™️ existing near them, they get angry and call it a violation of their sacred state. They call it “uncivilized,” “not of god,” “sinful,” “ungodly,” “evil.”

Read that again. Christian nationalists, who idolize and aspire to whiteness, who are proud of the (ongoing) whitewashing of the continents and who, at best, ignore, and at worst cheer for the genocide of indigenous cultures, view non-whiteness as evil. In the United States, Christian nationalism is inseparable from white nationalism.

I won’t purport to know what the founding fathers were thinking. I won’t pretend to know what the founders of Christianity were thinking. But, as a person who was raised in a house where the language of Christian white nationalism was woven into every conversation and every experience, I do know what Christian nationalists are thinking.

What we’re witnessing is the distillation of that righteous persecution complex, the revival period, the political weaponization of a group’s beliefs, and the toxic mix of conspiracy theories into the minds of an emotionally compromised and logic-shunning people. Were they always this extreme? Not out loud. It was never about religious freedom, it was about building an army for their deity.

This group has been isolated in an echo chamber by their own religious exceptionalism for decades. What we are experiencing of them now is an extreme and mutated breed of Christian that is finally too violent to be ignored. They’ve been outing themselves for a while now, because they think they’re gods special people. They think they’re untouchable, and whenever the law cracks down on one, new martyrs rise up, inspired by their holy persecution.

I have hope that their absurd bullshit will cause Christians everywhere to see the colonizer mindset that is built into their faith. Catholicism wiped out cultures everywhere it went, and Protestantism is doing the same. It was never about religious freedom, or saving the sinner, or any of that bullshit. It has always been about purifying the globe to an ultimate state of whiteness.

[sylvia-on-the-run]

Today, we celebrate the martyr Abu Ali Mustafa on the 23rd anniversary of his assassination. The great communist and arab nationalist leader was a model for Palestine and the Arab Nation.

[hero-israel]

The attack 100% will push Israeli society further right, further toward mistrust, trauma, and retribution. The attack will also 100% fail and have devastating repercussions for the people of Gaza. Maybe the Hamas losers know this, maybe they intended it to happen. A violent chaotic cathartic release with no real plan or attempt at achieving any kind of goals... were they that delusional? Did they think they would start the next Arab Israeli war and bring Israel down?

Or were they fully intending to fuel their own martyr complexes and to martyr hundreds of unwilling Palestinian civilians in a desperate attempt to make Israel lose the optics war? It's probably this one, and it only proves that they are LOSERS, they are sad pathetic losers and their greatest triumph is shooting grandmas and trying to capture Jewish sex slaves to prove what big manly men they are, while the women and children in their towns are being bombed to pieces. Disgusting pieces of shit.

But about that optics war... Mass executions and rapes and kidnappings by Hamas militants have done more to repair Israel's image in normal (I repeat and emphasize: NORMAL) people's eyes than any amount of sharing graphs and documents and educating people, or state sponsored tweets could ever have. This is the true Mask Off moment for Hamas and Gaza. Even antizionists are taking to social media to say "stop the violence innocent people are dying this is so bad we stand with the people of Israel." Like this is such an utter disaster for Gaza it boggles the mind how they greenlit this attack.

Like I truly think if Bibi orders a ground invasion most people aside from internet leftists and Arab nationalists would be alright with it. I hope he doesn't, I think a measured and careful response is crucial right now, but that's how badly Hamas fucked up whatever goodwill they had today.

It will push Israeli society further toward the right in terms of military / security crackdown and generally bleak attitudes towards coexistence with Palestinians (moreso). I would like very much to believe that Israelis will notice that the current government of right-wing channer trolls is totally talentless and lazy and that their incompetence and unnecessary cultural divisionism directly made possible this tragedy, and will then replace the right-wing channer trolls with right-wing skilled leaders. Note that by "right-wing skilled leaders" I no longer include Netanyahu, who should be as permanently discredited as the rest of them. The structure of Israeli electoral politics has let me down before, and I don't think Netanyahu has enough human decency to resign when he so blatantly ought to.

We are going to see something in Gaza that we haven't seen before; there is really no choice. I'm just not sure what that "something" will be.

I've seen several posters on Jewish Reddit argue for a full land invasion and lasting re-occupation of Gaza. This would be a Carter-Iranian-hostage-rescue level catastrophe. Gaza has been prepping for an Israeli land invasion for 15+ years, it is the basis of multiple Hamas and PIJ battle plans, we can assume every street and alley is boobytrapped and every window can hold an RPG launcher and every room can become a hostage site. Lasting military incursion with boots on the ground seems doomed to fail - and then if it succeeded it might be even worse, Israel would have to bleed its military and economic resources into managing the day-to-day lives of 2 million Palestinians. Of the options for eliminating Hamas, that would be the one that was worst for Israel in the immediate term, so it is the one I don't expect. Other options are terrible too, but less so for Israel itself.

To be very frank, I'd almost rather they skip Hamas and launch a decapitating strike on Iran directly. Terrible repercussions of course, but it avoids the usual script, the obvious boobytrap aspects, and puts a final "bookmark" on the threats that both Hamas and Hezbollah could represent.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Isabela Dias at Mother Jones:

It didn’t take long for the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania to galvanize right-wing politicians and supporters of former far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. About a month before the election in 2018, Bolsonaro, then the frontrunner, was stabbed on the campaign trail. While Trump seems to have recovered from the shot in the ear, his Brazilian counterpart had to undergo a colostomy and several abdominal surgeries in the aftermath of the stabbing. The incident with Bolsonaro has lessons for how the attempted assassination of Trump could affect this year’s US election. In Brazil afterward, false theories spread—both on the left and the right—of either a staged attack or a purposeful attempt to kill a dangerous threat to the establishment. Critics softened rheotric. Right-wing actors blamed the media for instigating the attack. And the discussion about Bolsonaro’s anti-democratic politics became notably more complex.

After the Trump news, Brazilians on the right were quick to see the similarities and decried the shooting as part of a systematic persecution against conservatives. On X, Eduardo Bolsonaro, a congressman and the third son of the one-time Brazilian president, shared a photo montage of a bloodied Trump and a pained Bolsonaro. “Trust me: he is already elected,” he wrote in English. “We have experience with a situation like that, we know the enemy—and you too.” Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the eldest son, also chimed in, blaming the left: “They tried to kill Trump, they tried to kill Bolsonaro, but the (extreme) right is the one accused of being violent. You may not like Trump or Bolsonaro, but ask yourself: why did they want to kill them?” A debunked video dubbed in Portuguese with a supposed message from Trump to Bolsonaro said, “They tried to do the same thing to me as they did to you.”

When asked about the shooting, Bolsonaro suggested “only conservatives suffer attacks.” Echoing talking points from some US Christian Nationalist groups, Bolsonaro said it was “a miracle from heaven” that Trump “was saved by a matter of a few centimeters,” just like it was a miracle that he survived in 2018. Calling the Republican nominee the “biggest world leader of the moment,” Bolsonaro, who has been barred from running for office until 2030, posted, “See you at the inauguration.” Earlier this year, the police confiscated Bolsonaro’s passport as part of a sweeping search-and-seizure operation linked to an ongoing federal investigation in Brazil—overseen by the Supreme Court—into Bolsonaro and his allies’ alleged coup-like efforts to overturn the results of the 2022 elections. Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva condemned the attack as a loss for democracy.

[...] The shooting also resurfaced false theories, from both sides of the political spectrum, about the attack against Bolsonaro six years ago. In September 2018, Adélio Bispo, who had previously been a member of a left-wing party, stabbed Bolsonaro in the abdomen. Although police investigations concluded that the perpetrator, who was arrested on the spot, acted alone, Bolsonaro and his supporters insisted that the stabbing had been ordered by someone and tried to blame it on the left. At the time, Bolsonaro called the left “aggressive,” saying they “have tried to eliminate their opponents no matter how.” His supporters have continued to use the stabbing to cultivate an image of Bolsonaro as a “political martyr.” Meanwhile, some on the left raised doubts about the incident, suggesting it had been staged and calling it a “fake stabbing.” After Saturday, André Janones, one of Lula’s allies in Congress, joked about Bolsonaro having “taught” Trump how to fake an attack and questioned the seriousness of the attempted assassination, mentioning the fact that Trump asked for his shoes amidst the chaos. “At least this time they remembered to provide the ‘blood,'” he posted on X. In response, a far-right congressman aligned with Bolsonaro has vowed to send a letter to the US Embassy requesting the cancelation of Janones’ US visa.

The impact of the assassination attempt against Trump on the presidential race remains to be seen. But there could be hints in what happened with Bolsonaro. Some political analysts in Brazil believe that staying away from the public stage during recovery ultimately helped the far-right Brazilian candidate insulate himself from fiercer criticism and potential debate confrontations. A voter intention poll by the Economist from that time shows a rise in support for Bolsonaro and a decline for the opponent Fernando Haddad, from the Worker’s Party, after September.

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump in 2024 in the US and the stabbing of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 in Brazil have some things in common: they brought increased support for the person in polls (though it is too early to tell in Trump’s case).

[ghelgheli]

As a leading light in the constellation of “terrorism experts,” Jerrold Post has proposed that terrorists suffer from pathological personalities that emerge from negative childhood experiences and a damaged sense of self. Post argues for two terrorist personality types, depending on the specific quality of those childhood experiences. First, Post suggests, there is the “anarchic-ideologue.” This is the terrorist who has experienced serious family dysfunction and maladjustment, which lead to rebellion against parents, especially against the father. Anarchic-ideologues fight “against the society of their parents . . . an act of dissent against parents loyal to the regime.” Second, there is the terrorist personality type known as the “nationalist-secessionist”—apparently the name indicates “a sense of loyalty to authority and rebellion against external enemies.” During childhood, a terrorist of this personality type experienced a sense of compassion or loyalty toward his or her parents. According to Post, nationalist-secessionists have pathologically failed to differentiate between themselves and the other (parental object). Consequently, they rebel “against society for the hurt done to their parents . . . an act of loyalty to parents damaged by the regime.” Both the anarchic-ideologue and nationalist-secessionist find “comfort in joining a terrorist group of rebels with similar experiences.” The personality defect model views terrorists as suffering from personality defects that result from excessively negative childhood experiences, giving the individual a poor sense of self and a resentment of authority. As Ruby notes, “Its supporters differ in whether they propose one (Kaplan), two (Post and Jones & Fong), or three (Strentz) personality types.”

What all these models and theories aim to show is how an otherwise normal individual becomes a murderous terrorist, and that process time and again is tied to the failure of the normal(ized) psyche. Indeed, an implicit but foundational supposition structures this entire discourse: the very notion of the normal psyche, which is in fact part of the West’s own heterosexual family romance—a narrative space that relies on the normalized, even if perverse, domestic space of desire supposedly common in the West. Terrorism, in this discourse, is a symptom of the deviant psyche, the psyche gone awry, or the failed psyche; the terrorist enters this discourse as an absolute violation. So when Billy Collins (the 2001 poet laureate) asserted on National Public Radio immediately after September 11: “Now the U.S. has lost its virginity,” he was underscoring this fraught relationship between (hetero)sexuality, normality, the nation, and the violations of terrorism.

Not surprisingly, then, coming out of this discourse, we find that another very common way of trying to psychologize the monster-terrorist is by positing a kind of failed heterosexuality. So we hear often the idea that sexually frustrated Muslim men are promised the heavenly reward of sixty, sixty-seven, or sometimes even seventy virgins if they are martyred in jihad. But As‘ad Abu Khalil has argued, “In reality, political—not sexual—frustration constitutes the most important factor in motivating young men, or women, to engage in suicidal violence. The tendency to dwell on the sexual motives of the suicide bombers belittles these sociopolitical causes.” Now of course, that is precisely what terrorism studies intends to do: to reduce complex social, historical, and political dynamics to various psychic causes rooted in childhood family dynamics. As if the Palestinian Intifada or the long, brutal war in Afghanistan can be simply boiled down to bad mothering or sexual frustration! In short, these explanatory models and frameworks function to (1) reduce complex histories of struggle, intervention, and (non)development to Western psychic models rooted in the bourgeois heterosexual family and its dynamics; (2) systematically exclude questions of political economy and the problems of cultural translation; and (3) attempt to master the fear, anxiety, and uncertainty of a form of political dissent by resorting to the banality of a taxonomy.

Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots, Jasbir K. Puar & Amit Rai, 2002 [muse]

[goblins-riddles-or-frocks]

I was reading your metas and came across the part where you said he wanted her to already be in love with him and wanted his money back and..what does that even entail for him? He wanted an obedient slave? Ok but he still wouldn't have trusted her. He still wouldn't have been happy.

This is the full text of what I said in that previous ask on the topic:

He’s been waiting for a sun summoner for an untold amount of time and has been building all his goals and desires around it. He keeps demanding her submission but that won’t get him her respect. He wants her to idolize him and to agree with everything he does. In her he wants a companion in immortality and a starry eyed acolyte. He spent all this time thinking the sun summoner was the key to all of his life’s woes, and then Alina shows up and WRECKS his shit. he feels ripped off!! He wants his money back!! But also desperately, desperately wants her to magically have always been the person he wanted her to be.

Worth noting that that is from a meta post where I’m explaining my characterization choices for a fic I wrote. But I do think that’s still accurate of (my interpretation) of his canon characterization anyway.

I can’t tell whether you mean “happy” as in actual happiness or in the sense of being satisfied. Though either way, you’re absolutely correct!

Regardless, these two things do tie in together to be honest. In the sense of happiness: he is a withered, miserable husk of a person. I don’t think at this point he’s really capable of being happy.

There is so much about his backstory we don’t know. But it is explicit that he didn’t start out an unfeeling monster. Demon in the Wood does go out of its way to establish that. But it also establishes his ruthlessness from a very young age and ability to do difficult things to save himself. But he’s so goal oriented and those goals are usually at the cost of any immediate, real happiness. Throughout his life, he’s kept making sacrifices, of himself and others, in the name of his larger goals, but the growing cost in his wake means that the things he’s striving towards get loftier and loftier in order to be worth it. It’s pure sunk cost fallacy.

Meanwhile, age is itself corruption for him. As he accumulates wealth, luxury, and power, and in turn loses touch with humanity and becomes increasingly jaded, his concerns become more self-centered and power driven rather than based in genuine moral ideals.

Outliving everyone he’s ever known multiple times over solidifies his growing selfishness, because what is a few hundred, or thousand lives to him, when they will all be dead within a heartbeat anyway? He might be trying to “save Ravka” from a nationalist standpoint, but the people that make up the country itself are fully disposable. Like we see by Shadow and Bone, his take on Grisha liberation is literally just fascism.

So at the tail end of at least five hundred, to possibly one thousand years, we have a corrupt despot, sitting on an endless pile of corpses, and lifetimes of genuine personal misery, who still believes himself to be the ultimate martyr, and that there is going to be— there must be— some sort of return on his enormously outsized and dearly purchased investments.

And he expects that return to be Alina.

Tangentially, something that really annoys me about this series is that, for all its focus on weighing legend and fable with reality, and trying to find the truth in stories that have been twisted by time and repetition, is that we get absolutely zero sun summoner lore, despite the strong implication that it does exist. The show makes some paltry attempt at giving us something about it being almost a prophecy? That there is some sort of, explicitly religious, story that a sun summoner will come and save Ravka or some such thing. The books don’t have even that.

We know that there is concept of sun summoners as something that could potentially happen, because they have a name for Alina’s ability the moment she’s discovered— even though there’s no indication that there’s ever been anyone else who shared the same power. But we never hear how, what exactly the expectations are, or for how long that’s been known.

What also know that the Darkling is waiting for one. And from how he speaks to her, he seems to view her as almost a cosmic reward and salve for his suffering. I do not think he’s exaggerating when he talks about how she was “meant” to be his/his balance or how she was “meant” for the amplifiers that he intends to bolster his destiny to rule. I think he fully believes in some sort of fate or grand destiny for the both of them, or rather for himself, and she is just a branch of that.

This is reaching pure conjecture, but there is the implication that shadow summoning only exists because of Ilya Morozova’s dabbling with merzost. And it itself highly seems to predate any iteration of a sun summoner ever existing, so the theory that one might ever come to be is literally because someone needs to offset the Darkling. (The series is generally very “what about Baghra? idk don’t worry about it” in terms of… a lot of things when it comes to how unique Alina and the Darkling are lmaoo and I guess that applies here.) And there’s the one kind of throw away line of his in the first book about how Etherealki typically work in pairs, but *meaningful look* Alina doesn’t have one, that I feel further hints at this idea of them being a matching set. The worldbuilding itself is murky and hard to parse in its contradictions, but I think it’s safe to say that he personally views her as something created for him.

He is putting all of his misery, and insane desires and dreams accumulated over many centuries, at her feet and expecting her to be the fulfillment of it all. There’s no way she can actually satisfy that! It is a fully, completely unattainable standard. It will never be enough. “What is infinite? The universe and the greed of men” etc, etc.

I already said this in that fic meta, but it’s relevant again here: I do think that, genuinely, there’s no degree of submission Alina could ever offer that would be enough. Partially because his irrational desire for her preexisting unconditional love, where he wants an impossible scenario where she simply never went against him or hated him for anything he did, can never be met after their initial falling out, but also because his expectations are fully unattainable. It isn’t a void that any real, living person can fill.

So you’re fully correct, even if she was completely obedient, and star struck, and ready to listen to him in all things, even as he lies to her. Even if she were willing to believe he was completely justified and in the right for his plans of like cartoonish and genocidal world domination, he would not be happy with her! She would always fall short.

All of this is to say that what I find most compelling about the Grisha trilogy is its stylized-through-fantasy premise of a vulnerable protagonist whose identity is threatened to be entirely subsumed by the exacting desires of a cruel man. I think for all of its clumsy and more juvenile trappings— and how it doesn’t fully even engage with this theme that is integral to it, yet mostly exists in the margins— it’s a fairly interesting and complicated space to play with themes of abuse and grooming. And that’s usually the main lens I’m engaging with it through.

I hope that clarifies my point!