#you just want an internet that is right wing purity culture only | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

qqueenofhades · 5 years

Note

Re: the post you reblogged about Bush. I'm 21 and tbh feel like I can only vote for Bernie, can you explain if/why I shouldn't? Thanks and sorry if this is dumb or anything.

Oh boy. Okay, I’ll do my best here. Note that a) this will get long, and b) I’m old, Tired, and I‘m pretty sure my brain tried to kill me last night. Since by nature I am sure I will say something Controversial ™, if anyone reads this and feels a deep urge to inform me that I am Wrong, just… mark it down as me being Wrong and move on with your life. But also, really, you should read this and hopefully think about it. Because while I’m glad you asked this question, it feels like there’s a lot in your cohort who won’t, and that worries me. A lot.

First, not to sound utterly old-woman-in-a-rocking-chair ancient, people who came of age/are only old enough to have Obama be the first president that they really remember have no idea how good they had it. The world was falling the fuck apart in 2008 (not coincidentally, after 8 years of Bush). We came within a flicker of the permanent collapse of the global economy. The War on Terror was in full roar, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were at their height, we had Dick Cheney as the cartoon supervillain before we had any of Trump’s cohort, and this was before Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden had exposed the extent of NSA/CIA intelligence-gathering/American excesses or there was any kind of public debate around the fact that we were all surveilled all the time. And the fact that a brown guy named Barack Hussein Obama was elected in this climate seems, and still seems tbh, kind of amazing. And Obama was certainly not a Perfect President ™. He had to scale back a lot of planned initiatives, he is notorious for expanding the drone strike/extrajudicial assassination program, he still subscribed to the overall principles of neoliberalism and American exceptionalism, etc etc. There is valid criticism to be made as to how the hopey-changey optimistic rhetoric stacked up against the hard realities of political office. And yet…. at this point, given what we’re seeing from the White House on a daily basis, the depth of the parallel universe/double standards is absurd.

Because here’s the thing. Obama, his entire family, and his entire administration had to be personally/ethically flawless the whole time (and they managed that – not one scandal or arrest in eight years, against the legions of Trumpistas now being convicted) because of the absolute frothing depths of Republican hatred, racial conspiracy theories, and obstruction against him. (Remember Merrick Garland and how Mitch McConnell got away with that, and now we have Gorsuch and Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court? Because I remember that). If Obama had pulled one-tenth of the shit, one-twentieth of the shit that the Trump administration does every day, he would be gone. It also meant that people who only remember Obama think he was typical for an American president, and he wasn’t. Since about… Jimmy Carter, and definitely since Ronald Reagan, the American people have gone for the Trump model a lot more than the Obama model. Whatever your opinion on his politics or character, Obama was a constitutional law professor, a community activist, a neighborhood organizer and brilliant Ivy League intellectual who used to randomly lie awake at night thinking about income inequality. Americans don’t value intellectualism in their politicians; they just don’t. They don’t like thinking that “the elites” are smarter than them. They like the folksy populist who seems fun to have a beer with, and Reagan/Bush Senior/Clinton/Bush Junior sold this persona as hard as they possibly could. As noted in said post, Bush Junior (or Shrub as the late, great Molly Ivins memorably dubbed him) was Trump Lite but from a long-established political family who could operate like an outwardly civilized human.

The point is: when you think Obama was relatively normal (which, again, he wasn’t, for any number of reasons) and not the outlier in a much larger pattern of catastrophic damage that has been accelerated since, again, the 1980s (oh Ronnie Raygun, how you lastingly fucked us!), you miss the overall context in which this, and which Trump, happened. Like most left-wingers, I don’t agree with Obama’s recent and baffling decision to insert himself into the 2020 race and warn the Democratic candidates against being too progressive or whatever he was on about. I think he was giving into the same fear that appears to be motivating the remaining chunk of Joe Biden’s support: that middle/working-class white America won’t go for anything too wild or that might sniff of Socialism, and that Uncle Joe, recalled fondly as said folksy populist and the internet’s favorite meme grandfather from his time as VP, could pick up the votes that went to Trump last time. And that by nature, no one else can.

The underlying belief is that these white voters just can’t support anything too “un-American,” and that by pushing too hard left, Democratic candidates risk handing Trump a second term. Again: I don’t agree and I think he was mistaken in saying it. But I also can’t say that Obama of all people doesn’t know exactly the strength of the political machine operating against the Democratic Party and the progressive agenda as a whole, because he ran headfirst into it for eight years. The fact that he managed to pass any of his legislative agenda, usually before the Tea Party became a thing in 2010, is because Democrats controlled the House and Senate for the first two years of his first term. He was not perfect, but it was clear that he really did care (just look up the pictures of him with kids). He installed smart, efficient, and scandal-free people to do jobs they were qualified for. He gave us Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor to join RBG on the Supreme Court. All of this seems… like a dream.

That said: here we are in a place where Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren are the front-runners for the Democratic nomination (and apparently Pete Buttigieg is getting some airplay as a dark horse candidate, which… whatever). The appeal of Biden is discussed above, and he sure as hell is not my favored candidate (frankly, I wish he’d just quit). But Sanders and Warren are 85% - 95% similar in their policy platforms. The fact that Michael “50 Billion Dollar Fortune” Bloomberg started rattling his chains about running for president is because either a Sanders or Warren presidency terrifies the outrageously exploitative billionaire capitalist oligarchy that runs this country and has been allowed to proceed essentially however the fuck they like since… you guessed it, the 1980s, the era of voodoo economics, deregulation, and the free market above all. Warren just happens to be ten years younger than Sanders and female, and Sanders’ age is not insignificant. He’s 80 years old and just had a heart attack, and there’s still a year to go to the election. It’s also more than a little eye-rolling to describe him as the only progressive candidate in the race, when he’s an old white man (however much we like and approve of his policy positions). And here’s the thing, which I think is a big part of the reason why this polarized ideological purity internet leftist culture mistrusts Warren:

She may have changed her mind on things in the past.

Scary, right? I sound like I’m being facetious, but I’m not. An argument I had to read with my own two eyes on this godforsaken hellsite was that since Warren became a Democrat around the time Clinton signed Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, she sekritly hated gay people and might still be a corporate sellout, so on and etcetera. (And don’t even get me STARTED on the fact that DADT, coming a few years after the height of the AIDS crisis which was considered God’s Judgment of the Icky Gays, was the best Clinton could realistically hope to achieve, but this smacks of White Gay Syndrome anyway and that is a whole other kettle of fish.) Bernie has always demonstrably been a democratic socialist, and: good for him. I’m serious. But because there’s the chance that Warren might not have thought exactly as she does now at any point in her life, the hysterical and paranoid left-wing elements don’t trust that she might not still secretly do so. (Zomgz!) It’s the same element that’s feeding cancel culture and “wokeness.” Nobody can be allowed to have shifted or grown in their opinions or, like a functional, thoughtful, non-insane adult, changed their beliefs when presented with compelling evidence to the contrary. To the ideological hordes, any hint of uncertainty or past failure to completely toe the line is tantamount to heresy. Any evidence of any other belief except The Correct One means that this person is functionally as bad as Trump. And frankly, it’s only the Sanders supporters who, just as in 2016, are threatening to withhold their vote in the general election if their preferred candidate doesn’t win the primary, and indeed seem weirdly proud about it.

OK, boomer Bernie or Buster.

Here’s the thing, the thing, the thing: there is never going to be an American president free of the deeply toxic elements of American ideology. There just won’t be. This country has been built how it has for 250 years, and it’s not gonna change. You are never going to have, at least not in the current system, some dream candidate who gets up there and parrots the left-wing talking points and attacks American imperialism, exceptionalism, ravaging global capitalism, military and oil addiction, etc. They want to be elected as leader of a country that has deeply internalized and taken these things to heart for its entire existence, and most of them believe it to some degree themselves. So this groupthink white liberal mentality where the only acceptable candidate is this Perfect Non-Problematic robot who has only ever had one belief their entire lives and has never ever wavered in their devotion to doctrine has really gotten bad. The Democratic Party would be considered… maybe center/mild left in most other developed countries. It’s not even really left-wing by general standards, and Sanders and Warren are the only two candidates for the nomination who are even willing to go there and explicitly put out policy proposals that challenge the systematic structure of power, oppression, and exploitation of the late-stage capitalist 21st century. Warren has the billionaires fussed, and instead of backing down, she’s doubling down. That’s part of why they’re so scared of her. (And also misogyny, because the world is depressing like that.) She is going head-on after picking a fight with some of the worst people on the planet, who are actively killing the rest of us, and I don’t know about you, but I like that.

Of course: none of this will mean squat if she (or the eventual Democratic winner, who I will vote for regardless of who it is, but as you can probably tell, she’s my ride or die) don’t a) win the White House and then do as they promised on the campaign trail, and b) don’t have a Democratic House and Senate willing to have a backbone and pass the laws. Even Nancy Pelosi, much as she’s otherwise a badass, held off on opening a formal impeachment inquiry into Trump for months out of fear it would benefit him, until the Ukraine thing fell into everyone’s laps. The Democrats are really horrible at sticking together and voting the party line the way Republicans do consistently, because Democrats are big-tent people who like to think of themselves as accepting and tolerant of other views and unwilling to force their members’ hands. The Republicans have no such qualms (and indeed, judging by their enabling of Trump, have no qualms at all).

The modern American Republican party has become a vehicle for no-holds-barred power for rich white men at the expense of absolutely everything and everyone else, and if your rationale is that you can’t vote for the person opposing Donald Goddamn Trump is that you’re just not vibing with them on the language of that one policy proposal… well, I’m glad that you, White Middle Class Liberal, feel relatively safe that the consequences of that decision won’t affect you personally. Even if we’re due to be out of the Paris Climate Accords one day after the 2020 election, and the issue of climate change now has the most visibility it’s ever had after years of big-business, Republican-led efforts to deny and discredit the science, hey, Secret Corporate Shill, am I right? Can’t trust ‘er. Let’s go have a craft beer.

As has been said before: vote as far left as you want in the primary. Vote your ideology, vote whatever candidate you want, because the only way to make actual, real-world change is to do that. The huge, embedded, all-consuming and horrible system in which we operate is not just going to suddenly be run by fairy dust and happy thoughts overnight. Select candidates that reflect your values exactly, be as picky and ideologically militant as you want. That’s the time to do that! Then when it comes to the general election:

America is a two-party system. It sucks, but that’s the case. Third-party votes, or refraining from voting because “it doesn’t matter” are functionally useless at best and actively harmful at worst.

Either the Democratic candidate or Donald Trump will win the 2020 election.

There is absolutely no length that the Republican/GOP machine, and its malevolent allies elsewhere, will not go to in order to secure a Trump victory. None.

Any talk whatsoever about “progressive values” or any kind of liberal activism, coupled with a course of action that increases the possibility of a Trump victory, is hypocritical at best and actively malicious at worst.

This is why I found the Democratic response to Obama’s “don’t go too wild” comments interesting. Bernie doubled down on the fact that his plans have widespread public support, and he’s right. (Frankly, the fact that Sanders and Warren are polling at the top, and the fact that they’re politicians and would not be crafting these campaign messages if they didn’t know that they were being positively received, says plenty on its own). Warren cleverly highlighted and praised Obama’s accomplishments in office (i.e. the Affordable Care Act) and didn’t say squat about whether she agreed or disagreed with him, then went right back to campaigning about why billionaires suck. And some guy named Julian Castro basically blew Obama off and claimed that “any Democrat” could beat Trump in 2020, just by nature of existing and being non-insane.

This is very dangerous! Do not be Julian Castro!

As I said in my tags on the Bush post: everyone assumed that sensible people would vote for Kerry in 2004. Guess what happened? Yeah, he got Swift Boated. The race between Obama and McCain in 2008, even after those said nightmare years of Bush, was very close until the global crash broke it open in Obama’s favor, and Sarah Palin was an actual disqualifier for a politician being brazenly incompetent and unprepared. (Then again, she was a woman from a remote backwater state, not a billionaire businessman.) In 2012, we thought Corporate MormonBot Mitt Fuggin’ Romney was somehow the worst and most dangerous candidate the Republicans could offer. In 2016, up until Election Day itself, everyone assumed that HRC was a badly flawed candidate but would win anyway. And… we saw how that worked out. Complacency is literally deadly.

I was born when Reagan was still president. I’m just old enough to remember the efforts to impeach Clinton over forcing an intern to give him a BJ in the Oval Office (This led by the same Republicans making Donald Trump into a darling of the evangelical Christian right wing.) I’m definitely old enough to remember 9/11 and how America lost its mind after that, and I remember the Bush years. And, obviously, the contrast with Obama, the swing back toward Trump, and everything that has happened since. We can’t afford to do this again. We’re hanging by a thread as it is, and not just America, but the entire planet.

So yes. By all means, vote for Sanders in the primary. Then when November 3, 2020 rolls around, if you care about literally any of this at all, hold your nose if necessary and vote straight-ticket Democrat, from the president, to the House and Senate, to the state and local offices. I cannot put it more strongly than that.

#politics for ts #long post #anonymous #ask

20K notes · View notes

hazzabeeforlou · 5 years

Text

11 questions

Yes I did this a bit ago but @helloamhere (thank you, ily, have fun bussing around Europe, did that once, had to follow apple maps to know where to get off ‘cause I speak ZERO German...) tagged me and I’m an anxious mess waiting for medical news today so WHY NOT!

Rules: answer 11 questions then pose 11 of your own.

1. What do you think fanfic does better than published fiction (if anything?)

Okay obvious answer and not very high brow, but SMUT. You will not see me perusing the gay aisles of Barnes and Noble romance novels :) For various reasons :)

2. What do you think it does worse

I think (maybe it’s just this fandom) overall it’s quite a bit more sanitary than novels, both in morality and subject matter. I hate to think what the purity police would say about some of the books I’ve read... especially the old ones? But then I usually come here looking for fluff and happiness too so perhaps that’s just the major draw of fanfic, idk.

3. What’s something another fandom has or does that you wish your fandom had or did?

To be honest I’m not well versed in other fandoms, but I’m going to go with I wish this fandom didn’t have constant infighting. Seriously in all my born days I have never seen a group of people claim such a similar goal and yet devour each other so viciously. Hence I usually avoid anything incredibly explosive or triggering here; I deal with and confront radical people (religious extremists, right wing extremists) in my everyday life and I cannot bring myself to turn my escapism into that same vortex of endless arguing, though I appreciate and support those who fight the fight. I often have very sharp opinions and fall to one side or the other of the fault line, but I draw a personal boundary at a point.

4. Do you consider yourself a “fandom” type of person in general, or committed to only one, and if so, tell me more about what this means to you.

I have been a HUGE fandom person my entire life, though this is the first time I’ve ever been in a community for it. Star Wars and Narnia consumed most of my adolescence, along with Lord of the Rings. I briefly dabbled in Dr. Who and Merlin (as one does) but because I didn't read HP until nearly the end of college, I kindof missed out on that one. Basically anything geeky or fantasy driven I have always loved, and I can’t really explain how I ended up here? But this is the only fandom I’m active in socially. The power of HL I guess...

5. I’m trying to get through writing a first draft right now and it’s a slog. How do you stay motivated for long projects, writing or otherwise?

Ah. A call out question! Like any good Aries, I love starting new things! And then letting them to languish unfinished. I have, however, trained in classical music, and thus I’ve programmed myself to just keep doing the thing because pieces take months and months and months to perfect and if you can’t stick with a project, you go nowhere. I also operate on a reward system, as in writing is the reward for practicing, then when I’m sick of words I go back to music, and so the turn tables. I have learned to ignore (I’m great at ostrich-ing) the crushing self doubt of creativity and just bulldoze ahead and do the thing, which results in very messy first drafts and often bad habits in my musical technique and a tendency to overplay, which wastes energy, but rehearsals wait for no one. I also thrive on last minute deadlines!

6. Tell me about what you read as a kid. Favorite book? Or if you weren’t into reading then, favorite TV show, etc?

I HAVE SO MANY. Narnia was my first love. I also adored George MacDonald (At The Back of the North Wind is a fucking masterpiece). My mom hardly let me read Redwall (see: hints of magic) but when she caved I devoured all of those. Anne of Green Gables. American Girl stuff (lots of it, yes Josefina and Kaya were my faves). I read far too many Star Wars expanded universe novels (New Jedi Order shaped me as a person, esp Traitor). I remember reading all the Eragon series, though these were dubiously approved... and I read various classics, as one is supposed to. In high school I printed out the entire Beowulf in Old English, got a CD of a dude reading it, and proceeded to memorize the first several lines. I can still recite Anglo Saxon but I have no clue what it means (see: I’m a good mimic). Everything non-Christian-magic-related I read during or after college, sigh.

7. Have your tastes changed?

This sounds bad but not really. I rarely read non fiction, oops. Biographies are a slog for me. I dislike historical fiction and I don’t have a good reason for that. I do love a good mystery, but usually not in book form (audio or visual Agatha Christie is my mana). I do adore socio-policial books, though (The Better Angels of our Nature a good example) or books doing a deep dive into a historical topic. These days I enjoy a good satire more than much else, and since I started on Terry Pratchett in 2016 I haven’t looked back.

8. I’ll steal your question above--tell me about a fic that changed you, or became a “touchstone” fic that you go back to!!

I didn’t read fics period when I entered the fandom, and stubbornly maintained that for a while, but the fic that changed my mind was (Take Me Home) Country Roads by @a-writerwrites (Awriterwrites). I read it during a drive through the very parts of the USA it’s set in, and I couldn’t put it down, spotty internet be damned. From there @horsegirlharry birthed me into the gay 1D world, though I can’t for the life of me remember which of hers I first read! (Does it matter? They’re all so beautiful...)

9. Tell me about a WIP, if applicable. How’s it going?? It sounds great.

I’m plodding along on The Garden, it’s going well, but urgency isn’t a priority. It’s going to be one of those things that I finish and then go in and make matter because right now my ideas are half formed and I know I’ll eventually know where I’m going but it’s a case of blind trust in instinct at this point!

10. What’s your favorite place to read and sitting position?

Like a true gay I cannot sit normally in a chair, coupled with my pain issues means I’m usually draped over the back of something with a cushy lumbar support, massive pillow, or propped sideways lying down. I love reading outside, but have a tendency to attract bugs, also I’m very light sensitive so my eyes hate the sun, especially if I’m reading from a screen.

11. Do you feel like fic reading and writing is social for you? E.g. do you share with friends (in or outside of fandom), or are you a lone wolf seeking out your fics in the dead of night??

I LOVE the social aspect of fic reading and writing within fandom! I have shared PITS with only two real life friends though; I am very tight lipped about the fact that I write fic. People are cruel and musicians are judgmental arseholes and if I prefer to spend my days dreaming up love stories for my OTP instead of pouring over scores, that’s my fucking business.

Alright, 11 from me (I wanted to include artists too so!!):

1. Are you a start small-work larger type creator, or map everything out then attend to detail?

2. What style of art/writing has most influenced your creative choices? (Genre, time period, muse)

3. How long have you been writing/arting? Is this something you knew you’d do your whole life?

4. What is your favorite thing about creating for your fandom? (reception, excitement, newness, etc.)

5. Have you met any recent creative goals that you’re really proud of?

6. What is your creative baby; what work do you want stamped on your proverbial gravestone as I MADE THIS (or have you made it yet?)

7. Do outside forces (politics, culture, hegemonies) play into your creations? Do you intentionally or subconsciously subvert norms or explore ideas?

8. Your creative mind is a garden. Describe what kind it would be and what it would contain (i.e. rock garden, palace garden, wildflowers, rose... etc.)

9. Do you believe that creative art has power and if so, how do you hope yours impacts others?

10. I’m double stealing this question: what’s a fic or fan art that changed your life or was a touchstone for you?

11. If you could pick any hero of yours to read/look at your creations, who would it be and why?

TOTALLY only if you want to, but @13ways-of-looking @twopoppies @alienfuckeronmain @prettytruthsandlies @pattern-pals @newleafover @disgruntledkittenface @lesbianiconharrystyles @lululawrence

#writing stuff #about me

11 notes · View notes

still-finding-our-way · 4 years

Text

N17, N16

(SX 742760) 28/11/ 2020

I am slow to write about this walk. For days after, whenever I close my eyes, visions arise, vivid and intense. Spooling and searing under lids, I need time to process what feels like a profound experience. Hallowed and spiritual, time distorted, surreal and dreamlike, we are moving through a white space, still without a whisper of wind. Silence magnified. The sighting of a magnificent raven perched on a boundary wall, silhouetted against the gloom, statuesque and blacker then coal. Its eerie caw, rasping, cuts through the stillness. We watch, still and wordless, spellbound by its presence, reluctant to peel away to continue on our journey. The sighting feels totemic. This is the ravens space, not ours.

Jennie points out a tiny plant no more than finger height amongst the moor grass, dew drops suspended, crystal cut on delicate limbs—it radiates amongst earthly hues, no seasonal decoration able to match its completeness. Stripped back to the elements, away from noise and distraction, the high moor often feels otherworldly, now swathed in thick fog, visibility reduced to less than a few metres, the landscape is positively alien. Spatial perspective has dissolved and we are suspended in a colourless void. A place where there is no middle or far distance, no front, back or sideways, no horizon or sky. Only the here and now. Just us, breathing in whiteness, the sound of boots trudging. For all we know we might have slipped through a megalith portal, crossed over a time and space threshold and be walking in a different dimension and reality.

My eldest daughter Libby joined us on this walk. All three of us seeking relief and respite on the moor and in each other’s company; vital therapy for shaking out the suffocating insularity caused by the lockdown restrictions. As with Jennie’s children and my own, Libby grew up with parts of Dartmoor as her extended playground. Now, as an avid climber, she regularly searches out the moor’s rocky outcrops to boulder and climb with her partner Harry. No doubt under normal circumstances—not being pregnant and having clear visibility—she would have confidently strode out and led the way. Today however, engulfed by a swirling nothingness, unable to correlate the symbols on the map with the surrounding terrain, the compass becomes our only reliable guide.

Navigating through murky liquid water requires an act of faith. Follow the flickering red arrow, trust the magnets and the unseen. Our belief rewarded by staying on course. Landmarks marked on the map: Rippon Tor, Logan Stone, Buckland Beacon, Pil Tor and Top Tor, loom out from the grey miasma, yawning great slabs of granite, alien rock sculptures, moulded and defiant. It felt miraculous. All this despite my erroneous route planing. X may mark the spot but as we found out, almost to our peril, the links between the X’s do not necessarily follow a neatly drawn line on the map.

The walk was designed primarily around visiting Buckland Beacon, a Tor which stands 1,253ft (382m) above sea level and which Jennie had discovered hosts two slabs of stone carved with the 10 commandment’s from the Christian bible. Given our religious upbringing, exposed to the spiritual fervour of Pentecostalism, we wondered how we had not heard about the stones before.

A quick scan of the internet reveals a family who had made money through the Greenall Whitely brewery established in the 18th century in the North of England. An enterprise enabled by the seismic cultural and economic fallout from the industrial revolution. Flicking from page to page I quickly spiral into a story about commercial enterprise, the expansion of capital, wealth, political influence and private education, the tentacles of which reach Devon through the brothers William and Herbert Whitely, who moved to the county in the early 20th Century. William Whitely became lord of Buckland Manor, buying up land and a number of surrounding farms with the help of his younger brother, Herbert. As a staunch protestant and traditionalist, William commissioned local stone mason W. A. Clement to engrave the ten commandments on two slabs of granite on the south face of the Beacon in 1928. The inscription was a celebration of the Parliamentary ruling that rejected proposals to revise the Book of Common Prayer, and included the dates when the bill was passed and an eleventh commandment for good measure.

Meanwhile, the younger brother, Herbert had been busy building a menagerie on his private estate near Paignton, acquiring all manner of exotic plants and animals. In 1923 he opened his collection to the public as Torbay Zoological Gardens, a venue that later became known as Paignton Zoo. I read with interest that Herbert had a particular penchant for blue, collecting and breeding blue animals and plants. The most precious hue in nature, not really a pigment but an interplay of light on feathers, wings, skin, scales and exoskeletons. Blue is not an earthly colour, it has to be extracted from stone or made synthetically and as such has been much prized in history. The deep blue pigment 'Ultramarine' favoured by the great Italian renaissance painters, Raphael, Botticelli and Titian, was ground from the semi-precious mineral ‘Lapis lazuli’, which translates from its Middle Eastern roots as literally ‘blue stone’. Mixing and blending, accruing and containing. Blue became the colour of royalty and divinity. Peacock feather, delphinium, cerulean and the deepest indigo. A slick of blue eyeshadow drawn across Cleopatra’s brow to seduce an empire. Virgin blue, alchemy and sorcery. Blue blood and blue beard. The rich and powerful scoring words into stone and hoarding natures treasure.

Reading the inscription on the stones unearthed long forgotten memories from childhood. Stories flooded back about the wrath and vengeance of the Christian old God ‘Thou shalt have none other gods but me … I the Lord thy God am a jealous God’. Seduced and softened by modern liberalism, a new religion where, on the surface at least, we are expected to cast no judgement, the language felt controlling and finite, limited and at odds with the fecundity of the moor, which even in the deepest winter is alive. You can feel and smell the aliveness, folding and churning, a living entity. Leaf mould and dung, symbiosis, copulation and predation; the parasitic and endophytic, plant and animal and the in-between. Everywhere sprouting and spewing fungi, mulching and mashing. Names that weave story and folklore into identification of plant and fauna, marking out the deadly and the vision inducing: Witches butter, Yellow brain, Ink cap and Velvet shank. The moor speaks to an earthly spirituality, synthesising and composing, living and dying, a life renewing continuum. I take heed of myth that reflects the biological life cycle as found in the ancient trinity of the Hindu deities: Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva—forever creating, maintaining and destroying. Alive and dead, my skin catches on the shards of granite, grains of quartz and feldspar, mingling with micro-biological lifeforms, bacteria and my own spiralling blue-print contained in DNA.

The commandment stones are no match for the elements or the passing of time. Eaten away by lichen and eroded by the onslaught of weather, the words have to be regularly chiseled to stop them disappearing altogether. A hundred years passing, not even a heartbeat in geological time. Rooted in pre-history and borne out of fire and fusion, the stones represent forces far bigger than the scratchings and scrubbings of men. Standing on the stones, taking the obligatory 'we were here' selfies, it is easy to dismiss the monument as archaic, the monomania of a rich and powerful man. But we arrive at the stones with our own set of beliefs, contained by ideological structures—some of which are invisible to even ourselves—that colour how we see our place in the world. We talk comfortably about the effect of nature on the body as evidenced through scientific measurement and analysis, the language of endorphins, lowered blood pressure and raised serotonin levels—but we are not so fluid in the language of the spiritual.

Sipping hot tea, I garble about monotheism and the cultural separation of the divine from earthly realms to an abstract other place. But I am unable to grasp the right words to explain the contradiction of the stones with the surroundings. I want to say how the arrival of the three mono religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam elevated the divine to a non-earthly domain, somewhere over the rainbow, beyond the clouds and out of reach. The earlier gods and goddesses; the spirits and deities of rivers, trees, forests and stones were all but chased out, surviving only through folklore and myth. Whilst the life renewing vitality of the deep earth became associated with devilment and hell; a place to bury the carnal and hide our earthly appetites. Out too, went the animal spirits, the totems from which to learn and draw strength from: the sharp eyed raven, the stealth of the wild cat, the strong ox and cunning snake. In separating the divine from the corporeal we created a hierarchy and dominion that placed man atop of the pile so we might touch the divine and in doing so we cut off our roots. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Bones and dirt, dirty old bones. Godliness became whiteness and purity, and heaven the only place where we might be free from earthly weights; the sweat and the tears, pain and sickness, shame and folly. You can see the attraction—the body weighs heavy, it breaks and is fallible. Our appetites always biting back. Too much and we get sick, too little and we get sick. How to to lighten the load? Psychedelic drugs, serotonin, diazepam, liquid ecstacy, shamanic rituals, prayer, hallucination, meditation, visions and dreams; a story to make it all go away.

The crown slips. The spires reach high up to the skies but bring us no closer to heaven. We are no more divine or kingly, as we ever were. Heaven was always here.

The spool keeps spinning and I can’t rewind. Each moment evaporates into nothingness. Gone. White space. Dense twisted oak and hardy hawthorn giving way to larger trees as we descend into the valley. Mosses, liverworts, fern and lichen. Leaf litter turning to thick mulch. Branches snag and catch loose hair as we duck beneath trees. Bulbous fruiting fungi wet to touch, animal. Three women: mothers and daughters and friends, traipsing down a winding road in the deepest winter. Smiling and laughing, savouring the moment. An old church, cool and still invites us in. Before we enter we study the lettering on the ornate clock face on the church tower, we think it spells ‘Dear Earth’. Later I find out Mr William Whitely has been at it again, replacing the numbers in 1931 with the letters ‘My Dear Mother’. I figure it means the same as our first interpretation. We enter the church and stay awhile. My girl waits outside, sitting on an old lichen covered bench amongst the granite gravestones, her trusted dog by her side. The old bones of Mr Whitely not far away feed the earth while she grows new bones deep within her belly.

1 note · View note

voxrepulsori · 7 years

Text

The French Origins of « You Will Not Replace Us »

THE NEW YORKER | 04.12.2017 | Thomas Chatterton Williams

The European thinkers behind the white-nationalist rallying cry. The Château de Plieux, a fortified castle on a hilltop in the Gascony region of southwestern France, overlooks rolling fields speckled with copses and farmhouses. A tricolor flag snaps above the worn beige stone. The northwest tower, which was built in the fourteenth century, offers an ideal position from which to survey invading hordes. Inside the château’s cavernous second-story study, at a desk heavy with books, the seventy-one-year-old owner of the property, Renaud Camus, sits at an iMac and tweets dire warnings about Europe’s demographic doom. On the sweltering June afternoon that I visited the castle, Camus—no relation to Albert—wore a tan summer suit and a tie. Several painted self-portraits hung in the study, multiplying his blue-eyed gaze. Camus has spent most of his career as a critic, novelist, diarist, and travel essayist. The only one of his hundred or so books to be translated into English, “Tricks” (1979), announces itself as “a sexual odyssey— man-to-man,” and includes a foreword by Roland Barthes. The book describes polyglot assignations from Milan to the Bronx. Allen Ginsberg said of it, “Camus’s world is completely that of a new urban homosexual; at ease in half a dozen countries.” In recent years, though, Camus’s name has been associated less with erotica than with a single poignant phrase, le grand remplacement. In 2012, he made this the title of an alarmist book. Native “white” Europeans, he argues, are being reverse-colonized by black and brown immigrants, who are flooding the Continent in what amounts to an extinction-level event. “The great replacement is very simple,” he has said. “You have one people, and in the space of a generation you have a different people.” The specific identity of the replacement population, he suggests, is of less importance than the act of replacement itself. “Individuals, yes, can join a people, integrate with it, assimilate to it,” he writes in the book. “But peoples, civilizations, religions—and especially when these religions are themselves civilizations, types of society, almost States—cannot and cannot even want to . . . blend into other peoples, other civilizations.” Camus believes that all Western countries are faced with varying degrees of “ethnic and civilizational substitution.” He points to the increasing prevalence of Spanish, and other foreign languages, in the United States as evidence of the same phenomenon. Although his arguments are scarcely available in translation, they have been picked up by right-wing and white-nationalist circles throughout the English-speaking world. In July, Lauren Southern, the Canadian alt-right Internet personality, posted, on YouTube, a video titled “The Great Replacement”; it has received more than a quarter of a million views. On greatreplacement.com, a Web site maintained anonymously, the introductory text declares, “The same term can be applied to many other European peoples both in Europe and abroad . . . where the same policy of mass immigration of non-European people poses a demographic threat. Of all the different races of people on this planet, only the European races are facing the possibility of extinction in a relatively near future.” The site announces its mission as “spreading awareness” of Camus’s term, which, the site’s author concludes, is more palatable than a similar concept, “white genocide.” (A search for that phrase on YouTube yields more than fifty thousand videos.) “I don’t have any genetic conception of races,” Camus told me. “I don’t use the word ‘superior.’ ” He insisted that he would feel equally sad if Japanese culture or “African culture” were to disappear because of immigration. On Twitter, he has quipped, “The only race I hate is the one knocking on the door.” Camus’s partner arrived in the study with a silver platter, and offered fruitcake and coffee. Camus, meanwhile, told me about his “red-pill moment”—an alt-right term, derived from a scene in the film “The Matrix,” for the decision to become politically enlightened. As a child, he said, he was a “xenophile,” who was delighted to see foreign tourists flocking to the thermal baths near his home, in the Auvergne. In the late nineties, he began writing domestic travel books, commissioned by the French government. The work took him to the department of Hérault, whose capital is Montpellier. Although Camus was familiar with France’s heavily black and Arab inner suburbs, or banlieues, and their subsidized urban housing projects, known as cités, his experience in Hérault floored him. Travelling through medieval villages, he said, “you would go to a fountain, six or seven centuries old, and there were all these North African women with veils!” A demographic influx was clearly no longer confined to France’s inner suburbs and industrial regions; it was ubiquitous, and it was transforming the entire country. Camus’s problem was not, as it might be for many French citizens, that the religious symbolism of the veil clashed with some of the country’s most cherished secularist principles; it was that the veil wearers were permanent interlopers in Camus’s homeland. He became obsessed with the diminishing ethnic purity of Western Europe. Camus supports the staunchly anti-immigrant politician Marine Le Pen. He denied, however, that he was a member of the “extreme right,” saying that he was simply one of many voters who “wanted France to stay French.” In Camus’s view, Emmanuel Macron, the centrist liberal who handily defeated Le Pen in a runoff, is synonymous with the “forces of remplacement.” Macron, he noted acidly, “went to Germany to compliment Mme. Merkel on the marvellous work she did by taking in one million migrants.” Camus derides Macron, a former banker, as a representative of “direct Davos-cracy”—someone who thinks of people as “interchangeable” units within a larger social whole. “This is a very low conception of what being human is,” he said. “People are not just things. They come with their history, their culture, their language, with their looks, with their preferences.” He sees immigration as one aspect of a nefarious global process that renders obsolete everything from cuisine to landscapes. “The very essence of modernity is the fact that everything—and really everything—can be replaced by something else, which is absolutely monstrous,” he said. Camus takes William F. Buckley, Jr.,’s injunction to stand “athwart history, yelling Stop” to the furthest extent possible, and he can be recklessly unconcerned about backing up his claims. On a recent radio appearance, he took a beating from Hervé le Bras, a director emeritus at the Institut National d’Études Démographiques, who said that Camus’s proclamations about ethnic substitution were based on wildly inflated statistics about the number of foreigners entering France. Afterward, Camus breezily responded on Twitter: “Since when, in history, did a people need ‘science’ to decide whether or not it was invaded and occupied?” Camus has become one of the most cited figures on the right in France. He is a regular interlocutor of such mainstream intellectuals as Alain Finkielkraut, the conservative Jewish philosopher, who has called Camus “a great writer,” and someone who has “forged an expression that is heard all the time and everywhere.” Camus also has prominent critics: the essayist and novelist Emmanuel Carrère, a longtime friend, has publicly reproached him, writing that “the argument ‘I’m at home here, not you’ ” is incompatible with “globalized justice.” Mark Lilla, the Columbia historian and scholar of the mentality of European reactionaries, described Camus as “a kind of connective tissue between the far right and the respectable right.” Camus can play the role of “respectable” reactionary because his opposition to multicultural globalism is plausibly high-minded, principally aesthetic, even well-mannered—a far cry from the manifest brutality of the skinheads and the tattooed white nationalists who could put into action the xenophobic ideas expressed in “Le Grand Remplacement.” (At a rally in Warsaw on November 11th, white-nationalist demonstrators brandished signs saying “Pray for an Islamic Holocaust” and “Pure Poland, White Poland.”) When I asked Camus whether he considered me—a black American living in Paris with a French wife and a mixed-race daughter—part of the problem, he genially replied, “There is nothing more French than an American in Paris!” He then offered me the use of his castle when he and his partner next went on a vacation. Although Camus presents his definition of “Frenchness” as reasonable and urbane, it is of a piece with a less benign perspective on ethnicity, Islam, and territory which has circulated in his country for decades. Never the sole preserve of the far right, this view was conveyed most bluntly in a 1959 letter, from Charles de Gaulle to his confidant Alain Peyrefitte, which advocates withdrawal from French Algeria: It is very good that there are yellow Frenchmen, black Frenchmen, brown Frenchmen. They prove that France is open to all races and that she has a universal mission. But [it is good] on condition that they remain a small minority. Otherwise, France would no longer be France. We are, after all, primarily a European people of the white race, Greek and Latin culture, and the Christian religion. De Gaulle then declares that Muslims, “with their turbans and djellabahs,” are “not French.” He asks, “Do you believe that the French nation can absorb 10 million Muslims, who tomorrow will be 20 million and the day after 40 million?” If this were to happen, he concludes, “my village would no longer be called Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, but Colombey-les-Deux-Mosquées!” Such worry about Muslims has been present across Europe at least since the turn of the twentieth century, when the first “guest workers” began arriving from former French colonies and from Turkey. In 1898 in Britain, Winston Churchill warned of “militant Mahommedanism,” and Enoch Powell’s 1968 Rivers of Blood speech alleged that immigration had caused a “total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.” Anxiety about immigrants of color has long been present in the United States, especially in states along the Mexican border. This feeling became widespread after 9/11, and has only intensified with subsequent terrorist acts by Islamists, the Great Recession, and the election of the first black President. Meanwhile, white populations across the world are stagnant or dwindling. In recent years, white-nationalist discourse has emerged from the recesses of the Internet into plain sight, permeating the highest reaches of the Trump Administration. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the White House senior adviser Stephen Miller endorse dramatic reductions in both legal and illegal immigration. The President’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, has returned to his post as the executive chairman of the far-right Web site Breitbart. In a 2014 speech at the Vatican, Bannon praised European “forefathers” who kept Islam “out of the world.” President Trump, meanwhile, has made the metaphor of immigrant invasion literal by vowing to build a wall. In Europe, which in recent years has absorbed millions of migrants fleeing wars in the Middle East or crossing the Mediterranean from Africa, opposition to immigration is less a cohesive ideology than a welter of reactionary ideas and feelings. Xenophobic nationalism can be found on both the left and the right. There is not even unanimity on the superiority of Judeo-Christian culture: some European nationalists express a longing for ancient pagan practices. Anti-immigrant thinkers also cannot agree on a name for their movement. Distrust of multiculturalism and a professed interest in preserving European “purity” is often called “identitarianism,” but many prominent anti-immigrant writers avoid that construction. Camus told me that he refused to play “the game” of identity politics, and added, “Do you think that Louis XIV or La Fontaine or Racine or Châteaubriand would say, ‘I’m identitarian?’ No, they were just French. And I’m just French.” Shortly after Trump’s Inauguration, Richard Spencer, the thirty-nine-year-old white nationalist who has become the public face of the American alt-right, was sucker-punched by a protester while being interviewed on a street corner in Washington, D.C. A video of the incident went viral, but little attention was paid to what Spencer said on the clip. “I’m not a neo-Nazi,” he declared. “They kind of hate me, actually.” In order to deflect the frequent charge that he is a racist, he defines himself with the very term that Camus rejects: identitarian. The word sidesteps the question of racial superiority and co-opts the left’s inclusive language of diversity and its critique of forced assimilation in order to reclaim the right to difference—for whites. Identitarianism is a distinctly French innovation. In 1968, in Nice, several dozen far-right activists created the Research and Study Group for European Civilization, better known by its French acronym, GRECE. The think tank eventually began promoting its ideas under the rubric the Nouvelle Droite, or the New Right. One of its founders, and its most influential member, was Alain de Benoist, a hermetic aristocrat and scholar who has written more than a hundred books. In “View from the Right” (1977), Benoist declared that he and other members of GRECE considered “the gradual homogenization of the world, advocated and realized by the two-thousand-year-old discourse of egalitarian ideology, to be an evil.” The group expressed allegiance to “diversity” and “ethnopluralism”—terms that sound politically correct to American ears but had a different meaning in Benoist’s hands. In “Manifesto for a European Renaissance” (1999), he argued: The true wealth of the world is first and foremost the diversity of its cultures and peoples. The West’s conversion to universalism has been the main cause of its subsequent attempt to convert the rest of the world: in the past, to its religion (the Crusades); yesterday, to its political principles (colonialism); and today, to its economic and social model (development) or its moral principles (human rights). Undertaken under the aegis of missionaries, armies, and merchants, the Westernization of the planet has represented an imperialist movement fed by the desire to erase all otherness. From this vantage point, both globalized Communism and globalized capitalism are equally suspect, and a “citizen of the world” is an agent of imperialism. When Benoist writes that “humanity is irreducibly plural” and that “diversity is part of its very essence,” he is not supporting the idea of a melting pot but of diversity in isolation: all Frenchmen in one territory and all Moroccans in another. It is a nostalgic and aestheticized view of the world that shows little interest in the complex economic and political forces that provoke migration. Identitarianism is a lament against change made by people fortunate enough to have been granted, through the arbitrary circumstance of birth, citizenship in a wealthy liberal democracy. Benoist’s peculiar definition of “diversity” has allowed him to take some unexpected positions. He simultaneously defends a Muslim immigrant’s right to wear the veil and opposes the immigration policies that allowed her to settle in France in the first place. In an e-mail, he told me that immigration constitutes an undeniably negative phenomenon, in part because it turns immigrants into victims, by erasing their roots. He continued, “The destiny of all the peoples of the Third World cannot be to establish themselves in the West.” In an interview in the early nineties with Le Monde, he declared that the best way to show solidarity with immigrants is by increasing trade with the Third World, so that developing countries can become “self-sufficient” enough to dissuade their citizens from seeking better lives elsewhere. These countries, he added, needed to find their own paths forward, and not follow the tyrannizing templates of the World Bank and the I.M.F. Benoist told me that, in France’s Presidential election, in May, he voted not for Marine Le Pen but for the far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who shares his contempt for global capitalism. Benoist’s writing often echoes left-wing thinkers, especially the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who wrote of “hegemony”—or the command that a regime can wield over a population by controlling its culture. In “Manifesto for a European Renaissance,” Benoist argues that white Europeans should not just support restrictive immigration policies; they should oppose such diluting ideologies as multiculturalism and globalism, taking seriously “the premise that ideas play a fundamental role in the collective consciousness.” In a similar spirit, Benoist has promoted a gramscisme de droite—cultural opposition to the rampaging forces of Hollywood and multinational corporations. The French, he has said, should retain their unique traditions and not switch to “a diet of hamburgers.” Despite Benoist’s affinity for some far-left candidates, “Manifesto for a European Renaissance” has become a revered text for the extreme right across Western Europe, in the U.S., and even in Russia. The crackpot Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, who promotes the ethnopluralist doctrine “Eurasianism,” has flown to Paris to meet Benoist. “I consider him to be the foremost intellectual in Europe today,” Dugin told interviewers in 2012. Earlier this year, John Morgan, an editor of Counter-Currents, a white-nationalist publishing house based in San Francisco, posted an online essay about the indebtedness of the American alt-right to European thought. He described Benoist and GRECE’s achievement as “a towering edifice of thought unparalleled anywhere else on the Right since the Conservative Revolution in Germany of the Weimar era.” Although Benoist claims not to be affiliated with the alt-right—or even to understand “what Richard Spencer can know or have learned from my thoughts”—he has travelled to Washington, D.C., to speak at the National Policy Institute, a white-nationalist group run by Spencer, and he has sat for long interviews with Jared Taylor, the founder of the virulently white-supremacist magazine American Renaissance. In one exchange, Taylor, who was educated in France, asked Benoist how he saw himself “as different from identitarians.” Benoist responded, “I am aware of race and of the importance of race, but I do not give to it the excessive importance that you do.” He went on, “I am not fighting for the white race. I am not fighting for France. I am fighting for a world view. . . . Immigration is clearly a problem. It gives rise to much social pathologies. But our identity, the identity of the immigrants, all the identities in the world have a common enemy, and this common enemy is the system that destroys identities and differences everywhere. This system is the enemy, not the Other.” Benoist may not be a dogmatic thinker, but, for white people who want to think explicitly in terms of culture and race, his work provides a lofty intellectual framework. These disciples, instead of calling for an “Islamic holocaust,” can argue that rootedness in one’s homeland matters, and that immigration, miscegenation, and the homogenizing forces of neoliberal market economies collude to obliterate identities that have taken shape over hundreds of years—just as relentless development has decimated the environment. Benoist’s romantic-sounding ideas can be cherry-picked and applied to local political resentments. The writer Raphaël Glucksmann, a prominent critic of the French far right, told me that such selective appropriations have given Benoist “a huge authority among white nationalists and Fascists everywhere in the world.” Glucksmann recently met me for coffee near his home, which is off the Rue du Faubourg SaintDenis, one of the most ethnically diverse thoroughfares in Paris. The Nouvelle Droite, Glucksmann argued, adopted a traditionally German, tribal way of conceiving identity, which the Germans themselves abandoned after the Second World War. The Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt argued that “all right is the right of a particular Volk.” In a 1932 essay, “The Concept of the Political,” he posed the question that still defines the right-wing mind-set: Who is a people’s friend, and who is an enemy? For Schmitt, to identify one’s enemies was to identify one’s inner self. In another essay, he wrote, “Tell me who your enemy is, and I’ll tell you who you are.” The Nouvelle Droite was fractured, in the nineteen-nineties, by disagreements over what constituted the principal enemy of European identity. If the perceived danger was initially what Benoist described as “the ideology of sameness”—what many in France called the “Coca-Colonization” of the world—the growing presence of African and Arab immigrants caused some members of GRECE to rethink the essence of the conflict. One of the group’s founders, Guillaume Faye, a journalist with a Ph.D. from Sciences-Po, split off and began releasing explicitly racist books. In a 1998 tract, “Archeofuturism,” he argued, “To be a nationalist today is to assign this concept its original etymological meaning, ‘to defend the native members of a people.’ ” The book, which appeared in English in 2010, argues that “European people” are “under threat” and must become “politically organized for their self-defense.” Faye assures native Frenchmen that their “sub-continental motherland” is “an organic and vital part of the common folk, whose natural and historical territory—whose fortress, I would say—extends from Brest to the Bering Strait.” Faye, like Renaud Camus, is appalled by the dictates of modern statecraft, which define nationality in legal rather than ethnic terms. The liberal American writer Sasha Polakow-Suransky, in his recent book, “Go Back to Where You Came From: The Backlash Against Immigration and the Fate of Western Democracy,” quotes Camus lamenting that “a veiled woman speaking our language badly, completely ignorant of our culture” could declare that she is just as French as an “indigenous” man who is “passionate for Roman churches, and for the verbal and syntactic delicacies of Montaigne and Rousseau, for Burgundy wines, for Proust, and whose family has lived for generations in the same valley.” What appalls Camus, PolakowSuransky notes, is that “legally, if she has French nationality, she is completely correct.” Faye’s work helps to explain the rupture that has emerged in many Western democracies between the mainstream right, which may support strict enforcement of immigration limits but does not inherently object to the presence of Muslims, and the alt-right, which portrays Muslim immigration as an existential threat. In this light, the growing admiration by Western conservatives for the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, is easier to comprehend. Not only do thinkers like Faye admire Putin as an emblem of proudly heterosexual white masculinity; they fantasize that Russian military might will help create a “Eurosiberian” federation of white ethno-states. “The only hope for salvation in this dark age of ours,” Faye has declared, is “a protected and self-centered continental economic space” that is capable of “curbing the rise of Islam and demographic colonization from Africa and Asia.” In Faye’s 2016 book, “The Colonisation of Europe,” he writes, of Muslims in Europe, “No solution can be found unless a civil war breaks out.” Such revolutionary right-wing talk has now migrated to America. In 2013, Steve Bannon, while he was turning Breitbart into the far right’s dominant media outlet, described himself as “a Leninist.” The reference didn’t seem like something a Republican voter would say, but it made sense to his intended audience: Bannon was signalling that the alt-right movement was prepared to hijack, or even raze, the state in pursuit of nationalist ends. (Bannon declined my request for an interview.) Richard Spencer told me, “I would say that the alt-right in the United States is radically un-conservative.” Whereas the American conservative movement celebrates “the eternal value of freedom and capitalism and the Constitution,” Spencer said, he and his followers were “willing to use socialism in order to protect our identity.” He added, “Many of the countries that lived under Soviet hegemony are actually far better off, in terms of having a protected identity, than Western Europe or the United States.” Spencer said that “clearly racialist” writers such as Benoist and Faye were “central influences” on his own thinking as an identitarian. He first discovered the work of Nouvelle Droite figures in the pages of Telos, an American journal of political theory. Most identitarians have a less scholarly bent. In 2002, a right-wing French insurrectionary, Maxime Brunerie, shot at President Jacques Chirac as he rode down the Champs- Élysées; the political group that Brunerie was affiliated with, Unité Radicale, became known as part of the identitairemovement. In 2004, a group known as the Bloc Identitaire became notorious for distributing soup containing pork to the homeless, in order to exclude Muslims and Jews. It was the sort of puerile joke now associated with alt-right pranksters in America such as Milo Yiannopoulos. Copycat groups began emerging across Europe. In 2009, a Swedish former mining executive, Daniel Friberg, founded, in Denmark, the publishing house Arktos, which is now the world’s largest distributor of far- and alt-right literature. The son of highly educated, left-leaning parents, Friberg grew up in a wealthy suburb of Gothenburg. He embraced right-wing thought after attending a diverse high school, which he described as overrun with crime. In 2016, he told the Daily Beast, “I had been taught to think multiculturalism was great, until I experienced it.” Few European nations have changed as drastically or as quickly as Sweden. Since 1960, it has added one and a half million immigrants to its population, which is currently just under ten million; a nationalist party, the Sweden Democrats, has become the country’s main opposition group. During this period, Friberg began to devour books on European identity—specifically, those of Benoist and Faye, whose key works impressed him as much as they impressed Richard Spencer. When Friberg launched Arktos, he acquired the rights to books by Benoist and Faye and had them translated into Swedish and English. Spencer told me that Arktos “was a very important development” in the international popularization of far-right identitarian thought. Whether or not history really is dialectical, it can be tempting to think that decades of liberal supremacy in Europe have helped give rise to the antithesis of liberalism. In Paris, left-wing intellectuals often seem reluctant to acknowledge that the recent arrival of millions of refugees in Europe, many of them impoverished, poses any complications at all. Such blithe cosmopolitanism, especially when it is expressed by people who can easily shelter themselves from the disruptions caused by globalization, can fuel resentment toward both intellectuals and immigrants. The philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who has long embodied élite opinion on the French left, sometimes falls prey to such rhetoric. A 2015 essay, which attempted to allay fears of a refugee crisis in Europe, portrayed Syrian refugees as uniformly virtuous and adaptable: “They are applicants for freedom, lovers of our promised land, our social model, and our values. They are people who cry out ‘Europe! Europe!’ the way millions of Europeans, arriving a century ago on Ellis Island, learned to sing ‘America the Beautiful.’ ” Instead of making the reasonable argument that relatively few Muslim refugees harbor extremist beliefs, Lévy took an absolutist stance, writing that it was pure “nonsense” to be concerned about an increased risk of terrorism. Too often, Lévy fights racism with sentimentalism. Lévy recently met with me at his impeccable apartment, in a sanitized neighborhood near the Champs- Élysées. In our conversation, he offered a more modulated view. “I’m not saying that France should have received all two or three million Syrian refugees,” he said. “Of course, there’s a limited space.” But France had involved itself in Syria’s civil war, by giving support to opponents of the regime, and had a responsibility to help people uprooted by it, he said. Recent debates about European identity, he noted, had left out an important concept: hospitality. “Hospitality means that there is a place—real space, scarce, limited—and that in this place you host some people and you extend a hand.” This did not mean that he wanted an end to borders: “France has some borders, a republican tradition, it is a place. But in this place we have the duty to host. You have to hold the two. A place without hosting would be a shrinking republic. Universal welcoming would be another mistake.” A necessary tension is created between “the infinite moral duty of hospitality and the limited political possibility of welcoming.” When I asked Lévy why the notion of the great replacement had resonated so widely, he dismissed it as a “junk idea.” “The Roman conquest of Gaul was a real modification of the population in France,” he went on. “There was neversomething like an ethnic French people.” Raphaël Glucksmann made a similar critique of the idea of “pure” Frenchness. He observed, “In 1315, you had an edict from the king who said anybody who walks on the soil of France becomes a franc.” This is true, but there is always a threshold at which a quantitative change becomes qualitative; migration was far less extensive in the Middle Ages than it is today. French liberals can surely make a case for immigration without pretending that nothing has changed: a country that in 1900 was almost uniformly Catholic now has more than six million Muslims. The liberal historian Patrick Boucheron, the editor of a recent surprise best-seller that highlights foreign influences on French life throughout the ages, told me that he had little patience for people who bemoan the country’s changing demographics. French people who are struggling today, he said, are victims of unfair economic policies, not Muslims, who still make up only ten per cent of the population. Indeed, only a quarter of France’s population is of immigrant origin—a percentage that, according to Boucheron, has remained stable for four decades. Boucheron sees identitarians as manipulators who have succeeded “in convincing the dominated that their problem is French identity.” For Boucheron, it’s not simply that the great replacement is a cruel idea; it’s also false. “When you oppose their figures—when you say that there were Poles and Italians coming to France in the nineteen-thirties—they say, ‘O.K., but they were Christians,’ ” he said. “So you see that behind identity there’s immigration, and behind immigration there’s hatred of Islam. Eventually, it always comes down to that.” But to deny that recent migration has brought disruptions only helps the identitarians gain traction. A humanitarian crisis has been unfolding in Paris, and it is clearly a novel phenomenon. This summer, more than two thousand African and Middle Eastern migrants were living in street encampments near the Porte de la Chapelle; eventually, the police rounded them up and dispersed them in temporary shelters. “We don’t have enough housing,” the center-right philosopher Pascal Bruckner told me. “The welfare state is at the maximum of its capabilities. We’re broke. And so what we offer to those people is what happens at Porte de la Chapelle.” Many liberals have downplayed the homeless crisis, rather than discuss potential solutions. “We turn a blind eye to this issue, just to look generous,” Bruckner said. At one point in my conversation with Lévy, he flatly declared that France “has no refugees.” Far-right figures, for their part, have relentlessly exploited Paris’s problems on social media, posting inflammatory videos that make it seem like marauding migrants have taken over every street corner. Jean-Yves Camus, a scholar of the far right in France (and no relation to Renaud Camus), told me that there is a problematic lack of candor in the way that liberals describe today’s unidirectional mass movement of peoples. “It depends what you call Frenchness,” he said. “If you think that traditional France, like we used to see in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, should survive and remain, then certainly it will not survive. This is the truth. So I think we have to admit that, contrary to what Lévy says, there has been a change.” But what, exactly, does the notion of “traditional France” imply? The France of de Gaulle—or of Racine— differs in many ways from the France of today, not just in ethnic composition. Renaud Camus recently told Vox that white people in France are living “under menace”—victims of an unchecked foreign assault “as much by black Africa as it is by Northern Islamic Africans.” Yet feminism, Starbucks, the smartphone, the L.G.B.T.Q. movement, the global domination of English, EasyJet, Paris’s loss of centrality in Western cultural life—all of these developments have disrupted what it means “to be French.” The problem with identitarianism isn’t simply that it is nostalgic; it’s that it fixates on ethnicity to the exclusion of all else. The United States is not Western Europe. Not only is America full of immigrants; they are seen as part of what makes America American. Unlike France, the United States has only ever been a nation in the legal sense, even if immigration was long restricted to Europeans, and even if the Founding Fathers organized their country along the bloody basis of what we now tend to understand as white supremacy. The fact remains that, unless you are Native American, it is ludicrous for a resident of the United States to talk about “blood and soil.” And yet the country has nonetheless arrived at a moment when once unmentionable ideas have gone mainstream, and the most important political division is no longer between left and right but between globalist and nationalist. “The so-called New Right never claimed to change the world,” Alain de Benoist wrote to me. Its goal, he said, “was, rather, to contribute to the intellectual debate, to make known certain themes of reflection and thought.” On that count, it has proved a smashing success. Glucksmann summed up the Nouvelle Droite’s thinking as follows: “Let’s just win the cultural war, and then a leader will come out of it.” The belief that a multicultural society is tantamount to an anti-white society has crept out of French salons and all the way into the Oval Office. The apotheosis of right-wing Gramscism is Donald Trump. On August 11th, the Unite the Right procession marched through the campus of the University of Virginia. White-supremacist protesters mashed together Nazi and Confederate iconography while chanting variations of Renaud Camus’s grand remplacement credo: “You will not replace us”; “Jews will not replace us.” Few, if any, of these khaki-clad young men had likely heard of Guillaume Faye, Renaud Camus, or Alain de Benoist. They didn’t know that their rhetoric had been imported from France, like some dusty wine. But they didn’t need to. All they had to do was pick up the tiki torches and light them.

Thomas Chatterton Williams

This article appears in the print edition of the December 4, 2017, issue, with the headline ““You Will Not Replace Us”.”

Thomas Chatterton Williams, a contributing writer for the Times Magazine, is a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He is at work on a book about racial identity.

#France #US #USA #Alain de Benoist #Renaud Camus #Guillaume Faye #Identité #identity #idenditarian #Immigration #gramscisme #gramscism

7 notes · View notes

qqueenofhades · 5 years

Text

So, it’s Friday evening, and it turns out I have more thoughts about things that happened this week. I almost never do Discourse on this blog, on whatever subject, but sometimes even your friendly local depressed historian gotta say things. If you’re not in the mood for a long-ass meta-y text post, just keep on scrolling, no hard feelings.

In the wake of the Notre Dame fire, which obviously a lot of us were upset about, and profoundly relieved that it did not end up being completely catastrophic, the usual spate of posts began to pop up, alleging that people only cared about Notre Dame because of the loss to Western/European/Christian history, that nobody had been this upset about the National Museum of Brazil or the outbreak of arson at three black churches in Louisiana in the same week, and so on. I don’t blame anyone for making those posts, because I know they cared about those issues and wanted to ensure that their importance was communicated, especially when something major like Notre Dame was getting all the airtime. However, I couldn’t help but notice how that followed the same pattern as all Woke Tumblr Discourse (tm). An event happens, people express reactions to it, and are then attacked or indirectly shamed for not expressing reactions to another event. Or there’s the usual cycle of “nobody will care about this because it’s not happening in America”-style posts, or passive-aggressive insinuations that “you don’t care if you don’t reblog this.” And -- I say this with the greatest kindness possible, because I know, I know you guys care -- it’s... not helpful.

The culture of Tumblr and other left-wing sections of social media often rests on enacting performative wokeness, on showing that you care about the most Progressive (tm) issues, or that you have thoroughly scrutinized your fandom tastes or political beliefs for anything Problematic and/or can prove yourself to an imagined moral standard (and there have been some great metas written on how this essentially replicates conservative evangelical purity culture, with the goalposts switched). This is why we keep having to circulate (and doubtless will have to do so with increasing frequency) those posts reminding the left not to eat its young and flame all prospective Democratic challengers to Trump in 2020 to a crisp before the right wing, which is only too happy to let us do the work of sabotaging ourselves, even gets a chance. This is also why you see the posts responding to said angry “nobody cares about this!” posts, in which people mention the fact that not visibly reacting to all the (vast and terrible) injustice in the world does not mean they don’t care. The world is a big place. So is the internet. I can guarantee you that people do care, and just because you didn’t see immediate evidence and response to it when you opened up your Tumblr dash is not proof of a collective nefarious conspiracy.

Take me, for example. I am a thirty-ish academic and historian who considers myself well-informed and literate in current events. I read national and international news every day to find out what’s going on (because I live in England, the answer is Brexit, and the status is Failed). And yet, there are plenty of things that I only hear about for the first time on Tumblr, often attached to one of those “nobody cares about this!” posts. And you know what? I do care. I care a lot. And I’m guessing that most other people do as well, because no matter how it may feel, the majority of individuals are fundamentally decent people with basic empathy for others, even if our whole system is a nightmare. But the urge to demand why nobody is Discoursing about this issue (again, among a vast and exhausting sea of them) needs to take a few fundamental things into account.

First, the American media (as a large portion of readers are relying on) simply does not report this stuff. Look at what’s happening in that godforsaken country right now; does it really seem like the kind of place that’s eager to tell you about Brazilian museum fires or black-church arson? I’m someone who makes a conscious effort to read the news no matter how depressed it makes me, and I still miss tons of stuff, because it’s not there. The Western media reported on Notre Dame, people knew about it, and were upset. But when those of them who did not know about the National Museum of Brazil learned about it, they were also upset. We can definitively say now that the National Museum was a bigger and more irreplaceable tragedy in terms of what burned. But we were also apparently 15-30 minutes away from losing all of Notre Dame. You can be upset about both these things. You can express empathy for the history lost in both cases. There is not a greater moral value attached, and you’re not racist for caring about Notre Dame if you heard about it first (unless you’re only upset about Notre Dame for reasons related to race or perceived cultural superiority and are peddling vile conspiracy theories about Jews and Muslims intentionally burning it down, in which case you are a racist). Almost everyone who learned about the National Museum fire was just as horrified.

2019 is a hard and monstrously unfair and tremendously difficult place to live. The internet has made exposure to both all the information and no real information at all simultaneously possible. Not everyone can display active engagement and empathy with every tragedy everywhere. People have jobs, lives, kids, work, school, other commitments, mental and physical health to look after and even when they read the damn news, there’s no guarantee whatsoever the news is going to report it. If they haven’t made the conscious effort to search out every scrap of terribleness that exists in this hellworld, they.... really should not be shamed for that. If they don’t care even after they learn, that’s another debate. But again, in my experience, most people do. But if they are first exposed to it by someone claiming they won’t care, that makes them less likely to engage with it, and to want to enact meaningful change. Firing wittily sarcastic takedowns at easy targets on echo-chamber liberal Twitter is one thing. We all enjoy a good roast and venting our frustration at times. But as a long-term engagement strategy, it’s going to actively backfire.

I talk a lot about being a teacher, and my experiences with my students, but it’s relevant again, so here goes. The kids in my classes come in believing some pretty strange things, or they flat out don’t have a clue even about what I consider basic historical knowledge. If my reaction was to shame them for not knowing, when they have expressly come to me to learn better, I’m pretty sure I’d be a bad teacher. My strategy, whenever a student can actually be nudged to answer a question, is to pick out whatever correct thing they said. Even if the rest of the answer is wrong and we need to work through it, I start by highlighting the part of it that was right, and to build their confidence that I’m not just going to tear them down when they respond. Freshmen are scared of not knowing things and to be made to look like an idiot, so I try to assure them that I’m not going to do that and I will constructively engage with their contribution and treat it seriously. You can then move to dealing with the other parts of it that may not be right, or even Mmm Whatcha Say side-eye. It is a long and often frustrating process and sometimes after reading their essays, you wonder how much of an impression you made. But if you actually want to get people to care about things, you can’t mistake Ultimate Wokeness or Look How Progressive/Anti-establishment/Enlightened I Personally Am for the simple requirement of being a decent person. You can have the greatest and most necessary beliefs or value systems in the world, but if your response to people is to lash out at them even before they begin the conversation, you’re setting yourself back. And I know that’s not really what you want to do.

This should not be interpreted as some wishy-washy “everyone just needs to be nice to each other!!!” kindergarten-playground-rule. I frankly think the whole system could use a good nefarious dismantle, and you sure as hell don’t get there by mistaking insipid moral equivalence for necessary action. But accepting the existence of people different from you, and considering how you want to engage with them, and understanding that issues are complicated and people are flawed, is a fundamental part of being a mature adult (and this has nothing to do with chronological age; there are 15-year-olds who are plenty more mature adults than 50-year-olds). I honestly do love the desperate desire to make people care, and that, for the most part, is why people who identify as liberal or left-wing do so, because they want to (and they do) care. But it’s also why they can be bad at winning elections and getting into meaningful positions to enact this change. The right wing stays on message and sticks together. Even if they absolutely hated Trump, plenty of Republicans held their noses and voted for him anyway. The left did not do that. The greatest virtue of liberal thought, i.e. its determination to include multiple perspectives, has increasingly reduced it to smaller and smaller camps where only the purest survive, like some kind of ideological Hunger Games. It might be great for making yourself look good to your hall of mirrors, but.... not so good for actually doing something long-term.

Once again, this is not to blame anyone for being upset and worried about things, for wanting people to know about them, and so forth. But I am gently-but-firmly suggesting, in my capacity as old, salty, queer spinster academic aunt, that perhaps you consider how you start the conversation. Once again, it’s my experience that most people want to know and want to care, but there are countless factors that mean not every bad thing in the world will be acknowledged everywhere by everyone at all times. You can care about different things for different reasons. That is okay. You can care about something because you have a personal connection to it. That is also okay. You can not care about something because you just don’t have the capacity and are emotionally exhausted and there’s so much shit in this world that you have to compartmentalize and set boundaries. That is also okay.

For example, I was obviously very upset about Notre Dame, and still am, though I’m relieved it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Am I happy it’s going to be restored? Yes. Am I unbelievably angry that a half-dozen of the elite uber-rich could just suddenly throw billions of euros at it for its restoration, when it had to struggle for years to get funding for crucial renovations? Yes. Do I feel as if that if the vaults have suddenly been opened to restore one major European Christian landmark, it’s incredibly heartbreaking that that level of instant capital just won’t be addressed to actual endemic, long-term issues like global warming and social inequality and the Flint water crisis and whatever else, and that this is a sad and troubling message for our society in many ways? Yes. All of these things exist together. And I imagine most people feel the same way.

In short: I realize this is the internet, and therefore just is not designed to do that, but maybe we can give each other a little bit more of the benefit of the doubt, and think about how we would like to educate and engage those we come in contact with, whether virtually or in reality. We can do it wherever and whoever we are, with anyone that we meet, and I wonder what it would be like if we did.

#hilary for ts #history #notre dame #Le Discourse #anyway yes #i just felt like it needed to be said #nothing particularly original perhaps #and it has been said before #but still #long post

490 notes · View notes