{Disclaimer: my subsequent rant contains my comparatively uninformed views, as a non-Jewish person, about the outrage I feel over the persistent trend of Disney/MCU using Magneto as an excuse to be antisemitic.}
-
Since everyone knows I love Magneto, there’s been an assumption from a lot of people that ‘you must be looking forward to that new X-Men 97 series coming out on Disney then.’
And my response has always been: I probably won’t even watch it, because I can’t trust Disney/MCU with Magneto’s character.
-
I’ve cited ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’ as a prime example of why. They took two characters, who were the children of Jewish and Romani Holocaust survivors – then erased their cultural heritage completely, and turned them into Nazi volunteers.
They would never have gotten away with this if they had to factor in Magneto’s fatherhood – the man was hunting down Nazi collaborators over in the 20th Century Fox Studios franchise.
Then they unceremoniously killed Pietro, in the most nonsensical way possible – because he’s literally faster than speeding bullets.* They treated his character as disposable, because they didn’t want to have to measure up to the high standard already set for Quicksilver’s powers and characterisation.
*(As ‘X-Men: Days of Future Past’ proved, Peter can casually nudge bullets aside to prevent collateral damage.)
And Wanda? They villainised her in the worst way; removing her agency, and refusing to hold her accountable for the damage she was responsible for. Because moral ambiguity is never something for ‘heroes.’
-
All this to say, I did not have high hopes for Disney/MCU to handle the complexities of Magneto’s character.
-
The only way to truly do justice to his character is to understand that Magneto was right.
The main political premise of the X-Men is that both Magneto and Professor X are correct in their beliefs – and the tragedy comes from their two groups fighting amongst themselves, instead of standing together against the real antagonists: the government and/or extremists who want to eradicate all of them. It doesn’t matter if you’re loud and proud, or if you’re unobtrusive and compliant – they will come for you all.
(There’s a reason the X-Men franchise is queer-coded, folks. But that’s a post for another time.)
In every situation where Erik is branded as an alarmist for suggesting the possibly that the humans in power will betray mutantkind, the humans in power betray mutantkind.
But people prefer to ignore the truth if it makes them uncomfortable.
-
So, I knew I’d likely be disappointed by whatever the new series had in store for Magneto’s character.
(I still haven’t watched it, and still probably won’t, especially given what I’ve learned.)
And I expected more of him being villianised, because of course we can never have Erik be a character unless he commits an evil betrayal against our ‘real’ heroes ohohohoho…
(And, you know. This will still probably play out eventually.)
But.
I set the bar so low. And yet, not even I expected Disney/MCU to deliver such a horrendous antisemitic retcon.
They had such an opportunity to portray empathy and positivity for the Jewish community. And yet, they instead decided to… engage in Holocaust revisionism? Once again, trying to divorce Magneto’s cultural heritage from his mutant politics? Even though they have actual Nazis to hold accountable, they’re trying to divert the blame onto Jewish people – falsely claiming ‘the oppressed became the oppressors?’
It’s horrific.
-
Using Magneto’s character for this purpose is unthinkable.
You cannot separate his cultural trauma as a Jewish Holocaust survivor from his activism surrounding mutant rights.
Magneto is who he is because he does not want history to repeat itself.
-
And it’s interesting, that Disney/MCU are perfectly content to acknowledge Nazis were the ‘Big Bad Guys’ when their hero is a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, all-American faux-military man.
(Don’t forget: Steve Rogers was Jewish-coded by his Jewish creators. Does this translate onto the screen? Or is it quietly and easily set aside?)
But when their ‘anti-hero’ is a European anarchist, who was enslaved and tortured by Nazis because he was Jewish… this is what they choose to do instead?
Magneto deserves better than this.
-
12 notes
·
View notes
Antisemites are going mask-off. And we Jews see you.
So some shit for brains antisemite sent me this message the other day. This is one of several antisemitic Anons I've gotten recently, but this one is the most blatant.
My first response was to taunt them. I thought of writing something like this:
"Hey, you fucking loser, you forgot the part of your Nazi script where you try to deny that the Holocaust happened. Lame ass motherfucker, you can't even get your own lies right. Next time you try harassing a Jew online, at least try to tow the Nazi party line, you white supremacist. Also, you fucking COWARD, how dare you come to my inbox on Anonymous. If you’re going to tell me you wish I would die in a Nazi gas chamber, at least have the common courtesy to tell me your username so I know who I am blocking."
But then, I thought: No. That's not how to respond. Because that's not what this is about.
I mean, don’t get me wrong. Making fun of a stupid a Nazi by telling them that they forgot to deny the Holocaust when they decided to harass me for being a Jew — that is gallows humor of the darkest kind. But a morbidly glib zinger of a reply doesn’t actually address the real issue here.
The real issue is that a lot of you with antisemitic tendencies have been going completely mask-off the last few weeks, and you have been diving headfirst into Jew-hatred.
You are finally feeling liberated to speak the Jew-hating words that you have been dying to say.
You have been practically champing at the bit to tell a Jew that you wished there would be another Holocaust so you could get rid of all those millions of "bad Jews" that you don’t like, and now you feel liberated to scream those words from the rooftops.
Over the last few weeks, we Jews have been watching you, some of you that we considered to be friends, and we’ve seen many of you turn on us and spit out the most vile, hateful things about us.
And we know exactly what you will be doing when the next Nazi craze spreads like wildfire from country to country, throughout cities and towns.
You like to claim that you would have been punching Nazis in the face during World War II. You like to claim that you would have protected us. Some of you even like to claim that you would have sheltered us, like the heroes who hid Anne Frank.
But we know better.
No. That’s all just romantic bullshit that some of you like to tell yourselves to make yourselves feel important.
In reality, you would have been deciding who is a "good Jew" and who is a "bad Jew." You would have been deciding who you should rat out to the police for a reward. You wouldn’t be protecting us! You would be saying, "I really don't like that Jew. I’m going to go tell the Gestapo about them." Or worse, you would be saying, "Oh, that Jew over there, they’re just an animal. They’re barely human. The Nazis can kill them, I don’t care."
Most of the people who turned against their Jewish neighbors in Nazi occupied Europe weren't monstrous, inhuman beasts. Most of them were people, just like you, who had been conditioned to hate Jews by nearly two thousand years of Christian antisemitism coupled with a targeted campaign of white supremacist propaganda. This widespread antisemitism allowed the Nazis to transform an irrational and enculturated feeling of distrust towards Jews into a feeling of intense hatred, where gentiles demonized Jewish people and blamed "those Jews" for all the bad things that were happening in the world.
And the white supremacists are doing it again. And YOU are falling for their trap. Again!
Don't you get it? This is the oldest trick in the book! Periods of antisemitic violence usually erupt every 70-100 years or so, after most of the Jewish elders who hold the living memory of the last genocide have all passed away. And the Holocaust was 80 years ago. And here we are. Again.
And just like the Christians in Europe who turned on their Jewish neighbors, you are starting to turn on us.
You buy into antisemitic conspiracy theories, just like the white supremacists do.
You stand in the streets, screaming "gas the Jews" and "die Jews die."
You sound like the Proud Boys. You sound like Nazis. Do you even hear yourselves???
You pretend that all Jews are all a monolith and a hive mind, and you try to convince yourselves that we are all a proxy for the fucking Israeli government, which the vast majority of Jews fucking despise. If we could, trust me, most of us would strangle Netanyahu with our bare hands.
You celebrate Jewish deaths because you have convinced yourselves that killing a random Jewish civilian is "just the same" as killing Netanyahu, because you have manipulated yourselves into believing that all Jews are the Israeli government.
And you don't see how fucking STUPID that is!!
Jewish people are no more the Israeli government than YOU are YOUR government.
A people are NOT their government.
According to Tumblr statistics, nearly half of you reading this will be from the US. Shall I blame YOU personally for the actions of the US government? Of course fucking not! And you'd better fucking not blame random Jews for Netanyahu!
And some of you Jew-haters, in pretending that Jews are all a monolith and a hive mind, even say vile, antisemitic shit like, "Looks like the Jews are becoming the Nazis."
You choose those words carefully, twisting the Shoah, our greatest tragedy, into a knife. You try to weaponize the slaughter of our people against us. You try to reduce the 6 million of us who were murdered into a white supremacist meme.
YOU SOUND LIKE THE FUCKERS AT A TRUMP RALLY, FOR FUCKS SAKE. DO YOU EVEN HEAR YOURSELVES???
And you do that to dehumanize us. You do that to feel morally superior. You do that to feel less uncomfortable when you laugh at our deaths.
But we know that WE are not becoming Nazis. But YOU are. The reason you say that shit about us is because YOU are projecting YOUR insecurities onto us.
Because you know that you are slowly, insidiously being coopted by the Nazi ideology of David Duke and Richard Spencer.
And perhaps somewhere deep down, you feel uneasy about it. So you accuse Jews of being a monolith, a hive mind, and then you say stupid antisemitic shit like, "Maybe the Jews are the Nazis after all."
And you say that to yourselves so that you can turn off your empathy and celebrate as you watch us die.
What a disgusting way to try to absolve yourselves of YOUR guilt.
And we Jews are watching you. We’re watching you very carefully. And when the dust settles, you will have found that we have vanished from your life.
Very soon, you won’t see us again.
And no, that won't be because we'll be walking into the gas chambers, as much as you'd like us to, like some historical movie about the Holocaust that you watched when you were a child but turned off halfway through because you just didn't care.
NEVER AGAIN MEANS NEVER AGAIN.
As much as we know that you ENJOY watching our deaths (sanitized, of course, with a blur filter over the video so that you don’t have to feel too guilty about watching us being tortured and murdered), that’s not the reason you won’t be seeing us again.
The reason you won’t be seeing us again is because we will be walking out of YOUR life.
You have lost us as friends, and you might not even know it yet.
We are gone from your life, because we know that we can’t trust you.
We know that when the Nazis come to our community and march down the street hoisting their swastikas and doing their Sieg Heils (I've seen it with my own eyes) … when the Nazis harass us Jews in the street (I've seen it with my own eyes) … when the Nazis SHOOT US DEAD (it happened at a synagogue a block away from my synagogue, and many of those who saw it will never open their eyes again) — we know you won’t help us.
You will shove us into the line of fire.
And we know that you’ll absolve your conscience, so you won’t feel too bad about our deaths. You’ll tell yourselves, “It’s okay. Why should I have protected that one? That one was a bad Jew.”
We Jews see you. We see your hypocrisy on full display.
And we are telling you this:
If you see Jewish civilians being tortured and murdered, no matter what country they are from, and your first response is to CELEBRATE … if your first response is to post memes that say shit like, "The Jews fucked around and found out" … if your first response is to say that mass murdering Jews is "brutal but justified" … if your first response is to behave like a Q-Anon believer or a MAGA-hat wearing Republican and treat all Jews like we're a monolith, a hive mind…
When THAT is your response to seeing a tragedy unfolding, you are a FAILED ally, and a FAILED advocate.
You are an antisemite.
But mostly, you are just a really horrible, shitty person.
And we don’t want you in our life.
166 notes
·
View notes
Summary:
In the aftermath of an unexpected confrontation, Charles and Erik find themselves with their powers swapped.
As it’s only been three months since the Pentagon, Paris, and Washington, the other X-Men aren’t too keen on Erik’s sudden reappearance in their lives. Regardless, it’s deemed practical for Erik to stay close until the effects wear off.
Amidst his own complicated feelings, Charles discovers how expressive magnetism can be.
Erik doesn’t remove his helmet.
But a convergence of adversaries with cruel intentions has Erik’s trauma bought to the forefront of everyone’s mind. And if his friends aren’t prepared to support him, they’ll lose Erik in more ways than one.
<><><>
Notes:
This story is No.100 of my posted works appreciating Erik Lehnsherr!
So, I wanted to do something special to commemorate the occasion. And what better way to appreciate this character than by writing close to 53,000 words (in total), as an exploration of trauma.
‘X-Men: Days of Future Past’ took place in January 1973. This story is set three months afterwards; the beginning of April. None of the main cast of characters escape judgement. (Though Erik, of course, has done nothing wrong in his entire life.)
This was a lot of fun to write. Enjoy!
15 notes
·
View notes
I hope you're okay, Roach. I don't know how things are going down right now, but I've seen the news about the Day of Hate being planned and I hope you're okay.
im actually out of state for a week visiting my mom, who has been having health problems! this is the first time i've cracked my computer open in a couple days. my opinion is that neo nazi groups love scaring the shit out of jews and making them look like they're hysterical crybabies who flip out over nothing. it's kinda like making the boy cry wolf when you're the wolf. but, crucially, neo nazis don't like going anywhere or doing anything. they're already desperately clinging to the delusion that they're genetically superior to everyone else because they're all of them not the kind of people who actually have anything to really be proud of.
i suspect that a couple dozen lazy, pathetic motherfuckers are going to run around with flags, make halfassed attempts to set stuff on fire or break some windows, then go home and triumphantly jack off in their sweaty gamer chairs while assuring each other online that they're real authentic hardasses. but like every single hate rally i've ever seen put into place peters out miserably the minute they get surrounded by counterprotestors. they're all a bunch of out of shape chickenshits who don't know what to do with themselves once they're actually peeled away from their poses.
like, look: this kind of bigotry is the ideology of the kind of people who are already scared to fucking death of a girl with blue hair and pronouns. they're a bunch of neurotic cowards desperately clinging to the fantasy of genetic superiority because they have nothing else going for them. they aren't brave, they aren't hard working, they aren't resilient, and they don't last any longer than it takes to get punched in the nose.
i mean, i don't want to sound like a callous asshole here, synagogues absolutely do need to be on high alert for shooters and bomb threats, because a few crazies somewhere, some time, are for sure coming for them. but this kind of operation is maximum fear inflicted for minimum calories expended, and it makes me want to lean out the window and make vigorous cranking gestures at the nearest nazi just to show how unbothered i actually am. if they're not gonna do much shit, i'm not gonna give much of a shit.
102 notes
·
View notes