#the ethics of punching nazis in the face | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mythical-lotus · 2 years

Text

Okay everybody, I have finally decided to talk about my patch jacket - My pride and joy, and in theory the longest art project I have ever worked on and continue to work on. I started it in late September of 2020 I believe, And have continued to work on it since

All right here we go nerds

This is the front and back of the jacket all zoomed out. You can zoom in and look at it here, but I'm also going to be showing some closer photos and elaborating on my favorite/most memorable parts

I'll be going through and pointing out either my favorite or things that I think need explaining so you can skip the text if you just want to look but yknow

First Picture:

I noticed that in the very top right corner of this part of the jacket, one of the pins in the photo is a bit obscured and very small, it says "The future is intersectional," with feminine looking hands reaching for each other one with a light skin tone and one with a dark skin tone.

There's also a blue pen, hidden under the collar of the jacket by mistake, that's the Poseidon pin I bought from Overly Sarcastic Productions crowdmade shop (along with the Loki pin and Athena pin next to it). I would highly recommend their history and mythology videos!!

I am a type 1 diabetic, and have been since February 6th of 2012, and hooked onto the button of the pocket is an old emergency contact bracelet of mine.

There's a small tooth sewn into the side of the jacket with dark magenta thread, and I wanted to specify that it is a deer tooth and that it was gotten ethically. One of my friends participates in vulture culture, and she found a few deer teeth in the woods and gifted them to me.

This is slightly lesser known so I thought I'd throw it in, the purple bottle cap pin with the green ribbon on it symbolizes mental health awareness.

Second Picture:

The green and blue patch that looks like a hourglass is a climate change awareness patch - To my knowledge the symbol isn't specifically related to any group, just a general climate change symbol.

The gold circle with a silver triangle is a Vulcan symbol from Star Trek: The Original Series called an IDIC (Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations), that represents protecting and learning about diversity throughout the galaxy.

A very close friend of mine is a trans man and he is not out to his family because they are unfortunately very bigoted, and he has been forced to shave his legs by them and so I made a patch that's just a hairy leg, out of spite. This is somewhat for him but also a more general patch for "don't tell anyone else how they should look."

Third Picture:

This part is pretty full so I'll just do like a rapid fire "What's all this then?"

The "Cabbage" patch was a recommendation from a friend cuz they thought it was funny, the tab sewn onto the side of the collar was found in my garden, the safety pins dangling below it are the rainbow and trans flag respectively although they need repainted, "I Don't Wanna Feel Better" is a reference to a Penelope Scott song (amazing artist btw), bisexual flag with she/her over it, and "God Loves Gays" in honor of my horribly homophobic church.

Fourth Picture:

Ralsei pin of my lovely boi, Ari patch (the name and likeness of my dog), The patch above "Punch Your Local Nazi" is the cover art of Penelope Scott's album "Public Void," I.W.W. Wobblies stands for International Workers Of The World (who were called Wobblies in the early industrial revolution), and the Minecraft blocks at the very bottom are just some of my favorites (Grass Block, Mossy Cobble, Slime, and Enderman).

Fifth Picture:

I live in a very cop heavy area (idk if that's even a term but whatever), So it's not really safe for me to have a obvious ACAB patch, but the dice show the number 1312 when you look at the rightmost face.

Sixth Picture:

The embroidery of the Scales Of Justice on the bottom in purple and teal was commissioned from one of my very close friends (same person I got the tooth from), and I think her deerly for it ;)

Seventh Photo:

Uhh these are all pretty self explanatory, but for literally anything on this jacket, please ask me about it if you want to know because like oh Oh I want to talk so much If you couldn't tell

Eighth Picture:

I call this my healthcare arm, it has my omnipod, which is the device I used to treat my type 1 diabetes, and the patch below it refers to how a lot of times diabetic equipment is treated as a luxury when the different quality of equipment you use can drastically alter how healthy you are. It's like trying to do surgery with a kitchen knife and saying that "it's a luxury" to do surgery with a scalpel.

CURSE YOU TUMBLR PHOTO LIMIT

#long post #like so long you guys #star trek #patch jacket #Can I tag this is punk? It was definitely inspired but I don't consider myself part of the subculture #Just so y'all can see it because I think you'd like it :))#punk #diy punk jacket #diy jacket #jean jacket #patches #pins #pronoun pins #bisexual #LGBTQ #disability rights #diabetic #diabetes

35 notes · View notes

cypric-rat-hyperfixation · 3 years

Text

ratpunk

New* aesthetic: ratpunk

Centered around RATS specifically

>>>> namely the brown rat, Rattus norvegicus, but could really go for any rat (e.g. black rat, Gambian rat, spiny rat, fantasy rat creatures, etc)

>>> hell you can even throw in mice and other largely detested rodents

Has the features common to all punk, rebellion against the mainstream and the fight against oppression, just in relation to rats somehow

>>>> can have the visual aesthetic side of punk as well

>>>> can also have the visual aes of any -punk aesthetic as a result (e.g. solarpunk, trenderpunk, spacepunk, cyberpunk, etc)

Also specifically contains themes of loving, appreciating, and caring for rats instead of detesting them

>>>> e.g. activism against lab cruelty, correcting myths about the bubonic plague, promoting ethical breeding practices, correcting myths about hygiene, spreading correct information of any sort, being soft and gentle and nurturing toward rats, depicting rats in positive and clean light, making sure others are aware of rats’ needs before welcoming some into their lives, activism against kill traps and promotion of humane/live traps, activism against unethical treatment of feeders, etc etc

Textual examples of ratpunk:

“For loving, not testing”

“Adopt, don’t shop”

“Before you consider treating a rat this way, stop and consider whether you would treat a puppy this way”

“Fuck PETA”

“Pet rat =/= street rat”

“I [rats] spend as much time grooming as your cat”

“We’re [rats are] not vermin”

“I [rats] don’t live in the sewers”

“Yeah well, I [rats] think you’re gross too”

“Buy from a breeder, never a pet store”

“Rats are friends, not food!”

so much more

Things you might do that are ratpunk:

Engineering humane/live traps

Speaking out against the treatment of feeders

Rescuing feeders, disabled rats, sick/injured rats, aggressive rats, rats living alone, and other rats facing rejection/hardship

Speaking out against this shit

Enlightening people about the emotional capacities and needs of rats, such as the classic compassion study and studies about why you cannot own only one

Guiding first-time rat owners through ethically caring for their rats

Helping people rehome their rats when needed

>>>> e.g. helping them find a new home, helping them move the rats to their new home, helping them cope after rehoming rats, etc

Being loving toward rats

Guiding people toward ethical breeders instead of pet stores

so SO much more

Common ratpunk visuals and concepts

Art of rats + visual punk aesthetics

Rats saying punk phrases

>>>> e.g. guillotine the rich, aromantic rights are human rights, down with cis, trans women are women, my body my choice, unionize, BLM, stop Asian hate, decriminalize drugs, queer rights, punch nazis, indigenous rights, abolish the police, etc

Rats in “punk” outfits (1)(2)

Punks with rats

Rats advocating for and supporting punk themes

>>>> e.g. clean energy, socialism/communism/anarchism, wearing masks, getting vaccinated, antifa, universal health care, radical self-acceptance, mutual aid, consent culture, etc)

Rats rejecting mainstream and oppressive systems

>>>> e.g. capitalism, police, prison system, cringe culture, binarism/exorsexism, losing disability when you get married, conservatives, gender norms, pronoun conformity, label policing, religious bigotry, colonialism, “curing” autism, 13th amendment + mass incarceration loophole, rape culture, fascism, eugenics and genocide, anti-NPD/ASPD rhetoric, classism, etc)

so so SO much more

*This aesthetic already largely exists and is shared by just about every ratblr out there, but I just thought I’d coin and tack a name onto it so that we can share ratpunk-specific things in one tag maybe!

So yeah, have fun ratpunking. :>c

#ratpunk #ratposting #ratblr #rats #fancy rat #giant rat that makes all of the rules #punk #pride #gun cw #long post

147 notes · View notes

rametarin · 3 years

Text

And before you fucks argue with me about the intention of the mob about Kyle that night

If it was the proud boys screaming, “I’m going to kill you, nigga! I’m going to kill you!” You would accept nothing less than the idea that the Proud Boys, or at least the individuals on that night, were just a bunch of white supremacist fucks that were being honest about their intentions to kill the person they were circling around.

It’s on fucking video and audio that they were yelling, “we’re going to kill you.” From multiple people, multiple sources. To be hit by a skateboard counts as assault with a deadly weapon, especially if someone is fleeing from you and YOU ARE ACTIVELY PURSUING THEM, AS A GROUP, AND ATTACKING.

Rosenbaum grabbed hold of Kyle’s rifle and tried to wrestle it away from him. This is objective, court supported fact of the case. He got part of his finger blown off and soot from the gunfire on his hand. He was legally trying to steal Kyle’s weapon. This resulted in a lethal bit of self defense.

This angered the mob, whom decided that this hispanic Nazi killed their comrade, so they gave chase. And they fully intended on killing him. Multiple people physically attacking him and someone else already having a gun trained on him is evidence enough.

Rosenbaum was effectively doing suicidal high-risk aggressive instigating rodeoclowning, lunging at people and threatening them, getting in their faces, touching, pushing, punching, leaping on cars and yelling threats. And swatting him was going to get the mob down on you. Because in the heat of that shit, he-said she-said, it’s mob tactics. And a coordinated mob has an advantage.

They were either going to intimidate him into compliance to let them continue burning things and antagonizing cops, beat him half to death and then make sure to arrange themselves so no one could identify the attackers if they could (and they have formation tactics for just this sort of guerilla violence shit)

youtube

You see how they arrange here? They put the face protestors up front; the elderly, the females, the soft targets that look good screaming out in pain against whatever brutes are attacking them. So no retaliation can come from melee range without the photo-ops later making the antagonized look like heartless brutes.

And then they get the black blocc fucks to do shit like beat people over the head with bike locks, in a kind of jack-in-the-box, before sneaking away.

4chan found this motherfucker and he turned out to be a PROFESSOR OF ETHICS AT BERKLEY. YES. THE FUCKING IRONY. A GOD DAMNED TENURED PROFESSOR AT A COLLEGE. ON ETHICS. Peek-a-booing out from behind women and elderly people walls to beat anybody they deem to be fair game over the head with improvised weapons.

Everything went wrong when they fucked with Kyle on every conceivable metric. And they’re trying so hard to find some corkboard connection to white supremacists groups or sentiments or motivations, and getting only reaches, every single time.

10 notes · View notes

antoine-roquentin · 3 years

Link

Fascism—a form of revolutionary conservation—gains force as a means to smash the workers movement, to crush communism. If today there is no fascism, it’s because there is also no communism. It’s for this basic reason that the analogies with Weimar are wide of the mark.

There are, of course, other authoritarian, conservative politics out there, but conservatism itself is historically weak. As Corey Robin has argued, the U.S. Republicans, for instance, only hold onto power through the Senate, Electoral College, and the courts—precisely those institutions that don’t rely on popular support. Liberalism is still majoritarian, and even as it has become more authoritarian. Populism is merely its ineffectual shadow.

So, why do we fantasize otherwise? The historian and author Barbara Tuchman coined an eponymous law that holds that “the fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold.” As Tuchman elaborates:

Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts…. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance…. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening—on a lucky day—without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena.

Perceptually ready to find disaster, we’ve been primed by cinema as much as history-writing and the news to expect emergencies to feel like, well, emergencies. The reality is that very serious and dangerous situations—war, for instance—are often boring for the participants. The much-prophesied global pandemic, now that it has arrived, hasn’t been permanent emergency but rather a lot of tedium and a steady wearing down of society. Nothing feels as real and immediate and urgent as we were told it would be. When does the real stuff start?

At a basic level, then, we should wonder if our favored fascist dystopia is not an attempt to make good on the projections of the culture industry, the reality of the contemporary emergency having failed to live up to its hyperreal expectations. The radical aspects of the Trump presidency were his tweeting and his grating bravado; the rest, continuity—the same deportations, tax cuts, and wars as before. To adapt our political views to Hollywood schemas, we choose to imagine that the mundane degradation of politics is actually fascism, or that the real fascism, the real disaster, the real dystopia, will emerge next time around.

However, it’s not simply that this fantasy is a function of the fact that we are all subjects of the culture industry; it’s also that the fantasy enables a certain kind of left cowardice in the guise of left bravery (antifascists out on the street punching Proud Boys). The leftist denunciation of the powers-that-be as “fascist” is ultimately complicit with the constitution of elite authority. When we rebel, we build up power as a substantial Other, and thereby infinitely postpone seizing authority for ourselves. As philosopher Todd McGowan has written, “rebels never have to see how their resistance manifests itself without what it resists. Rebellion provides the comfort of being on the outside while imagining that there is a substantial enemy on the other side.”

Fantasizing the fascist threat makes it feel like those in power are really wielding authority, rather than being the incompetent, self-contradictory forces they are. The reality of power today is a void of outsourced authority—outsourced to science, both physical and economic; to external enemies; to the objective necessities of globalization. Without our participation in sustaining the fantasy of substantial authority, we would all have to face the void: now what’s going to happen to us without the barbarians? The desired-for fascist dystopia is thus a kind of wish fulfillment: it allows us to imagine that someone might exercise a strong hand, that our world of drift and wearing-down will end, so that we can finally be confronted with our real reality—the naked exercise of power, not this simulacra.

The political right, it should be said, has its own versions of fascist fantasy. In the 2000s, it was “Islamofascism,” an idea as fraudulent as Trumpofascism. Today, the populist right conjures up “Cultural Marxism,” an unholy alliance of the Left and international capital. The “Great Reset”—an uninspired rebranding of “ethical capitalism” by the World Economic Forum, whose purpose is to provide legitimation for a stagnant capitalism—has been recast as a Bolshevik plot. Shit, they imagine, is getting real. The truth, of course, is that it’s all the same shit, just with different aesthetics. This is the secret of our contemporary political polarization: both populist reactionaries and liberal antifascists loudly shout about how everything is changing, when really we’re just getting the same slow decay.

Reaction has always thrived off lurid fantasies—this, for once, is a genuine continuity with fascism. But for the portion of the Left that participates in the fantasy of antifascism, it is self-sabotage. Elites are unfit to rule—we know this, and their response to the pandemic only confirms their incompetent authoritarianism—and yet we persist in imagining them to be domineering masters. In thinking of them as fascist strongmen rather than weak placeholders, the Left avoids its real task of filling the political void with a concrete, alternative program.

Rather than stoke fears about an imminent fascist takeover, we should accept that dystopia has already arrived. It is a low-intensity, mostly banal dystopia, but dystopia nonetheless. Images of emergency, immediacy, sudden action and tanks on the streets—these are fantasies used to cover over the much more mundane situation of diminished popular sovereignty. Worse, in fearing a fascism that doesn’t come, we make ourselves prey to other forces—both those that currently destitute democracy as well as those that may emerge.

When government becomes too intractable, when the continuing absence of popular sovereignty means that elite discipline and coherence ebbs away, the stage is set for a new character to bring order. This may be a sensible and self-composed figure who provides succor to all of those exhausted by an increasingly rancorous culture war. This non-partisan, charismatic figure would be parasitic on worn-down democratic institutions, on the feeling that, “if this is democracy, I don’t want it anymore.” For all of us accustomed to fantasizing about fascism—an act of abnegating our own authority—a 21st century Caesarism may prove seductive.

should be read in the context of AOC supporting pelosi against a candidate perceived to be worse, hakeem jeffries, and ending up with no committee posting as a result. would a progressive movement within the democratic party that championed hawkins over biden, ultimately causing biden to lose to trump, have more or less power than it does today?

65 notes · View notes

moonstarphoenix · 4 years

Note

Hi! I saw some of your tags about Steve and Peggy and I remember how angry I felt after Endgame and how it made me reconsider everything about their “relationship” and even Peggy and I was wondering what is your detailed opinion about her/ their relationship? I remember how I used to think she was this incredible female character, but now I realize it was mostly because the mcu lacked good female characters because looking back, there are some very questionable things about her.

Endgame has caused a lot of us to reconsider Peggy and the “relationship” with Steve. I honestly never gave much thought to her. She was in the first movie and then he moved to the future and she was a part of his past who had lived her life. An old friend he could reconnect with. Endgame, however, changed all of that.

Also, I apologize to my followers. This got long.

Peggy Carter is a very questionable, morally gray character. To me, it’s obvious that she held very little interest in Steve other than as a viable candidate for Project Rebirth until he became Chris Evans-sized. The little interest she shows at camp and in the car ride is because he is literally unlike any man she has ever likely encountered, like the guy she punched, who likely always objectified her. Her interest in Steve seems to stem from the fact what he can do for her career. This is a theme that carries on though not just TFA but through Agent Carter as well. The colors she wears in the iconic first season shot of blue dress and red hat, naming the whole organization SHIELD as a nod to Captain America. The rewriting in the radio program of what happened to Bucky suddenly becoming Betty Carver. It’s like a big red arrow saying “I knew Captain America (Captain America, not Steve Rogers). I was his one and only!”.

They don’t talk for months throughout TFA. Literal months. There’s nothing that shows us them getting to know one another, them writing letters, etc. It indicates they haven’t spoken in months by the time he shows up to entertain the troops. My good friend, @cosmicmechanism, did a timeline that shows how very little contact they actually had in the movie. [LINK] He’s off being the showpony, she’s doing whatever it is she is doing. Which is another issue. We are never actually told what they hell she does. Is she an agent for MI-5? Is she a spy? Is she a secretary? We never know, other than for no real reason, how/why she seems to be pulling a paycheck from the US Army and appears in meeting with high ranking army officials when she shouldn’t have been there. Had they kept her the Virginia heiress she is in the comics, her presence in the US Army would have made a little more sense.

The AC tv show presented a lot of problems in trying to elevate Peggy’s importance to Steve. She certainly wasn’t leading the Commandoes and wasn’t anywhere in the field with them, otherwise she would have been shown in the montage in TFA with them and she would have had a prominent part of that exhibit in TWS instead of a brief interview ABOUT STEVE RESCUING HER HUSBAND IN AZZANO.

Anyway, there’s also the way she acts with and around Steve. She stops the safer transport to Azzano to drop him off in a war zone with bombs actually going off around them. There would have been soldiers on the ground tracking Steve’s descent. He would have been easily captured. Then, there’s the red dress trope. The vixen appearing in a scene for no other reason than to seduce the hero from the other person in the scene, whether it’s a friend or other love interest. Even if you don’t ship Stucky, you can still read that scene as the seductress looking to come between two best friends. Plus, there was no reason for her to even come to the bar dressed like that. If she wanted to remind Steve of a meeting, she would have appeared in normal clothes.

And of course, we have the attempted murder scene. This is the scene that made so many, including me, not like Peggy Carter. That scene of Peggy shooting Steve behind is new shield is played for laughs and a moment to make seem badass but it’s toxic, violent, and downright abusive. She acts like she already had a claim on him. He was not hers. They weren’t dating in any way. And yet, her reaction to walking in on a free man kissing another woman was to shot him. In a closed environment with a big metal circle the only thing protecting him. She didn’t know that shield would protect him. She didn’t know those bullets wouldn’t ricochet. She could have easily killed Steve or any person in that room including Stark.

The next major grievance to me that they gloss over the fact that as a director of SHIELD, she would have had a hand in hiring Zola, the same Nazi scientist she knew had captured and tortured Bucky, the best friend of the man she supposedly loved, who she knew was HYDRA. She allowed him to continue his work, likely signed the paychecks that funded his continued experiments. She was a founder. She would have had a say. She would have been a part of that decision. That indicates something darker as well. Based on the fact that we saw Howard Stark call Zola Arnim, shows that they became close to him. And that hints that it is entirely possible that Stark and Carter knew about Bucky or at least the Winter Soldier program, which is human experimentation. That doesn’t look too well on MCU’s golden girl, does it?

If they had allowed her to be the morally grey character and actually showed Steve realizing that HYDRA had corrupted SHIELD from the beginning and she was involved in that, I think a lot of us could have come to terms with the character. It certainly would have been a better story and added layers upon both Steve and Peggy. Instead, they pushed this false ‘love of his life’ narrative and how she made him the mad he was for a woman he had kissed once, talked to maybe 4 times, and a relationship that likely wouldn’t have worked out due to a difference in morals and ethics.

Their relationship is a problem because we are never fully shown them developing that love. We get a few flirty glances, an attempted murder scene, a kiss in the middle of a mission, and a compass with a picture that Steve had obviously cut out himself. They could have had them exchange letters, had her send him a real pic, etc. Anything to show them getting to know each other. Instead, we get him staring at a compass that honestly would have been destroyed in the crash or would have been thrown from the window on impact. It shouldn’t have survived.

I do think you’re right, Anon. I think a lot of us thought she was an amazing, badass character because she was only one of three female main characters at the time. Until we are introduced to survivors Nebula and Gamora, and genius Shuri, and strong, beautiful Okoye and Nakia (true badasses all of them). And let’s face it, Hayley Atwell (a problematic woman in her own right) did a good job pushing Steggy and trying tot elevate Peggy’s importance to Steve as more than it really was and shown to be, also negating the whole reason Steve became Captain America, trying to enlist in the army 6 times and always fighting, and the relationships he had with Bucky and his mother, Sarah, pre-serum.

So I hope you enjoyed this reading! Thanks for the wonderful ask!

#Anonymous #answered ask #anti peggy carter #anti steggy #anti endgame #i'm so sorry this got so long #i keep trying to cut it down #but i talk alot #and can't ever seem to edit things down #anti hayley atwell

235 notes · View notes

greengay · 3 years

Text

i think it’s also like.......since they are KIDS who are still discovering their sexuality.........obviously some mature later than others..........and they feel maybe bad? for not ya know.......being as sexually open as an ADULT.......and they take their shame and try to make it normal? like HOW DARE you experience attraction you FREAK.......and that’s a factor in how this sort of purity culture or whatever has sort of come to be

(i think it’s also, like.....a sort of psy-op thing.....COMING FROM SOMEONE WHO WAS 17 and told people it was IMMORAL to ship anything from bbc sherlock besides johnlock lmfao.....i didn’t care abt the “morality” i just wanted johnlock supremacy.......but like we had all convinced ourselves it was out of ETHICS LOL)

i think it’s also the opposite too......like maybe they’re in an awkward age where sexual attraction feels scary and uncomfortable and their younger friends who...experience it even less are like.....wtf? you think xyz is HOT? EW he’s like a father figure to me etc. and then they feel shamed for HAVING sexual attraction, and we all know the ppl who are vocally against smth usually feel guilty abt it to an extent

(like......the ppl who are like PUNCH A NAZI IN THE FACE!!!!!!! uwu!!! are usually guilty white suburban kids who don’t face those kinda hardships........or like ppl who are “anti-shipping/anti-rpf” are literally.....writing rpf.........or ya know ppl who hate fat ppl the most are ppl who are insecure abt their own bodies etc.)

idk fandom used to be a mostly Adult™ space (at least like mainly 17-25ish) because those were the ppl who had access to the family computer, and that’s why there wasn’t as much insane drama cos these ppl had their prefrontal cortex more developed

what’s the solution????? should we....separate kids/adults? then that’s just like......an easily defined pool for predators to choose from..........also some younger ppl are just.......more mature (not in a “you’re so mature for your age” kind of way, but like......some ppl can just absorb things better and interact w adults in a not-weird way)

it also depends on the fandom? like for mcr and green day, at least........these are unmistakably sexual bands.......gerard and billie joe jerk off on stage, they’re not catering to 14 year olds.............same with hannibal.....it’s a show abt a dude who eats ppl........it’s geared more towards adults..........but for like steven universe or she-ra.........younger ppl should “be in charge” so to speak?

so yeah i guess the demographic that the interest is aimed towards should have more sway in fandom? what do we think

26 notes · View notes

zorilleerrant · 3 years

Text

Scenes from Earth 420 (a batfam fic I’m working on)

Bruce: And he said, ‘who are you’ and I said, ‘I’m the goddamn Batman.’

Casey: Wait…you’re…Batman?

Ollie: …

Tony: …

Lex: …

Van (laughing): Brucie, Batman? No, he’s, no, we’re just the world’s hugest Batfans, I have, do you know I have three of the old Batsuits? Brucie got them signed for me.

Bruce: Yeah, I’m not Batman.

Van: He just likes Batman.

Bruce: Yeah. What he said. I just like Batman.

Van: A little too much, if you ask me. I mean, this is, we are talking about a guy who, you know, punches clowns for a living.

Bruce: Someone’s got to clean up Gotham’s clown problem.

Tony: For…for a living….

Lex: To be fair to Bruce, he doesn’t just punch clowns.

Ollie: In the major teamups, we mostly fight aliens.

Tony: In the major major teamups, we mostly fight Nazis.

Lex: And that one time, he fought the school board over giving Jason a suspension.

Bruce: That wasn’t fair. I wanted to kill his math teacher, too.

Tony: Did you tell him that?

Bruce: I did tell him that, yeah.

Van: Aw, Brucie, you can’t be telling math teachers you want to kill them. I mean, I get it, but, babe, that’s not the way. Now, what I would do –

Bruce: Yeah, we get it, you’d bribe them.

Tony: I’d bribe them, too.

Ollie: Don’t act like you’re above bribery, Bruce.

Bruce: I did bribe them. Eventually.

Lex: I’d send drones to their houses with polite notes, for the implicit threat.

Tony: Aw, I want to change my answer.

Casey: I’d break into their house and start slightly rearranging the furniture, then leaving little notes in their handwriting about what a terrible error they’d made, and writing things backwards on the mirror and stuff. Then making ghost noises. And start drugging their water so they’d get paranoid and prone to believing you when you whisper how they’ve wrong Jason into their ears so they reverse their decision.

Tony: I want to change my answer again.

Casey: As an educator, though, I would prefer the bribe.

Bruce: Yeah, I’ll start with the bribe, next time.

...

Bruce: I really hope that’s all of them. I said I’d get Wednesday home by 8.

Dick: Wait, Wednesday?

Wednesday: Dinah won’t be Robin, anymore. She says she will choose only to honor her mother from this point on, and I support her.

Dick: By refusing to help us?

Bruce: She’s working on a science project, it’s fine. Homework first.

Wednesday: She isn’t refusing to help. She simply wants to help with the mantle most suited to her legacy. And not to erase her metahuman heritage. A worthy goal, I think.

Dick: Right. But not you. You’re okay erasing your metahuman heritage and, uh, implicitly dishonoring your mother, I guess?

Wednesday: I’m going through a teenage rebellion.

Dick: As Robin.

Bruce: Don’t judge her. You did the same thing.

...

Bruce: Shouldn’t you be doing something more. Computery.

Barbara: Why? I already know too much about computers.

Helena (eating popcorn): We have this theory that it’s not just metahumans running around, but we need access to labs to test that.

Bruce: So use my labs, Helena, I told you, mi casa whatever the fuck.

Helena: Thank you, but I’m a strong, independent woman with no need for any kind of Batlab whatsoever. I do my own work with my own bootstraps.

Bruce: Oh shit. I’m a terrible dad. I’m sorry, Helena, I didn’t mean –

Barbara: She’s joking. We need access to peer review.

Bruce: By. By the fish?

Helena (throwing popcorn): By the fish scientists, Bruce.

Bruce: Oh, thank god, that makes more sense.

Barbara: Anyway, my latest line of research is into clownfish symbiosis. There’s actually a lot of promising genetic connections.

Bruce: Clownfish are metahumans? Like. Nemos.

Helena (laughing): Don’t bother, Babs, he’s not going to get it.

Barbara: I can give you my latest paper if you want.

Bruce: Oh. Uh. Interesting.

Barbara (also laughing): You could ask Lex for the highlights. He read it. And enjoyed it.

Bruce: Right, right. So. Uh. Koi.

Helena: Koi are not metahumans, Bruce.

Barbara: Was that really a concern.

Bruce: Cats, dogs? Horses? What are the ethical implications, here. Should I worry?

Barbara: We’re finding out about potential mutations, Bruce, it’s not suddenly going to make dogs hyperintelligent or anything.

Bruce: Ace will find that very relieving, thank you.

Helena: And don’t worry! If any of the clownfish decide to be supervillains, I’ll fight them for you, I promise.

Bruce: Thank you, Helena. I didn’t want to say anything.

...

Bruce: Dick!

Dick: Hi, Bruce. Hi, um. We haven’t been introduced, I think.

Bruce: What? This is Halvy. You love Halvy.

Dick: Who the fuck is Halvy*, Bruce. No offense, Halvy.

Halvy: No, that’s fair.

Bruce: You know! With the koi pond?

Dick: The koi – from the youtube videos? You brought the guy from the youtube videos to visit me at school, Bruce?

Bruce: Well, yeah. Halvy’s my best friend.

Dick: Since when??

Bruce: I don’t know. Two. Three months, now? Three months? How long we been building the koi pond Halvy?

Halvy: A year and a half, if you include when I dug the hole.

Dick: Wait, you’re building the pond? Those are. Those are your videos.

Bruce: Yeah? Me and Lex and Halvy. Didn’t you watch the videos.

Dick: Look, if you’d told me this was your project…

Bruce: You didn’t watch them. You just pretended to watch them. To patronize me.

Dick: I have a lot going on, Bruce.

Bruce: Helena watched them. Helena’s a better son than you.

Dick: Yes, but Helena - Wait. Is this the guy that kidnapped me that one time?

Bruce: He didn’t kidnap you. We had a lovely dinner. That’s not kidnapping.

Halvy: Well, to be fair to me, I did mean to kidnap him, but I forgot to buy rope.

Dick: Oh my god! It is you!

Bruce: He fed both of us, and the food was actually decent, and not even poisoned. You act like you’ve never been kidnapped, Dick. He even gave you wine.

Dick: I had a French test!

Bruce: You already speak French, Dick, I don’t see the problem.

Dick: He threatened me at gunpoint! And now you’re building koi ponds with him!

Bruce: He’s reformed.

Halvy: It’s really just the one koi pond.

Bruce: See? Nothing to worry about.

*Halvy is an alternate universe version of Two Face not originally from Earth 420, but transported there some years ago, replacing that world’s original. He does have a fairly elaborate backstory but it’s not relevant here.

...

Bruce: For the last time, Damian, no, you cannot murder Richie Rich and replace him with a dinosaur.

#batman #look i said something #long post #my writing #zorille's earth 420

1 note · View note

serendipitous-magic · 3 years

Note

a pro-shipper is someone who believes that any ship is okay because “fiction doesn’t affect reality” (including sensitive topics) and that there should be no “fandom police” telling them that it’s wrong. idk your last reblog had me a bit confused

I’ve never heard that phrase used before. No, I wouldn’t sort myself into that particular camp. However, I think the internet gets WAY too polarized about these things. Should people be romanticizing abuse or abusive relationships of any type? No, absolutely not. Ive always believed that fiction has a huge impact on reality (I’ve made posts about it before, but I’m on mobile rn so I’m too lazy to go find and link them), and the more people romanticize abuse in fiction, the more socially accepted it’s gonna become in real life. (See: all the studies about some of the the horrific effects of violent porn.)

However, I think the internet has somewhat lost its ability to differentiate between portraying something in order to explore or reflect upon a dark topic, and romanticizing or condoning that thing. Note how I said up there that people absolutely should not romanticize abuse. But if nobody ever made any kind of art or fiction that portrayed abuse, or any other kind of evil, how would we as individuals and as a society ever process, understand, or make progress? If we Disney-fy and bowdlerize every single thing, we will be an emotionally, morally, and philosophically stunted people.

I was actually just talking about this with a friend, perhaps I put it better there:

“Plus, people have this really weird assumption that portraying something in art in the same thing as.... doing it in actual real life? Which is absolutely ridiculous, not to mention damaging, because art and fiction have always been so much about exploring themes and thoughts and whatnot, and if you say "you must ONLY EVER explore MORALLY PURE things in fiction and never stray into dark or immoral subject matter!!!" ... that limits human thought and philosophy and morality SO MUCH.”

So, to address your ask:

“any ship is okay” nah, not exactly. I don’t support condoning, encouraging, or romanticizing abuse. (And to reference the post that started this, which I might link later when I’m not on mobile, “abuse” here of COURSE includes child abuse.) However, the internet really has to learn that portraying something is not tantamount to supporting or condoning it. If we were only ever allowed to make art about the things we supported or actually partook in, Agatha Christie would be the most accomplished serial killer of all time.

“There should be no fandom police” Actually yeah, I agree. Discussion board moderators and the like, for self contained fandom communities where there are built in guidelines? Yeah, sure. But fandom is a Wild West of art, fiction, and self expression. It’s a sandbox, as people have often described it. I’ll reference that earlier post again and say that if a fan feels that they need their hand held online, and they can’t blacklist tags, block content they don’t want to see, and manage their own fandom experience, then they’re probably too young to be unsupervised online. Again: this is not saying that “oh nazis are allowed to exist, just block them! :)” no. Obviously that’s different. But I think “fandom police” are entirely unnecessary. In my experience, such “police” operate very much like police in the real world: they don’t really make anything safer, they just harass people who are minding their own business.

Also, I don’t think people need “fandom police” to tell them what’s right or wrong. That’s just... I don’t want to be mean here, but that’s ridiculous. For one thing, if a fan genuinely needs a random internet stranger to come in and tell them “that’s morally wrong” in order to navigate morality, that fan is WAY too young to be unsupervised on the internet. For another thing, the idea that somebody (or multiple somebodies) should be tasked with going around decreeing moral value on various fandom trends and topics is just plain impractical. Who’s to say that person or those people are pure bastions of morality? It just doesn’t work that way.

Now, should people have constructive conversations about morality and ethics and philosophy, in and out of a fandom setting? Yes. Duh. That’s the only way human beings made it past the Paleolithic era as a species. And (again, because I feel like people are going to willfully misinterpret this), I’m not saying “oh absolutely any kind of behavior and any message and anything is fine because we all have different opinions uwu.” See the first paragraph. Punch Nazis, eat the rich, and spit in the face of racists, homophobes, and misogynists.

I’ll quote my conversation with a friend again because I feel like it really wraps up my thoughts here:

“Yeah the internet has really ruined the term "problematic." Nazis are problematic. Writing about nazis to explore themes of morality isn't problematic, it's a reflection on and exploration of morality and history. And people don't seem to be able to see the difference between those two things”

And finally, I really don’t see how “it’s your own responsibility to curate your fandom experience and filter out the things that make you uncomfortable; it’s everyone’s responsibility to properly tag and label content so it can be filtered and curated. It is not everyone else’s responsibility to restrict their art to your personal tastes.” ... is somehow equal to “everything is allowed and there are no moral restrictions or ethical code on the internet.” That’s a bit of a leap there.

5 notes · View notes

tanadrin · 5 years

Text

Was listening to “What a Hell of a Way to Die,” a podcast about war and the U.S. military, which has an interesting episode on pacifism and how it’s usually understood politically and culturally. Along with anarchism, staunch support for the concept of pacifism is one of the pillars of my worldview that’s definitely become more... complicated as I get older. It’s hard to argue, in the face of certain historical (or even contemporary!) events, that pacifism especially in more absolutist forms is always the most moral course of action, and there’s this common retort to people articulating a pacifist position, or even who are suspected of holding such a position, that involves weaving a counterfactual in which you have no choice but to commit violence.

But, as their guest points out, that’s true of any ethically monstrous act. It’s always possible to come up with a sufficiently contorted thought experiment that will get you to the answer you want--that doesn’t mean the thought experiment is in fact correct, or even useful. And what starting from a position of committed pacifism does is it forces the consideration of options other than violence. Because once it’s available as a solution, violence is a really tempting tool. But that it is so tempting, so emotionally satisfying to articulate, should make it suspect--besides the fact that it so rarely turns out as neatly and cleanly in your favor as one would expect--and maybe it’s good that the episode I listened to right before this was about Afghanistan, and how the current moral dilemma there is “prolong a government whose existence is being propped up by the US, and thus the civil war against that government, which is killing tons of people, mostly native Afghans, or withdraw and probably let the Taliban take over again.” Like, there’s no good option there--but what is the solution? To keep killing people and hope a good option eventually appears that makes all those deaths worth it?

Violence is baked deeply into the human psyche, and deeply into the American political psyche more than anything. A generation of action movies and Tough Guys Who Get Things Done and a narrative of American supremacy under which perceived national humiliation was intolerables, I am convinced, a major reason why the response to 9/11 was to invade Afghanistan in the first place (with the fig leaf of an absurd ultimatum beforehand). It has made admitting that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (by any reasonable measures boondoggles and failures and astonishing wastes of resources and human life) were mistakes essentially impossible. Even if in theory a moral case can be made for violence under highly contingent circumstances (just as it can be for murder or cannibalism or burning the Mona Lisa) doesn’t mean we should have anything like the rapid recourse to it that we do in our political discourse. And maybe the only way to make that case is to articulate a vision of what is possible if you do start from the heuristic of strong pacifism.

The classic argument is, as the podcast discusses, well, what about the Nazis? What about Hitler? What about World War 2? Was pacifism a good or moral idea in 1941? Essentially, they point out, you ought to reject the premise--because while pacifism might have been of very little use in 1941, Hitler did not appear ex nihilo that year, and there are absolutely points in 1939, in 1933, in 1923, or earlier, when an approach other than “threaten our enemies with violence” might have resulted in a very different outcome for Germany in the 1940s.

This is, I think, something it’s super popular, even (especially?) on the left right now to ding liberals and centrists for. “They don’t even think it’s OK to punch Nazis! What a bunch of apologists for fascism!” The common centrist defenses of nonviolence--”civility” and “marketplace of ideas” and “not liking what someone says, but they have a right to say it” get sneered at, and yeah, I’m not gonna lie, I find the platitudes wear pretty thin pretty fast. But that doesn’t mean they’re wrong, it doesn’t mean that the observation that a quick recourse to violence, while emotionally satisfying, is never as effective as its proponents would like you to think. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t other ways to respond to violence and hatred and authoritarianism that are impossible to consider so long as physical violence is considered an appropriate and easy reply. And this goes doubly for international relations, where the temptation of a quick drone strike or a missile strike versus the political considerations of sending in troops versus the political cost of doing nothing makes the choice even more stark.

I guess all that is a preamble to me shrugging and saying--yeah, I don’t know if pacifism is always the morally correct stance. I think pacifists can reasonably and correctly make a choice not to answer violence with violence in defense of themselves--but I don’t know if they can demand others do that, too, or passively permit violence against other people. That doesn’t sit well with me. But I do think that as a moral heuristic, pacifism is probably a very good one, one that does not get nearly enough credit, and I do think the failure to give it serious weight, to refuse to consider any pacifist a Truly Serious Person, the eager willingness to bite the bullet (ha ho) of violence (despite that being the default political position of 99.9% of humanity throughout its entire history, and so not much of a bullet!) usually means violence becomes the first option rather than the last, and we cannot begin to understand just how much we impoverish our politics and our world by refusing to reject true compassion as a “realistic” option.

#i should note #that as conflicted as i am #i probably could never honestly describe myself as anything *other* than a pacifist

171 notes · View notes

catbountry · 7 years

Text

How to Become an Un-Person, or We Are Already Divided and You’re the Ones Doing It

Jontron hopped in on a livestream with noted pro-GGer and social justice critc Sargon of Akkad recently, and if you believe Tumblr and Twitter he pretty much admitted to being a Nazi, which I suppose makes it acceptable to punch him in the face, or so I’m told. You can listen to it yourself (it’s fucking five hours long, though), but in it, as expected, it’s being quote-mined for the most incriminating shit he says, while the overall message is being completely ignored, ‘cause the people most upset about it don’t want you to hear it: that is, you have three dudes who were once potential allies and formerly fairly progressive themselves admitting to being actively driven away from the Left due to the Left’s poor behavior. They also identified identity politics as being a catalyst for the resurgence of white nationalism on a broader scale and basically expressed feelings of being disenfranchised and alienated.

The broader point is that Jontron knew that his expressing his views would get him crucified by the new Left, and whaddya know, he was right!

Now, I could go over all the things he said I personally disagreed with, found to be ill-informed or ignorant, or whatever. But that’s not really the point. The point is that he expressed his views despite being more than a little terrified of the backlash he might receive. And his views are pretty moderate by most standards. Some of them wouldn’t even jibe with what most people consider left-wing. But for disagreeing at all, for going against the narrative, he has found himself what Izzy might call “un-personed,” but I think is more akin to shunning, or being labeled as a dissident. It’s a big ole’ Scarlet Letter passed around a community as a way of saying, “do not engage this person. Shun them. Reject them socially, as they do not follow the accepted rules. They have crossed a line, and must be punished until they repent.”

One of the other points made in the stream was criticism of the dogmatic nature of internet social justice and the new Left. If you’re wondering why so many atheists seem put off by social justice, it’s because the movement has been co-opted by people who treat its principles the same way they treat religious texts. I can say that for me, growing up Catholic, the idea that white people are inherently racist (or men are inherently sexist) is far too close to the idea of Original Sin, which is the root of all Catholic Guilt. It’s little wonder, as Jontron points out, that by grouping white men together and antagonizing them, that a few of them got pissed off enough and now this generations youth is more conservative than any generation before it. Oh yeah, and Neo-Nazis are back.

All of this happens less than a day after I basically got shouted down by a co-worker for thinking that punching Nazis is not a good idea and won’t fix anything, but instead will more likely escalate violence.

This happened on our lunch break. I’d discussed politics with this guy before and was able to disagree politely on a number of subjects, but when I expressed disapproval for the use of violence against abhorrent speech, my previously mild-mannered co-worker, a dude who looks like hipster Jesus, went fucking livid. At one point he shoved a poorly-drawn meme in my face in lieu of an argument, demanding me to “READ IT!” while shoving his phone in my face. When I pulled up a post on Popehat that better stated my own argument, he scrolled through it quickly, barely reading it. When I argued the legality, he shouted “THE HOLOCAUST WAS LEGAL! SLAVERY WAS LEGAL!” to the point where I felt like I was in a plebcomics strip. When he kept talking over me, I quipped at him to “quit mansplaining me” as a way to break the tension, but that just set him off further. As his anger escalated, he threw everything he could at me; guilt-tripping, name calling, putting words in my mouth, turning ME into a strawman by not listening to my arguments, and even used Captain America and my love of punk rock against me as a means of emotional blackmail. When I finally said that he was scaring me and acting way too violent, he said “OH, BUT I THOUGHT EXPRESSING IDEAS WASN’T VIOLENCE!”, throwing an earlier point I made back in my face. There were others in the room, mostly women, and it took my one co-worker, a gay, black man, to try and get us to calm down. I tried, feebly, to apologize, to recognize he felt passionately but that I would not change my mind and I merely wanted it to be understood where I was coming from (mostly that I don’t want to be a hypocrite; if we’re allowed to punch somebody because we feel their ideas put us in danger, then that will have to apply to those we disagree with), he shot back at me bitterly, accusing me of being a hypocrite myself. Eventually I walked out. I had co-workers trying to re-assure me that things got heated, that these are uncertain times, everybody’s tense right now, and it’s not like I’m pro-Trump anyway.

But to hipster Jesus, I might as well have been a swastika-branded Nazi reciting the 14 words and Hitler saluting.

The next day we didn’t really talk or make eye contact. I found myself wondering if he hated me; if I’d been branded an un-person. But I also was too afraid to say anything, for fear of provoking him again. I became so sick with worry I ended up having to go home early after throwing up for three minutes in the women’s restroom. I expressed this concern to my manager, who said that for now, at least, this is between us, but if it gets worse, he will have to sit both of us down and have a talk. So long as it’s not interfering with our work, he says.

I’m terribly afraid that if this is going to be resolved, if I’m to be un-un-personed, I’m going to have to apologize for... well, I guess engaging him at all. Part of the reason I was so caught off-guard was because we’d disagreed before, and walked away with polite disagreement. This was unprecedented. I really don’t know what’s going to happen from here on in.

So when Jontron said he got the chills seeing the reaction to Richard Spencer getting punched in the face, I, too, felt a chill. Because the problem with saying that punching Nazis is okay is that the very same people who say this are also prone to calling people who they disagree with Nazis, regardless of whether they are or aren’t. So many years of crying wolf over “fascism” has left me numb. Oh, is it fascism now? What about those other times before when you said it was fascism? Oh, but it’s for REAL now? Well, do you really expect me to believe you NOW?

But on top of all that, was hipster Jesus barely holding himself back from punching ME in the face?

Personally, I find using violence to silence those that have opinions you find objectionable, even if those opinions are already horrible, is more akin to fascism, really. But I suppose this is to be expected from self-professed communists. Communism, which wound up with a higher body count than National Socialism ever did.

I discussed this with Izzy, and he told me this, in regards to his own beliefs that punching Nazis won’t work: that as a Jew, he’s equally as fearful of the far Left as he is of the far Right, because whenever either one takes power, he said, it always seems to end up with dead Jews.

I can’t blame him at all for feeling wary that the people who stay silent about Jews being attacked by leftists on campuses are suddenly bragging about how they are championing the Jews.

So pardon me if I’m feeling more than a little disgusted with the people whose side I’m supposed to be on.

#not fan fiction #the Ethics of Punching Nazis in the Face

738 notes · View notes

ask-lady-shiva · 4 years

Note

jewish people 🤝 witches 🤝 hellenic polytheists: nazis deserve to get beat. (and we will beat them ourselves)

Really you'd think people would recognize that hey, this group calling for a white ethno state and the violent removal of people they don't like based on things they cant control like their race/ethnicity/gender identity/sexual orientation is a BAD thing. But with a president that empowers and validates them people genuinely sit there and want to play devils advocate for them.

Let me be clear. There is no debating with a Nazi. There is no negotiating with a Nazi. When their ideology is that there are certain groups of people that should not be alive and free, any middle ground reached neccesarily compromises morals and ethics. Fuck them up and punch em in the face.

#asks #lys #tw politics #tw nazi #tw violence #tw trump

6 notes · View notes

utterimmolation · 4 years

Text

AC: Syndicate/Captain America Drabble

He's a scrawny thing as they grow up. A heart full of courage and lungs barely strong enough to keep him going. Full of righteous fury and desperation, born of a premature birth and his father's distance.

"Fool," his sister murmurs, dabbing at his bloody lip and swollen eyes, souvenirs from yet another fight in another alley, goaded by another taunt. The light is dim, the stove barely works enough to heat the warm, medicinal milk she presses into his bruised, skinny hands, hand so like her own, yet far weaker.

On his worst days, he resents her healthy body. They were born at the same time, but she'd come first, perfectly healthy.

He came next, nearly dead and stealing his mother's life in a twisted exchange.

she is his twin though and no matter how much shakes her head clucks tongue at him full of that same righteous fury all who have been cast aside have. a woman in man world.> Look down at her at your peril, because her stringent refusal to exchange her pants for skirts mean she has a greater range of movement to kick you in the gnads and clock you in the face.

-----

Their father dies in the first war. Sort of.

He came home yes, but his mind, his soul had died, trampled in the trenches.

He doesn't drink, doesn't rage and rave like some other veterans do in the streets. He becomes quieter and quieter, and every tightening coil of rage and pain until he pops.

Jacob wonders if he was worse before they came to live with him in his small flat.

(Years, decades later, he discovers that yes, he was worse, and for all his faults, he was still just a man. A man who sent his children away, knowing he was a ticking bomb, knowing how volatile he could become, living in a neverending nightmare. A man, who tried to protect his children by sending them to his late wife's elderly parents, who sent money and medicine to try to prolong his in-laws lives.

A father who, when he could no longer deny the truth, fought his demons for the chance, for the right, to raise his children, and when he was on the brink of becoming them, fled, knowing they would chase him and leave those he loved safer.

Jacob Frye reads his father's letters and diaries, and finally, finally begins to forgive. He has too much regret already.)

Usually this rage will be released in an abrupt hurling of a book or a mug at a wall. Other times, is the sudden tightness of his voice as he excuses himself from the table, strides into his room, closes the door and punches the brick wall by his bed for hours. Occasionally it's him staying in bed for days on end, further stressing his poor daughter, who does what respectable jobs she can from sympathetic neighbors in order to try to keep both men in her life alive.

The final time Jacob ever sees it happen is the final time he sees his father.

He's taking out his temper, his inextinguishable rage from constantly being bedridden on his father. He's yelling himself hoarse, his beleaguered lungs straining more and more to provide his thin blood with oxygen and his father is winding up, tighter and tighter and he's ignoring the signs and--

Suddenly, Evie is on the floor, a large bruise already appearing on her face.

The room is silent. Ethan Frye's blank eyes begin to clear and slowly fill with horror as he looks from his hand to his daughter slowly getting up (never staying down, never), keeping herself between her other half and her sire.

Their father doesn't say a word. He slowly turns, shakily gathers his coat, his wallet and a bag, that he fills with a few clothes. He picks up his hat and slowly lurches out the door.

It closes with a quiet, definitive click.

-----

The twins are twenty years old and war has broken out once again.

The country is still raw from the last war. Buildings are still settling into their rebuilt frames and new brickwork to replace the ones that had lasted centuries, only to be blown to bits by falling bombs.

"I've been drafted," Evie breathed in his ear as they lay on next to each other on his ratty bed, listening to their neighbor's radio playing the latest patriotic tune hailing King and Country.

"...what?"

"Of a sort," she murmurs. "There was a woman at the library, a regular. It turns out she's been watching me for weeks. Said I make a good fit for British Intelligence." She smiles wryly. "Apparently the noble folk call it the 'Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare', so it's perfect for a woman."

Jacob laughs so hard he causes himself a coughing fit.

-----

Her being a woman is not the reason he stands in line at the draft office, clutching his papers. Evie can protect herself. But he can't stay in bed whilst there's the chance they send his other half (his better half, Evie would snark) somewhere that he can't follow.

They were meant to be side by side, forever. Poverty and sickness had never stopped them. The Frye Twins were indomitable together, be that scrapping up money or fighting whatever group of dog-kicking fools had earned Jacob's ire.

They deny him, of course. Even in a country seemingly determined to grab every warm body, they won't take his.

So he tries again. And again.

Evie knows of course. She doesn't approve. But she knows him like she knows herself and knows he needs this--she won't stop him.

-----

"Why do you try so hard to fight?" An old man with a German accent asks him after he's been scolded and threatened by yet another draft officer and been kicked out to the mocking chuckles and pitying looks of other, stronger men.

How can he explain the crushing fear of loneliness looming in the distance, the horror of a life of possible solitude when he's never been alone since conception? The fear that his twin may not come back, or worse, come back the same way their father did? The anger at his helplessness, the pride he feels for his sister, the longing for a destiny that he knows is greater than the one he forsees?

"Someone has to," is what he goes with instead.

The old man smiles.

-----

What Erkstine describes is fantastical, impossible, ridiculous and possibly deadly.

Jacob is immediately on board.

"This will hurt," Erkstine warns as they strap him into the coffin-like machine and eject him with pale blue chemicals.

-----

It really, really, really bloody hurts.

-----

He emerges a head taller than his twin and rippling with muscle. Men feel his chiseled chest and bulging biceps, murmuring to each other in awe.

She pushes her way to the front, ignoring caustic glares at her audacity. She clasps his arm and smirks mischievously. "Looks like you hit a growth spurt, brother."

His straightened and dazzling new teeth gleam in the spotlights of the lab. "Jealous, sister?"

"Hardly," she scoffs, trying to cover the glimmer of tears welling in her eyes at the sight of her healthy, happy alive sibling. "Muscles wither, dear brother, but I was still first."

"By four minutes! That doesn't even--"

Gunshots ring out.

-----

Erskine is dead, the formula to creating a thousand great knights is lost with him.

The higher-ups are furious. They debate his fate in front of him, acting as if he isn't even there. To him, he is a low-blood expensive pet project that they can never recreate. He has little to no formal training, comes from Whitechapel, of all places...he is socially worthless.

-----

On one hand, they give him a knighthood for his service to the Empire--Good job they seem to say. You didn't die the ethically dubious dangerous experiment in service to the country.

On the other hand, they dress him up in a cheap costume designed to look like a modern day knight, color it red, white and blue, and use him as a propaganda symbol. Sir Britain they call him, putting his cowled face on posters encouraging people to buy war bonds and sign up for service. He stars in commercials, gives pre-written speeches on the radio.

He hates it. He hates it even more when they fly him out near the front and have him pose with real troops, like his very presence will help fill empty stomachs and block bullets.

It's on one of these trips near occupied Poland that he hears more about the about the mysterious Hydra group, who murdered Erkstine, who controls the Nazis. He hears about whispers of another group that controls even them, one centuries old. He hears about how an entire regiment is captured by Nazis wielding futuristic, Asimov weapons.

He hears about the three ESO agents were with the regiment and how while one was found dead, the other two, a Polish man and an English woman, are missing, presumably captured.

He demands to know the woman's name, feeling the twisting in his gut that already knows. They hem and haw before they finally admit her identity.

Evie Frye.

-----

He doesn't know how to fly a plane.

Luckily, the angry Scottish mechanic, fired for having dared point out the head engineer was letting shoddy work go through, for speaking up despite being a woman, does.

"Names Agnes Macbean," she yells over the racket of the old two-seater's engine. "Ain't this a way to go out, eh? Sticking it to the Nazis!"

-----

It is embarrassingly easy to sneak into the Hydra base. He's so much faster and stronger than the average man now, and the brass knuckles certainly help.

Most of the men he finds imprisoned but Evie isn't with them.

Instead, he finds her in a lab straight out of a pulp novel, full of blinking lights and needles with strange chemicals.

(Nazis and military officers would say they decided to experiment with a version of the serum on her because it worked so well on Jacob, and genetically speaking, there was no one on earth as similar to him than his twin.

Jacob and the men who were imprisoned would say they used her first because it was she who rallied them into rousing chants of defiance, who, when backhanded by a sneering soldier, proceeded to blind him with her own spit blood, knee him in the groin, and headbutt him unconscious.)

She's only half-conscious when he pulls her from the chair, but she's still a crack shot and able to hold her own beside him as they fight through soldiers, elites, and a strange, powerful Hydra officer known only as Roth.

-----

Afterwards, the higher-ups give him training and his own elite squad. It's as much a punishment as it is a reward: he's no expert fighter, and his what he's allowed to pick isn't what's considered the cream of the crop.

To him, it's perfect.

He gets three ESO agents: Evie and two men: one, a Ned Wynert, is rumored to have run a corner of England's black market prior to the war breaking out. The other, Robert Topping is a fast-talking former bookie and carnie, with a penchant for ridiculous hats and getting through nearly any lock.

Agnes is brought on as the team's engineer and mother hen and she quickly gains some assistants in the form of former street urchins: a clumsy lad named Nigel and a sly, cunning young code-cracker named Clara.

They get a discharged soldier named Abberline, who is as honorable as he is resilient. A couple of brothers, Billy and Dennis Strum, children of Jamaican immigrants and expert riflemen. Durand Boucher, a beast of a Frenchman with delicate fingers and talent for explosions.

They're the diamonds in the rough, the unappreciated and overlooked. Some, jokingly, mockingly, call them the Knights of the Crooked Table.

Jacob Frye, Sir Britain himself, calls them his Rooks, to his sister's audible dismay.

Mission after mission, fight after fight, the Rooks succeed. Bases are raised, no-man lands taken. Sir Britain is a whirlwind on the battlegrounds, wielding pistols and knuckles, his arms covered in gauntlets made with a rare, unbreakable metal and painted with the flag of the Motherland. Evie is at his back, sometimes with her own pistol and throwing knives, other times crouched in a tree for days on end, guiding and clearing the way with her sniper rifle. Robert wears such bright clothing that he's practically invisible when he forgives them to sneak into enemy territory, Ned is able to self-talk and turn many a soldier with the promise of money for intelligence. Agnes can turn even military rations palatable, and hotwire Nazi trucks with a speed the belies her large frame. The brothers are crack shots at impossible distances, Durand, capable of turning nearly anything into a bomb. Abberline is a long-suffering sort who gets along swell with Evie, and has a poorly hidden soft-spot for Clara and Nigel.

They are an unstoppable team.

But Hydra grows ever more powerful. A man by the name Red Skull looms like a spector, guiding the war like one would a chess match. The elites of Nazi appear with incredible armor and weapon that are difficult to defeat, nearly impossible to reverse engineer, and glow an insidious gold.

Jacob is grim, but he isn't worried. He has his team, he has his fists. He has his twin. Everything else can be overcome.

-----

And then...there's the train.

The Hydra weapons. The elite soldiers guarding the dangerous cargo. Him nearly getting killed, only to be saved as Evie fires with unerring accuracy.

The golden beam nearly tearing the train in two, the force sending his sister tumbling out.

Trying to reach for her, straining as she dangles from the side of the train over the mountain pass--

The snap as the bar gives way.

And the sight of his sister, his twin, his other half, tumbling like an errant leaf into the snow, hundreds of feet below, becoming nothing more than a black dot, then disappearing altogether, like she never existed.

He doesn't remember if he screamed her name. He probably did.

(Honestly, he had probably stood there gaping in horror instead of doing something, instead of lunging after her, following after like he'd done all their lives. Like he should have done. Like it was supposed to be.

He thinks this because there are many moments where he should have said something, where he wants to scream...and doesn't, too overwhelmed, too broken:

The first time he woke up in a new century, taken from his frozen coffin by a mysterious Brotherhood.

The first time he realizes that everyone he knows is dead.

The time when he goes to the British History Museum and discovers monuments and exhibits to him...and only him. His friends, his family, his Rooks, his sister...regulated to footnotes.

And of course the moment that he fights a deadly assassin on a rooftop in the dead of night, one who killed a member of the Brotherhood he will call his own. An assassin just as strong and as fast as he. An assassin who goes by many monikers the world over, the bogeywoman of the Creed:

The Creed Killer. The Winter Huntress.

Well, no. That's a lie. He does say something.

In that moment where he fights this impossibly skilled assassin of assassins, when he struggles against the strength and tricks contained within her left, silver arm. When he knocks her mask off, and the face looking back at his is achingly familiar and as improbably young as his own, covered in a legion of freckles and holding artic blue eyes in a too blank face.

He does speak then.

"...Evie?"

"...who on earth is Evie?")

-----

The eventual battle with Roth, with Red Skull is a blur. He fights with that same raging fury in his heart, but he still feels...empty. Cold. Even seeing Roth try to harness the power of the mysterious golden artifact, only for it to overwhelm him and wreath him in ethereal flames draws only a grim satisfaction from him.

It's when he is behind the controls of the futuristic plane holding legions of bombs capable of turning all of America to ash that his thoughts crystallize with abrupt clarity.

One Frye died to the cold and ice. It's only fitting that the other should as well.

Or blazing fire, should the bombs go off on impact.

Either way, he'll be going home.

The water rushes in, the cabin shudders and he welcomes the piercing darkness with a smile on his face.

#Crossover #AC Syndicate #Marvel #Ubisoft #drabble #The Frye Twins #Evie Frye #Jacob Frye #Jacob becomes Sir Britain #Evie still becomes an assassin #sort of

9 notes · View notes

twocubes · 5 years

Text

idk i mentioned at some point that,

(this entire post is kind of sleep deprived i was writing while waiting for Some Horrors to pass)

we live in this strange... decision-making context, where there are hard limits on what we can know.

like, at most relevant levels, (social, technological, biological, even geological) all the knowledge we have about the world has expiration dates. the laws we grew up with expire, the social currents that shaped the world we lived in dry up, the knowledge needed to live every day shifts, the stories everyone thinks in die out and are renewed, the cultural agglomerates we think of people as disappear, the meaning of neighborhoods in the cities we live in change, the buildings we know become reused and renewed, even the nature of the people we’ve grown up with changes.

and it goes on downwards from there. species die out and appear, family lines die out and branch, infections migrate, viruses mutate, everything changes. from the nature of the soil, to the patterns of the weather and the sea, to the shape of the ridges in the ocean and the pattern of the mountains, to the pattern of the stars, on the longer scales.

everything is constantly shifting.

and this is trivial, of course. everyone knows this.

but what is relevant here is, this makes it a weird context in which to make decisions.

most ethical hypotheticals (that i know, as a non-philosopher-of-ethics) are built to be very well-defined situations given to an individual decision-maker. you’re a person in this situation, and you need to make a decision right now, and that’s the entire situation. even if the gimmick is that you don’t know, you know the odds, at most.

in fact, the more you don’t know and the more there are other people involved, the more the situation stops to be an “ethical” one and the more it becomes a “game theory” one.

which... suggests a fundamental problem with the popular discussion of these things, frankly. Either you have your “humanities” version, which is hyperindividualized and basically presupposes the entire situation is completely known, or you have the “stem” version, which (I’m told) is going to be “oversimplified” and “reductive” and “genetically infected by nash’s schizophrenia because i’m just kind of deeply ableist and like this is the only way i know how to criticize game theory’s role in cold-war paranoia because i’m an asshole and this is how i deal with my math anxiety” ANYWAYS

what I was trying to talk about was, the following completely obvious realization:

ENDS-JUSTIFY-THE-MEANS REASONING MAKES MORE SENSE IN A COMPLETELY DETERMINISTIC ENVIRONMENT

and the following... statement

IN A SITUATION WHERE ALL INFORMATION DEGRADES, ENVIRONMENTS ARE ALMOST NEVER COMPLETELY DETERMINISTIC, AND AS A RESULT ENDS-JUSTIFY-THE-MEANS REASONING WILL HAVE A TENDENCY TO HAVE MORE AND MORE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES THAT ULTIMATELY INVALIDATE THE ORIGINAL ACTIONS

in other words, the actual answer to the culturally humanities-ethics question “do ends justify the means” is the culturally stem-ethics answer “how much do you know about the situation you are in”.

which, i mean, is probably dubious as a framing, but, ok, let’s go with it.

the thing that put me on this post was... a post where people were talking about pacifism. The argument(s) against pacifism are ends-justify-the-means argument(s): even if it’s the nazis? etc.

and my point is that, well, pacifism is a heuristic. if you have a panoply of ways you have to oppose the nazis, "War” is a dangerous choice. You don’t know everything. War has bad consequences. The world is uncertain. You should be skeptical of war, even against the nazis..

Like, suppose we accept the idea that America is (as argued by people) at the start of a fascist period; that there is in fact going to be an inevitable slide towards, like, vast networks of concentration camps and systematized, mechanized slaughter and millions of deaths of specific (internal) subpopulations in relatively short periods of time, etc.

Posit further that, I guess, America’s military’s chronic griftiness and planes that melt in the rain and way-too-expensive RC-planes mean that despite its massive overspending it’s a lot less militarily prepared than it thinks, and perhaps even pretend that nuclear weapons aren’t A Thing, although idk if that’s necessary,

Would the optimal outcome, ethically, be for China and... idk, some network of geopolitical allies of Iran or something, this is hard to make even remotely realistic... to just invade, crunch the US in half, and put a big wall between the two halves? In order to Stop The Genocide?

Is that what you, right now, should be trying to engineer into happening?

strictly, i don’t know what your answer to that question was, but, i will observe that very few people seem to be organizing in this direction.

my point here is, if you think like this, probably what you’re thinking of as remedies to the current situation are, like, electoral politics, or internal rebellion, or mass disobedience, or... whatever.

it probably isn’t War.

And, yeah, this is gonna generalize to a lot of other things involving violence. Punching Nazi’s etc.

Like these choices aren’t necessarily wrong, the point is these choices are only as correct as the people who made them put work into figuring out the consequences of in advance. if Spencer hadn’t been quite as well known — profiled in a bunch of mainstream publications and everything and just, really obviously what he was, in a certain amount of danger of becoming Cool — the outcome of him being punched in the face would have probably been a lot more mixed, in terms of, like, its social impact. Similarly with, i guess, eggboi and other expressions of public disapproval of Obvious Shitheads or whatever.

AN EE WEI SS

tthhhh point is, there is Actually A Point, where questions of Strategy and questions of Ethics like, Meet; and the ends-justify-means question strays right in the middle of that

and the problem is that, these two sides, they... exist in worlds that don’t talk to eachother and Kind Of Hate eachother.

and i uh.

i... Hhhhate? That? thass bad.

So, the thought I’m trying to get at is, One Way To Try And Bridge The Gap is

Strategic Justifications Of Ethical Principles.

like. Defaulting to more pacifistic solutions unless properly justified by some level of Almost Certainty as an attempt to avoid chaotic catastrophic consequences.

this gives some way to like, actually have criteria when you’re moving from ethical rules of thumb to actual strategic thought, trying to decide to what an extent you can be certain of Ends that would require Meanss

rhrhhrhrrrhrrr im sleepy

94 notes · View notes

jewish-privilege · 5 years

Link

One of Wenzel Michalski’s early recollections of growing up in southern Germany in the 1970s was of his father, Franz, giving him some advice: “Don’t tell anyone that you’re Jewish.” Franz and his mother and his little brother had survived the Holocaust by traveling across swaths of Eastern and Central Europe to hide from the Gestapo, and after the war, his experiences back in Germany suggested that, though the Nazis had been defeated, the anti-Semitism that was intrinsic to their ideology had not. This became clear to Franz when his teachers in Berlin cast stealthily malicious glances at him when Jewish characters — such as Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice” — came up in literature. “Eh, Michalski, this exactly pertains to you,” he recalls one teacher telling him through a clenched smile. Many years later, when he worked as an animal-feed trader in Hamburg, he didn’t tell friends that he was Jewish and held his tongue when he heard them make anti-Semitic comments. And so Franz told his son Wenzel that things would go easier for him if he remained quiet about being Jewish. “The moment you say it, things will become very awkward.”

As a teenager, Wenzel defied his father’s advice and told a close friend. That friend quickly told his mother, and the next time Wenzel saw her, she reacted quite strongly, hugging him and kissing his face: “Wenzel! Oh, my Wenzel!” Now a stocky, bearded 56-year-old, Wenzel recalled the moment to me on a recent Saturday afternoon. He raised the pitch of his voice as he continued to mimic her: “You people! You are the most intelligent! The most sensitive! You are the best pianists in the world! And the best poets!” In his normal voice again, he added, “Then I understood what my father meant.”

Wenzel Michalski is now the director of Human Rights Watch for Germany. He and his wife, Gemma, an outgoing British expat, live in a cavernous apartment building in the west of Berlin. In their kitchen, Gemma told me that after arriving in Germany in 1989, she often got a strangely defensive reaction when she told people she was Jewish; they would tell her they didn’t feel responsible for the Holocaust or would defend their grandparents as not having perpetrated it. And so, to avoid conversations like these, she, too, stayed quiet about being Jewish.

Recently, the Michalskis’ youngest son became the third generation of the family to learn that telling people he is Jewish could cause problems. The boy — whose parents asked that he be called by one of his middle names, Solomon, to protect his privacy — had attended a Jewish primary school in Berlin. But he didn’t want to stay in such a homogeneous school for good, so just before he turned 14, he transferred to a public school that was representative of Germany’s new diversity — a place, as Gemma described it, where he “could have friends with names like Hassan and Ahmed.”

The first few days there seemed to go well. Solomon, an affable kid with an easy smile, bonded with one classmate over their common affection for rap music. That classmate introduced him to a German-Turkish rapper who would rap about “Allah and stuff,” Solomon told me. In return, he introduced the classmate to American and British rap. Solomon had a feeling they would end up being best friends. On the fourth day, when Solomon was in ethics class, the teachers asked the students what houses of worship they had been to. One student mentioned a mosque. Another mentioned a church. Solomon raised his hand and said he’d been to a synagogue. There was a strange silence, Solomon later recalled. One teacher asked how he had encountered a synagogue.

“I’m Jewish,” Solomon said.

“Everyone was shocked, especially the teachers,” Solomon later told me about this moment. After class, a teacher told Solomon that he was “very brave.” Solomon was perplexed. As Gemma explained: “He didn’t know that you’re not meant to tell anyone.”

The following day, Solomon brought brownies to school for his birthday. He was giving them out during lunch when the boy he had hoped would be his best friend informed him that there were a lot of Muslim students at the school who used the word “Jew” as an insult. Solomon wondered whether his friend included himself in this category, and so after school, he asked for clarification. The boy put his arm around Solomon’s shoulders and told him that, though he was a “real babo” — Kurdish slang for “boss” — they couldn’t be friends, because Jews and Muslims could not be friends. The classmate then rattled off a series of anti-Semitic comments, according to Solomon: that Jews were murderers, only interested in money.

Over the next few months, Solomon was bullied in an increasingly aggressive fashion. One day, he returned home with a large bruise from a punch on the back. On another occasion, Solomon was walking home and stopped into a bakery. When he emerged, he found one of his tormentors pointing what looked like a handgun at him. Solomon’s heart raced. The boy pulled the trigger. Click. The gun turned out to be a fake. But it gave Solomon the scare of his life.

When Solomon first told his parents about the bullying, they resolved to turn it into a teaching moment. They arranged to have Wenzel’s father visit the school to share his story about escaping the Gestapo. But the bullying worsened, Gemma told me, and they felt the school did not do nearly enough to confront the problem. The Michalskis went public with their story in 2017, sharing it with media outlets in order to spark what they viewed as a much-needed discussion about anti-Semitism in German schools. Since then, dozens of cases of anti-Semitic bullying in schools have come to light, including one case last year at the German-American school where my own son attends first grade, in which, according to local news reports, students tormented a ninth grader, for months, chanting things like “Off to Auschwitz in a freight train.” Under criticism for its handling of the case, the administration released a statement saying it regretted the school’s initial response but was taking action and having “intensive talks” with the educational staff.

...For the Michalskis, all this was evidence that German society never truly reckoned with anti-Semitism after the war. Germany had restored synagogues and built memorials to the victims of the Holocaust, Wenzel said: “So for a lot of mainstream, middle-class people, that means: ‘We’ve done it. We dealt with anti-Semitism.’ But nobody really dealt with it within the families. The big, the hard, the painful questions were never asked.” In Wenzel’s view, the Muslim students who tormented his child were acting in an environment that was already suffused with native anti-Semitism. “A lot of conservative politicians now say, ‘Oh, the Muslims are importing their anti-Semitism to our wonderful, anti-anti-Semitic culture,’ ” he said. “That’s bull. They’re trying to politicize this.”

Jewish life in Germany was never fully extinguished. After the Nazi genocide of six million Jews, some 20,000 Jewish displaced persons from Eastern Europe ended up settling permanently in West Germany, joining an unknown number of the roughly 15,000 surviving German Jews who still remained in the country after the war. The new German political class rejected, in speeches and in the law, the rabid anti-Semitism that had been foundational to Nazism — measures considered not only to be morally imperative but necessary to re-establish German legitimacy on the international stage. This change, however, did not necessarily reflect an immediate conversion in longstanding anti-Semitic attitudes on the ground. In the decades that followed, a desire among many Germans to deflect or repress guilt for the Holocaust led to a new form of antipathy toward Jews — a phenomenon that came to be known as “secondary anti-Semitism,” in which Germans resent Jews for reminding them of their guilt, reversing the victim and perpetrator roles. “It seems the Germans will never forgive us Auschwitz,” Hilde Walter, a German-Jewish journalist, was quoted as saying in 1968.

Holocaust commemoration in West Germany increasingly became an affair of the state and civic groups, giving rise to a prevailing erinnerungskultur, or “culture of remembrance,” that today is most prominently illustrated by the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a funereal 4.7-acre site near the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, inaugurated in 2005. But even as Germany’s remembrance culture has been held up as an international model of how to confront the horrors of the past, it has not been universally supported at home. According to a 2015 Anti-Defamation League survey, 51 percent of Germans believe that it is “probably true” that “Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust”; 30 percent agreed with the statement “People hate Jews because of the way Jews behave.”

...The exact nature of the anti-Semitic threat — and indeed, whether it rises to the level of an existential threat at all — is intensely debated within Germany’s Jewish community. Many see the greatest peril as coming from an emboldened extreme right that is hostile to both Muslims and Jews, as the recent shootings by white supremacists in synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway, Calif., and mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, horrifically illustrated. Multiple surveys suggest that anti-Muslim attitudes in Germany and other European countries are more widespread than anti-Semitism. At the same time, a number of surveys show that Muslims in Germany and other European countries are more likely to hold anti-Semitic views than the overall population. The 2015 Anti-Defamation League survey, for instance, found that 56 percent of Muslims in Germany harbored anti-Semitic attitudes, compared with 16 percent for the overall population. Conservative Jews see the political left as unwilling to name this problem out of reluctance to further marginalize an already marginalized group or because of leftist anti-Zionism. The far right, anti-Islam A.f.D. — the very political party that, for its relativizing of Nazi crimes, many Jews find most noxious — has sought to exploit these divisions and now portrays itself as a defender of Germany’s Jews against what it depicts as the Muslim threat.

...The early signs are mixed. Sigmount Königsberg is the anti-Semitism commissioner for Berlin’s Jewish Community, the organization that oversees synagogues and other aspects of local Jewish life. At a cafe next to the domed New Synagogue, which was spared destruction during the pogroms of November 1938, Königsberg, an affable 58-year-old, told me his mother had been liberated from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and had intended to move to Paris. Instead, she became stranded in the German border town of Saarbrücken, and she soon met Königsberg’s father, also a Holocaust survivor. Like other Jewish families, they were ambivalent about remaining in Germany. Königsberg employed an often-used metaphor to describe this unsettledness: Until the 1980s, he said, German Jews “sat on a packed suitcase.” After East and West Germany reunified, many Jews feared a nationalist revival. Despite a wave of racist attacks on immigrants, that revival did not seem to materialize. In fact, the European Union, which was created to temper those impulses, was ascendant. Jews felt more secure, Königsberg told me: “We unpacked the suitcase and stored it in the cellar.”

Now, he believed, that sense of security has eroded. People aren’t heading for the exits yet, he said, but they are starting to think, Where did I put that suitcase?

...[Felix Klein, Germany’s first federal Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight Against Anti-Semitism] listed several things the German government should be doing at the federal and state levels to fight anti-Semitism; chief among them was training teachers and the police simply to recognize it. He also said school books should include more lessons about Jewish contributions to Germany. “We only started to talk about Jews when the Nazi period came up in our history lesson,” he said. “We didn’t speak about Jewish life before that, and we didn’t speak about Jewish life after.”

The rise of anti-Semitic acts, Klein told me, was not just a matter of rising hate but a rising willingness to express it. This was because of social media, he said, as well as the A.f.D. and its “brutalization” of the political discourse. There are also the challenges that are caused by anti-Semitism from Muslims, he said, though, he added, according to criminal statistics, this was not the main problem...

He added that the existing statistics should not be used as a pretext “to avoid a discussion regarding anti-Semitism from Muslims.” I asked him if there was any fear that such a conversation would raise tensions between minority groups instead of protecting them. “I think there is a fear,” he said. “This is why I think the right strategy is to denounce any form of anti-Semitism, regardless of the numbers. I don’t want to start a discussion about which one is more problematic or more dangerous than the other.”

He leaned in to underscore this point. “You should not start this discussion, because then you start using one political group against the other. We should not do that.”

...Last year, two-dozen Jewish A.f.D. supporters founded a group called “Jews in the A.f.D.,” or J.A.f.D., asserting, in a “statement of principles,” that it is the only party willing to “thematize Muslim hatred of Jews without trivializing it.” In response, the Central Council of Jews in Germany and 41 other Jewish organizations released a joint statement condemning the A.f.D. as racist and anti-Semitic and warned Jews not to fall for its “apparent concern” for their safety. “We won’t allow ourselves to be instrumentalized by the A.f.D.,” the statement read. “No, the A.f.D. is a danger to Jewish life in Germany.”

On a Sunday afternoon last October, J.A.f.D. held its inaugural event in a gymnasium on the outskirts of the Hessian city of Wiesbaden. A J.A.f.D. supporter in the crowd of attendees, who wore a yarmulke and a Star of David necklace that dangled outside his shirt next to an A.f.D. pin, told me, in a strong Russian accent, that he had emigrated from Moscow in the early 1990s. As reporters gathered around him, he rattled off a series of claims often recited at far-right political gatherings: Muslim immigrants come from an “absolutely alien” culture. They would “bring Shariah law” and “rape” to Germany. When a reporter from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung tried to get his name, the man refused to give it. He didn’t trust the lügenpresse — “the lying press” — he said, using a phrase that, long preceding “fake news,” had been deployed by propagandists in Nazi Germany to spread conspiracy theories about newspapers controlled by “world Jewry.”

...The Fraenkelufer Synagogue sits on Berlin’s Landwehr Canal, a snaking, several-mile-long waterway that meets the city’s major river, the Spree, on each end. In September 1945, according to a Chicago Sun reporter, the canal still stank of decayed corpses when 400 Jewish survivors and about 30 American Jewish soldiers gathered for the first postwar synagogue service in Berlin. The main neo-Classical sanctuary that had once stood at the site sat in ruins, but a Jewish-American lieutenant stationed in Berlin named Harry Nowalsky, who could see the synagogue from his bedroom window, had made it a personal mission to restore a smaller, still-intact sanctuary in time for Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year. On the cool holiday evening, the congregants, as one reporter wrote, “sang songs of Israel with tear-stained faces.”

...Fraenkelufer Synagogue would not exist today without immigration. After the war, Jews from Eastern Europe formed a small congregation. After 1989, Jews from the former Soviet Union joined, but by the turn of the millennium, the congregation had dwindled. That began to change several years ago, with the immigration of young Jews from around the world to the neighborhood, including some of the thousands of Israelis who have migrated to Berlin in recent years — many of whom lean to the political left and are troubled by Israel’s rightward political shift...

One evening last summer, three generations of the Michalski family — Wenzel and Gemma, Wenzel��s father, Franz, and his mother, Petra, as well as Solomon’s siblings — sat in a row at an English-language theater in Berlin to watch Solomon, now 16 and enrolled in a new private school, perform in a play inspired by his experience with anti-Semitic bullying.

The play began with a scene in a classroom where an assignment was written on the board: “Tribalism Divides Communities — Elucidate.” The teenagers portrayed two tribes, the Whoozis and the Whatzits, who, because of ancient rivalries, fight. Eventually, everyone falls to the floor and perishes in a final battle. But then everyone slowly rises.

“So that’s it?” one tribe member said. “Everyone dies in the end?”

“That sucks,” another said.

“Yes, but it’s realistic,” another said.

Solomon had the last line.

“Well, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m not leaving until we get this right.”

After the play, Gemma told me that she didn’t hold grudges against the kids who bullied her son. “I didn’t give up on those kids,” she said. “The school gave up on those kids.” The attitude from many of the teachers, she said, was: “You can’t talk to them; they’re just Muslims.” This revealed a troubling unwillingness to stand up for, as she put it, “life in a liberal, tolerant democracy for everyone, beyond racism.”

I asked Solomon if he had thought much about anti-Semitism before the bullying episodes. He told me about a trip he took with his grandparents just before the bullying began. They visited the places in Poland, the Czech Republic and eastern Germany where his grandfather had hidden from the Gestapo. “That really opened my mind,” he told me. “I knew about my grandpa’s experiences, but I just, you know, felt really proud to be Jewish after that trip. Then after this whole thing happened, it makes me even more proud to be Jewish. I wouldn’t say I feel more religious. But it’s just the identity, the ethnic background of being Jewish and walking in Berlin as a Jewish boy.” His mother later told me that she found it sad that her son had formed a stronger sense of tribal identity based on the experience of mistreatment. She had not wanted him to forge his identity in fear. “I wanted him to be free,” she said.

Solomon told me that he was happy at his new school. He had made new friends of diverse backgrounds, and they had formed a band called the Minorities. Still, he added, he did not feel free to express his newfound Jewish identity in public. He had wanted to wear a Star of David necklace, he told me, but he and his parents had decided that this was not a good idea. The necklace could be exposed if someone were to pull his shirt back. “The thing is,” he said, “it’s still really dangerous. I mean, it’s not like, ‘O.K., everything is fine now.’ ”

[Read James Angelos’s excellent piece in The New York Times Magazine.]

#long post #germany #antisemitism #islamophobia

210 notes · View notes

butyouvealwaysbeenthecaretaker · 4 years

Text

It’s also really important to like, be aware of the history of “divide and conquer using progressive-seeming language” as a way to defuse grassroots campaigns. That’s not just Leftie paranoia, I mean it is literally used as a conscious strategy.

I suppose some of what we’re seeing with transphobic feminism is an example of that, splitting cis women off from trans women, trans people off the rest of the acronym; or the recent UK election where tabloids who don’t give a shit about Jewish people (or anyone else), chose to amplify stories about Labour anti-semitism & anti-Hinduism to lever off some of the base + well-meaning centerist types, leading to five more years of right wing incompetence.

So like, you don’t want to dismiss important concerns out of hand; but at the same time, you don’t want to fall into the trap of amplifying them either, so it obscures your key message, or becomes a source of division. It’s never an easy one to get right, I think. You look at the narratives and have to think - is this helping get closer to our goals? Is this critique constructive, the first step to necessary change; or does it reify it, does it make that the story (if it wasn’t true before, it certainly is now!)? The critiques haven’t increased participation from black environmentalists in XR; nor has it produced a new movement created by & centering black people who want to take direct action on climate change. That makes them bad critiques (regardless of whether or not they were also true).: they didn’t work.

The only narrative I hear out of left wing, anarchist, progressive spaces is - this campaign is problematic, and it sucks. That’s divide and conquer in action, with nary a whiff of “we’re concerned about these problems, but we also share these goals”, or “I don’t like how they do things, but they’re right about the core issues”, or “we don’t like that group, so we’ve set up our own which is run the ‘right’ way, but we show up at their actions and they show up at ours” or most importantly, “we want you to succeed, but you’re getting these things wrong, so can we collaborate on fixing them”. And that’s how we lose the battle on climate, ultimately, if different groups with shared goals but different approaches (and which might not like each other all that much) can’t stay focused on collaborating, and presenting a unified front.

It’s exactly the same splintering as {leader of the Labour party} choosing to condemn attacks on statues, or rationalists getting sucked into debates about nazi punching ethics. Ultimately, none of this matters; critique of protest as an artform functions as a distraction tactic, and a way to derail campaigns, to hijck the news cycle or online discourse away from the issues and onto the “way” protest is done. I reserve the right to stay cynical on that.

Please stop talking about whether it’s right to change old statues or commit protest damage against property, stay focused on police violence (and black inequality more broadly). Please stop nitpicking about when it’s OK to use violence against humans in activism, stay focused on rising anti-semitism and dangerous right wing organising. Please stop using identity-politics to critique environmentalism on the basis of what kinds of people are and are not at protests, stay focused on the narrowing window of time we have to prevent catastrophic climate change. Please stop fighting over bathrooms, stay focused on a united LGBT front against rising right-wing strength to dismantle protections enjoyed by all of us.

It’s a tricky one to get right, because how you protest is important. And when the critiques are very serious ones, like the possibility that a Labour victory might be a threat to Jewish citizens, those can’t be treated lightly.

(but that’s why they’re used. Because they work.)

So like, you’re looking at the % coverage on looming environmental apocalypse on some of these sites or users or outlets, vs % coverage on what XR is doing wrong and why they are a unified monolith of bad, and a little noise goes off.

Just as when you’ve got tabloids who knowingly used anti-semetic dogwhistles in attacks on (previous Labour leader), and immediately drew attention to (new Labour leader)’s Jewish connections, suddenly declaring themselves concerned about (leader in the middle) as a racist threat, over and over again in headlines which don’t bother presenting the opposition manifesto even once in detail.

And you’ve got shitstain misogynists coming out of the woodwork to support radical feminism in the name of “protecting women”.

And “you can’t support Hilary Clinton, because she supported wars which devastated communities abroad”.

It’s like...

...I mean, it’s a lot of what organising a good campaign is, is successfully preventing these counter-narratives from gaining traction. But how can you, when you’re a grassroots campaign fighting against a wealthy, powerful media/system/business? And when the sorts of people you need on your side are also the kinds of people who quite rightly really care about these things, and can absolutely be demoralised, splintered and drained by a well-run splinter campaign? And when these issues are not trivial, they really are important, and you can’t push back on them without dismissing concerns, silencing good conversations, dismissing problems which need to be addressed...?

...while also not letting the same five wealthy blokes wreck the economy and planet while accumulating even more power while you’re distracted on that...

It’s not a problem that can easily be solved, but it has definitely impacted my slide towards feeling cynical and suspicious of a lot of this kind of activism, aimed at reflection/self-critique/becoming less problematic/rooting out bad people or perspectives. Not because the issues aren’t important, but it’s easy to get stuck on activism as individual self development and consciousness raising, rather than broad-based action and results.

But face to face activism is far more effective than trying to be accountable to the entire internet, hence the importance of...people coming to participate, and bringing their critiques with them. Once I’ve seen a woman glue herself to a lamp-post (or, always bring tea and biscuits to meetings), if she comes to me and says...there are these problems, we need to solve them...I can be pretty sure it’s not a deliberately amplified attack campaign. AND we can work together on looking at how we can fix this in what we’re doing, or, what needs to be done locally to improve on things. You can immediately contextualise it, start finding concrete solutions. You can’t be accountable to a Guardian columnist who has looked at some photos of your protest and has an Opinion.

A bit like Dan Savage says about there being no such thing as “the one” in relationships; you have to find your 0.8 and round it up to a one. Or, in this case I think it’s better to say, find your 0.8, and then try and make that other 0.2 happen.

#the sweet art of protest

2 notes · View notes