#ultranationalism

[victusinveritas]

Art by Maxim Bazhenov.

It's kind of a shame that Sisters of Mercy stopped putting out new music, because this needs to be an album cover for them...or Laibach.

[protoslacker]

“Palestinian effective sovereignty in al-Aqsa is not due to diplomatic negotiations, or international law, or armed struggle (although all these played a role in defending it). It’s about moral authority. Israeli policies in the last decade threaten the status quo by effectively allowing ritual Jewish visits to the site (although nominally banned). But Israel has not dared to take over the site, and it remains in Palestinian hands, at least for now,” he continued. “So lots of people will emphasize the religious dimension, which is clearly there and is important, but it’s not just about that. It’s also about basic freedom,” Wallach observed. “And this effective and symbolic sovereignty, despite its clear limitations, is deeper than the limited self-rule of Ramallah or Gaza and ultimately provides a far greater challenge to Israel.”

Yair Wallach quoted in an article by Robert Mackey in The Intercept. This Is Not Fine: Why Video of an Ultranationalist Frenzy in Jerusalem Is So Unsettling

Israel’s defenders tried to contain the damage from video of religious Zionists celebrating the conquest of Jerusalem as flames leapt above the Aqsa mosque compound.

Yair Wallach’s incisive Twitter thread

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Are you still doing the Animorphs reviews? If so, Megamorphs 3: Elfangor's Secret.

Short opinion: One of my friends was gently poking fun at me for reading trashy sci fi paperbacks meant for small children*, so I read the scene from the beach on D-Day aloud to the whole room.  No one has poked fun at my reading material since then, and two people have since asked to borrow my copies of the series.  

Long opinion:

Elfangor’s Secret might have the most social commentary of any book in the entire series—even #9 and #40 pale in comparison—but it delivers that commentary in a way that is subtle, nuanced, and doesn’t resort to black-and-white thinking.  The way it accomplishes that goal is through using the opening scene to suggest that even Our Intrepid Heroes have the potential to develop some incredibly toxic ideas if raised in a society that sufficiently encourages them.  

Tobias opens the book by wistfully watching some humans slaves (apparently) enjoying themselves, because in this universe he’s an ignorant little jerk who has been taught not to consider the extreme drawbacks of being enslaved and can only see that the slaves get to be on the beach while he does not.  Marco is living with two healthy, engaged parents and his very own Pong system… at the expense of referring to people of Latino descent as “jungle rats” (MM3).  Cassie is at least kind to her slaves, which doesn’t exactly nullify the fact that SHE OWNS SEVERAL SLAVES.  Ax and Rachel end up outside of the Racist Hatefest for different reasons (Rachel, at least, tried to fight back—go Rachel).  Jake engages in so much xenophobic, narcissistic, paranoid posturing that he might as well be POTUS wearing his insecurities printed on a t-shirt.  Although the book’s narration doesn’t excuse his behavior, it does explain why he’s so desperate to fit in with the status quo: in Nazi America, he has grown up his entire life being told that he is inferior because of his “Jewish blood” (MM4).  

This book wastes no time at all in thoroughly condemning everything from Jake’s contempt for other races to Cassie’s and Tobias’s willingness to minimize the horror of slavery.  It shows that in a world where the U.S. doesn’t take advantage of the innovative ability of all its residents—regardless of race or religion or nationality—its technology and economy not only don’t advance but actually backslide by several decades.  Not only does the book condemn the atrocity of imperially-driven foreign war, but it actually lampoons the concept by showing the idiocy of Jake and Marco being so concerned with whether “decent” people own all the land in Brazil when they have much bigger concerns like, say, the impending annihilation of their entire species by the yeerks.  But the opening sequence also shows how easy it is to slide into that kind of counterfactual thinking.  

The Animorphs aren’t inherently bad people (well, maybe—but that’s a debate for another time) but they develop a lot of truly atrocious ideas when they’ve grown up their whole lives drinking the poison of their uber-nationalist white-supremacist government.  It’s the same poison that the Princeton student who can’t see beyond Cassie’s skin color long enough to treat her as a human being has been drinking all his life.  The same poison that makes several hundred English archers believe their only path to glory or meaning in life is through slaughtering hundreds of French knights as a part of some conflict they don’t even understand.  The same poison that drives the Nazi soldiers to try and conquer the world so they can wipe out anyone who doesn’t look like them.  The same poison that makes the sailors at Trafalgar look at Rachel as an object not a person.  The same poison that causes Visser Four to view the humans as livestock to be corralled or slaughtered.  

However, as disturbing as this book is in its portrayals of nationalism and racism, it also shows that anyone who is willing to overlook surface differences not only can but must fight back.  As horrifying as Nazi America is in the first scene, it is still a world in which Rachel is definitely a “subversive” and Cassie is probably on her way to becoming one as well.  When Tobias first pops up in Princeton in the 1930s, he gets a skin-crawly sense of wrongness at the realization that 100% of the students are white males even though he himself has the necessary privilege to “belong” there.  Marco describes his own decision to kill Visser Four as a “stain on the conscience,” correctly realizing that just because the yeerk isn’t human doesn’t mean that he isn’t killing a sentient being, much less an unarmed prisoner of war—and even then he only kills Visser Four quickly to spare the yeerk a slow death.  Ax spends a lot of this book desperately trying to find some greater meaning in the battles he witnesses, but after Rachel describes the Holocaust to him he comes to the realization that sometimes the only way to stop an unthinkable wrong from happening is through committing a wrong as well.  

The ordinary humans themselves also come out of the woodwork to protest the divisions between them.  The one Princeton student, Friedman, immediately speaks up on Cassie’s behalf when Davis addresses her with a racial slur.  Ax is moved by the devastating kindness of “Doc,” an Allied soldier who dies trying to comfort a fatally injured comrade.  Adolph Hitler himself, raised in a world different from the one that let him become a demagogue, is a humble truck driver who hesitates to shoot an alien he doesn’t know anything about.  All of these people—and the Animorphs themselves—face a choice.  They can do what is easy, through accepting the message that they are somehow superior simply because of their birth status or national identity.  Or they can do what is right, through fighting back against those divisions long enough to reach out to their fellow humans and make radical steps toward peace.   

*Just to be clear: I am not in any way implying that the Animorphs books aren’t trashy sci fi paperbacks meant for small children.  They were literally commissioned as a marketing tactic to sell AniTV and transformer toys to kids, they use alien species and fictional technologies to ask important questions about the boundary conditions of humanity, they were all (except Visser) published straight to paperback, and they are deliberately written in a way that children as young as six or seven can enjoy but also learn from them.   I’m saying that the fact that they are trashy sci fi paperbacks meant for small children does not in any way preclude them from having extreme violence, literary merit, or moral imperatives.  

[thegeekylady52]

Ultranationalism get away from me

[theyouthtimes]

Religious Freedom at Risk in One of Five Countries

Religious freedom is under threat in one of every five nations around the globe, in part because of an increase in "aggressive ultranationalism", a Catholic NGO said in a report Thursday. Aid to the Church in Need found incidents of religious persecution in 21 countries in the two...

[icearc1979-blog]

French President Emmanuel Macron urged the European Commission on Thursday to do more to curb an influx of low-paid east Europeans working on temporary assignment in France, warning that it was sapping support for the EU. After meeting EU chief executive Jean-Claude Juncker in Brussels for the first

I always tell my Eastern European friends that it isn't economic migrants, refugees & asylum seekers from Africa or the Middle East that’s really driving populist ultra-nationalist/nativist sentiment in Europe. Many of these societies in Eastern Europe are extremely xenophobic and discriminatory to minorities. So while they(majority of Eastern Europeans) rabidly rave against the notion of having Asians and Africans in their countries even in solidarity via a sharing of hosting refugees, it’s Eastern European migration for better economic opportunities within the EU to richer countries in the North and West that is driving anti-EU sentiment and paradoxically not the migrants from elsewhere. Brexit was more to do with nativism against Eastern Europeans than recent migrant flows from Asia and Africa. In fact many of these migrants come from former colonies of these European powers and have a far deeper relationship with them than many Eastern European peoples. A point lost on the likes of populist nationalists like Hungary’s Orban and Poland’s Kaczynski who have & peddle this “ common White Christian heritage” myth of the EU

[ya-da]

塩チャーシュー麺、ライス。 とうとう塩を頼んでみた。ほ〜。塩にすると臭みがあるんだ。やはり正解は、醤油ラーメンか。 本日、僕の前の客はゼロ。あとからひとり。 美味しいのになあ。なんで客いない？ ネトウヨラジオがかかってるせいか？ （いや、客こないからネトウヨに走るのかもしれないが） #ラーメン #塩ラーメン #ラーメンライス #japanesefood #ramen #ultranationalism #hatespeech #憂国 (中華そば・つけ麺 甲斐 高円寺店)