Author: Coe Walkley

The Turner Diaries is an extremist, racist, antisemitic 1978 novel by a man named William Pierce. The author was originally a PhD physicist and professor before joining the American Nazi Party and then founding his own far-right militant extremist group, the National Alliance. The book was originally published in a far-right organization’s journal called “Attack!”, before becoming so popular that it got its own paperback edition published by a white supremacist publisher, making the book available on its own by mail order.

Out of all of the texts we’ve read in this class (setting aside the influence of Mein Kampf and the Protocols on the Holocaust happening), I was very surprised to see that this book seems to somehow have inspired more violence than any of the others? Part of the reason why this surprised me is that skimming through the actual text of this book, beyond just its content, this just seems like a really poorly written book just in quality of writing itself. Like- this is not a good or cleverly written novel. The text itself feels extremely childish and amateur in its style, and it does not feel like it could have possibly been written by someone who was once a university professor with a doctorate. Some excerpts I found funny:

“Omigod! It’s 4:00 AM. Got to get some sleep!” – page 7.

“I just have to remember that my new name is-ugh!- “David J. Bloom.” I am really being ribbed about that.” – page 63

“I’ll use the time to write a few pages-my last : diary entry. Then it’s a one-way trip to the Pentagon for me.” – page 110

The plot of this book is nothing short of a total fantasy world in how its constructed.

It follows the story of a man named Earl Turner living in a dystopian image of future America where the white people are oppressed by what he calls “the System”. His big talking point he brings up at least once a page is how the government took everyone’s guns away. (I imagine Pierce writing this book while watching a typical evening of Fox News.) Turner joins an extremist revolutionary group whose goal is to take down the government and essentially do a genocide of everyone who is non-white or Jewish. Most of the text of the book is just descriptions of absurd violence and guerrilla warfare, reaching the absolutely insane level that the white supremacist group blows up New York City with nuclear weapons for the sake of their cause. The book ends with a scene I personally found hilarious, it probably wasn’t funny originally when he wrote this in 1978. But Earl Turner’s big plan to save the world? Crash a plane into the Pentagon.

(Maybe leaning on Kaczynski’s idea of feelings of inferiority a little bit here), this book to me was just an example of a man born into privilege in a fairly well-off white family who needed to create a fantasy world where he was oppressed so he could get the chance write a self insert as the heroic and tragic savior of this aforementioned fantasy world. Because this America he created is completely detached from the reality of the situation, and Pierce pulled every string possible to make himself a victim when in our world he is not a victim in the slightest from these sorts of oppression. (And is arguably a part of the group doing real oppression that does exist.)

I think reading this was really eye-opening for me at how white supremacists get wrapped up in wild conspiracy theories and end up committing atrocious acts of violence. Because the author of this book is an example of someone completely lost in a romanticized fantasy world where being a racist makes you an unfairly oppressed outcast rather than just a loser. If someone with antisocial tendencies who was losing touch with reality read this, I guess I could see how it could end up with them trying to become a tragic hero just like the protagonist. But I think it’s a shame there’s people out there who are struggling so deeply that they feel they need to turn to this sort of fantasy to find any meaning in their lives.

Out of all of the texts we have read so far in this class, I’d say this is the one I have the fewest objections to.

The core message of Kaczynski is that pretty much everything wrong with the world today is because of the Industrial Revolution and our development of technology. He points out how increasingly humans are being forced into systems that they do not thrive in and how the human beings are the things being adjusted to fit those systems rather than the systems being adjusted to fit the humans. It strikes me as a sort of Brave New World-esque theme. On first glance it seems like Kaczynski is advocating for eugenics in certain ways, but what he is more so saying is that the way society is headed with the development of technology we’re inevitably going to have eugenics in the end (and that is a bad thing.)

I’d already read this text awhile ago before taking this class, so reading it again this time was sort of just a reminder to me of what Kaczynski’s ideas were all about. My overall reaction to this one was… vaguely positive..? But to get it out of the way, my main problems with this text are the way that Kaczynski makes unnecessary ad hominem attacks against a bunch of groups he really doesn’t need to in order to make his central point: (activists of various kinds and all the other groups he mentioned disliking in this text who have good intentions with their actions). He seems to dismiss very real social issues that affect real people as being unimportant side issues. This doesn’t seem like a very smart idea if he wants people to buy into this ideology, and he is alienating a whole bunch of potential allies that read this text into stopping there and dismiss him. I also don’t think what he did with the mail bombs was very polite or good, but I suppose as he said, it did work. He got the text published, and now this is a text people know about. So, whatever I guess.

I like the way he frames some issues with technology, pointing out how sure, technology solves some things, but once the interconnected system of technology is established everyone is sort of forced to fit into that system whether they want to or not. Like how when the telephone was invented it was an optional gadget you could own if you wanted, but now its a requirement to participate in a whole range of things in daily life. I’ve been frustrated with this personally on my own before I even read this. A little while back I got rid of my iPhone in exchange for a flip phone that only texts and calls, and I have found that life has been more enjoyable without a smartphone, although it is often a little difficult. And I do agree with Kaczysnki that a more rugged life closer to nature is more fulfilling (atleast for me personally). I spend 2 months of my year living and working on a mountain in the middle of the woods, and life is anything but easy there. It is incredibly tiring, and you are constantly covered in sweat and dirt, but you inexplicably love it regardless. So I have taken it that being covered in dirt and sweat is probably just the way humans are meant to be.

I think a lot of these ideas in this text are going to become more appealing in the coming decades, especially as at the moment it often feels like we’re sliding into a techno-dystopia of a world, and I hear people yearning ever more often by the day to just get away from it all and go live in a hut in the woods, or to be a potato farmer in the middle of nowhere. I think subconsciously a lot people are buying into Kaczysnki’s ideology and seeing pre-industrial life as preferable to what we have right now. Maybe Kaczynski was on to something.

The Anarchist’s Cookbook was certainly an informative read. Some very useful stuff…

This book contains information on how to make all sorts of illegal things: drugs, weapons, explosives, tools for sabotage, etc. All of this deadly stuff is just put out there in this text like its any ordinary cookbook, easy and accessible for anyone. But from reading the introduction and other tidbits in the text, the ideology being espoused is not quite what I would expect. In the introduction William Powell states that “this book is not written for members of fringe political groups” which is completely contrary to what one would think given the content of the book. Powell says that the book is written for the “silent majority” of Americans, and he condemns fascists, communists, and capitalists, which confuses me and leads me to ask, “Who’s side is this guy on?”

I think what he means is that this book is not for the sake of some loner, radical extremist or extremist group who wants to do acts of violence, rather, this book is for ordinary citizens so that they have the tools necessary to overthrow the government if it became necessary. The idea is that the population has a right to overthrow a tyrannical government, sort of going along the lines of the same ideals as the Declaration of Independence, John Locke, etc. But what Powell argues is that the people need the tools necessary to do this, and people can’t just overthrow their government with bare hands. They need these recipes to make the tools themselves. So he’s not making a direct call to violence, he’s just sort of saying that he believes people have a right to know how to make these things so they could overthrow the government if they wanted. One comparison to make is that this seems like roughly the same reason a lot people make for the Second Amendment being important here in the United States.

Looking at the context of this book, I think it’s very fascinating to note that William Powell was only 19 years old when he wrote it. (That’s the same age as me..!) He wrote it after finding out he was being drafted to the Vietnam War in 1971, and his intention was making an extreme act of protest against the US government by spreading such information as this. Understanding this story, it seems like this whole book was just him being momentarily really mad, as he turned his back on this book only a few years later. He converted to Anglicanism in 1976 and became opposed to violence, and he started campaigning for his book to be taken out of circulation. But he had already sold the rights to his book and there was absolutely nothing he could do. So from then up until his death in 2016 he would view his book as a giant teenage mistake without having any options for getting rid of it.

Looking at its history after publication, there remarkably seems to be almost no incidents related to the book where someone actually did an act of violence using its information, besides two or three little things here and there. Over 2 million copies of the book have been sold since its publication, and this book is actually legal to own in the United States. It is not legal to own in other countries however, and simply owning this book has gotten many people in the UK sentenced to multiple years in prison.

Well, the SCUM Manifesto was an interesting read, to say the least.

The Society for Cutting Up Men’s ideology is exactly what one might expect from its name, an extreme plan to solve all of the world’s problems by removing what they view to be the real source of them all: men. Now, as a man reading this manifesto, it’s a little hard for me to put real distance between myself and the text or to read it completely impartially, as it is kind of advocating for me to be killed… My first impression upon reading the manifesto was somewhere in-between being humored and a little saddened. I don’t think this technically counts as a feminist text since it’s not advocating for equality, instead for flipping the patriarchy into a matriarchy. Part of me was wondering as I read if this was a satire, some sort of piece trying to make the reader experience a kind of extreme “what if the roles were reversed and men were the ones who were oppressed? how would that feel?” and if that’s what it was going for it definitely succeeded in its aim, as this did make me feel a little bad. But I still think I can understand some of the frustrations expressed in it and I see a little where the author is coming from, and I agree that there’s alot of things wrong with the way men have culturally been made to be in our society, as well as the very uncomfortable history of the patriarchy. I think these criticisms are completely valid. The text also seemed to me to be a kind of inversion of the ideas of Freud in some parts, sort of a flipped reality from what late-1800s to early-1900s psychology espoused.

This text also had many delightful quotes in it that had me burst out laughing,

“To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo.”

“Every boy wants to imitate his mother, be her, fuse with her, but Daddy forbids this; he is the mother; he gets to fuse with her.”

“The sick, irrational men, those who attempt to defend themselves … will cling in terror to Big Mama with her Big Bouncy Boobies, but Boobies won’t protect them against SCUM”

Anyhow, looking at the context of this text and the background of the author, I think I understand a little better how Solanas came to her viewpoints. In her upbringing Solanas was abused by multiple different male figures in her life: her father, her stepfather, her grandfather, and (maybe Andy Warhol? I can’t really tell from the description of what happened between them, but she ended up shooting him). She ended up homeless for some years, and was also in and out of mental institutions. The SCUM Manifesto was self-printed and distributed by Solanas from 1966-1967 in New York City, and then got officially published by Olympia Press for a few years until the company went bankrupt, and the rights went back to Solanas until her death, and is now being printed by a variety of places.

My paper will be an analysis of the philosophy of Georges Bataille, a controversial philosopher from the 1920s who wrote about mysticism, human sacrifice, and transgression, and who took some influence from the 120 Days of Sodom and the Marquis de Sade. Bataille was extremely provocative in his own time period and essentially got kicked out of the French Surrealist movement for being too out-there with his ideas. He was also the founder of a secret society (essentially a cult) known Acéphale, whose members held midnight meetings in the woods and celebrated ideas of human sacrifice and published multiple editions of a pamphlet promoting very unusual and taboo philosophical ideas about eroticism and transgression . Georges Bataille also wrote multiple novels, one of the most prominent ones being The Story of the Eye, a bizarre and somewhat unhinged book that verges on being just a work of erotica, but still contains philosophical themes integral to his system. I read it and was fascinated by its weirdness and how thought-provoking it was, and I want to understand it better. Georges Bataille’s ideas are extremely weird and esoteric, and there are multiple concepts in his system I would like to comprehend: one is known as “Base Materialism” and another one is the “Accursed Share.” I would like to understand what these ideas are and how they threaten/attack the existing core ideals of western civilization, and why other philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sarte opposed him so vehemently.

I suppose the core question I would be asking is what makes Georges Bataille’s system of philosophy so different from mainstream philosophy and from western thought in general, and to analyze how his philosophy embraces topics that are otherwise seen as forbidden/taboo in our society. I want to understand why to many in philosophy Bataille is seen as such a controversial and even scandalous figure, and why his work is so disruptive and destablising.

This was my first going to the Holocaust Museum, and the whole experience of it hit me hard.

I think one part of it that struck me was the way the museum began by simply showcasing the gradual rise to power of the Nazis and how the party slowly upscaled their practices. There were pictures and videos of Nazi parades, and as I moved through the rooms showing the persecution worsening by each passing year in the 1930s, I could still hear throughout it the “Sieg, heil!” coming from the other room as things got worse. It didn’t begin on day 1 with the Nazis openly declaring they were going to commit a genocide, it started with simple acts like boycotts and intimidation, and their policy was originally just to get rid of the Jews by making life uncomfortable so they’d want to leave on their own, or by deporting them. I found it deeply fascinating and horrifying how the Nazis gradually and strategically pushed what they could justify to their people, until by the 1940s they had set up a systematic plan for mass-killing of human beings. It made me wonder if this same thing could happen here in the United States today.

I was also disturbed by the exhibits that talked about how no country would accept Jewish refugees fleeing from Germany in the 30s. I was heartbroken the story of the ship of refugees that made it all the way across the Atlantic and was then refused firstly by Cuba, secondly by the US, and thirdly by Canada. I read the letter of one of the passengers from the ship who was full of hope that he and his family were going to make it to America and be safe from persecution, and then I looked on to the next section and it said that the ship was forced to return to Germany and the man who wrote the letter died in Auschewitz a few years after… It really hurts me to know that so many people came so close to safety, but they were sent back to die in Germany just because other countries didn’t care enough to help.

I learned a few things I never knew before, such as their euthanasia program that secretly killed 250,000+ disabled people/children. I suppose one of the chapters I read in Mein Kampf helped me understand why they would’ve wanted to do this, as it was part of Hitler’s social darwinism. He thought that people who were weak/mentally-ill/disabled should not be kept alive so that their “inferior genes” would be taken out of the gene pool. I had no idea until I went to the museum that this was something Hitler actually put into practice. Another part that sticks with me was the audio library with voice recordings of Holocaust survivors. I sat down on a bench and spent probably 20 minutes listening to all of them, and I had afterwards a much more vivid image of what exactly a concentration camp was than I previously did.

If there was anything in this museum that gave me hope, it was the stories that told of people’s resilience throughout the Holocaust. I remember the quote from Anne Frank’s diary that said, “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are really good at heart.” I remember an account by a woman in Auschewitz who told the story of how a nurse in the camp treated her with kindness, compassion, and was the reason she was able to keep going. I remember also the recording of one survivor who mentioned how people were still people in the camps, and that in their horrendous conditions there were people still making jokes, telling stories, and looking out for each other. He said something along the lines of “human beings can tolerate a lot.”

Adolf Hitler was born on April 20th, 1889 in Austria. He had a complicated childhood, struggling in school and being physically punished/beaten by his father. He began developing his extreme viewpoints during his childhood, quickly becoming a German nationalist (despite the fact he was Austrian, not German.) He also found a lot of passion in art, and in 1907 when he was 18 years old he applied to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, from which he famously got rejected.

From then on he sort of went into a period of his life of being a struggling artist living on the streets. He ran out of money and became homeless for a few years, moving between homeless shelters in Vienna, selling his paintings when he could. In Vienna he was exposed to a lot of nationalistic and antisemitic rhetoric, one of them being from the mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger. He would briefly move to Munich, but would shortly after leave to enlist in the Bavarian Army to fight in WW1, after it broke out in 1914. He served until 1918 until being blinded in a mustard gas attack and getting hospitalised. In the hospital, Hitler was given the news that Germany had lost the war. Despite the first world war being horrific, Hitler seemed to look back on his experience in the war in a very positive light, calling it “The greatest of all experiences.” Fighting for Germany seemed to have furthered Hitler’s extreme nationalistic views, and he was beyond infuriated to hear that Germany had surrendered. He saw the signing of the armistice to be a betrayal by Jews and Marxists, and he called them “the November Criminals.”

He returned to Munich after the war and joined the German Worker’s Party, a precursor to the Nazi party. Hitler got very involved in the party and began to give fiery speeches espousing his nationalistic antisemitic viewpoints. In 1920 this party would become the Nazi Party, and after rapidly rising through the ranks of the party, Hitler was named the leader in 1921.

In 1923 Hitler along with a former General from WW1 and other conspirators attempted a coup, but the plot failed and Hitler + the others were arrested and charged with treason. Hitler was given a 5-year prison sentence for the coup, and it was during his prison sentence that he wrote Mein Kampf, which he published in 1925. He sold over 200,00 copies of the book between his release from prison and his rise to power in 1933.

The book’s influence grew further after Hitler became Chancellor, and during the height of the Nazi regime a copy of the book was given for free to every newlywed couple and every soldier. The book was at its peak of popularity during the Nazi regime, but would be completely banned in Germany after the end of World War II. It would remain banned in Germany up until 2015.

My experience reading a few chapters of Mein Kampf was interesting and I feel like I understand a little better the way Hitler thought. But connecting the dots of where he was coming from, his whole everything seems like it’s based on a completely arbitrary and unnecessary definition of race and what makes someone a member of “the German race.” It’s also based on alot of conspiracies that are just plainly untrue, a lot of them reminiscent of the Protcols of the Elders of Zion.

In chapter 3, Hitler talks first about what he thinks makes a good statesman. One of the points is that he thinks people shouldn’t get into politics until they are 30 so that they can have time to develop their worldview and not flip on issues and betray their bases. He also talks about how he tries to adapt his speeches and rhetoric to fit the specific crowd he’s speaking to rather than trying to convince them to agree with him on everything.

He then goes on to talk about what he thinks keeps a nation state stable, and this is where his viewpoints get really wack. He goes on a rant for many pages about how the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s parliament was full of “inferior races” rather than having a majority of Germans in control, and he thought this was the real reason why Austria-Hungary collapsed. He goes on from here to talk about how the most important thing in the stability of the state is that the population has “homogeneity” and all speaks a common language, and further argues that Austria-Hungary was weak because it didn’t have this. He goes on a tirade essentially against representative democracy altogether, saying that the whole system of having an elected congress/parliament is bad because it suppresses the voice of Germans and puts other racial groups into power. He ends the chapter with an angry rant against another political party, the Christian Socialist Party, who Hitler sees as being not anti-semitic enough since they only hate Jews on a religious basis and not on a racial one. (A big deal, I guess?)

In Chapter 4, Hitler picks up where he left off in his anger against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, making more points about how the empire fell because of its internal racial differences and how it elevated non-Germans to positions of power. But he quickly moves on to another subject, which is his idea of “Pan-Germanism”, that all the nations of Germans need to unite together and work for the common interests of the race. After this, Hitler lays out his concept of what I think is the same Lebensraum I learned about in history class. He talks about how Germany’s land area is too small for Germany to grow, and that the German people need more territory so that they can grow more food and extract more resources, rather than trying to establish overseas colonies like other European powers. He talks about how territory expansion is the way that nations have always survived throughout history, and argues that Germans should expand to ensure their “superior culture” survives. He also talks about how he thinks that the population of Germany needs to be made “genetically-strong” which could be achieved by not supporting weak/disabled people and just letting them die, i.e. natural selection. Much of the latter half of this chapter is him then taking a more conspiratorial turn and laying out how he sees the rise of Marxism in Germany as a Jewish plot to destroy the German race, and how he sees Jews as “living parasitically off of superior peoples.”

Vol. 2 Chapter 15 is a big jump from where I had my first chapters, so I didn’t understand what he was talking about quite as closely, but I got the general picture. He was mainly talking about how World War 1 was a betrayal to the German race, and he thinks the humiliation of Germany that followed was specifically a plot by the Jews to strip the German people of their honor so that they can more easily destroy the nation. He rants further about Marxism and other groups he sees as enemies of Germany, and ends with basically a call to action for Germans to fight back, and that is the end of the book.

I don’t really like this guy...

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was originally circulated in a Russian newspaper in 1903 and Russian was the original language it was written in. It was presented as a real document taken from a meeting of Jewish elite, and this was 6 years after the meeting of the First Zionist Congress of 1897, so many people thought the text came from that. A London newspaper immediately declared the Protocols to be a forgery only a year after it was published, recognizing similiarities between it and a French political satire by Maurice Joly called “Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu” as well as a German novel from 1868 called Biarritz by Hermann Goedsche.

The text really took off around 1917 with the Bolshevik Revolution, as the text spread ideas that the revolution in Russia and the rise of communism was the work of the Jews. The text was picked up by Henry Ford, who distributed an English translation in his newspaper under the title “The International Jew”, and this became the most widely-seen edition of the text in the United States.

Adolf Hitler was introduced to the document in the 1920s and he saw it as a reason to blame the Jews for the German defeat in WW1, and he used the text in his book Mein Kampf. He directly used the text in his speeches to push his antisemitic message, and he blamed European Jews for socialism and communism. The Nazi regime used the Protocols as a justification for many of the horrible things it would later do. Despite the fact that many top Nazis knew it was fake, such as Joseph Goebbels who wrote in his diary, “I believe that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a forgery.” The text was proved a forgery in 1935 at trial in court at Berne, Switzerland.

The text has been republished in many new editions after the original in 1903, and has been adapted over the past century to account for new times. It was even made into a new edition in which it blamed the Jewish conspiracy for the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a weird and cooky text, posed as a supposed transcript from a meeting of a mysterious elite Jewish organization pulling the strings and controlling the world from behind the scenes. It lays out an extensive plan for how this organization is going to conquer the Gentiles and establish some kind of world supergovernment through a plot of behind-the-scenes manipulation. While it is quite clear to me reading this in 2025 that this text is nothing but a false flag operation aiming to spread antisemitic hatred and paranoia, I see how this could have been compelling to a person in its time period for the same reasons big conspiracy theories popular nowadays. Plus, there are definitely people out there still believing the lies pushed by this text, and antisemitic conspiracies about Jews controlling the world are very much still here with us in 2025.

The narrator of the text is a supposed leader of this Jewish elite organization, and the perspective is this leader talking to fellow members of this elite group, preaching about their methods and plans to take over the world. It makes many references to them having a supposed network of spies and agents across the world who have been manipulating peoples and nations for centuries to aid their end goals of domination. The way it is written seems intentionally designed to make an oblivious reader angry and paranoid, and the text seems to be trying to make you feel like you are getting a glimpse into the evil plans from the elite that they desperately don’t want you to see.

The impression I get from the first section of the book sends a clear message to the reader: “We are evil and we want to control the world.” It very explicitly advocates for these things, and it doesn’t try to sanitize the tyrannical plans these schemers supposedly have. But clearly there’s an agenda behind this perspective it’s pushing, and I think you can sort of understand it from inverting the perspective and assuming the author is just using this narrator figure as a way of manipulating the readers into believing something to the opposite of what’s really happening.

One of the interesting perspectives the narrator pushes is that this elite organization is on the side of the very prominent working class movements of the time period, such as the socialist, communist, and anarchist movements. It seems like the author of the text is directly discouraging the reader from siding with these movements/viewing them as struggles for working class liberation, making them out instead to be some kind of ploy by the supposed Jewish elite to manipulate them. I think this is very consistent with how this text was distributed by Henry Ford, a person who very much had interests in defending the status quo of capitalism, and who had an interest in redirecting the anger of working people away from influential capitalists like him and instead towards a scapegoat like the Jews.

Similiarly, I feel like the text is trying to coax me, the reader, to be in favor of some kind of monarchy/aristocracy? The narrator brings up time after time throughout the text how the aristocracy was one of the biggest things stopping their Jewish elite organization from taking over (giving a subtle nudge for me to view the aristocracy as a benevolent force of defense, protecting me against this spooky evil elite controlling the world.) It makes me suspect that whoever wrote this document was a very pro-aristocracy person, since they seem so desperate to convince me that an aristocracy is actually something that has my interests at heart, (which I otherwise have no reason to think.)

Overall, I see this text as a lie to defend the status quo in the early 1900s by scapegoating the Jewish population and trying to redirect people’s anger about other things against some big, grand, non-existent conspiracy.

As a person, Marquis de Sade was not much better than his characters.

Marquis de Sade was born in a relatively important family, growing up in great wealth and with his father’s direct ties to the monarchy. But De Sade had a troubled childhood, being often subjected to extreme corporal punishment and having his father later abandon him, and he was said to have been rebellious, spoiled, and violent. Entering adulthood, De Sade married a wealthy lady, but had near constant affairs with other women, mainly prostitutes. He committed a number of cruel and brutal acts against many of these women, some not so far from what his characters did in 120 Days of Sodom. One of these was in 1768 when de Sade attacked one of them, cutting her and dripping hot wax onto her wounds. He also personally engaged in acts of sodomy, which got him exiled to Italy by the court. He was imprisoned multiple times throughout the 1760s and 1770s, but he was bailed out by the King of France on multiple of these occasions, purely by his connection. But his luck would eventually run out, and he would remain encarcerated for much of the remainder of his life.

De Sade was transferred to the Bastille prison in 1784, where he would remain until the prison was stormed by the mob of revolutionaries in 1789. He sort of deceived the revolutionary government into believing he was actually a victim of the monarchy, and was released from prison in 1790. But during his time in the Bastille, he wrote the 120 Days of Sodom. He wrote the book on a tiny scroll in his prison cell, and when the Bastille was stormed he thought that the manuscript was lost forever, and it wasn’t until 1904 that it was posthumously published.

The overlaps between Marquis de Sade and his characters in the 120 Days of Sodom are undeniable. Both he and his characters obviously had a proclivity for disgusting and brutal acts of sexual violence, and multiple of the crimes in the novel were directly inspired by the acts de Sade committed in his own life. His hatred of religion was another one of the ideas shared between the author and his work, as clearly was demonstrated in the philosophy expressed by his characters. Overall, the general themes found when looking into de Sade as a person are roughly what one would expect after reading his book. He was a horrendously violent and sadistic person, and he spent much of his life imprisoned for crimes not far off from what he wrote about.

There are times in life when you read something and say afterwards, this was a bad book. But it is not very often you read something and say, this is unequivocally the worst piece of literature ever written.

The 120 Days of Sodom is a horrendous and disgusting book . I don’t know where I would even begin in explaining its content. But to summarize it briefly, 4 french noblemen in the 1700s kidnap a dozen or two children, both boys and girls, and they spend 4 months sexually torturing them and committing every act of deranged self-indulgence possible.

For the first 300 or so pages this book is a normal narrative of these things happening with characters, description, and dialogue, and then, because I assume de Sade never finished the work, the book turns into just a long list of short and summarized debaucherous acts spanning another 100 pages. I have found a fun hobby of opening to this list at the end and then passing the book around at my table in the dining hall, watching as each person’s face drops as the book reaches them. It’s unbelievable. I didn’t know it was even possible to write something this shocking.

Something I found interesting was one of the interpretations made by a scholar in the beginning of the text. The argument was that, in a certain way, this book could be seen as a moralist work, since it is so bad it literally inspires the reader to be better than it. That was exactly my initial reaction when I first got my hands on the book over the summer. I perused the text and read a few lines here and there, and then I found the list at the back of the book. After reading a few pages this summer, one of my first instincts was to look into becoming a monk and committing myself to live a life of hermitage off in a monastery, or something similiar. The book made me want nothing to do with the disgusting self-indulgences it featured, and it actively repulsed me into wanting to a better person. This book is so vile it leads you to desire to be virtuous. That is the only good thing I have to say about it.

If there is a message to this all, I have absolutely no idea what it is. If de Sade is trying to make a commentary on the French nobility being like the characters of his book, he is in the process also making a gigantic Freudian slip in the fact he thought of these ideas himself. He wrote the book. He must be exactly like these characters too. I don’t think there’s any possible way you could put a distance between de Sade and this work he created, the characters in the book point directly to an author that must be just as bad. In my opinion, this book is not very meaningful. All it is is a glimpse into an extremely twisted mind of a deranged lunatic author. It is not very hard to see why this text is considered forbidden.

I found Jonathan Swift’s satire piece “A Modest Proposal” to be a very fun read, as well as a very good commentary on the dehumanization of poor people. The premise of Swift’s so-called proposal is that, in order to solve poverty in the population of Ireland, newborn children should be harvested for their meat and eaten, as well as be used for material to make clothes, shoes, and other products for the population.

Swift is obviously not serious, and he does not genuinely think this is a good idea, but his deadpan style of humor, his meekness, and his simplicity in the way he articulates the plan makes it legitimately seem like he’s entirely earnest in this idea. I think this is one of the reasons why it’s such an effective piece of satire. In the way I read the text, Swift was making a very serious point about how people (probably specifically the British of his tme period) are dehumanized and seen as just commodities to be sold. I think one of the most interesting things about the proposal is that from a scientific and economic standpoint his plan completely checks out. But that’s precisely his point: poor people are being treated like a commodity to be traded, just a statistic. They are not being treated as human beings. When the British government in the 1700s thought about what to do about poverty, they did not see the paupers as human beings. There was no moral component of their consideration, just a cold and cruel scientific/economic approach. I think Swift’s scientific approach to consuming babies for nutrition is an ingenius allegory for what the moral problem is. It could make an oblivious reader ask, “Does Swift really not see any humanity in these babies? What’s wrong with him? How could he possibly say that? This is cruel!” This is probably the exact thing Swift wants the reader to ask, except to the British who fail to see the humanity in the Irish people they are letting starve.

I think Swift’s point is just as true today in our country as it was in his country in the 1700s. I think our institutions view poor people in just as cruel a way. Not people to have empathy for, just a statistic to be scientifically tackled. Just a commodity to be sold.

The Gospels of Judas and Mary Magdalene were interesting reads for me, especially as someone with a preexisting fascination with Gnosticism and other heretical sects of early Christianity.

It was clear to me the reasons for why these texts would have held such controversy in the eyes of the church, given that they presented narratives that completely contradict the mainstream gospels. For the Gospel of Mary Magdalene especially, the thought that Jesus might have trusted a woman more than the rest of his disciples would have been a bold and outrageous idea, especially looking at how patriarchal the societies of the time period were. As for the Gospel of Judas, the framing of Judas as being possibly the most enlightened disciple and the one Jesus trusted above all others completely contradicts the mainstream narrative that Judas was nothing but a selfish and greedy traitor.

Beyond this, I was also fascinated with the cosmological ideas themselves being presented. In both of these texts Jesus communicated a very different message than he does in the mainstream gospels. He talked of matter being evil, he mentioned that the world was created by an evil demiurge named Yaldabaoth, and he condemned the main 12 disciples as worshipping a false god. It reminded me of some ideas I have studied personally with my interests in philosophy, specifically those of Plotinus and the larger school of Neoplatonism, which advances a similiar point to Jesus in the Gospel of Mary about matter being evil.

I definitely enjoyed these reads because of how they were right up my alley in mysticism and esoterica, and I’m definitely going to explore more heretical gospels in the future. I am interested in looking further into these texts to see what influence they might have had from these shools of thought in philosophy from this time period, and vice versa.

Hello