I had never heard of The Turner Diaries prior to this assignment, and initially, I wasn’t sure what I was reading. It was written like a historical account, and even had an introduction that made it out to be historically legitimate, but I wasn’t familiar with the events it described. My next thought was that it was some kind of white supremacist MAGA bull shit. Turns out I was only half wrong. The Turner Diaries predates MAGA by almost forty years, but it is definitely a white supremacist text. It is overtly racist and antisemitic. Some of the concepts remind me of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, for instance, the “system” (finance, government, media, etc.) being entirely run by Jewish people. The portion that I was able to read was absolutely awful. It just seemed like a racist self-insert wish-fulfillment fantasy, which brings me to the author. William Luther Pierce wrote The Turner Diaries under a pseudonym. (I would too if I’d produced such utter rubbish.) Pierce was a member of the National Alliance, a white supremacist, neo nazi, terrorist hate group. Pierce was a physicist who got his degree at the University of Chicago and went on to teach at Oregon State University, but his real calling was being a racist shithead. He was a member of the John Birch Society and the American Nazi Party. The Turner Diaries themselves were initially published in serialized volumes in the white supremacist magazine Attack! from nineteen seventy-five to nineteen seventy-eight. It was published in paperback form in nineteen seventy-eight after positive responses from readers. The Turner Diaries were not just hate propaganda; they also ended up driving several real-life terrorist attacks, including the nineteen eighty-four assassination of Alan Berg and the nineteen ninety-five Oklahoma City bombing.
Author: Elizabeth
I never understood how Kaczynski rationalized the unabombings as a legitimate form of protest toward the technological world, and after reading his manifesto, I still don’t have a clue. Here’s what I got: he had a strong dislike for those he calls “leftists”, claiming they either have low self-esteem or are oversocialized. However, he also doesn’t care for conservatives, calling them fools. He doesn’t go into nearly as much detail about his hatred for conservatives, though, and I’d be interested to know how he identifies politically. I found some background on Ted Kaczynski, and he’s made out to be some sort of genius. To me, he just seems like a weird dude. He excelled from grade school to high school, but was sent to college at just sixteen years old. He partook in a controversial study where people essentially attacked his personal beliefs, and it’s been speculated whether that impacted his later life choices, although Kaczynski himself claimed no connection. When he finished college and postgraduate education, he moved to an isolated cabin in Montana and lived without any modern technology, not even running water. He hated all things to do with modern technology and was vehemently against technological advancement. What really (according to Kaczynski) set off the attacks was when he found that a road had been put through a favorite spot of his in the wilderness. This detail is what really makes me question how smart this guy really was. I mean, I hate all the construction that goes on near my house; the whole neighborhood is becoming a concrete jungle, but somehow I manage not to blow things up. Anyway, Kaczynski sent 14 bombs from the years 1978 to 1995, all but two of which detonated. Three people died from the bombings, and an additional 23 were injured.
I did not care for The Anarchist Cookbook. I didn’t see the point. It might have been more appropriately named “101 Ways to Cause Destruction and Hurt People”, because that’s basically what it was. The only instances in which you’d need to know how to make a bomb would be to either destroy something or hurt someone. The whole book embodies exactly why we can’t have anarchy. People (not all, but enough) would wreak havoc. The way I see it, I want the government out of my sex life, out of my health, and out of my classroom. But that doesn’t mean I want people to be allowed to vandalize, steal, and assault as they please. I guess I just don’t understand the appeal of anarchy itself. I understand wanting to legalize drugs and such, but don’t people understand that without some form of order, they themselves could just as easily become the victim of a crime? The entire tone of the book didn’t sit well with me either. There was an air of superiority that I didn’t care for. As if having radical beliefs and a basic knowledge on how to commit crime was something to brag about. I know the government hurts people and is responsible for several horrific crimes themselves, but I just don’t think razing the whole thing to the ground is the answer. Throwing the baby out with the bath water, so to speak. The whole thing just seemed like an attempt at edginess. Anyone with half a brain knows that buying illegal goods and making weapons isn’t going to grant the desired results; it will grant you a sizable prison sentence though. I guess what I’m saying is I don’t know what this book was trying to accomplish besides making itself look “cool” and “provocative”. You’d get better takes from an emo kid at a Jr high.
I was pretty sure the SCUM manifesto was written in the sixties based purely on the amount of times the words “dig” (eleven) and “groove” (twelve) appeared. This was confirmed when Solanas refers to Robert McNamara, US Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam war. This manifesto is all over the place. It’s a passionate sixteen pages of word vomit. Ideas aren’t fully fleshed out, several typing errors mar the pages, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense in certain parts. I’m not against unpalatable feminist ideas, but they should be at least comprehensible. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was dealing with whilst reading this. Was it a Jonathan Swift situation (ridiculous satire meant to prove a broader point)? Or maybe even a Protocols of the Elders of Zion situation (an individual authoring a fictitious account of another group’s ideas to sow discord and paint them in a negative light)? But I did some research on Valerie Solanas and it seems that she was being genuine and/or wasn’t too well. In her early life, Solanas faced struggles with mental illness, poverty, and abuse, and became a sex worker later in life. She then (non fatally) shot Andy Warhol in nineteen sixty eight, which brought a lot of attention to the SCUM manifesto. Solanas herself said that the acronym assigned to her work (Society for Cutting Up Men) was not her idea, and she disliked it. She also said that the edition published by Olympia Press included several typographical errors and that they had cut out parts of several sentences, rendering them incomprehensive. It’s still debated whether this SCUM manifesto is in fact satire, but I don’t think it is. I think Solanas had a lot of anger and extreme ideas, as well as being mentally unwell. After all, if it were satire, what would it be satirizing?
Topic Overview: In the nineteen eighties, Britain, dozens of low budget horror films (Cannibal Holocaust, I Spit On Your Grave, Driller Killer) were dubbed by the media “Video Nasties” and banned under the obscene publications act. The government’s reasoning was that the films posed a threat to society, especially children. The graphic content was definitely a factor, but so was the rise of cheap home video (VHS), making films accessible to the general public. Fear of American and Italian exploitation cinema “corrupting” British culture was also a concern.
The Question: How did the banning of “Video Nasties” shape their reception and legacy in horror culture? Did it make them more popular? Did it cause a rise in video piracy and bootlegged copies? How did it influence future films (Saw franchise, Terrifier, etc)? Are they still banned/censored? What was their impact on future censorship in Britain? How did the “video nasties” moral panic reflect British anxieties about class, youth, and moral decay in the nineteen eighties? Did the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) and the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) serve public morality, or reinforce government control through censorship? What distinguishes “obscene” violence in film from violence in mainstream cinema, and who gets to decide? How did press coverage of the “video nasties” shape public opinion more than the films themselves? Would modern films (2020’s) of the same nature receive the same backlash, and what does that say about modern values, shifting cultural norms, and desensitization? Source Ideas: News articles from the nineteen eighties about this topic, journal articles from later on describing the legacy of the films. Journal articles/government/historical texts about the roles of the British Board of Film Classification, the Director of Public Prosecutions, and the Obscenities Act.
The D.C. Holocaust Memorial Museum made me consider the intellectual versus emotional impact of an event, and why it’s important to have both. I’ve read numerous factual texts that are not survivor testimonies regarding the Holocaust, but learning about the full scale of the event didn’t strike me as much as the Anne Frank exhibit, for example. Learning about victims and survivors is more impactful because it invites us to relate personally. The card I got at the beginning with a victim on it really struck me. It was a young woman named Henia who was taken to Treblinka and murdered along with her husband and two children. The card contained her photo and two diary entries. It was chilling to become so familiar with the story of a woman close to my age who suffered and died in a Nazi death camp. I think it’s important to know that six million Jewish people and millions of others died at the hands of the Nazis during the Holocaust, but I think it’s equally important to learn specific stories. In my Global Issues in Literature class, we just finished reading Maus by Art Spiegelman, which is a great example of how zeroing in on a single story or aspect of a large scale event can actually have the most impact. Another thing that struck me about the museum was its depiction of the banality of evil. It wasn’t just random cruelty; it was systemic, organized genocide by people who would claim to be ordinary. It shows us just how little it takes for a society to devolve into complete hatred, and just how little time it takes. I think if in nineteen thirty, you asked an average German man to start killing his Jewish neighbors, he wouldn’t take to the idea. But it’s like that proverb of the frog boiling so slowly he doesn’t realize he’s being boiled; Hitler invoked nationalism first, and then slowly introduced intolerance, and before you know it a genocide is in progress.
After reading the context behind Mein Kampf, I was unsurprised to find that Hitler tended to fabricate the truth for the sake of his personal image. So what I’ll be doing is taking information from my previous post regarding chapters one and two of Mein Kampf, and pointing to where we have been misled.
“Hitler begins his story with his dad, who left home at a young age in pursuit of a career in civil service. Dad wanted the same path for his son Adolf, but Adolf wanted to be a painter.” It’s true that Hitler wanted to be a painter, but according to the Manheim introduction, his father didn’t pressure him into a civil service career, and the relationship between father and son wasn’t nearly as fraught as Mein Kampf depicts it to be.
“He got diagnosed with a lung condition that for some reason made it so he couldn’t go to school anymore…?” Hitler’s “lung condition” was probably bull shit. His teachers said he wasn’t dumb, but he was lazy, and the story about his illness was likely just what he told his mom (and himself) to get out of school.
“Anyway, Hitler’s mother died and then he went out to fend for himself. Like I mentioned, he doesn’t get into art school, and he’s not good at architecture, so now he has to do manual labor. He spends a good amount of time whining about how manual labor is so hard and awful and unfair. (See the irony?) He complains that he can’t even unwind with a book at the end of the day because he’s so tired. He’s really heavy handed with the “look how hard my life was!” angle, and to be honest, it’s kind of annoying.” Okay. Let’s unpack this, because Hitler wasn’t as poor and struggling as he wants us to think. He inherited some good money from his dad’s death, and then later his mom’s, plus a share of his mom’s pension. He lived for a while in a residence for working men, but he didn’t do much work. That is until he began to sell his drawings, which earned him more money than he would have gotten as a banker at the same age.
Clearly, Hitler is not above making himself look like the victim to forward his own interests, but honestly, who’s surprised?
Hitler begins his story with his dad, who left home at a young age in pursuit of a career in civil service. Dad wanted the same path for his son Adolf, but Adolf wanted to be a painter. Unfortunately, he was kind of a shit painter, and he didn’t get into art school. But let’s backtrack a bit. When Hitler was thirteen, his dad died of apoplexy. He got diagnosed with a lung condition that for some reason made it so he couldn’t go to school anymore…? Yeah, I’m not sure about that one; I have severe asthma and yet somehow I managed to continue my education past seventh grade. Anyway, Hitler’s mother died and then he went out to fend for himself. Like I mentioned, he doesn’t get into art school, and he’s not good at architecture, so now he has to do manual labor. He spends a good amount of time whining about how manual labor is so hard and awful and unfair. (See the irony?) He complains that he can’t even unwind with a book at the end of the day because he’s so tired. He’s really heavy handed with the “look how hard my life was!” angle, and to be honest, it’s kind of annoying. I have no sympathy for this man. Eventually Hitler becomes a water color artist. Now he can read at the end of the day. Yay. That’s the perfect segue into his very opinionated thoughts about reading. Firstly, he wants us all to know that he is an excellent reader because of his exceptional memory and above average intelligence. He proceeds to tell us that reading is about selecting only the correct and important elements from a text (which he’s great at by the way). Now let’s delve more into Hitler’s ideology, because there is a lot to cover. We start with his hate for the Slavic people. He thinks everyone should speak German. (Sound familiar? “This is America, speak English!”) He thinks that Germany’s fate after World War I was unjust, and he wants to remedy that by “purifying” Germany. He groups Germans into three categories: fighters, in between, and traitors. Fighters agree with him. In betweens don’t care either way. And traitors think that Germany doesn’t need “purification”. Hitler thinks he’s the savior everyone needs. Hitler felt that all “true Germans” should live in one united Germany. He believed there were “true Germans” in places like Vienna and Bavaria, and that they were being oppressed by Slavic people in Austria. This is a notable example of his “us versus them” thinking, and his desire to blame other nationalities for Germany’s problems. Hitler resented the Hapsburgs, the Royal family who ruled Austria (and later Austria Hungary). They had Germans, Czechs, Poles, Slavs, Hungarians, and others living in one empire. Hitler resented this and saw it as a betrayal of “pure” German blood. He wanted the Hapsburgs to allow him to create one Germany “untainted”. This idea was called Anschluss, and he believed this was the answer to Germany’s defeat. He spends some time talking about how everyone is poor and despondent in Germany, and that the education system doesn’t imbue German children with nationalistic pride. Then he talks briefly about his dislike for the Social Democrats. He dislikes them because they think Slavs and other non-Germans should be allowed to live in Germany and Austria. Dude has a lot of opinions.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was first published in April of 1903 in a newspaper owned by Russian antisemite Pavel Krushevan. It made a resurgence in 1917 when the Bolshevik party seized power. Many who were against the revolution and communism in general blamed Jewish people for it, which is called Judeo-Bolshevism. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion gained even more traction from there, and the text made its way around the globe, being translated into nine additional languages, beginning with German in 1919. It would eventually be translated into English, French, Japanese, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, and Arabic from its original Russian. By 1920, suspicions regarding The Protocols of the Elders of Zion arose. It was British diplomat and writer Lucien Wolf who pointed out that the Protocols were fabricated from Biarritz, an 1868 German novel. Despite this, Henry Ford goes on to publish The International Jew, several articles inspired by the Protocols. It’s not until 1927 that Ford apologizes and rescinds the publication, however by then it is already in wide circulation. In 1921, further evidence revealing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to be fictitious came out. It turned out they were largely copied from Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu by Maurice Joly. This didn’t stop Hitler from referencing them in his 1925 book Mein Kampf though. The Protocols gained immense popularity in World War II Germany, with Franz Eher Verlag (the Nazi printing house) issuing twenty two printings of it. German authorities continued to spread antisemitic conspiracies and the lies in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, translating it into Ukrainian and Belarusian and circulating copies all across Europe. At long last, in 1993, Russia denounced the Protocols, stating it is a forgery and antisemitic. The text was officially banned in Russia in 2006.
Source: The Holocaust Encyclopedia
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is clearly satire. Anyone could see that, right? Right?! Apparently not. Around nineteen seventeen, leading up to the end of World War One, this hoax of a document began to make its way around the globe. By nineteen twenty five it had been translated into English, German, French, Japanese, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, and Arabic from its original Russian. Henry Ford (founder of Ford Motor Company) even took inspiration from it and published a serial called The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem. But Ford wasn’t the only one to perpetuate harm based on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Adolf Hitler frequently cites the work of satire in Mein Kampf as if it were legitimate. So here’s my question: was Hitler really just that dumb, or did he know exactly what he was doing? I’m able to say with fair certainty that Hitler knew the book was a hoax, but he was willing to use a hoax if it helped his cause. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was exposed in nineteen twenty, with further evidence discounting it being presented in nineteen twenty one. Mein Kampf wasn’t published until nineteen twenty five. However it’s not uncommon for political demagogues to fabricate or entirely rely on false rhetoric to promote their cause. Look at Trump: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” More baseless (and frankly ridiculous) claims about minorities and oppressed groups still circulate today, by those in power as well as everyday citizens. Just like Jewish people were blamed for communism after World War One, Hispanic people are being blamed for the economy today. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
120 Days of Sodom was written 1785 in France. At this point in time, France was already teetering on the edge of a revolution (the French Revolution would kick off in 1789). Those in power were disliked by many for their corruption and exploitation of those with less power. Therefore it could be argued that de Sade was trying to hold a mirror to the faults of the aristocracy. Each libertine could be intended to represent a group in power. The Duc, a nobleman, may represent nobility and aristocracy. The Bishop, a member of the clergy, could represent the church. The President, a judge, represents the judiciary, and Ducret, a banker, stands for the wealthy. De Sade might be intending to paint a completely objectionable and not at all subtle picture of what he believes France will devolve into if these powers remain unchecked and in authority. One could even argue that de Sade found it necessary for his representation to be so grotesque and shocking. It’s like when my dad says “the only way I can be heard in this house is by yelling!”. The only way de Sade feels like his point can get any attention is by making it obscene and frightful. But there is another angle to look at this from. De Sade himself was certainly no saint. In fact, he was in prison for various forms of sexual deviance when 120 Days of Sodom was written. It doesn’t make much sense to criticize someone for the exact same thing you’re guilty of. So is it possible de Sade identifies with the four libertines more than he condemns them? I would say yes. Both de Sade and each main character have a certain disdain for religion, and similar…tastes in other things. 120 Days of Sodom is just as likely a pervert’s sex fantasy as it is a bold political statement.
Brief content warning: I can not be held responsible if you choose to look up any of the extreme horror titles I mention. You have been warned.
“Extreme horror is a subgenre of horror that uses shocking, graphic content like excessive gore, sexual violence, and taboo subjects to push boundaries and create a visceral, psychological impact.” (Google)
As an avid fan of the extreme horror genre (sometimes known as “splatterpunk”), I’ve read things far worse than what de Sade had to offer. So why did I read the hell out of Aron Beauregard’s Playground but suffer slowly through de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom? After all,they both have weird sex, gross scenes, innocents being harmed, and copious amounts of violence. But there are some differences, at least to me.
- Firstly, nobody is claiming the splatterpunk novel you got on your Kindle for 99 cents is literature. It’s rubbish. It’s low brow. It’s a guilty pleasure, if that. 120 Days of Sodom is pretentious. It thinks it’s making a bold political statement, when in reality it’s just a pervert’s fantasy. Literary theorist and professor Stanley Fish once conducted an experiment where he gave his literature class a list of random theologians and asked them to interpret the “poem”. The class spent over twenty five minutes discussing its significance. Is this a good argument for reader response theory? Yes. Is it also proof that you can slap a “literature” sticker on any old rubbish and people will buy it? Also yes.
- Next, let’s consider the source. I’m fairly sure Judith Sonnet (No One Rides for Free, Chainsaw Hooker) doesn’t have violent orgies with teenagers. De Sade on the other hand…the “Little Girls Scandal” speaks for itself. One might argue in favor of separating the art from the artist, but that’s rather difficult to do when the art is the artist. In a way, de Sade writes about himself. You can’t convince me that he isn’t sexually interested in the horrors he describes.
I think for me, the assumption of importance and the objectionable qualities of the author himself are what sets 120 Days of Sodom apart as uniquely unpleasant.
So I was just doing a bit of digging into the gospel of Mary of Magdala, and I found some interesting speculations. I’m familiar with Simon, James, Joses, and Judas in the bible. These were supposedly the brothers of Jesus, although the Catholic church maintains that Mary (the mother of God) was a virgin her whole life, so these siblings are either cousins or Joseph’s children from a previous marriage. There are also several unnamed sisters of Jesus who are categorized the same as the brothers by the Catholic church. I was researching Mary of Magdala, or Mary Magdalene, and I found an interesting theory that she might have been one of the unnamed sisters of Jesus. In the gospel of Philip, another gospel that didn’t make the cut, one of Jesus’s sisters is referred to as “Mary”. I thought this was interesting since Mary of Magdala makes several appearances in the bible. In the gospel of Luke, she follows Jesus as he journeys to spread his teachings, and in the gospel of Matthew she is there at his crucifixion, weeping at the cross. Also in the gospel of Matthew, she and another woman named Mary are the ones who see that the stone in front of Jesus’s tomb has been removed. They are then spoken to by the angel who shares the news of Jesus’s resurrection, and are in fact the first to see the risen form of Jesus. The funny thing is, the bible never explains why Mary of Magdala is such a close follower, or what her relationship is with Jesus. She is never listed as one of the apostles (there are only twelve, and they are all men), and in the biblical canon, Jesus is never said to have had a wife. I think it makes sense that Mary of Magdala could be one of Jesus’s sisters.
I’m slightly ashamed to admit that I wasn’t one-hundred percent sure this was satire until I got to the very end. However once I got to the paragraph that begins “Therefore let no man talk to me of other expedients…”, and Swift lists all the things that eating babies is “preferable” to (Of learning to love our country…Of teaching landlords to have at least one degree of mercy towards their tenants), I was certain this wasn’t for real. But that begs the question “then why does it exist? What is it for? Who is the target audience?” I have some background knowledge on Ireland that might be helpful. (Swift was Irish and wrote “A Modest Proposal” in the seventeen twenties or thirties I think.) Famine and poverty were rampant in Ireland during the early seventeen hundreds, (especially seventeen twenty to thirty) although worse was to come in about ten years with the “Great Frost Famine”, and still more in eighteen forty-five with the Irish potato famine. Swift was clearly going for shock value when he wrote “A Modest Proposal”, trying to offer a “solution” so horrendous as to make people (specifically landlords and wealthy land owners) consider the reasonable solutions they had been resisting. I think Swift is also attempting to put the heat on wealthy people. In the text, he primarily suggests that those who would enjoy eating the children are the wealthy, high social class individuals. He might be drawing a parallel, saying that the way they treat their tenants and the poor (and by extension their children) is akin to eating babies. He might also be suggesting that these rich land owners wouldn’t have a problem killing and eating children, after all they are already letting them starve, rot in filth and pestilence, and wear rags.
Hi.