Author: Sarah Coppenbarger

First published in 1971, William Powell’s The Anarchist Cookbook details the “recipes” for manufacturing homemade illicit drugs, explosives, weapons, surveillance devices, and methods of general sabotage, while even offering legal advice for when one finds themself arrested at a demonstration. Powell wrote this book at the height of the counterculture era during the U.S.’s involvement in the Vietnam War, a time when many Americans became severely disillusioned with the federal government. During a period in which people felt left in the dark regarding politics and government, Powell wanted to “stir some stagnant brain cells into action” (p. 27) among what he called the “silent majority” by providing them with what he saw as a comprehensive anarchist toolkit for fighting against systems of governmental oppression.

I think Powell meant well but was incredibly naïve when he wrote The Anarchist Cookbook. He was so young and angry about being drafted into the Vietnam War, and frustrated with the political climate in the late 1960s. At that moment, he likely believed the book was a clever act of resistance. Because he stated so clearly that his intention was only to educate the “silent majority” and not to provide a toolkit for fringe groups or reckless individuals (p. 111), he seems to have genuinely assumed that the recipes would be used only to resist governmental oppression, and not to harm innocent people. However, he could not have been more wrong. In reality, several high-profile bombers and mass shooters have been linked to The Anarchist Cookbook. They possessed copies, read it before committing attacks, and in some cases used its information directly. The Oklahoma City bomber and the Columbine shooters are two of the most infamous examples. These acts of violence, which caused immense harm and trauma, are exactly the kinds of outcomes Powell insisted he did not intend. They also represent a fundamental difference between Powell’s stated goals through his book and the way in which it was actually used. 

On page 111, Powell also writes, “I see ‘the revolution’ as a humanistic change, which may or may not incorporate violence. It must be a revitalization of the American system to take us back to the real moral and political principles adopted in 1776.” By this logic, someone like the Oklahoma City bomber could claim justification because he believed he was retaliating against federal overreach. But even if government oppression should be challenged and held accountable, that does not mean that the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of innocent people are expendable.

To me, this is where Powell’s naïveté becomes most clear. He assumed readers would share his belief in “humanistic change” through revolution and would take care with these recipes and not misuse them. He assumed they would understand the difference between resisting oppression and committing indiscriminate criminal acts. However, once the book was published, it was too late because even after he called for the publisher to withdraw The Anarchist Cookbook from circulation, he was refused. 

Based on the 2016 Netflix documentary American Anarchist, which centers on interviews with Powell, he no longer stood by what he had written in The Anarchist Cookbook. In the film, he expresses remorse and even embarrassment, calling the book “absolute rubbish.” He also acknowledges that he could understand how anarchists or extremists might read portions of the text such as “freedom is based on respect, and respect must be earned by the spilling of blood” (p. 157), and use it to justify really destructive or straight up evil acts, which has unfortunately been the case. Powell’s later reflections serve as a reminder of the negative impact that texts can have even when they are written with good intentions. Overall, I can certainly see why The Anarchist Cookbook is still to this day extremely controversial, and I can only hope that people do not continue to use it for the wrong reasons.

To be honest, I found the SCUM Manifesto quite amusing because it is so extreme that it almost sounds like it could be satirical, similar to A Modest Proposal.

Overall, Solanas wrote the SCUM Manifesto in an organized, yet repetitive manner. She breaks the text up into several sections, each describing a different part of societal infrastructure that males have developed in an attempt to achieve womanhood and to also hide the fact that they are not females, while also manipulating females from childhood, who Solanas believes to be the superior sex, into believing that they are of the status Solanas believes men to be: that is, an empty, boring, insipid, and inferior blob. This manipulation of women by the male sex is what Solanas argues has allowed males to lead the world and for women to be on the sidelines (for example, being subservient and pandering to men instead of expressing original opinions).

She describes how men are always trying to “fuse” with females in order to become like them because males on their own are essentially lifeless and the only way for them to have some sense of feeling is to become a woman (the superior sex, according to Solanas).

She uses the SCUM Manifesto as a call to arms for women to not fall for male antics and rise above institutionalized maleness to reclaim the world for themselves by eliminating the male sex and all the institutions that it has established. She even goes as far as to say that “if women don’t get their asses into gear fast, we may very well all die,” (Solanas, 8).

Solanas also describes how the SCUM will reform society and how they will aim to eliminate the male sex and take over the world by undermining male-created infrastructure like the money-work system, taking over broadcasting, and breaking up male-female couples.

Another aspect of the SCUM Manifesto that I found interesting is how cynical it is, which I feel is not typical of someone that is trying to be revolutionary. In her call to arms of the female sex, suggesting that there is hope for society if the SCUM eliminates males, Solanas is also saying that there is no point in continuing society after the first generation. For example, on page 12, she asks questions like: “Why produce even females? Why should there be future generations? What is their purpose? When aging and death are eliminated, why continue to reproduce? Why should we care what happens when we’re dead? Why should we care that there is no younger generation to succeed us,” which does not seem conducive to a successful movement.

So why would Solanas write this manifesto?

Solanas was likely not happy with the state of the world and how current male-dominated institutions were negatively affecting society when she self-published the manifesto in 1967. This leads me to believe that the manifesto functions as a satire that mocks male-led societies and institutions. It could also be negative personal interactions with men throughout her life that factored into the way she writes about them in her manifesto. Her distrust of men, especially in the artistic world (which she details in her manifesto) could also be why she shot Andy Warhol in 1968 because her extreme distrust of male artists led to her experiencing extreme paranoia over a work of hers that she presumed Warhol stole. Solanas was also very resentful of anti-feminist women that catered to the patriarchy because in her eyes, they were allowing men to continue destroying the world, which she discusses in the SCUM Manifesto. 

Overall, I can certainly see why the SCUM Manifesto is controversial. If anything because of how extreme it is. However, like A Modest Proposal, Solanas probably saw real problems in society that she believed male-led institutions caused and wanted to bring them to people’s attention, which led to her releasing this manifesto. However, I am not so sure that it was effective, as people were not really aware of the manifesto until after she shot Warhol, and even with that exposure, large second wave feminist organizations such as NOW distanced themselves from her and condemned her actions, which stifled any support for her ideologies in the manifesto.

One of the most striking things I noticed about Triumph of the Will was that it did not mention Jews or any other racial group as a source of Germany’s problems, especially since this propaganda film was produced in 1934, a time when Germany was trying to lift itself out of economic struggle following global disasters like WWI and the Great Depression. I found this very interesting because, in my mind, I associate Hitler and the Nazi movement most strongly with the Holocaust, and how scapegoating “inferior” racial groups was a primary ideology of the Nazi regime, and yet, this film seemed to me more focused on German nationalism and the German people themselves uniting as one and working together to save Germany from economic ruin. In fact, there was a huge emphasis on encouraging Germans to put themselves to work in the film. There were several long scenes of men working tirelessly, but with a smile on their faces, appearing as though they were happy to be working. The one work scene that stood out to me the most was where Hitler was addressing 52,000 German working men with shovels in their hands (“soldiers with hammers” as they are referred to in the film) where he tells them to make more fields for the farmers and “carry Germany into a new era.” He also declares that “no one in Germany shall not work.” This scene did an excellent job of portraying how the focus of Hitler and the Nazi Party in 1934 was to get every able-bodied German employed to resolve Germany’s economic issues. The emphasis on working also highlighted for me how the goals of the Nazi Party changed throughout the course of Hitler’s reign. At first, their goals seemed to be more oriented towards increasing German nationalism and promoting work to lift Germany out of its dire economic condition at the time in order to maintain their existing state, whereas after this had been achieved, and Germany became a force to be reckoned with, the goals of the Nazi Party became more focused on expansion and purifying the “Aryan race.”

Overall, Triumph of the Will does have historical and artistic relevance. I can also see why it was essential in promoting the Nazi movement and some of their ideologies (German nationalism, working), especially during a time where the German people were likely not happy with the direction that Germany was heading after struggling through the Great Depression and WWI, and wanted a leader like Hitler that presented the possibility of not only moving forward, but becoming a great nation.

The historical argument that I will aim to answer in my research paper is to what extent did Richard Wagner’s own writings, ideas, and cultural legacy make his music particularly usable for Nazi ideology. This topic is particularly relevant because Wagner died in 1883, which was way before Nazism became popularized, and was even before Adolf Hitler, the dictator of the Nazi regime, was even born. Based on my preliminary search for potential sources for this research paper topic, I found that Wagner did write antisemitic essays such as Judaism in Music and also utilized nationalist and antisemitic rhetoric within his artistic works, which were widely circulated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries due to him being one of the most famous and influential German composers at the time. Additionally, his relation to the Bayreuth Circle, a network of Wagner fans that centered around the annual Bayreuth Festival and Wagner’s family, also seems to play a role in promoting nationalist and antisemitic ideologies that Hitler’s Nazi Party later appropriated. As far as sources go, I will aim to use sources that discuss Wagner’s antisemitism and nationalism and how these ideologies present themselves in his works and the impact of these works on Nazism. Examples of articles I found through the Simpson Library’s website that seem related to my research topic include but are not limited to: The Darker Side of Genius: Richard Wagner’s antiSemitism by Jacob Katz, Richard Wagner and the Impact of his Anti-Semitism by Pierre-Michel Menger, The Flying Dutchman, the Wandering Jew, and Wagner’s Anti-Semitism by Stephen McClatchie, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner by Paul Lawrence Rose, Wagner, Hitler, and Germany’s Rebirth after the First World War by David Ian Hall, Revolutionary Art – Nationalism – Anti-Semitism: The Case of Wagner by Goran Gretic, The Effect of Richard Wagner’s Music and Beliefs on Hitler’s Ideology by Carolyn Ticker, and Why Fans of the Evil Genius Remain Fans: The Case of Richard Wagner and the Bayreuth Festival by Florian Stoll and Philip Smith.

One of the things I found most interesting about the Holocaust Museum information blurbs was the way they portrayed Hitler with respect to D. Cameron Watt’s introduction to the edition of Mein Kampf that we read in class. In the museum, Hitler is frequently portrayed as a criminal mastermind whereas D. Cameron Watt interprets Hitler as someone that attempts to make himself appear smarter than he is through Mein Kampf and that he did not really know what he was doing and was doing a lot of improv foreign policy, which he supports by saying that a lot of the things Hitler talked about doing in Mein Kampf were either never done, or not done in the same way. The Holocaust Museum had a more accurate interpretation/portrayal of Hitler’s intelligence. Even for someone that was self-educated, Hitler went from a nobody to the dictator of one of the most infamous regimes of all time. He also drastically expanded Germany’s territory from 1939-1942 (which was very effectively visualized in the permanent exhibition maps at the museum) and rebuilt Germany’s completely decimated economy after WW1 and even led them to be a dominant world power by hugely expanding the German military and being at the forefront of technological and warfare innovation (e.g., rocket propulsion and poison gas). Because of the success and effectiveness of the Nazi regime and Hitler’s role as dictator, demonstrated by what I read in the museum, I think that Watt did not give Hitler enough credit for his effectiveness as a leader. 

As for my thoughts on the Holocaust Museum in general, I really liked how there were castings of real objects of historical significance from the Holocaust, as well as personal items from Holocaust victims. For example, I had the opportunity to see a casting of the Warsaw ghetto wall which the local German administration used to establish a “closed” ghetto for Jews that separated them from non-Jews and made them easier to control. I also saw the original main door to the chief hospital in the heart of the Łódź ghetto, an original prisoner bunk bed from the Auschwitz concentration camp, personal belongings such as spoons that concentration camp prisoners were forced to give up upon their arrival, original film of the actions of the mobile killing squads, the 3D model of the Auschwitz gas chamber and crematorium, and so much more. 

All of these physical and visual objects were really cool to me in the sense that they represent literal pieces of history and they made my experience in the museum so much more visceral because I was able to directly see with my own eyes what Holocaust victims were subjected to and the horrific conditions, they were forced to live in. The addition of these pieces that appealed to the senses made the exhibit so much more effective than solely reading text. Overall, I walked away from the Holocaust museum with a much deeper appreciation for the stories of Holocaust victims and survivors as well as for Mein Kampf and its fundamental role in the Holocaust.

It is important to note that several of the political ideologies that Hitler presents in Mein Kampf are not completely original. In fact, he got a lot of inspiration for Mein Kampf from those that came before him and popularized things like political antisemitism, the idea of “lebensraum,” and the role of a Kulturkampf in purging all non-German liberal, and modern influences from public life, which will be the focus of today’s contextual blog post.

Karl Leuger, the founder and leader of the Christian Socialist Party in the 1890s, popularized the use of political antisemitism to rally the masses, at least for Hitler’s purposes in Mein Kampf. In fact, Hitler got to directly observe Lueger at the peak of his party’s power in the early 1900s. At this time, Hitler, as a destitute and self-taught young man, focused much of his efforts into following municipal politics through newspapers like Deutsches Volkblatt. In many of these newspapers, he was able to see how Lueger was able to use antisemitic rhetoric and German nationalism to win over the working class. His praise for Lueger and their shared political ideologies show up frequently in Mein Kampf as well as during Hitler’s reign over the Nazi Party two or so decades later.

Also, the preexisting ideas of the “Aryan race” and social Darwinism, relate to one another and inspired much of Hitler’s political philosophy in Mein Kampf. Specifically, while there is no hard proof evidence that suggests that Hitler read the works of German zoologist Ernst Haeckel, the social Darwinist and racial ideas that his interpretations of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution promoted (particularly in terms of racial hierarchies and antisemitism) are more than likely linked to Nazi ideology due to the fact that they helped justify racial nationalism in Germany. Because of how Hitler and the Nazi movement as a whole situated the “German/Aryan race” at the top of the racial hierarchy as the master race, it gave them the ability, coupled with the social Darwinist perspective of Haeckel, to justify their maltreatment of “less superior” racial groups. Hitler even read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which likely confirmed and strengthened his belief in Judeo-Bolshevism, thus propagating the use of political antisemitism even more as a tool to assert the supremacy of the German race and grounds for the elimination of other races.

As for the idea of “lebensraum” or “living space,” German geographer Friedrich Ratzel coined the term. This term Ratzel developed is what gave Hitler the blueprint for expanding into other parts of Europe at whatever cost (e.g., displacing Slavik populations) to alleviate German overpopulation. “Lebensraum” relates to Westward Expansion and the American belief in Manifest Destiny that led to the displacement of many indigenous populations. In Mein Kampf and during the Nazi regime, Hitler used Manifest Destiny and Westward Expansion as a proof of concept for his plans to conquer Eastern Europe.

The last thing I wanted to talk about was the role of Otto von Bismarck’s 1870’s Kulturkampf in developing Hitler’s political ideologies in Mein Kampf. While Hitler did not plan to carry out his own Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church like von Bismarck did, he saw the 1870s Kulturkampf as a clear demonstration that the German state could hold absolute control over society, which would allow him and his Nazi Party to purge all non-German influences.

Overall, because it is so clear that Hitler was not the only one thinking all of these harmful ideologies, and that it was people who came much before his reign that initially popularized them, it has become that much more concerning to me that people during his era did not see the Nazi movement and its success coming sooner. I say this because it was all there in Mein Kampf and I wonder if more people out of the tens of thousands that purchased a copy when it was published would have taken the opportunity to actually read it, could the world have avoided some of the very problematic actions taken by Hitler and the Nazi party.

Mein Kampf, the 1925 autobiographical and political manifesto of Nazi Party leader, Adolph Hitler, describes several facets of Hitler’s life and political ideologies. Due to the sheer volume of the text, I will only be discussing the textual components of the second and third chapters of volume 1 in this blog post.

Hitler begins chapter two by discussing his younger years of suffering as an impoverished student in Vienna, Austria. He expresses his talent for architecture and his interest in pursuing a career in it. He repeatedly mentions how he was grateful for having such a difficult life (after going from middle class to poor after his mother died and did not leave him anything) because it taught him about the nature of people. As he discusses his experience of living in poverty, he begins to detail how bad the social condition (people being uncertain about their daily income, unemployment, alcoholism, etc.) was in Vienna at the time. His experience with poverty led him to study literature on social conditions/problems which fostered his interest in politics. He is also adamant that reading is only useful when it strengthens already existing viewpoints that the reader has or will sharpen skills useful to their profession versus them reading to learn a lot of different information. This reminded me of the psychological principles behind confirmation bias that I learned about in my AP Psychology course last year and how they can prevent people from gathering information objectively, which is likely why Hitler’s political ideologies about Social Democracy and Jews became more extreme the more he “studied” about the relationship between the two which I will discuss below.

He also details his initial feelings regarding Social Democracy and Jews in Austria. He discusses how at first he felt a level of sympathy towards the Social Democratic movement because of its demands for better working conditions, higher wages, and social welfare for the working class that were suffering under the bad social conditions in Vienna at the time. He then segues into his transition from feeling sympathy for the movement to holding a strong hatred towards it after his personal encounters with members of the movement. He despised their rejection of German nationalism, culture, heritage, the state, and religion. He concludes his rejection of Social Democracy by discussing how the movement purely relied on propaganda, intimidation, and terror to strip workers of their German national identity. He also discusses his initial impression of Jews and claims how in his youth, he never really had much exposure to them, but also was tolerant towards them and viewed anti-Semitism as uncivilized. However, his hatred for Jews grew in correlation with his growing hatred for Social Democracy as he learned that Jews headed the Social Democratic Party and the liberal press drawing the conclusion that “the Jew was no German” (pg. 122). 

Chapter three of Mein Kampf mostly focuses on the political landscape of Austria at the time Hitler was residing there. He describes two movements that happened one after the other: the Pan-German movement and the Christian Socialist movement, respectively. He describes how both movements had potential for success in terms of saving the quickly deteriorating Austrian state and the German nationality but failed due to a series of faults in the designs of the movements themselves. Specifically, for the Pan-German movement, Hitler describes how it had the correct ideological goals (strong anti-Semitic, anti-Habsburg sentiments, and reuniting all ethnic Germans under a single Reich). However, he presents three principal failures for why the movement ended up not gaining as much traction as it could have. For starters, it lacked social policy to win over the working class because it paid so little attention to addressing social issues. It also got too sucked into participating in parliamentary debates that the movement’s message ended up getting lost. Hitler also mentions how the press manipulated the goals of the movement to the point where the masses did not understand the cause of the movement. In line with the parliamentary debates, Hitler says on page 176 how the Pan-German movement “gained parliamentarians instead of leaders and fighters.” This suggests that the Pan-German movement failed because it stopped working for the people and failed to mobilize them to fight for the movement’s goals. The third failure of the movement was its anti-Catholic campaign that resulted in the alienation of millions of devout German Catholics. Hitler claims that this was a bad call mainly because successful political leaders must never give the public more than one enemy to fight at a time because splitting the masses attention like that weakens the momentum of a movement. In the case of the Pan-German movement, it divided its energy among attacking the Catholic Church, the Habsburg dynasty, and the parliamentary establishment. Because this movement did not focus its political wrath on only a single primary target, it split the German population instead of uniting it, leading to its failure. 

Finally, he discusses the failures of the Christian Socialist movement which came shortly after the Pan-German movement had run its course. He claims that at first the Christian Socialist movement appeared as though it would become successful because it corrected several of the errors present in the Pan-German movement. For example, it understood the importance of the masses in gaining political momentum and it avoided fighting religious institutions. However, the Christian Socialist movement was still flawed in two ways: it understood anti-Semitism purely as a religious and economic issue, rather than a racial one, and instead of scrapping the deteriorating Austrian state and uniting all Germans under a single, united Reich, the movement sought to preserve and stabilize the Habsburg dynasty, which Hitler believed would accelerate the dilution of German power in Central Europe. Because the Christian Socialist movement’s anti-Semitism was rooted in Catholic doctrine, it believed that a Jewish person who converted to Christianity or adopted German culture was no longer an issue which simply allowed Jews to assimilate or convert while retaining their “influence” which made the movement’s campaign superficial and ineffective (pages 197 & 198).

To sum up this exceedingly long blog post, it is likely that Hitler, after studying and analyzing the faults of these two movements, was able to see what would make his own political party (the Nazi party) as successful as it was. In other words, the failed Pan-German and Christian Socialist movements served as the initial blueprints in a sense for Hitler’s own government. Overall, Mein Kampf serves as an understanding for why Hitler adopted the certain political ideologies that he incorporated into his dictatorship role in the Nazi regime. 

One of the things that struck me most about The Boy in the Striped Pajamas was how it portrayed the Nazis. Several of the main characters in the movie, including Bruno’s mother, his grandmother, Lieutenant Kotler’s father, and even Lieutenant Kotler himself, who are all in effect Nazis, show sympathy for the Jews or take actions that defy the expectations of the Nazi regime. For example, Bruno’s mother, from the moment after learning from Lieutenant Kotler that the horrid smelling smoke coming from the chimneys are Jews’ bodies being burned, she immediately starts to go on a downward spiral: she constantly is crying, arguing with her husband, the Commandant, about how much of a monster he is and how the Nazis could be doing something so horrible like this. However, she also seems to understand at the beginning of the movie that the “farm” Bruno speaks of is a concentration camp. She even refers to the Jews as being “strange” and “different.” Yet, suddenly after learning about the Nazis burning the Jews’ bodies, she starts to feel more morally conflicted. Additionally, Bruno’s grandmother openly opposes the Nazi regime and the work that her son, the Commandant, is doing, which she demonstrates at the celebration at the beginning of the movie and even when she chooses deliberately to not visit Bruno and his family in the countryside (at least that is what I think really happened, meaning she was not actually sick). Additionally, Lieutenant Kotler’s father allegedly fled to Switzerland, likely because of his opposition to Nazi actions, but instead of speaking out, he ran. Even Kotler himself deliberately chooses not to report his father for fleeing, even though that was his duty to the regime. All of these characters, whether they were blindly following the Nazi law and order, were just trying to be on the winning side, or were just plain ignorant about the extent to which the Nazis were treating Jews, they were all still complicit in the Holocaust. So, it is interesting that the movie decided to go in that direction and portray the perpetrators (Nazis) as if not all of them were terrible people, which is fair to say because not everyone is completely bad, but that still does not take away from the results of their complicity in their silence.

One of the questions that arose for me while I was reading the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was whether it was a direct precursor to the Holocaust. After doing some digging, I found that Adolf Hitler, Germany’s Nazi era dictator from 1933 until 1945, and Joseph Goebbels, one of Hitler’s closest, most devoted followers and chief propagandist for the Nazi party, both knew of the existence of the protocols and of the fact that they were forgeries. In fact, the protocols had been disproven by journalists and experts in a series of 1921 articles by The Times. Even Goebbels himself wrote in his diary that he knew the protocols were phony. However, that did not stop the Nazi regime from propagating the “inner truth” of the text and using it to advance their political agenda at the time. As evidence of this, the protocols were even assigned by German teachers across Nazi Germany, as if they were factual, to indoctrinate and brainwash German schoolchildren to express hatred towards Jews. 

Even earlier than Hitler and Goebbels, Erich Ludendorff, one of Germany’s top military leaders, announced in 1919 that Jews were one of several groups responsible for the nation’s defeat. By 1922, he was focusing entirely on Jews as “the enemy,” to which he cited the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. So, to answer my initial question, it seems like the protocols were heavily cited by German authority from the 1910s up until the fall of the Nazi regime to scapegoat Jews and blame them for the nation’s problems at the time, which suggests they played an instrumental role in inciting/justifying the Holocaust.

Something else that I investigated was the history of Jews in Russia and how they were perceived by Russians throughout history. Way before the protocols were even written, there already existed a heavy anti-Jew sentiment in the Russian Empire due to the Christian belief that Jews killed Jesus. In fact, Jews were even barred from entering the Russian Empire because this hatred was so prevalent. Later, after the Russian Empire acquired more Polish-Lithuanian and Ottoman territory, its Jewish population increased dramatically because it had gained several regions that had large populations of Jews from 1772-1815. This territory acquisition caused Imperial Russia to have the largest Jewish population in the world at one point. In 1903, the same year that the protocols were first distributed, there were a series of pogroms, or anti-Jewish riots that occurred. It is possible that the protocols fostered anti-Jewish sentiments even more, potentially escalating the scale of these pogroms.

Overall, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is one of the most notorious antisemitic documents that has ever been distributed. So much so that it has been controversial through various eras of global history, first in early 1900s Russia, second in Nazi Germany, and has even resurfaced in recent presidential election campaigns. The longevity of this text and its direct involvement in some of the most notably horrific moments in history certainly serve as a reminder of its impact.

The first literary element employed in the prologue to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion by the author is ethos. Right off-the-bat, the author is trying to establish the credibility and legitimacy of the text by saying that its contents are “truisms” (ordinary truths) no matter how “pungent” and “hateful” they get. I found this aspect very ironic since this document is famously known to be a forgery. This also struck me as interesting because it sounds like the author was worried that these protocols would be too controversial for the masses that he had to try and beggingly convince the audience that there is still truth to them.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion follows the alleged plans of Jewish leaders to ascertain global domination by controlling the media, economy, government, and education systems. One of my biggest takeaways from the text was how it labeled liberalism as “bad” and the constant comparisons there are between the existing constitutions among the Gentiles and the Jews’ “plans” that will improve these conditions. The protocols also discuss how the Gentiles cannot be left to rule themselves, which is the opposite of democratic governments like that of the United States where we have popular sovereignty. The alleged Jewish solution to this is to establish an autocracy where the Elders select an all-powerful king that rules with firmness and cruelty. This reminded me of Hobbes’s Enlightenment philosophy which now democratic countries like the U.S. rejected. It is as if the author of these fake protocols wanted readers to be fearful that global domination by the Jews was a serious threat because it would set countries back from some of the improved governmental systems the many had adopted by the time of the protocols’ publication.

The reasoning behind having power concentrated in one cruel king is that evil is the only way of attaining good which demonstrated parallels for me with Raskolnikov’s “extraordinary man” theory from Crime and Punishment. This may be reach, but it may be possible that a reference like this may have reached a lot of people and made them even more concerned about a possible Jewish threat because it was likely written for a Russian audience due to the large presence of Jews in Russia at the time the protocols were published as well as the alleged threat that Russia would soon be subdued next by Jewish authority if action was not taken.

I also noticed that the text propagates several negative Jewish stereotypes. For example, the idea that all Jews control the media, banks, the world, that they are conniving, calculating, ruthless, arrogant, greedy, obsessed with money, and rich. The text utilizes all these stereotypes extensively. These examples are illustrated in the several sections of the protocols that put emphasis on money and how it will result in total control for the Jewish “super-government,” how the new Jewish government will tax internally to make more revenues for their government, how the Jewish government will control information that the press reports on to trick the “bestial” Gentiles into thinking that they have liberty when they do not, etc.

Overall, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is definitely an antisemitic text that is worthy of controversy.

I think that one of the biggest things that contributed to the controversial nature of this novel was the specific attitudes that people had towards fictitious writing in the 18th century, particularly in France. During the time when Sade wrote the 120 Days of Sodom, there was a widespread fear that fictitious writing could morally corrupt its readers. The same sort of worry is still prevalent in the 21st century. A notable example of this being parents’ opposition to their children playing violent video games. However, studies have shown that simply watching things that are violent does not altogether make someone express violent tendencies, nor is it a major factor in contributing to violent behavior. The result is the same when it comes to reading fiction. Just because someone reads a controversial novel like the 120 Days of Sodom does not mean that they will repeat the same behaviors as the four libertines in the novel. Sade might even have been trying to argue for this point through the unchanging attitudes of the libertines throughout the novel because no matter what the storytellers exposed them to through their narrations, their tastes remained the same. However, it still did not stop people from having a bone to pick with the novel’s publication. 

Another interesting thing to point out about the context in which Sade authored this novel is that he was an active participant in politics. Based on my knowledge of his political affiliations, including constitutional monarchism and radical republicanism, Sade very much opposed the absolute monarchies that existed in France at the time. His extreme political views and activism led me to believe that he could have written the 120 Days of Sodom to express his displeasure/the cruel, evil nature of the absolute monarchy. I say this because the way Sade conducts the novel mimics the rule of an absolute monarchy. In his novel, all the power was concentrated in the hands of the four libertines (who represent the different facets of an absolute monarchy), and all of the victims (the French citizenry), no matter what, suffered horrible fates (like that of the poor who had everything taken from them and were treated horribly under the French monarchy). This parallelism that Sade uses in the 120 Days of Sodom creates this political narrative that a world led by an absolute monarchy is cruel, evil, and hopeless, just like the four libertines and the fates of the victims.

Sade even says on the first page of the novel that the wars that Louis 14 (an absolute monarch) had waged throughout his reign is what made people like the four libertines (and those that put Sade in prison for so much of his life) so powerful and wealthy. Perhaps Sade was just using this novel as a way to vent about his being in prison because of people like the libertines who occupied high ranks in the social hierarchy and who made an example out of him when they locked him in his own Black Forest castle. In any case, this is all I have for now. Until next time.

I find it interesting how Sade wrote the 120 Days of Sodom in such a methodical way. From the first page of the manuscript, he breaks the introduction to the 120 days into six sections. There, he describes all of the characters in the novel (which are honestly difficult to keep track of because there are so many), the regulations the libertines will abide by during the 120 days, and how they go about setting this whole operation into motion. The exposition of this novel is extremely long, which is one of the things I find most striking about its structure. Sade really wanted us to know these characters inside and out, possibly in order to fully understand the extent of the debauchery they engage in as well as the ruthlessness and cruelty of the four libertines, which greatly contrast that of the children and their daughters (minus Julie).

I also find it interesting how Sade wanted all the child victims to be of the elite French class, instead of being poor. I feel like this choice was very deliberate in that Sade wanted the audience to understand that the most extreme debauchery seeks the ruin of others, and someone that is already poor cannot fall any further than they already have. The opposite is the case for rich people of high social status. 

There is also heavy anti-religious sentiment in this novel, of course stemming from the increasingly despicable acts committed by the four libertines throughout the course of the novel, but also because of the way Sade wrote the four libertine’s characters, particularly the bishop. They denounce God throughout the novel and even offer the most severe of punishments to Constance and Sophie for their practice of Christianity at the castle. The bishop in particular serves as an oxymoron himself as he is committing the worst of sins, does not seem to believe in God, and yet he is a well-respected religious figure.

One common thread I have noticed between the four texts we have read so far in this class is that they are all very extreme, and the extremeness has pointed towards an issue that people of authority do not want addressed. This, coupled with the paragraph below, leads me to believe that Sade was trying to say something political and grab people’s attention using the most extreme of content.

The structure of this novel also feels very repetitive in a way and gets increasingly worse in terms of the types of stories told by the four storytellers and activities committed by the libertines. The fact that the 120 days goes by so smoothly in such an uninterrupted way for the libertines (reflected by the structure of the novel), since they are in full control the entire time, potentially sheds light on the influence and power of people like the four libertines that allows them to get away with whatever they want. Based on the first few sentences of the introduction, it seems like Sade thought that the political climate of France at the time is what made it possible for people like the four libertines to get away with things similar to the deeds committed in the novel. This is to say that Sade was potentially trying to shed light on French society at the time, but this will be more explored when I am able to discuss the context of this novel in Thursday’s blog post. So, until next time.

One of the most striking features of A Modest Proposal was how Jonathan Swift seems to be contradicting himself. After reading about the context surrounding when this proposal was written, it seemed to me like Swift was sympathizing with the plight of poor and middle-class Irish Catholics, while simultaneously showing great indifference towards them in some of his other works. This made me wonder if Swift wrote this proposal not only as a satire of England’s exploitation of Ireland and the Irish elite’s exploitation of the lower class, but also as a satirical critique of those that claimed him to not show pity towards the state of the Irish poor. It’s also likely that Swift wrote this proposal in a satirical way because he knew the weight of the argument he was making against England/wealthy Irish landlords and that if he didn’t make an attempt to relieve tension for readers from both sides (that of the wealthy English/Irish landlords and the poor Irish Catholics), then he might have found himself in a lot more trouble than his proposal already entailed. With that being said, Swift didn’t spare details of brutality and grotesqueness in his proposal, which seems to correspond to the increasingly deteriorating state of Ireland and the worsening social conditions at the time A Modest Proposal was written. I believe that his use of the cannibalism of children and infants definitely makes it apparent how serious he was about the encroachment of England on Ireland and the Irish landlords devouring parents and having the titles to their children. Overall, he gets the message across for how severely Ireland was suffering. Honestly, Swift’s proposal seems like something English authority/wealthy Irish landlords definitely wouldn’t have wanted circulating around because of how negatively it portrays their exploitation of Ireland and poor Irish Catholics. Swift essentially portrays England and wealthy Irish landlords as brutal and evil by equating their exploitation of Ireland and the Irish people to that of exploiting children as a food source. This is likely part of what made this text “controversial” in the eyes of English authority and Irish landlords at the time. I suppose he also likely used the cannibalism metaphor in particular because of the famine occurring in Ireland at the time he wrote the proposal. He probably knew that it would be more impactful using this particular metaphor, which would likely rally together more people (poor Irish Catholics) against their wealthy landlords and England. Was Swift trying to stir up a little rebellion/revolution? I’m not exactly sure, but he was definitely trying to call out English and landlord oppression of the poor Irish Catholics.

One of the most striking things I noticed in the Gospel of Mary was the role that Mary played in an important religious context, especially since women back in the 3rd century CE typically were not high on the totem pole or as spiritually enlightened as men in religious settings due to issues like sexism. For instance, Mary is portrayed as being very close to Jesus, even more so than the other disciples. Because of this, she appears more spiritually enlightened than them because she “gets” Jesus’s teaching and they don’t. When the disciples are worried about spreading Jesus’s message, Mary comforts them and recounts a vision she had where Jesus responded to her. Even though the disciples ask her to explain the teachings she learned to them, they start to question her and accuse her of lying about Jesus’s words because she knows more than they do and even more so because she’s a woman. I thought it was just really interesting how Mary, the only woman disciple mentioned in this text, who has also been wrongly labelled as a prostitute for a very long time, was the only person to receive more enlightenment from Jesus than the other disciples, and was the only person that could truly understand his teachings. This text portrayed Mary as having somewhat of a special leadership role which feels very uncharacteristic for religious manuscripts, particularly ones from the 3rd century CE. The way in which the Gospel of Mary is written and how Mary is portrayed makes me wonder about whether or not the author of this text wanted to legitimize Mary and what she had to say after she had seemingly been discredited many times, which might be what makes it so controversial as it challenges current views on Mary’s character and the legitimacy of her “strange ideas” that seem to have been overlooked by many.

One of the most striking things I noticed in the Gospel of Mary was the role that Mary played in an important religious context, especially since women back in the 3rd century CE typically were not high on the totem pole or as spiritually enlightened as men in religious settings due to issues like sexism. For instance, Mary is portrayed as being very close to Jesus, even more so than the other disciples. Because of this, she appears more spiritually enlightened than them because she “gets” Jesus’s teaching and they don’t. When the disciples are worried about spreading Jesus’s message, Mary comforts them and recounts a vision she had where Jesus responded to her. Even though the disciples ask her to explain the teachings she learned to them, they start to question her and accuse her of lying about Jesus’s words because she knows more than they do and even more so because she’s a woman. I thought it was just really interesting how Mary, the only woman disciple mentioned in this text, who has also been wrongly labelled as a prostitute for a very long time, was the only person to receive more enlightenment from Jesus than the other disciples, and was the only person that could truly understand his teachings. This text portrayed Mary as having somewhat of a special leadership role which feels very uncharacteristic for religious manuscripts, particularly ones from the 3rd century CE. The way in which the Gospel of Mary is written and how Mary is portrayed makes me wonder about whether or not the author of this text wanted to legitimize Mary and what she had to say after she had seemingly been discredited many times, which might be what makes it so controversial as it challenges current views on Mary’s character and the legitimacy of her “strange ideas” that seem to have been overlooked by many.

One of the most striking things I noticed in the Gospel of Mary was the role that Mary played in an important religious context, especially since women back in the 3rd century CE typically were not high on the totem pole or as spiritually enlightened as men in religious settings due to issues like sexism. For instance, Mary is portrayed as being very close to Jesus, even more so than the other disciples. Because of this, she appears more spiritually enlightened than them because she “gets” Jesus’s teaching and they don’t. When the disciples are worried about spreading Jesus’s message, Mary comforts them and recounts a vision she had where Jesus responded to her. Even though the disciples ask her to explain the teachings she learned to them, they start to question her and accuse her of lying about Jesus’s words because she knows more than they do and even more so because she’s a woman. I thought it was just really interesting how Mary, the only woman disciple mentioned in this text, who has also been wrongly labelled as a prostitute for a very long time, was the only person to receive more enlightenment from Jesus than the other disciples, and was the only person that could truly understand his teachings. This text portrayed Mary as having somewhat of a special leadership role which feels very uncharacteristic for religious manuscripts, particularly ones from the 3rd century CE. The way in which the Gospel of Mary is written and how Mary is portrayed makes me wonder about whether or not the author of this text wanted to legitimize Mary and what she had to say after she had seemingly been discredited many times, which might be what makes it so controversial as it challenges current views on Mary’s character and the legitimacy of her “strange ideas” that seem to have been overlooked by many.

One of the biggest things I took note of from this reading was the light in which Judas is painted. Based on my current understanding of Christian theology, Judas was a disciple of Jesus who betrayed him for money, leading to the crucifixion of Jesus. In the Christian tradition, Judas is typically portrayed as a backstabber, and his name carries a strong negative connotation, which is why no one ever wants to be called a “Judas”. However, in Gospel of Judas, Judas appears to be seeking enlightenment from Jesus in a sincere way in that he’s constantly asking Jesus questions about what’s going to happen to the next generation. He even tells Jesus about a vision that he had and receives a response from him in order to learn more about his vision and what it means. Overall, Judas seems like he’s very close to Jesus, particularly because Jesus speaks to him in private on multiple occasions, which he doesn’t do with the other disciples. Towards the end of the reading, Jesus tells Judas about what happens to baptized people and that Judas will betray him. This section of the text reads almost like a prophecy to me because Jesus is telling Judas what he’s going to do before he does it. It almost seems like Jesus wants Judas to betray him, in order to set important biblical events in motion. Because of the way Jesus relays this information to Judas and the nature of their relationship in the text, it almost feels like Judas was only trying to help fulfil a prophecy because it’s what Jesus wanted. The way that Judas is portrayed here makes him seem less like an unfaithful traitor, and more like someone that was just trying to follow what his superior wanted of him in order to further events of biblical significance like Jesus’s resurrection. In a nutshell, I think Judas is portrayed in a much more positive light in this text than he is in traditional Christian theology, which could explain why the text is considered controversial as it contradicts traditional belief, making it a form of heresy.

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