I agree with frustratedasatruar and wish you had a higher resolution image for your icon.
If someone wants an svg let me know.
A yoga devotee and advocate for the homeless who helped out at an arts center, Baker decried both Biden and Trump. Baker, a socialist idealist who volunteered to fight against Islamic State forces in Syria, also had traveled to Seattle last summer to support protesters for racial justice who briefly claimed an abandoned police precinct and declared the area around it an autonomous zone.
The Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol deepened Baker’s belief that the United States was on the brink of civil war, according to court records, social media posts and interviews with Baker’s friends. He felt certain that Tallahassee, where a man fueled by misogyny killed two women at a yoga studio in 2018 and a pickup truck driver accelerated through a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters last summer, would see violence at the hands of far-right agitators. And he was convinced they had to be met with an armed resistance.
Public defender Randolph Murrell argued in court filings and during a Jan. 21 hearing that Baker’s comments were “the product of the heated political dialogue of the day.” They were no different, he said, from online posts by Republican officials telling their followers to “prepare for war” or to “take up arms” in the run-up to Inauguration Day. Baker’s friends said he had a bombastic social media presence that he stepped up to match inflammatory right-wing rhetoric.
Those close to Baker say they see a double standard in his being targeted.
“None of his statement was saying ‘On Inauguration Day, we’re going to go out and hunt down all the right-wingers,'” said Warren Stoddard, who fought alongside Baker in Syria. “He said, ‘We’re going to stop people from taking the Florida Capitol.’ And if no one went to the Florida Capitol, there’s nothing to stop.”
But the FBI agents who had been monitoring Baker’s social media posts since October described him as being on a “path toward radicalization.” They catalogued his Facebook musing about being “willing to do ANYTHING to ANYONE so I don’t end up homeless and hungry again.” They noted updates about “voting from the rooftops” and hoping “the right tries a coup on Nov. 3 cuz I’m so f—— down to slay enemies again.” A post on his page in December announced, “Trump still plans on a violent militant coup. If you don’t have guns you won’t survive.”
On Jan. 25, U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael J. Frank agreed that Baker posed a potential threat and ordered him held without bond, writing that the former soldier had “repeatedly endorsed violent means to advance the political beliefs that he espouses.”
I bloody *love* your icon, so you know. An Anarchist A embedded with a Volknut, and I'd thought *I* was clever when I came up with mine. *Thor.* The graphic design talent at work is astounding.
Thanks! Appreciate it!
[…] While [Umberto] Eco is firm in claiming “There was only one Nazism,” he says, “the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.” Eco reduces the qualities of what he calls “Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism” down to 14 “typical” features. “These features,” writes the novelist and semiotician, “cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”
- The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
- The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
- The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
- Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
- Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
- Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
- The obsession with a plot. “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.”
- The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
- Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
- Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
- Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
- Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
- Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
- Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
(link)
I expect that not only will some of the people from Wednesday face consequences, but that some of them will be very public and well-reported on, because the state wants people to believe that it’s in control, here to take action and save the day. What will not happen is the burnt corpses of organizers from Wednesday found in their torched cars with gunshot wounds to the back of the head and their deaths ruled suicides.
Mutual Aid Disaster Relief resource list masterpost
So I just found https://mutualaiddisasterrelief.org/resources/ And it is AMAZING.
I could share it as a link but many of you won’t click it and realize the abundance of things behind it that might be relevant to you right now. So Instead I’m gonna copy-paste the lot so you can all share in its glory. No part of this list was my work, I take no credit, I’m just the copy-paster.
The hotlines and specific services are US centric. If people wanna add less US-centric sources, please do.
Disaster Response
A Window Propped Open A Window Propped Open Issue 2: Lessons Learned Organizing After Hurricane Harvey A Love Letter to the Future Mutual Fire Brigade Basic Rescue Skills Trauma and Therapeutic Art: Information for Children, Families and Volunteers Transition is Inevitable; Justice is Not: A Critical Framework for Just Recovery Staying Above Water: Global Migration in the Face of the Climate Crisis Mutual Aid Disaster Relief: Navigating Trauma Citizen’s Guide for Readiness for Climate Extremes in the Desert Southwest Inhabit: Instructions for Autonomy Solidarity for Survival: A Graphic Illustration The Resilience We Want – A Guide to Making Your Community Space into a Hub for Resilience and Mutual Aid When We Got Handed Gatorade We Danced in the Street: A Survivor’s Survival Guide Prisoners in Disaster: The Legacy of Abuse, Exploitation and Endangerment of Prisoners in Disaster A People’s Framework for Disaster Response: Rewriting the Rules of Recovery after Climate Disasters
Disaster Disability Hotline
The Partnership For Inclusive Disaster Strategy’s Disaster Disability Hotline provides information, referrals, guidance, technical assistance and resources to people with disabilities, their families, allies, organizations assisting disaster impacted individuals with disabilities and others seeking assistance with immediate and urgent disaster-related needs.
The Disaster Hotline is always available for intake calls, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year at (800) 626-4959 and info@disasterstrategies.org. They will have their knowledgeable team respond to your call as soon as possible, often immediately, and intend to respond to all callers within 24 hours.
Safety and DIY Cleanup
Repairing Your Flooded Home EPA Flood Cleanup Booklet DIY Field Guide For Clean-up Of Flooded Homes Safety Notice For Unskilled Or Nontrade Volunteers House Gutting Manual Muckout Safety Guidelines Toxic Chemicals and Staying Safe Mold Cleaning and Prevention Mold Cleaning and Prevention (Spanish) Black Mold Flyer
Wellness/Community Care
An Activists Guide to Basic First Aid Peer Counseling and Active Listening Alternatives to EMS Home Remedies for Common Maladies Traveling Companions Information on Heat and Related Illnesses Hypothermia Responding to Critical Incident Stress Class Struggle and Mental Health Zine Madness and Oppression Guide A Call for Prefigurative Mental Health Support and Communal Care for Radical Orgs
Emergency Prescription Assistance Program
The Emergency Prescription Assistance Program, or EPAP, was created to help people in a disaster who don’t have health insurance so they have access to: prescription medicine, medical equipment, medical supplies, and vaccinations. Hotline: 1-855-793-7470.
Trauma and Burnout
Mutual Aid Disaster Relief: Navigating Trauma Trauma_Overview Preventing Burnout Understanding and Coping with Traumatic Stress Understanding and Addressing Vicarious Trauma Grounding and Centering for Activists Rising Up Without Burning Out Sustainable Activism and Avoiding Burnout Psychological First Aid Activist Trauma and Recovery Trauma and Therapeutic Art: Information for Children, Families and Volunteers Community Trauma Toolkit Coping With_Climate_Change_Distress
Disaster Distress Helpline
The Disaster Distress Helpline, 1-800-985-5990, is a 24/7, 365-day-a–year, national hotline dedicated to providing immediate crisis counseling for people who are experiencing emotional distress related to any natural or human-caused disaster. This toll-free, multilingual, and confidential crisis support service is available to all residents in the United States and its territories. Stress, anxiety, and other depression-like symptoms are common reactions after a disaster.
Call 1-800-985-5990 or text TalkWithUs to 66746 to connect with a trained crisis counselor.
Legal/Security
Security Culture – A Handbook For Activists Ruckus Security Culture For Activists Know Your Rights: Immigration and Disaster Relief Council on American Islamic Relations Know Your Rights Guide National Lawyers Guild Know Your Rights Guide Why Misogynists Make Great Informants
Disaster Legal Hotlines
Legal Aid of North Carolina: 1 866 219 5262 Florida Legal Services’ Disaster Recovery: 888 780 0443 State Bar of Texas Disaster Hotline: 800 504 7030 California Disaster Legal Services For More Legal Aid Disaster Hotlines go to: American Bar Association
Anti Oppression
Accomplices Not Allies Why Misogynists Make Great Informants Who Is Oakland: Anti Oppression Activism, The Politics of Safety, and State Co-optation Anti-Oppression Reader With Allies Like These Challenging Capitalism And Patriarchy Confronting Classism Contextualizing Katrina and Confronting Racism Guidelines For Being A Strong White Ally Overcoming Discrimination Patterns of Patriarchy Commonly Observed within Social Justice Movements Readings on Racism and Resistance for Solidarity Activists Ten Things To Remember – AntiRacist Strategies For White Student Radicals The Revolution Starts At Home – Confronting Partner Abuse In Radical Communities Towards A Perspective On Unlearning Racism
Kitchen and Food Handling
Popular Education and Direct Action
You Have Skills: Evaluating What Skills You Can Bring to Radical Organizing From Banks and Tanks to Cooperation and Caring Handbook for Nonviolent Campaigns Handbook For Direct Action Affinity Groups Affinity Groups 2 On Strategic Nonviolent Conflict Participating In Direct Actions -A Guide For Transgender People Planning An Action Rising Tide Climate Change Popular Education Ruckus Action Planning Manual Ruckus Action Strategy Guide Ruckus Scouting Manual For Activists Social Change Vision Questions Core Curriculum – A Guide To Effective Nonviolent Struggle What Do We Mean by Mutual Aid? Metodo de Trabajo y Organizacion Popular Manual de Planificación Para Organizaciones Sociales
Water, Sanitation and Hygiene
Also for even more resources, check out this Mutual Aid Toolbox from Big Door Brigade and these How To guides from Shareable.
I give white radicals the tools to work with, a theoretical framework, and some analysis of racial oppression. I cannot, however, make them take the steps to actually use in dismantling racism inside radical movements. I just tell them that their lip service and feeble attempts to this point are unacceptable, and one day it will all be taken out of their hands. So they had better act now, or they will find themselves on the wrong side, when these decisive battles take place.
White pagans who follow this blog -- this essay is about political organizing, but even if you are not an organizer, it has a lot of truth that can apply in any situation and anyone organizing in paganism, especially against racism, would do well to read it. I know that for someone who isn’t part of this organizing world a lot of the history and some terminology might be alienating but I highly encourage reading it anyway even if you have to skip the parts that are like that. And if you are interested in or new to organizing, it’s even more essential reading.
okay heres a genuine advice post for pagans who DO want to be allies to poc, jews, muslims, etc etc etc
grow comfortable with people not trusting you. make peace with it. dont get defensive, just let it be.
Im gonna use norse paganism as an example for ease of typing but this applies to all pagan branches. yes even you hellenic polytheism.
Its true! Not all norse pagan are neo nazis. There are DOZENS of good, wonderful norse pagans. Everyone knows that. However the issue is that there are just enough who are neo nazis. And its not just a small batch. Its more than you think. Its entire movements of facism.
That is not your fault - no one is personally accusing you of contributing to that. But it is still a part of your religion that you are responsible for, and you do benefit from the supremacy it offers. Again, not your fault, its just the way it is.
So because of that, you need to understand that minorities are justifed in not trusting the ENTIRE religion, which does indeed include you. Because mistrusting one person could be the last thing we do. Its not a slight against you, its an act of self preservation.
So when a minority expresses that distrust, they ask norse pagans to not interact, or they say they are uncomfortable with those symbols, the correct response is to respect that boundary. Entirely. Don’t go onto the post talking about how you’re one of the good ones, dont talk about how much you hate nazis.
If you TRUELY want to be a “good one” then your first step should be to respect boundaries. And that includes when minorities distrust you, personally.
Then your second step should be to do MEANINGFUL efforts to combat the “bad ones” and that doesnt mean rbing a post that says “nazis arent welcome here”. That means critical engaging with traditions, with people, and doing a lot of self reflection to unlearn that shit. Because you also internalized more than you think, which isnt your fault exactly, but it is still your responsibility to unlearn it. And ultimately it comes down to acknowledging how the religion benefits you.
Instead of using being rejected as an opportunity to sulk or get into a fight with said minority use it as a chance to improve yourself, your religion, and your allyship. If you truely are one of the good ones, then thats what you should want to do anyway. And minorities do notice who actually cares and who is performative, and we appreciate honest effort
And if people have genuine questions about anything im in a mood to answer. education is far better than discourse.
also: understand that there is no inherent dichotomy between poc and paganism, that there are pagans of color and have been for the many decades in which neopaganism has been a thing and has grown
like it’s all well and good to holler about punching nazis and signing pledges, but what have you done to make your co-religionists of color feel safe and welcome in the community? do you even grok that we are co-religionists and that this is a shared community, or do you perhaps view it as Yours and see poc as outsiders that need to be welcomed into it? (there is absolutely a difference between these things) do the recons among you value the work and scholarship of academics of color—particularly classicists of color, for hellenic recons? speaking out against obvious fash is critical but do you keep that same energy when anti-Blackness, antisemitism, etc is coming from people you actually consider yourself in community with? if you genuinely consider yourself an ally these are some hard questions you need to continually ask yourself and unpack
Hey friends, I know this month is always a bitch for everyone, especially financially, but I have $500 worth of bills (credit cards, website maintenance, adobe subscription, and then the (groan) car insurance. This does not include food or gas) to pay this month and no regular income. If you want to help me out, you can do one of the three things:
- Support a small independent business! Buy some of the prints from my shop / share the link to it for others.
or
- You can also donate directly to me via paypal (mireyahwolfe@hotmail.com) or venmo (borinquenaqueer) or cashapp ($reyahwolfe).
As always, any & all support (including just reblogging) is indescribably appreciated.
borinquenaqueer
greetings comrades, i am in need of $210 to pay the upcoming car insurance on the 20th! I’ve managed to pay most of the other smaller bills, thanks to y’all’s help. The insurance is the next big bill, and since it’s the first month of the new contract, I can’t delay it at all.
<3 <3 <3
borinquenaqueer
0/210
borinquenaqueer
Thank you all so much for the reblogs!
I’m still at 0/210 – please know that even the smallest amount helps me get closer 💜
borinquenaqueer
10/210
renniequeer
Hey folks, Reyah’s car is also our car–it’s the car that gets our kid to and from school and @wodneswynn back and forth from work. Please help out with a reblog even if you can’t kick some cash Reyah’s way. It would mean a lot to our little household of queers. <3
Next Step, We Burn It Down.
A close friend and beloved comrade passed away this week. Karen was fearless and even introduced me to prison abolition organizing during the strike camp out. She always said she didn't want a funeral, instead requested an uprising against the FDOC. Today, she go exactly that.
During the action three of our friends were captured outside of Florida State Prison, a memorial event for our lost comrade Karen Smith. 🚩🏴
Please consider donating to help with bail funds:
Venmo: FreeFloridaF12
Paypal: donate@flprisonersolidarity.org
#KarenSmithSentUs #AbolitionNow #BurnItDown
This is insane
burdenbasket
holy fuck, this is A LOT
Also that figure is way too low, modern population estimates might be as much as twice that. There were between 25 and 40 million in central Mexico alone, almost as many people in the North Amazon, almost as many in the Andes, and almost as many in the American South. All saw 80 to 99 percent population loss in the period of 2 to 3 generations.
The Greater Mississippi River Basin had a population somewhere between 5 and 12 million, the Eastern Woodlands had about as many, about as many in the Central Amazon, and almost as many on the American West Coast and North West Coast respectively. All of which saw 85 to 99 percent population losses in 2 or three generations after the others.
Multiple factions if European interests killed all the natives they could and destroyed all the culture and history they could. They were not limited by gender, language, religion, culture, ethnic group, nationality, geography, or time period; just every single person they could.
That’s not even genocide, it’s apocalypse.
aossidhboyee
Why are you all omitting the well known fact that it was not purposeful genocide but simply new microbes introduced that no one knew about at that time.
Cuz that’s not true.
Tw genocide, tw violence
When Columbus realized the pigs they brought were getting the Islanders sick he arranged to loose as many as possible ahead of them primarily into the Benne region, I believe. Cortez loaded sickened corpses into Tenochtitlan’s aqueducts, Spain deliberately targeted the priests of Mexican society first because they knew it would severely undermine the public ability to treat disease. When the post Incan city states developed a treatment for malaria, the Spanish deliberately targeted the cities producing the quinine treatment and made it illegal to sell it to non-christians. The Spanish took all the sick and forced them at sword-point to go back to their homes instead of to the sick houses or the temples throughout the new world, and forced anyone who wasn’t sick to work in the mines or the coin factories melting and pressing their cultural treasures down into Spanish coins. The English were just as bad, they started the smallpox blankets. A lot of the loss was not deliberate infections like this but it was preventable at a million different crossroads and every European culture took the opportunity to weaponize the plagues when they could.
They knew what they were doing, just cuz they didn’t know what germs were doesn’t mean they have some accidental relationship with it. Alexander the great used biological warfare after all, so it’s not like you can pretend the concept was alien to them, they wrote about it.
Besides they did plenty of old fashioned killing too, there were Spanish conquistadors that estimated their own personal, individual killings might have numbered over the ten thousands. They were sure they’d killed more than ten million in “New Spain” alone. They crucified people they smashed babies on the rocks, they set fire to buildings they forced women and children into and cooked their meals over the burning corpses, they loosed war dogs on people. They sold children into sex slavery to be raped by disease riddled pedos back in Europe and if taking their virginity didn’t cure the sick creeps the native children would be killed or sometimes sent back.
The English were just as bad, shooting children in front of their mothers and forcing them to mop their blood with their hair. Turning human scalps into currency. Feeding babies to dogs in front of their mothers and fathers. Killing whole villages and erasing them from their maps so that historians would think God had made it empty just for the English.
The Americans after them burned crops and drove several species of bison to extinction just to starve the plains tribes. They pushed the blankets too. On top of the wars of extermination and scalp hunting and concentration and laws defining natives as non-persons so that we’d never be protected by the Constitution.
And even if you wanna live in some dreamy fairytale where God just made a whoopsie and then there were no natives left, nobody forced them to erase our history. The Spanish burned every document they found to erase the literacy and literary tradition of the Central and South Americans. There are essentially three Aztec documents left and some excavated pottery, and some archeological inscriptions and that’s it. The single most advanced culture in math and anatomical medicine erased probably forever. Same to the Inca, the most advanced fiber and alloy engineers and economists gone forever. Nobody made them do that. Nobody forced the American colonizers to steal political technology and act like they invented democracy or sovereignty. Nobody forced them to build their cities on top of native ones and erase them from history forever. Baltimore was built on Chesapeake, which translates roughly to “city at the top of the great water” in most Algonquin tongues. My favorite example is Cumberland in Western MD, they didn’t even reshape the roads or anything, they paved the steps and walking paths natives had used for hundreds of years and now it’s almost impossible to drive cuz the streets are too narrow or steep. The culture that built them didn’t have horses. Phoenix AZ, called Phoenix cuz the settlers literally found an old city and “brought it back to life.” Did they save any history or cultural artifacts? No. Most cities on the east coast are like this. Nobody forced them to erase that history.
Colonizers are not innocent just cuz the germs did a lot of the work of the apocalypse.
evergreennightmare
(tlaxcallān had a democratic form of government)
that-fine-ass-bitch
Btw America BARELY acknowledges this, there’s no memorials or educational trips like Germany does the Holocaust, most schools don’t even mention that Native Americans existed
New Anarchist Reading Project/Podcast!
Hey tumblr, @starlightandgunpowder and I are starting a reading project to explore Anarchist ideas and texts, and make them more accessible.
We'll be reading through and unpacking, like a book club but with more of a focus on summarizing and analyzing the books. We'll then record these discussions and turn them into a podcast so folks can access both the texts, and the environment of a leftist conversation.
If you're interested in collaborating (or just want to learn more) come check out our discord at [https://discord.gg/HRzNJTRU]
So neither one of us has much experience modding or managing discord servers, so if anyone with some experience or skill with it, we’d definitely value engaging and sharing your knowledge with us!
This is the first text we’re gonna be going through and unpacking. This text is only about 60pgs long and serves a strong primer to some of the core principles & ethos that anarchists have used to rally around in different resistance movements.
@starlightandgunpowder and I will be recording a conversation between the two of us on Dec 13th unpacking and discussing some core ideas of this text.
11.27.20. Los Angeles
LASD spent the night before thanksgiving forcibly removing a family from a state-owned home. Police arrived with military gear to remove a family who had been squatting in the vacant home. Protesters at the eviction were unable to stop the police, but they have been begun protesting outside Mayor Garcetti’s home.
A reminder that in nearly every US city, the “housing crisis” is artificially produced through collaboration among real estate developers, landlords, and Democrat & Republican politicians, carried out by overfunded police. There is no scarcity, so capitalists create an illusion of it.
thanksgiving sucks go help some natives survive. help our families too.
mi’kmaq fishing sovereignty post: https://ysera.tumblr.com/post/632357902965932032
navajo/hopi covid relief fund: https://ysera.tumblr.com/post/631833415079133184
sovereign bodies/mmiw database fund: https://ysera.tumblr.com/post/631828874798497792
navajo water project: https://www.navajowaterproject.org/
more efforts and posts about indigeneity: https://ysera.tumblr.com/tagged/ndn/
[ tweet by Ruth H. Hopkins
As you celebrate thanksgiving, know that the Trump administration is taking away 321 acres of land from the Mashpee-Wampanoag, the tribe that helped the pilgrims survive and were present at the first thanksgiving. Tell legislators to support the Mashpee Reservation Reaffirmation Act. ]
For those who don’t live in Massachusetts, that is literally ALL THE LAND THEY HAVE! All of it. The state aims to make the entire ~3000 person tribe homeless.
gennesaret
If you want more information the tribe themselves have a website for you to look at! Please spread the word and reach out to your networks so people are feeling specifically asked to act upon this… it is incumbent upon all of us to stand up for our Mashpee-Wampanoag siblings at this time. We MUST be their allies. We MUST uplift their voices and support what their asks are.
We owe all Indigenous peoples in this country so much more than this… but this is a start.
Hello everyone, I’m a Black, non-binary lesbian looking to fundraise so that I can better provide for myself, pay off debt I owe my previous institution, and start my full-spectrum doula training program so that I can officially commence my career and most importantly, community role of offering full-spectrum doula care that centers Black & LGBTQ+ people. After struggles with my mental health that have been ongoing for the past few years that have worsened while I was away at college (and that are currently being agitated by the global pandemic), I decided to take a leave of absence for the spring and fall 2020 semesters to allow myself to recharge, find work, and explore my options within my institution and outside of it. During the earlier months of the pandemic, after hearing testimonies from other Black doulas and midwives and, learning about the dangerously high maternal mortality rates in Black women, I was intrigued and inspired by the work these individuals provide to make birthing safe again and make other types of doula care accessible to the most marginal and my heart has undeniably been set on becoming a birthworker since. But, I also want my care to be fully inclusive to those who don’t only identify as women yet are still looking for full-spectrum doula services.
Hi, in your answer about the concept of 'Mythic Time' you describe paganism "as an appendage of Modernity". I was wondering if you can explain more about that (or if you've written about it before) or if you can point me anywhere to read some more on this idea? Thank you!
I’ve talked around it a bit but mostly in the process of answering other things. Mapping this out is a long-term project for me and my thoughts are complicated so I’m going to narrow to one angle.
A couple years ago I started trying to get involved in face-to-face organizing against racism and other bigotry with other heathens, and in most cases I just ended up frustrated. It seemed to me that most heathens insisted on doubling down on strategies that have been proven completely useless. In my opinion, this was related to heathens acting in relation to an idea of “legitimacy”; they wanted to demonstrate that they were not dangerous, immoral followers of an arbitrary or obsolete set of beliefs and that they were rational, contributing citizens, and therefore that they were deserving of the same respect afforded to other religious communities. But how the are we supposed to fight racism within the horizon of “legitimacy” compatible with a white supremacist settler state? Worse, there was always a rationalization for why those compromises were, in fact, not compromises, but rather, the proper heathen thing to do.
It might not be transparent that this is related to the actual content of heathenism, but it absolutely is. When I said “Modernity” in that post (which I capitalized to distinguish it from the common meaning of, like, the present) I mean a diverse but interrelated set of ideas about reality, life, humanity, governance, technology, progress, etc that characterizes Western civilization, with roots in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment; which analyzes human beings as individual rational historical subjects; which are foundational to modern nation states and to capitalism (and some forms of anticapitalism). Despite all of their “reject modern degeneracy” bullshit, the folkish and other fascists are also entirely products of modernity (see Zygmunt Bauman).
There’s an article that’s had a lot of impact on me called “Maya Moral and Ritual Discourse: Dialogical Groundings for Consuetudinary Law” by the anthropologist Garry Sparks. The article is about the philosophy of K’iche’ Maya people in Guatemala that underlies and informs their customary laws and the systems of signification that they use to apply it to their lives, but secondarily it’s also about the encounter between them and the settler state of Guatemala. Some years ago Guatemala came to recognize the jurisprudence of indigenous law within their communities, but there were difficulties with incorporating this recognition into the national laws which are based on the same set of universalist liberal democratic principles as other western states are based on. The Maya were required to represent themselves in a way that makes their customs legible to the state. One of the ways they did this was by using philological, text-critical, and archaeological methods to demonstrate that their customs were genuinely older than European contact.
Now, I’m glad they were able to do that successfully, and (obviously) I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using philology and archaeology as a way of learning about the past, but the fact that it was required in order to make them legible to the state is an operation of colonialism. But the reason this is relevant is that it also appeals to the exact same value system that modern heathens and pagans uphold, and in fact, it’s actually the best or maybe even only thing we have at our disposal since the people we’re attempting to dialogue with have no living members outside of smaller-scale (but important) living folk traditions. This is most obvious with recon but not exclusive to it, not only because non-recons also make historical claims, but because at the end of the day it isn’t actually about the well-formedness of the historical argument, it’s about performing expectations, and the well-argued historical position is only needed when something falls outside of those expectations, and they serve to reintegrate the deviation back into modern western value systems, to make it legible. When this operates on colonized people, it’s demanding proof of blood quantum in exchange for recognition (in my area, Indigenous nations have been stripped of their status by a state-appointed “genealogist”); it’s repatriating artifacts to state-recognized Indigenous institutions instead of the actual family they belonged to; it’s believing that Haiti is poor because the people there are backwards and not because of puppet regimes and other interventions on behalf of capital; it denies Black people the level of humanity afforded to white people.
Its operation within heathenry doesn’t have all these consequences directly but there is a serious danger in elevating this sort of value system to the level of religious import (though frankly, the way American heathens treat Scandinavians, while obviously not rising to the level of the racism I just described, very often actually is tokenizing and patronizing). But again, our starting position is here, we are dependent on it to have any meaning at all, and that’s the central problem.
I talked a bit about how I think our contemporary values condition the reception of runic divination here: https://thorraborinn.tumblr.com/post/620723624681308160/probably-a-dumb-question-but-why-do-you-think
So by “an appendage of modernity” what I mean is that modern pagans’ experience of their own religion is mediated by modern systems of signification that alienates them from their actual goals. What we should be doing instead is emphasizing the contradictions between them to the breaking point. But of course, there’s something missing from this formula -- how do we do that if, as I said, we begin in a state of dependency on the epistemological tools of modernity? Is it possible to use those tools to build something distinct from it and which can challenge it?
Well first of all, this is kind of already happening somewhat within Norse academia. I’m not sure how many heathens are aware of how much Norse studies scholarship has advanced in the last decade+ but it seems to me that Norse Tumblr actually is aware of this and following it better than other concentrations of heathens on social media. The more we know about pre-Christian Norse people, the more we realize how diverse and internally conflicting they were, how difficult it is to even define the boundaries of what we’re talking about when we say “pre-Christian Norse people,” and how different they were from both us and what recent centuries’ conceptions of them. This helps, but isn’t sufficient.
Heathens say “we are our deeds”; I know this is considered cringy now due partially to its origin but I think it’s approaching something true, that we don’t believe in universals or in eternity, or in identities that exist in a vacuum. We believe in events and we identify with our actions. What we are isn’t an unchanging essence but a concatenation of events that condition future actions, verk mér af verki verks leitaði. This is very different from liberal heathen “anti-racism” that consists mostly of signalling static identity attributes such as that we are “aren’t racist,” and expecting this to have any actual impact on the world (the folkish are in no way thwarted by a rainbow hammer icon and signalling that you are “one of the good ones” only benefits yourself, not victims of racist violence). The path to a collective heathen self-creation is joining our customs with organized struggle against the capitalist settler state in solidarity with and accountability to the colonized peoples who have been victimized by liberal nation state ideology. It isn’t just that this is good, and heathens should do it because it’s the right thing to do, but our existence is actually dependent on it. That’s how we kill the colonizer in our heads. Until then, our relationships with our gods, ancestors, and each other will always be mediated by the alienating ideologies of late liberalism.
Hey comrades, I know we’re all even poorer than usual and that there are too many people suffering to help, but I’d really appreciate it if you would be willing to help out one of my disabled comrades who was horribly beaten by foxhunters for being a sab. He needs his car to get around and can’t fund it himself as he’s on government disability, and we all know how shit that is. He was blocked in and attacked on camera, had the winds smashed in and the back plate fucked (because his head was smashed into it) and beaten bloody, all on camera. This was in revenge for us completely ruining their bloodsport for their first official big hunt of the year - we stopped them from getting a single kill. So whether you’re an anarchist wanting to support a long-time activist in the movement, a disability activist supporting one of your comrades, or just a friend of wildlife wanting to get us back on the road as quickly as possible saving more foxes, please consider giving.