Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/09/02/after-pressure-paypal-takes-d.html
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Good. Better that they would have never allowed it in the first place, but still good.
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Hey it’s the the KKK, our favorite 19th century terrorist group.
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I don’t know whether to laugh or cry that the organization calls non-members who provide financial support “Ku Klux Kontributors.”
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Every time I see the word “klavern” it just mangles my brain. It’s very alt righty, the same venn-diagram point within circles of unalloyed nerdliness, desperation for fraternal love, and exclusionary hate. The more things change, the more they stay the same!
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SO much of the terminology from the Klan sounds like something out of a table-top role playing game in some nerd’s basement. They’ve got Wizards and Cyclopses and Knights and Realms and Hydras and a hundred other terms straight out of some off-brand Tolkien novel.
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I will actually give them credit for unintentional honesty here. If you contribute to and support the KKK (klan) you are the KKK (kontributor)
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That’s because a lot of their iconography started as fan-tribute to Sir Walter Scott. The people who started the Klan were also a bunch of white dudes over-invested in their fantasy worlds, except for them it was pseudo-chivalric, pseudo-historical Scotland. That’s where all the “knights”, “clans” (as in Scottish clans), and cross-burnings came from, it was deadly evil cosplay. They were genocidal murderous evil people, and some of them were genocidal murderous evil nerds.
It’s also what makes a lot of the “angry nerd”, “Sad Puppies”, Rey-haters" way less easily dismissible as “just fans being fans”.
This. Although they were born too soon for Tolkien, Lucas or George R.R. Martin, it was the exact same poisonous thing for Scott.
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I can never wrap my brain around kloran.
Klu Klutz Klowns.
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Stealing this and reposting it in Commie Art; thanks!
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In line with this, see the article in the August Harper’s, The Call of the Drums: Hungary’s far right discovers its inner barbarian, by Jacob Mikanowski. This same theme, in Hungary. And how the Tolkeinesque role-playing warlike ethos has been taken up by Victor Orban and his government. https://harpers.org/archive/2019/08/the-call-of-the-drums-hungarian-far-right/
[Side note – another article in the same issue about the Gilets Jaunes is eye-opening; author pushes back against the notion that it is a right-wing nativist movement, claiming instead that it’s an old-fashioned French-style leftist attempt at a revolution. Well written, and researched via interviews, which is a bit self-selected, but still interesting. He relegates the counter-narrative to a footnote and a small caveat, but still.]
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That’s not too surprising…in France, at the start, there were many people who self-identified at all ends of the political spectrum, but I don’t think most people, at this point, would claim it was ever monolithically or even mostly leftist. Outside of France it’s way more explicitly right-wing/nativist/racist/populist, so by comparison? The Left and the Right want to claim them in France, only the Right wants to claim them elsewhere, (oversimplified and super roughly).
Thanks for the links!
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It’s like a pledge drive, except instead of supporting NOVA and Sesame Street you’re supporting a bunch of bigots burning crosses. And the quality of their tote bags is shit.
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I’ll bet a lot of the delay was due to co-founder Peter Thiel weighing in, supposedly in the name of Freeze Peach.
Stetson Kennedy famously infiltrated the terrorist group and later exposed their silly rituals and titles to the public by working with the “Adventures of Superman” radio show in the late 1940s. The demystistification of the villanous “Clan of the Fiery Cross” humiliated them in front of millions of Americans.
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I’ve read that the “silliness” of the Klu Klux Klan was designed to prevent the authorities from taking their very real acts of violence seriously.
This argument was used by the author to explore parolees between the KKK and 4chan/8chan/Troll culture,.
This is another small example of what happens when horrible people become fans of something and then mass-enact it non-ironically.
When people call you a “snowflake” just remember they’re quoting Fight Club , a satire written by a gay man about how male fragility causes men to destroy themselves, resent society, and become radicalized, and that Tyler Durden isn’t the hero but a personification of the main character’s mental illness, and that his “snowflake” speech is a dig at how fascists use dehumanizing language to breed loyalty from insecure people.
So basically people who say “snowflake” as an insult are quoting a domestic terrorist who blows up skyscrapers because he’s insecure about how good he is in bed.
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That parallel is a bit of a stretch. The KKK originally introduced the titles and initiations and rituals to present itself to members as a another fraternal organisation (in addition to its main activity of terrorising African-Americans and other minorities). Every new group was borrowing from the template set by the Freemasons in that regard.
By the 1920s, though, they started to aspire to be a serious political organisation, so they really didn’t want the silly stuff (which were “traditions” that still served a serious purpose internally) exposed. This was evidenced by their very unhappy reaction to Kennedy when he did just that starting in the 1940s.
The channer and trolley “just joking”/“ironic Nazi” thing, in contrast, is just a paper-thin cover for the serious bigotry. There’s no mystique or organisational bonding involved: it’s simply intended to carve out a place for genuine hatemongering in the mainstream discourse.
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It was probably this article, or another review of the same source.
https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-ku-klux-klan-were-memelords
