Here is the full version of my first comic for The Nib, which went up yesterday.

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This is still constantly on my mind. 

If Kylostans want a space Nazi to be the hero so badly I’m not sure why they’re sticking around Star Wars, an explicitly antifascist franchise. There are plenty of stories where Nazis are the heroes, for instance The Iron Dream even if it’s satire (but I don’t think many of them can tell the difference, if the Emo Kylo Ren account debacle is any indication). I’m also pretty sure Stormfart has a recommended reading list.

Theres an entire ya series that would appeal to them if they bothered reading. It was actually on my states reader’s choose list 2 years ago.

Do I want to know what this series is D:

There is a book series that’s scifi YA. Huma s have been genetically engineered for specific roles , creating distinct caste. The lowest caste are the red heads, and I’ve got stuff to talk about with them but it’ll take way too much time.

A brief rundown of the castes whose hair denotes thier function.

The blacks, err.. EBONYs are big, strong and not very smart. They act as enforcers.

The purples are artists, pinks sex slaves, etc…

And they are all rulled over the supremely superior blondes, I mean GOLDs. Who have been genetically engineered to be the best traits of all the sub groups.

The main character is motivated by revenge for his dead wife, so she is both sanctified and silenced.

I wrote a more detailed post with my problems with it, but these are the more simple issues.

[ID: Set of photos of Brennan Mulligan of College Humor speaking into a microphone. The captions read, “People are not motivated by ideological codes. People are motivated by impulse, and construct ideological codes to justify and rationalize what they were already going to do.  An old professor of mine had this great thing. He said, “On the level of individuals and civilizations, personality predates ideology.” Meaning before you were a fascist, you were a bully and an asshole.” End ID]

Anyone who criticizes our thirst for blood money-whether it’s the Dixie Chicks or Tulsi Gabbard-gets skewered. All these years and we still haven’t learned the lessons.

KINGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG

Trump said he cancelled Sunday’s raids, but DO NOT LET YOUR GUARD DOWN. The people spread the word. Cities were getting prepared. That was a problem. They’re not gonna let that happen again.

Link to CNN

The key text, I feel, is right here:

This isn’t compromise; this isn’t kindness.  This is them losing the element of surprise.  Stay on guard, and for pity’s sake if you see another leak come across with cities/details, etc., put that shit on blast.  It’s not over ‘til Trump’s in federal prison and his allies are at the very least out of office, which means we’ve got heavy lifting to do.

It should also be pointed out that some of the people they were protecting ICE agents from were mayors, governors and even some police departments who publicly stated that they opposed the ICE raids. They NEED surprise because it’s not just The People who are ready to fight, it’s, in some cases, state and city governments.

And to the commenters saying they’re targeting people who have missed court dates: #1 They’re using people who missed court dates to cast a net over communities with refugees, and #2 When they start rounding up illegal white Canadians, then we can debate whether brown and black people are being systemically targeted.

Also notice how Morgan is framing the opposition to the raids as well as the targets themselves as murderous threats to public safety and to the lives of federal agents. This includes, as you point out, elected officials. This is how minorities and political opponents are pushed into the frame of threats that must be eliminated. This is fascist and anti-democratic (small 'd') rhetoric.

hot takes on AOC saying that the United States government is operating concentration camps:

WARNING: This post contains references to gruesome human rights violations. It is not for everyone.

76 people in a cell designed for 12.

155 people in a cell designed for 35.

41 in a cell for 8.

Don’t look away.

900 people total, or or more than seven times the 125-person capacity of the El Paso Del Norte immigration processing center.

If it weren’t for the white boxes shielding the faces of dozens of men and women stuffed into the overcrowded cell, it would be difficult to count the people in the photograph, since their overlapping limbs make it impossible to see where one body ends and another begins.

Standing room only cells, where people are held for weeks. Limited access to showers and clean clothes, resulting in those held wearing soiled clothing “for days or weeks.”

People standing on toilets just to find air to breathe. 24 deaths while in ICE custody.

Johana Mediana Léon, 25 years old. Transgender. Passed away four days after release from custody after complaining of chest pains.

Mergensana Amar, 40 years old. Removed from life support after committing suicide in custody.

Efrain De La Rosa, 40 years old. Committed suicide in custody by self-inflicted strangulation.

Roxana Hernandez, 33 years old. Transgender. Passed away in custody after experiencing cardiac arrest.

300,000-500,000 individuals per year in custody. Acting ICE director Mark Morgan’s response? Plans to increase large scale raids.

Don’t look away.

They’re not “centers.” They’re not “facilities.” They’re not “processing areas.” Let’s call them what they are.

The United States government is operating concentration camps. And we must act.

Memos surfaced by journalist Ken Klippenstein revealed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s failure to provide medical care was responsible for suicides and other deaths of detainees. These followed another report that showed that thousands of detainees are being brutally held in isolation cells just for being transgender or mentally ill.

Two weeks ago, the Trump administration cut funding for classes, recreation and legal aid at detention centers holding minors — which were likened to “summer camps” by a senior ICE official last year. And there was the revelation that months after being torn from their parents’ arms, 37 children were locked in vans for up to 39 hours in the parking lot of a detention center outside Port Isabel, Texas. In the last year, at least seven migrant children have died in federal custody.

Don’t look away.

It’s certainly been helpful for the Trump Administration that nobody has called them concentration camps until this week, when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came under great fire for doing so.

It may well be a testament to the media machine that is the Trump administration. Look away! He wore an ill-fitting tuxedo to meet the Queen! Look away! He won’t acknowledge that the Central Park Five are exonerated! Look away! He fired pollsters for giving him numbers that he didn’t like!

Don’t look away.

It’s helpful to the President that the media covers these human rights abuses intermittently instead of as what they actually are: proof of a racist administration, unchecked by the law. It’s helpful that there’s so much else to look at right now. But more than anything else, it’s helpful that the places where these people are being tortured and left to die are hidden. They’re locked away from the eyes of journalists and concerned members of the public. They’re misleadingly named.

That’s what a concentration camp is. And the immediate outrage to AOC calling them that is the right response. Hearing that the government is running concentration camps is something one should feel scrupulous towards. A concentration camp isn’t the same as a death camp. We don’t have those yet. But when Hitler ran his, they started as the former, extending to the latter.

Don’t look away.

Hannah Arendt, imprisoned by the Gestapo and interned in a French camp, wrote about the levels of concentration camps. Extermination camps were the most extreme; others were just about getting “undesirable elements … out of the way.” All had one thing in common: “The human masses sealed off in them are treated as if they no longer existed, as if what happened to them were no longer of interest to anybody, as if they were already dead.”

Is that not what we were doing?

I hesitate to speak for my own ancestry, for my family members killed at Neuengamme camp along with more than 43,000 others. But I can’t hesitate long enough to sway my thinking away from confirming what AOC already said.

It’s easy to think of the Holocaust only in terms of the final outcome. But there was a beginning.

Don’t look away. It started with fear mongering. It started with ghettoization. It started with hidden camps. Then, the pogroms. Then, the extermination camps.

Mass detention isn’t new. But this president has made it a centerpiece of his rhetoric and his agenda. He’s perfected the extreme language that dehumanizes immigrants. At a rally in Florida last month, Trump was bemoaning migrants’ legal protections when someone in the audience suggested they should be shot. The president laughed and made a joke.

Through overcrowding and dehumanization, concentration camps became self-fulfilling prophecies. The culture of abuse leads to frustration and violence, thus “justifying” their incarceration after the fact. Other citizens become desensitized to the dehumanization of a group of people and thus implicitly give approval for concentration camps by our lack of pushback.

Do you see it?

It’s happening now.

Don’t look away.

6:1

Modi won by a 6:1 margin against his main opposition.

Overall his party received close to 2/3 of the votes.

His main opposition guy, Rahul Gandhi of the Gandhi-Nehru dynasty, lost his home seat for the first time since 2004.

This is what it looks like when a country or 1.3 billion people slaps an out-of-touch dynasty and its imperialist media puppets in the face.

Respect the Indian people’s wishes.

ok op ive looked through your tag on india and, contrary to what i would assume is the purpose of a blog called “This is Everyday Racism” you have no interest in identifying the way your own biases victimize marginalized people in a society where you have the privilege. fine. what im sure none of the many many people who call you out can stand is that, through this platform, you manipulate social justice terminology and present hindu fascism as an example of “indigenous power” to people who lack familiarity with South Asia and thus rely on you to provide a progressive perspective on current events.  (If I’ve got anything wrong, please feel free to correct me! )

a) i find your use of “indigenous power” to describe the hindu nationalist BJP both insulting and incorrect. British India was never a settler colonial state in the way that the united states, canada and australia were, and so it is inappropriate from my POV (though I might be wrong and am open to correction on this point) to use terminology developed by indigenous people in the West fighting against settler colonialism to describe a completely different modern situation. India is a post-colonial state in the way that the US or Canada or Australia, as settler colonial states are not. I don’t know who you are describing to be indigenous – I can guess that you mean “Hindus” but this to me is highly suspect. The term “Hindu” is itself a colonial construction, a catch-all to describe a bunch of sects and traditions that never were a cohesive whole. The concept of “India” at all only came to be through British Colonialism – it was never a single unit before. How do you define indigeneity? Contrary to popular belief “Hindusim” is not a stable faith practice that has stretched from the Vedic era until today. The dominant state and local faiths of South Asia, even before the Mughal Empire, have been Jainism, Buddhism, Brahmanism, and different iterations of Bhakti traditions. Muslims have been in South Asia since the beginning of Islam, coming to Kerala via Arab traders: the first mosque in South Asia was built by a companion of the Prophet Muhammad. Also, contrary to popular Hindu nationalist belief, Islam was largely spread amongst the masses of South Asia via Sufism. Here I would also add that classical “Hindu” empires have also committed atrocities in the name of their state religion, persecuting Buddhists, Jains, and other “sects” of “Hinduism” though in my opinion, these groups would not consider the other to be of the same religion at all.  Still, no one in India needs to justify their presence. India is a secular democracy, as laid out by its Constitution. Also I’d add that India is a socialist country so your presenting Modi’s “progressive” reforms as proof that he’s not right-wing is again, incorrect. I am by no means a supporter of the Congress Party, particularly due to its instigation of the 1984 Sikh Genocide, but the Congress platform this year included a Universal Basic Income amongst other things. This is a country where the Communist Party (CPIM), though not really a national presence, has regularly won state elections though I will admit it has not been as successful in recent years. Modi is not only culturally right-wing, but for India, he is economically right wing as well. 

b) Modi won by a 6:1 margin by weaponizing the deaths of 40 soldiers in Indian occupied Kashmir. Demonetization was a disaster that resulted in the deaths of 100 people, hundreds of thousands of jobs lost, and cost India 1.5% GDP growth, amongst other negative consequences. Also, it failed to uncover black money which was the stated purpose of the policy in the first place. Unemployment under Modi is the highest it has been since the 1970s. There is an epidemic of farmer suicides. The Bajrang Dal, a militant offshoot of the Hindu Nationalist RSS and BJP, has been legitimized and so under Modi cow related lynchings of Muslims and Dalit people have risen. These lynchings are conducted by Hindu mobs seeking people who eat beef, which last time I checked was perfectly legal to do in secular India. Modi was trailing in the polls before the Pulawama attack at which point he politicized the soldiers’ death and rode a general wave of toxic nationalism back to power. 

c) I know you probably don’t care, but I wonder if you have ever bothered to read up on what happened in 2002 anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat when Modi was Chief Minister. 

(TW for description of graphic violence and sexual violence.) I’m putting the relevant section in italics, once you see the second set of asterisks its done.

*****

Many of the attacks were focused on Muslim women and children – children force-fed kerosene and set on fire, women and girls gang-raped and then burned, sexually violated and then killed. Children and infants were speared and held aloft, including at one point a fetus ripped from a pregnant mother’s body. I know I’m citing a wikipedia page but each of these claims within the wikipedia section has an attached academic citation which you can follow up on if you want. 

******

The events according to some observers meet the legal definition for genocide, or have been referred to as state-sponsored terrorism or ethnic cleansing. Scholars state that the believe the state government, of which Narendra Modi was leader, was complicit and even inflamed the tensions leading to the riots. State forces including police did not intervene and even joined the mobs alongside local and state level politicians. The fact that some rioters had voter registration lists which allowed them to deliberately target Muslim homes is a further example of Gujarat state complicity – the violence has been described as a “pogrom.”

This is who Modi is. This is what Hindu fascism is. It is contempt and violence towards the lives of the nondominant in India – based on economic status, caste, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, etc. The BJP doesn’t give a fuck about anyone who isn’t the perfect dominant caste Hindu martial male. Hindu fundamentalism lies about who South Asians are as a people, lies about our past history, lies about our present realities, and it lies about our future potential. I don’t live in India and I don’t think that you do either so at a very basic level, we are privileged enough to be unaffected by the Indian election. But it is also important to note our own complicity in fascism within our communities and back “home.” By peddling the lie that critique of Modi is imperialist you have instead become a fascist apologetic. During this election, Amit Shah the President of the BJP literally advocated for the removal of all Christians and Muslims on the basis that they are “infiltrators.” The NRC is the National Register of Citizens in Assam which records who are “genuine” citizens of India and who is not – it doesn’t take a genius to figure out who a Hindu fascist government decides who isn’t a citizen. This is what your “indigenous” rhetoric leads to, btw. 

Like I said, I have no love for Congress. But electing the BJP to spite Congress is like cutting off your nose to spite your face. More, the people who have been encouraged and even who were put forth as candidates who just won their elections are notably uninformed, unqualified, and most notably in the case of Pragya Thakur who just won her election in Bhopal as the candidate for the BJP, a terrorist currently out on bail. Thakur, accused of the 2008 Malegaon bombings which killed 10 and injured 80, recently valorized Godse, the RSS Hindu nationalist who assassinated Gandhi. 

If you want to support Modi, fine – but at least have the moral congruency to also understand and support the white nationalist nazis who voted for Trump, or Brexit, or the Australian government. Fascism is on the rise across the globe. You don’t get to pick and choose which fascist you support based on whether or not you would be safe under their rule. 

(Also, Hinduphobia has no meaning in the context you tend to use it, namely against Modi’s critics. I’m sure many people have told you this, but it’s just like accusing people who point out Trump’s flaws of reverse racism. If you mean it in a western context, prejudice encountered by Hindus is far more likely to be either to be misattributed racialized islamaphobia, or orientalism.) 

Also, as far as indigenous power is concerned, the BJP Government has sold of tribal land, forced tribal people out of their homes, arrested researchers, activists, and lawyers working for their betterment.

really great and extensive post. transnational movements for third world postcolonial solidarity have also been severely undermined by this type of fascist ethnonationalism. vijay prashad, among others, has written extensively about that. for all the talk of indigeneity, the bjp has been india’s greatest champion of multinational corporations and facilitator of neo-colonialism. they have entirely bought into the imf and world bank development agenda. the congress is also extremely culpable in this however. it is quite a shame that the communist parties who have been the only people in india actually discussing neocolonialism in a serious manner have been wiped out.

why am I chuckling so hard

The cure for fascism is… politically-motivated threats of brutal physical violence?

That’s literally fascism.

Yeah, remember how we defeated fascism in WW2 through polite conversation

Anyway, when I see the Kylo Ren helmet leak, all mangled with red running through it, I think about what a contrast it is to Darth Vader.

Vader was a physically and mentally destroyed man who had been born into slavery and had never truly been free. His armor was literally life support, as the Emperor kept him alive to exploit his power. And it was impeccable, not so much as a smudge on Vader’s helmet.

Kylo is a physically fit man with an apparent narcissism disorder who was born into privilege and has been given multiple opportunities to free himself from the Dark Side. His armor was for show. And now it’s destroyed and patched back together – Kylo’s outer shell now looks as disfigured as Vader beneath the mask.

We know that inside Vader there was still good. If Kylo is the opposite of Vader – and the mended helmet enhances that – there’s no good guy inside Kylo.

Was he ever really one in the first place? Or is the Solo family tragedy a space version of “We Need to Talk About Kevin”?

Personally I see Kylo as the inevitable descent of white liberalism/white saviorism into fascism; how good intentions combined with exceptionalism, where only special people like him know what’s good for the world and are responsible for everyone else. Therefore the failure to do as he says is a moral failure, because he knows best and is doing so much for everyone else. It’s that toxic point where a sense of destiny to save the world meets entitlement, and it is the rot in the Skywalker legacy. It was also inevitable because the entire idea of one Special Bloodline (as a stand-in for Special Race, Special Culture etc.) being the saviors was rotten from the start.

Also love how they’re trying to make “alt-left,” a thing. Alt-left isn’t a thing. We don’t call Trump supporters alt-right for nothing, they made that up themselves. Nobody calls themselves alt-left.

Not only have I been saying this since they coined the idea, but notice when the alt-right vandalizes Jewish cemeteries and memorials it’s just “kids being kids” while simply making a statement that you do not want a fascistic government (something conservatives often say without realizing the irony) it’s a national crisis?

I know it’s not hard to point out reactionaries hypocrisy when it comes to like safe spaces or hug boxes or whatever but genuinely how much of an echo chamber do you have to exist in for you to think this is a reasonable thing to say

reblog if attacking fascism is really the hill you want to die on

this is literally like one of the most justified and honorable hills you could die on??? lol??

actually I’m looking for the fascist to die on this hill

Jair Bolsonaro, a fascist, pro military dictatorship, racist, misogynist, and homophobe, has been elected Brazilian president. My heart goes out to all Brazilians who are in danger and living in fear right now because of him and his horrid followers.

I’m crying right now. It’s been really a terrible evening here. The future is more uncertain than ever and I wish it was overreaction bit it’s not. Their violence already started and tonight was no exception. We’ve been adopting this sentence now that we lost (WE LOST A LOT MORE THAN OUR CANDIDATE) that says “ninguém solta a mão de ninguém” (no one lets go of the other’s hand or something like that). It’s a good premisse. Thanks for your thoughts. Since it’s a world wave of hate, we are in this togeter.

We're in this together. No matter how small our thoughts and efforts may seem, we are side by side and hand in hand.

I really feel like Disney needs to stop doing this though. Like I get it, they have the right to fire anyone but I really think they should at least talk to these people beforehand or something. Because a lot of the people who work under them are extremely vocal about their opinions. I am really surprised Sarah Silverman hasn’t been fired yet.

I have my issues with Wendig (idk very much about Gunn other than the story of his firing) but I also don’t like this recent trend of Disney evidently wanting everyone who works with them to be completely inoffensive and milquetoast...? Writers tend to be a passionate and political bunch, and if you’re going to be all nicey-nice and “can we all get along” about the current political climate then I don’t even want to know you, much less read your stuff. Silence in the face of the utter shit that’s going down today is a political stance of itself, a statement of compliance and agreement. We need more than ever for creators to speak up, and it’s frightening that big corporations are muzzling them and effectively silencing prominent voices of opposition to the rise of fascism.