∞

A young child, using words she learned purely by mimicking the way others speak: I want to be a mommy when I grow up.

It’s scary, but not in the sense that they’d take it if they saw this post, saying I’m “triggered” and that I talk too much for a woman. It’s scary because it’s so sad, and I have no idea how to fix it.

And just like in the comments I read on articles a few years ago when people finally started occasionally openly talking about the rise of fascism, I find myself in agreement with a lot of what they have to say about things like labor exploitation and the soullessness of modern capitalism. But I am horrified by their solutions to it and their bigotry and hatred.

It’s also…humanizing, maybe, is the word. Like they come off more tragic than evil. 

Maybe there is no evil. Maybe being human is just endless tragedy.

My traumatized brain tends to see humans as threats. It’s getting better as I get older and I heal more and the trauma is further and further in the past, but it’s still there. If there is one lesson that experience has taught me about humans, it’s that you should believe them when they show you who they are and what they’re capable of, and that they will never change and they will always hurt you and blame you for being hurt. Humans aren’t safe to be around. 

It’s taken me a good few years of healing to even start believing the spousal person when he says that he’s not mad at me, and I still freeze up and panic when he gets frustrated about something even though I’ve had 20 years of proof that he is good and decent and that he will never hurt me.

So I assume that people know what they are doing and that they mean what they say, and they actively choose to do things like engage in genocide and become concentration camp guards and beat people to death for being different somehow and vote for people whose policies cause widespread misery while knowing that their victims are real and alive and feel pain and have dreams just like they do. Because my brain thinks assuming those things is the best way to keep me safe. See humans as the danger they are and stay alert and aware and be ready to engage in one of the four Fs as needed when the humans inevitably start hurting me.

But I don’t know. I don’t think my brain is wrong about humans inevitably hurting those around them. But maybe it is wrong about humans being fully aware and intentional about the hurting.

I just wish I knew how to fix whatever went wrong with the person behind this blog that I’m reading. The thing is that I think that if there is a way to fix it, it’s on a systemic level way beyond what I have the power to affect.

I actually found this blog through their reblog of a post about love being the answer, and I don’t know. Maybe that’s true. Maybe all humans can do is love, even as they suffer. Maybe if there is any hope, it’s in love. Radical all accepting all understanding love.

Or maybe I’m stupid and silly and wrong all the time, I don’t know.

Then facism comes along and tells them all the things they have always "felt" were true. Feminism is cancer, women are actually more privileged than men, powerful people actively seek to destroy people like them, and *that* is why they feel like shit.

Mind you, it's even more complicated than that and there's dozens or hundreds of different ways you could find your way to the alt-right, but to get to all of that would tiae thousands upon thousands of words and I'm not that good at structuring what I want to say.

As a rule of thumb, most of the time people don't feel like what they're doing is evil. They think they are correct, they think they are justified in their actions, and the human brain is absolutely amazing at shutting down potential criticism once you are convinced of something. It takes a whole lot of work to understand how these groups operate and organize and honestly, I think I've barely scratched the surface. There's also a lot of civility politics and seeming more respectable than you actually are (Richard Spencer is a prime example. He got international attention. He was the one who first coined the term alt-right, and everyone wanted to hear his opinions because he was wearing a nice suit and spoke all formal and polite. He didn't want to start a genocide, he wanted to "build a nation for white people" and "why can't white people have their own country? Asians have their own countries, black people have their own countries, only white people have to share and when they don't want to they get called racist. Isn't that unfair?" And recently an audio clip got released where he screamed at the top of his lungs after the Charlottesville rally blew up in his face and he sounded like an anime super villain) and the far-right is full of dishonest arguments and they love to fetishize the aesthetics of intellectualism without actually saying anything that would be reflective of modern intellectual discourse regarding literally any topic they get their hands on. If you want to understand the discourse a little better and maybe get better at better at understanding the thought processes of these people I can recommend you a few YouTube channels to check out. For purely educational stuff ContraPoints' "Decrypting the Alt-Right" video is a good starter. Even though a lot of the contemporary language they use has changed already most of the concepts she introduces are still relevant. ContraPoints whole channel is absolutely excellent in my opinion. Should you be interested, Hbomberguy, Shaun, Vasuh and Destiny also do some good stuff (the first two debunk stuff a lot, the other two are more useful if you want to see people logically deconstructing arguments of Nazis and right-wing extremists in real time).

I hope this wasn't boring. This is one of the things I, as I said, have spent a lot of my free time on, but you honestly never stop learning. It's very complicated and I'm honestly extremely concerned myself. I think that the way mainstream media handles those groups is extremely irresponsible because most people can't discern cleverly-designed propaganda when they see it and then go ahead and pull up different academic articles to debunk it themselves because that requires a level of education most people just don't have.