i'll embrace this blurry past.

If you knew who he really was, would you still hate him?

Like, they think that getting too close to a subject makes it so that subject corrupts you, that’s the basis of their purity crusades. Porn must be destroyed because it CORRUPTS people, and studying it is the same as consuming it in their eyes. Things like that.

So rather than doing any actual research on Fascism, they look for superficial things they can associate with it. Looking for ‘signs’ of fascism in media consumed or memes used.

But because of that, they are completely ignorant to the actual NATURE of fascism, what the ideology is and it’s political theories, what it preaches as an ideal.

This is a passage I like to highlight

Besides, trying to find some primordially authentic culture can be like peeling an onion. The textiles most people think of as traditional West African cloths are known as Java prints; they arrived in the 19th century with the Javanese batiks sold, and often milled, by the Dutch. The traditional garb of Herero women in Namibia derives from the attire of 19th-century German missionaries, though it is still unmistakably Herero, not least because the fabrics used have a distinctly un-Lutheran range of colors. And so with our kente cloth: the silk was always imported, traded by Europeans, produced in Asia. This tradition was once an innovation. Should we reject it for that reason as untraditional? How far back must one go? Should we condemn the young men and women of the University of Science and Technology, a few miles outside Kumasi, who wear European-style gowns for graduation, lined with kente strips (as they do now at Howard and Morehouse, too)? Cultures are made of continuities and changes, and the identity of a society can survive through these changes. Societies without change aren’t authentic; they’re just dead.

Additionally, sharing culture can itself be the means of preserving it! If a particular cultural practice is actually supposed to be closed to ‘outsiders’ (however that may be defined) that tends to be an important rule and will typically be made very clear.

One example Im thinking of is in the Philippines with batok the traditional tattooing practices of the Kalinga people. The last recognized master of the practice is a woman named Whang-Od Oggay and traditionally speaking batok tattoos are only done by and for members of the same tribe (”tribe” in this case does not mean “Kalinga” which is an ethnolingustic term but the actual tribal social structure, in Whang-Od’s case her tribe is the Butbut) but she has opened up the practice to outsiders (which includes other Filipinos and also foreigners) if they are willing to make the trek to her isolated village and undergo the very long and painful traditional tattooing process.  Now when something is a “closed practice” there tends to be an actual reason and logic to it and its not simply “just because” and in the case of batok its because many traditional tattoos conveyed meanings which were incoherent if one was not a member of the tribe such as eagle tattoos signifying someone conducted an act of bravery for the tribe or tattoos which convey ones ancestry within the tribe. She doesnt give those tattoos to outsiders not out of xenophobia but because they wouldnt make sense. She is however willing to give tattoos that are supposed to give a kind of magical blessing such as good fortune or heightened virility/fertility.