Tuesday, September 24, 2019

"Inside the World of Racist Science Fiction"



"The genre ranges broadly in tone and topic, from dark, foreboding dramas to broad, slapstick comedies; from neo-Confederate romances to futuristic dystopian nightmares. They’re dangerous and disgusting, for sure, but they’re also absurdly stupid and, on the whole, very badly written. As a playwright who specializes in edgy humor, I find them endlessly fascinating. Their vocabulary of broad stereotypes, paranoid fantasies and preposterous global-takeover schemes is the stuff comedy is made of.
I have a particular affinity for the sci-fi books. One of the most popular is Ward Kendall’s 2001 “Hold Back This Day,” which imagines a future in which the evil all-powerful “World Gov” has forcibly united the population of Earth under one religion and, by way of enforced race-mixing, one uniformly brown-skinned population. Jeff Huxton is a “skoolplex” administrator and one of the world’s few remaining white people. He slowly learns to cherish his white skin, becomes radicalized and joins a terrorist group called “Nayra” (“Aryan” spelled backwards!). They hijack a spaceship and travel to Avalon, a secret all-white colony on Mars, which has been transformed into a paradisiacal homeland...

It is unlikely that Mr. Trump has read any of these books. But members of his staff undoubtedly have. His former aide Steve Bannon is a fan of “The Camp of the Saints” and refers to it often — in knowing, offhand ways that betray both his familiarity with racist literature and his awareness of his target audience’s reading habits. Another administration official, Julie Kirchner, was named ombudsman at the Customs and Border Protection after spending 10 years as the executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. That organization, which Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a hate group, was founded by John Tanton, who runs The Social Contract Press, which is the current publisher of “The Camp of the Saints.”"




FB: "“The Turner Diaries” was an innovation of sorts, a hybrid of fantasy and how-to, and it has inspired hundreds of terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe, including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people and injured 684 others. The attack was a copycat of the one Mr. Pierce outlined in the book, right down to the time of day and type of explosives used. Pages of the book were found in a plastic bag in the car of the plot’s leader, Timothy McVeigh. The mainstream attention caused a kind of miniboom in the genre that lasted into the early 2000s, as other would-be authors, Mr. Kendall and Ms. Williams among them, tried their hand at writing fiction."

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