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Okay, lit-crit lesson over. Sort of. I wanted to make the point that the significances of characters, incidents or images in fiction often exist in a subjective real devolved from authorial intent before directing your attention to the funniest website I know. It’s not meant to be funny, admittedly, and it’s humour is often (ironically…again, unintentionally) rather dark, but it makes me smile. I speak, of course, of Stormfront, the ‘White Nationalist Community’ – and, more particularly, of it’s ‘Culture and Customs’ forum where members debate matters musical, artistic and literary in their own unique way. Sometimes the funnies are obvious. Threads with titles like ‘Because the Beauty of the White Aryan Woman must not perish from the Earth’, ‘Hollywood – Hebrews Hate Human Civilization’and the quite splendidly bizarre ‘Beyonce's Masonic Satanic Choreography’ are quite marvellous. ‘I WAS A HUGE BEYONCE FAN! I THOUGHT SHE WAS THE BOMB. THEN THIS STUFF GAVE ME A WAKE UP CALL’, bellows the author of the last thread (it’s very SHOUTY, is Stormfront). ‘REMEMBER WHEN HE WAS STILL IN HEAVEN, SATAN WAS THE “ANGEL” OF MUSIC…’ (er…I must have missed that bit on The Lightbringer’s CV) ‘…Jay-z’s backtracked music has the lyrics quite clearly. He says “MURDER MURDER JESUS”. They are Satanists. Lady Gaga, Rihana, Chris Brown, Beyonce…the whole lot of them! MAY GOT PROTECT US ALL AS WE CERTAINLY LIVE IN AN AGE OF DECEPTION!’ Well, yes. Yes, we do. Deception and, indeed, shrieking delusional mentalism. Let’s not ignore the ‘mentalist’ factor in balancing artistic intent with personal response. The real fun comes in their examination of pop culture, particularly fantasy. ‘Kick-Ass’ is described as ‘little Jew children running around in tight’. Robert E. Howard is ‘clearly’ in their camp, racially, as blacks, Mexicans and other non-whites are often so consistently described so negatively, particularly in his tales of Puritan adventurer Solomon Kane – despite pretty much no-one Solomon meets of any race being particularly pleasant, and his only real friend being N’Longa – an African witch-doctor. A black Beowulf provokes shrieks of Aryan outrage. Black and – oh sweet Jesus, no – gay characters in ‘Dr Who’ lead to imminent self-immolation (he’s a two-hearted illegal alien, you f***wits!) In raising a ‘Question about Lord of the Rings and White Racial Unity’ – and LOTR is very popular on Stormfront - one Hmmm. Writing during WW2 of a evil force trampling the diverse races of Middle Earth under it’s heel, defeated only by faith, friendship and racial/cultural co-operation…I wonder if there was an underlying metaphor or ‘objective correlative’ there that certain irony-free f***tards might have missed
poster is concerned about the positive representation of inter-race co-operation – leading up to a (ugh!) mixed-marriage. Don’t worry, comes the earnest reply, it’s all sub-textual: ‘There's nothing multicultural about it, in fact if you watch the movies (or read the books) you get the impression its a bunch of white men destroying the dark mongrel hordes.’ Well, yes, you do…if you are an arsewipe - as that reading goes against the whole Arwen/Aragorn Beren/Luthien thing, the friendship between Gimli and Legolas and little details like Tolkien’s describing racist ideologies as ‘wholly pernicious and unscientific’ and his response in 1938 to a German publisher’s query as to his ancestry that ‘if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.’ (he instructed his agent to let the proposed German edition of ‘The Hobbit’ ‘go hang’). Eurocentric he most certainly was – the northern European cultures, languages and mythologies he was familiar with as a philologist provided the principle fabric from which his fictional realms were drawn, but his understanding of myth informed his sense of cultural awareness...and delusion. He wrote to his son, in 1941, ‘You have to understand the good in things, to detect the real evil…I suppose I know better than most what is the truth about this 'Nordic' nonsense. Anyway, I have in this War a burning private grudge—which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler ... Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.’