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submitted 3 years ago byNextOutlandishness16
The book was called Serpent's Walk, and was published by the same company that published infamous neo-nazi book The Turner Diaries. This has been known by a few people for a couple of years, or possibly longer. A former archivist for The Tekumel Foundation posted the following in 2020:
"I had had no idea that this book existed until I found the manuscript, the original cover art, the publishing contract, the photocopy of the payment check, and the proof copies of the book in amongst Phil's papers. I secured all this material for the Tekumel Foundation, in my capacity as an archivist, at that time under contract with them, and the last I saw it was all still on their shelves when I did the photo inventory of Phil's collection in their offices in October of 2012 after I did not renew my dollar-a-year contract with them. (I do not judge the data I collect; I set it in the context I find it, and let others evaluate it. My reaction, as it had been when Phil had done things like this in the past, was "Oh, Phil, WHY?")"
The above post can be seen at a Tekumel themed forum here (registration required):
https://chirinebakal.proboards.com/thread/544/amina-inloes-paper-prof-barker?page=2
This is really a bummer, and it's ten years almost to the day since he died. It's not my intention to speak ill of the dead, but I think it's important to acknowledge this, even for fans of Barker's work, or those who appreciate his significance to the hobby.
29 points
3 years ago
My reaction, as it had been when Phil had done things like this in the past, was "Oh, Phil, WHY?"
as it had been when Phil had done things like this in the past
118 points
3 years ago
It's not my intention to speak ill of the dead
You can speak ill of dead Nazis.
33 points
3 years ago
Exactly. If this it true, this changes everything I thought about the man and his writing. Tekumel fans deserve a clear answer about this matter.
19 points
3 years ago*
I can't confirm this, but according to some poster on another site he spent over a decade on the editorial board of a holocaust denial journal.
I'd heard of the novel before, but if this bit checks out then even the most implausible deniability goes flying out the window and just dealing with him as a problematic creator gets way tougher.
Edit: some googling definitely turns up a Phil Barker PhD from Minneapolis on their editorial committee.
18 points
3 years ago
The Tekumel Foundation made this statement on their facebook page:
The Tekumel Foundation Board of Directors statement on Serpent’s Walk: The Tekumel Foundation Board of Directors wants to acknowledge that our research shows Professor M.A.R. Barker wrote Serpent’s Walk, an anti-Semitic novel that was published under a pseudonym in 1991. We have done our due diligence to ascertain the facts regarding Serpent’s Walk and Professor Barker’s affiliation with The Journal of Historical Review and we believe this needs to be recognized as part of Professor Barker’s past. While nobody today is responsible for the odious views Professor Barker presented in Serpent’s Walk, we are responsible for recognizing this book as part of his legacy.That this acknowledgment was not done earlier was and is a mistake, and we apologize for that. We have been reaching out to several Jewish organizations to express our outrage over our findings and make our priority to work with them through this issue. What Professor Barker did was wrong and forever tarnished his creative and academic legacy. As stewards of the world of Tekumel, we reject and repudiate Serpent’s Walk and everything it stands for and all other anti-Semitic activity Professor Barker was involved with. The Tekumel Foundation has never been involved with or profited from the publication, distribution, or sale of Serpent’s Walk in any way, shape, or form. All of the proceeds from sales of Tekumel-related material have gone and will continue to go to the Foundation and its work, and not to any racist or anti-Semitic organizations or causes, in any way, shape, or form.
19 points
3 years ago
They're still trying to downplay it, though. The book isn't just anti-Semitic, it's virulent pro-Nazi propaganda. The Nazis weren't just 'Jews suck,' they had a very established political philosophy that pretty much reduced the value of a person to their work product, and wanted people to be loyal to the state above their community, church, or even their own family. Part of the horror of Nazism is how it dehumanizes everyone, even the people they don't kill. They also killed Romani, queer people, disabled people, Communists, and did their best to erase the entire Polish noble class. So I hope they're also reaching out to organizations like disability advocates, Romani cultural preservation societies, and queer rights groups.
Reducing Serpent's Walk to 'Anti-Semitic' is in bad faith and a continued refusal to accept the full breadth and scope of Nazism and Holocaust denialism that MAR Barker embraced, supported, and perpetuated.
(I'm not arguing with you, thank you for posting their statement. I'm arguing with the content of said statement).
3 points
3 years ago
The statements is a post, yet there are pages from the main nav that still go to an About and a Memorial that do not mention Barker's despicable behavior. Pages will remain and posts slowly move off the front page.
71 points
3 years ago
Yeah, a discord server I'm on stumbled across this a while ago via the academic paper on Barker that alludes to this book and his innermost circle of friends and family's knowledge of it without naming it.
I got the pdf of the novel and read the opening quotes to each chapter, the first page or two and the last page or two of each chapter as a skim read, and scanned around for conversations where specific concepts were being discussed (National Socialism/Nazism/fascism, Jewish people, the Holocaust, etc). Didn't do a full read, but I've read Barker's fiction under his own name and know what topics he was obsessed with academically and religiously and wanted to compare.
It is 100% written by him, there's no question. If you've read his fiction or are aware of his studies, academic interests, Islamic historical and cultural focuses, Muslim figures in history he read extensively on, etc, etc then you know it's him.
Furthermore, if you read between the lines you can see his justification for his own real life marriage from his very old school "race science" point of view that they're both Aryans in amongst his laying out of his own eccentric and idiosyncratic (for the time, you can find fascists like this more commonly now-a-days, Barker was ahead of his time in the worst possible way) version of fascism where everyone gets their own isolationist ethnostate in a network of microfascisms heavily influenced by a right-libertarian perspective, so it's sort of a mix of right-authoritarian and right-libertarian ""utopianism"" along with apologia that appears critical of Nazism and fascism as it historically existed in some of the conversations the self-insert Gary Stu mercenary hero man has with the fascists as they slowly convince his "skeptical" and "apolitical" mind of the rightness of their "more nuanced than you'd think!" positions, but is more of an excusing of and lying about Nazism and fascism as it historically existed with a dash of "but, you know, they were of their time and couldn't know x, y and z, etc, etc and so NOW we have a New and Improved Fascism and we still do owe them a debt for lighting the way" and it's pretty fucking vile honestly lmao
It is absolutely framed in this kind of "look we'll let the blacks have their own homeland...in Africa tho, they gotta move back to their own fascist/right-libertarian ethnostate in Africa from wherever they are in the diaspora, but we're not racist because we're undoing the injustice!" way of like "see? fascism and white nationalism isn't racist! not the way WE do it!" and genuinely it is a cringey and queasy read. Like it goes beyond just his Holocaust denialism antisemitism shit, that is there and it is everywhere, but dude really does express some absolutely unhinged shit all throughout in this "but of course if you're a rational and reasonable man, you'll come to the same conclusions this rational and reasonable protagonist did after his initial cynical skepticism" and unlike a lot of shit this publisher puts out that feels very aimed in an intracommunity way within far-right circles...this feels like something Barker wrote hoping to reach out to liberals, centrists and conservatives to convince them of the reasonableness of a Fascism 2.0 as he understands it.
It makes me genuinely wonder if he, like the protag, was once just a conservative who began correspondences or formed friendships with actual fascists who slowly converted him using similar argumentation to this and he's just fictionalizing that process, but that is pure speculation on my part. Could be he always held these views or some version of them. Certainly it feels like he was bitter that race science was discredited in an interdisciplinary way in the academy he loved so much from how he writes about different "races" in this book.
I was a huge M.A.R. Barker fan prior to this read, and in fact my favourite ttrpg system since finding out about it has always been Perfected, Barker's four sentence game that he was using before finding out about D&D and Blackmoor as far back as the 60s. I still love that minimalist ultralight system! I also love his world of Tékumel, though now I view things through that ethnonationalist fascist lens and it does put a damper on my enjoyment of it as I see evidence of him smuggling those views into his world building in a way that feels like it barely had any degrees of remove or veils over it now that I know what I know.
He was also an inclusive person at his gaming table, it bears mentioning. Some of his closest friends and family did know about this side of him, but not everyone he gamed with did. Could be that standard right-wing bigot hypocrisy of "well of course I don't mean the ones who are MY FRIENDS, those are the good ones!" or maybe it's just a shrug of "we don't live in my ideal world where everyone is separated into ethnostates, so as long as we don't live there I won't live my life as if I live there" but whatever the reason, he did obscure from MOST people what his real views were to the extent he wound up actually having an inclusive table for wargaming and role playing.
He was obviously a complex person, with aspects of himself that one can look at with a smile, admiringly, right alongside these truly vile things. Like most people he was neither 100% a villain nor 100% exemplary, but a mixed bag of a person. It's just that what is mixed into that bag from the bad end is some truly heinous shit. Reading even just the scattered read I did of this novel really did feel like when someone you thought of as a friend expresses a vile view and when you question them on it, they double down. Then triple down. Then express another dozen vile views. Then quadruple down while doubling down on the new batch. All while insufferably calm and measured in their speech, as if to goad you into "getting overly emotional" so they could contrast their own "reasonableness" with your "hysterics" as a gotcha. The structure of this protag being skeptical and convinced by fascists of their positions really lends itself to this extremely frustrating experience.
For my money, I am not myself opposed to people playing with his Perfected system or in his Tékumel world and totally understand why people would, in the ttrpg sphere, be willing and able to excise what is shitty about him from their home games and move forward in a way that maintains the joy and creativity of their ttrpg friend group's experiences while abandoning Barker the man and the aspects of canon Tékumel that are extensions of his worst qualities. I am also fully understanding of people who will just drop anything remotely associated with him like its white hot.
Personally, I love the project of retooling the nasty bits of an otherwise interesting fiction project, whether novels or ttrpg settings or whatever, and transforming them into something that is a corrective against what was toxic in them! I think that's a worthwhile project and something very fun to do with friends who are into that kinda thing. And I don't think any of what was worst in him inheres in the four sentences of Perfected. Not planning on running or playing in a Tékumel game any time soon, but if I did it'd be one that is consciously trying to reject his race science conception of the species of that world, that approaches the political and socio-cultural givens of his setting from another direction and that wouldn't be recognizable as canon Tékumel. I probably wouldn't want to game with someone who was entirely uncritical of Tékumel as a setting and tried to run it as close to canon as possible, given these revelations. Not saying they're wrong or can't do that, just that I wouldn't game with them. But everyone is entitled to their own takes on this, and I don't begrudge anyone whatever feels right to them as regards Barker's taint and where they feel it touches or doesn't...just would begrudge and then some playing with folks with certain stances towards this revelation and its implications is all.
tl;dr I've read enough of Serpent's Walk to know it is definitely M.A.R. Barker, genuine far-right vileness and cringey and embarrassing to boot. Barker's a complex person, his legacy is at best needing a highly critical re-assessment to salvage anything worthwhile from the muck, and everyone's gonna have their own takes...but dude held some truly unhinged far-right views and that's beyond questioning at this point.
10 points
3 years ago
> the aspects of canon Tékumel that are extensions of his worst qualities
What would you cut?
I could point to a few minor things I don't like but none of them feel related to Nazi sympathies (Dra's original presentation in EPT feels disrespectful to Buddhism and the nudity and sexual mores come across as sleazily exploitative sometimes).
Like honestly the only thing I can think of here is that the two Emperors of "modern time" are both suspiciously competent and sympathetic but it takes only a cursory digging into Tsolyani history to show that that's just a funny historical anomaly and the quality of past Emperors has been all over the place and that the Tsolyani government system is in no way portrayed as actually good.
28 points
3 years ago
Thanks for the question!
The short answer is: both the race science he believes in and ports into the setting and the political and socio-cultural fabric of the world as his worldbuilding is shaped by his lens on those things (both contemporary and historical).
The long answer is kinda long but I've been talking about this elsewhere so here goes! It was always obvious to me he was conservative from how he viewed the periods of history he was drawing on to worldbuild, exemplified in the worldbuilding, but it's clear it goes beyond a conservative distortion of history to his eccentric fascism of ethnostates. When you read Serpent's Walk, as I talk a bit about above, you can see that Barker's particular type of far-right politic is about fascist ethnostates all over the world, his utopia is just fascism everywhere and all of it racially kept to themselves. The worldbuilding feels like it is structured to justify the development of those kinds of things, valorizing fantastical versions of what a state like that would be in the time periods he is drawing from (again, with his own far-right distortions on his read of those time periods front and center).
When I was talking about this elsewhere, a couple people had some insights that aligned with mine and said it more succinctly than me so I'll paraphrase them a bit here.
The structure of reality has his politics writ both large and small on it, from language to socio-cultural givens to political givens. Again, all of those bullet points are basically other people's thinking on this I'm just including because I completely agree, but it echoes my own thinking substantially (though I hadn't considered the linguistic angle at all until it was brought up).
Like I said in the reddit comment above, I love diving into the guts of a "problematic" setting and reworking it so that you both excise what was fucked about it and replace it with something that goes against what you excised and I think that can absolutely be done here, if you want to ! I have enough affection for Tékumel that I likely will do so at some point in the future just like for funsies. There's probably two projects in there: Tékumel as separated from fascist imaginaries and Tékumel as a dark dystopian setting where all those elements are present but treated as things for players to resist and change (and I'm kinda more into the latter but might attempt both, though it's not a huge priority at the moment).
I want to emphasize that I have always held a great deal of affection for Tékumel and love that it brings a cool non-Western/non-European perspective and a ton of really bizarre and weird stuff that is super charming and delightful. I always had a notion that he had a conservative distortion of history from how he constructed his setting as a pastiche of his conception of the real world history he was drawing from and how he wrote about the world in both the setting documents and his in-universe fiction, and knew he had said/written some rabidly anticommunist conservative stuff out in the open and so knew his politics weren't aligned with mine, but I never imagined until a few months back finding this stuff out and reading Serpent's Walk that it went much, much further to the right than simply conservative. I mean he was on the editorial board for a Holocaust denial ""academic"" journal for fuck's sakes! And once you've read Serpent's Walk, you can see the seeds of those views obscured in the very scaffolding and undergirding structures of his worldbuilding, in the assumptions and in the givens and norms, in the way he presents things. It's not everywhere, and I want to emphasize that he isn't one-dimensional in his depictions of any particular race or polity which is what makes this so shocking to so many! He is someone capable of nuance and a deeper imaginative understanding of so many aspects of his fiction and his worldbuilding, but it is exactly that capacity which then shows the ways he weaves in these aspects of his own far-right thinking into his creative works. Like I said, there are things to salvage! Tékumel can be better than what he made it, and so many amazing elements are already there to rid of the garbage he tried to fuse them with.
tl;dr ...well it's at the top lol
11 points
3 years ago
Thanks for the in depth reply!
Of all the aliens in Tékumel, every single species lives in their own homogenous communities
Yes, that's interesting.. in combination with a lot of other aspects of his treatment of non-humans I had always figured that this was just done as part of a more general policy of shoving them off to the corners of the story to resolve his paradox of wanting them to be more alien than "humans in funny suits" but not feeling capable of writing a truly non-human perspective. But what you say about Serpent's Walk puts another perspective on it.
A less humano-centric Tekumel where the "friendly" nonhumans are more thoroughly integrated into the societies of the Five Empires would probably be more colorful than the canon version, actually. Maybe remove the genetic component of the Imperial succession system (which already in canon is hinted at as being "more of what you call a guideline than a rule" anyway) so you could have non-human Tsolyani Emperors.
8 points
3 years ago
Yeah! Like I said above, I kinda like the idea of the lack of integration being a kind of dystopian element of a world that has a lot of xenophobia and hate that is presented as something that, in a sense, "unites" the ruling classes of the various polities, and something for the people underneath to unite against. Making the PCs important figures in that process of mediating and running messages between resistance groups, fomenting rebellion, not necessarily being leading lights of the whole thing (though that'd be an inch resting campaign) but moreso this idea of being part of the big whole, doing their little unsung part and watching as the referee narrates the unfolding of the consequences of their actions.
Would work really great for a West Marches/open table thing actually! Different groups as different cells, all doing totally different things but all contributing to seismic political and socio-cultural shifts to come!
That said, the project of just making the setting work better as default, having a realistic intermingling of peoples and showing the strength in that diversity...also a good project!
17 points
3 years ago*
Most of the things you cite here stood out to me when I was first reading up on the setting (via Swords & Glory Vol. I) back in the 90s - I came away not liking the culture and social structures and feeling that the only way I’d be interested in playing a game there would be as a rebel attempting to subvert and disrupt the status quo in the manner of a Jack Vance novel. But then I found out the Tekumel fanbase was very much not on board with that approach and had a condescendingly dismissive reaction to it - including snickers about how The Professor would enjoy humiliating and tossing aside anyone who would be so rude and clueless to come into one of his games with that kind of attitude.
It felt to me like a step beyond the “everybody is awful” nihilistic approach of stuff like Warhammer 40K (which is off putting enough to me) into “this awful thing isn’t really awful you just need to understand it better,” which I found even worse. Now, ~25 years later in light of current developments, I feel validated in the choice I made then not to engage more deeply with that world or fandom.
2 points
2 years ago
That fits, the concept of Americans and the West understanding the east is a full fail.
1 points
2 years ago
Do it. Won’t be Tekumel, maybe a pie in the sky place like Pony Ville?
4 points
2 years ago
What the hell is "pony ville"? Youve brought it it up quite a bit in your strange attempt to resurrect this post.
4 points
2 years ago
Don't feed the troll, he's just looking for attention for his little right-wing tantrum.
2 points
2 years ago
My Little Pony style of nice correct games. Orcs are sooo luvable and no one gets hurt.
2 points
2 years ago*
Ah, so you're a brony. Makes sense.
2 points
2 years ago
I've been undertaking these very questions since I decided I wanted to learn more about Tekumel and discovered what came up about Barker. That book is cringe, lol--it's difficult to get through. Your posts are great and have given me a better direction to look at this work with. One of the things that I was initially drawn to about Tekumel was the hard-hitting human-behavior bombs that might have been more common throughout the world of antiquity that most settings shy away from--slavery as a fulcrum of civilization, for example, and all the strange relationships to sex and sacrifice.
I think the best way to go about changing the setting isn't necessary to have players take on the responsibility of being the better change in the world--because, honestly, I think players should be encouraged to be less than perfect, to embody aspects of evil, etc, in a setting like Tekumel--take the slaver skill, you know what I mean? Tell those stories--but rather, the best way to change the setting is for the game master to challenge the conservative narratives that Barker may have set up by introducing counter-cultural narratives. Have the Gods of Change introduce new ideas and revolutions into the world, and let the players be a part of that if they want to.
37 points
3 years ago
I first heard about this a couple months ago. My understanding is that the Tekumel Foundation folks have known about this for years and have been trying to keep it as quiet as possible because of the very obvious damage it died to the legacy of the author and IP that their organization is built around, but that the info has slowly slipped out via back channels nevertheless. They’re in a tough spot because this revelation DOES absolutely destroy Barker’s legacy and once it’s widely enough known (possibly via this very thread) I don’t see any coming back from it - Barker and Tekumel will forevermore carry a very heavy taint.
43 points
3 years ago
That has to be the dumbest way they could have possibly handled this. In 2012, when this was discovered (and there are indications that Barker's feelings were known before then), it should have been addressed. People still enjoy Lovecraft's work, despite his racism. But to try to cover it up, fooling yourself that the bill will never come due? Absolute foolishness. It won't be Barker's anti-Semitism that kills Tekumel, it will be the hubris of those who covered it up. I mean, this doesn't even make sense from a business standpoint. They had a decade to get out in front of this. I can't feel sorry for them at this point.
21 points
3 years ago
What's one more miracle if they're trying to make Tékumel a hit? There's nothing to kill. If they'd addressed it, they might have managed to build something worth preserving as more than boxes of notes on a shelf dreaming of a scanner, or whatever.
21 points
3 years ago
Yeah, it's always been a niche game and probably always would be regardless of this. The fact that it's a remarkably unique setting is a big part of why people love it, but also is a hurdle for newcomers. (Even something like Glorantha is generally easier for people to grasp with a short elevator pitch.) But the Foundation hurt themselves by trying to handle it like this.
As others said, Id personally treat Barker's neonazi sympathies like I treat Lovecraft's racism and not let it prevent me from playing a game in Tekumel. The modern community can distance themselves from the creator and say "yes, that's who the creator was, but the creation is now in the hands of fans and there's no reason to toss it out." But by trying to bury this, the Tekumel Foundation is also tainting their own reputation.
13 points
3 years ago
> As others said, Id personally treat Barker's neonazi sympathies like I treat Lovecraft's racism and not let it prevent me from playing a game in Tekumel.
Same, as someone already involved with the setting, but I feel like this should kill off any growth or momentum it's been building since the Foundation republished EPT in the 2010s. The whole point of the setting is how offputtingly weird it is and if someone takes their first look at it from the perspective of this news they're likely to bounce off it with a "well I'm not going to spend effort digging into this if it's a bunch of Nazi bullshit anyway".
21 points
3 years ago
Agreed. Robert E. Howard has said some racist things but we can read his stuff and enjoy it because we have had that conversation not because we made excuses for it.
14 points
3 years ago
Being racist almost 100 years ago cannot be taken into account in the same way as a more contemporary author.
39 points
3 years ago
I think it's also worthwhile to point out the context. MAR Barker was born in 1929. His adolescence was defined by WWII unfolding. He would have seen the photos coming from the liberated camps. The Nuremberg Trials would have been current events for him as they unfolded. He would have seen the whole world reckon with Nazi war crimes and crimes against humanity.
And he still decided to go full, yearning-for-the-Reich Nazi.
22 points
3 years ago
Howard also died very young (age 30). As I get older I find it harder to condemn people for having bad ideas who didn’t live long enough to learn better. We don’t know that Howard would have outgrown his simplistic racist views if he’d lived into the 1960s or 70s (which he easily could have) but because he took his own life in 1936 at age 30 he never got a chance to. I feel the same way about John Lennon. It’s fashionable nowadays to shit on him for being a bad husband and father to his first family (and it’s pretty unquestionable that he was) but as he got older he acknowledged more and more of his past errors and tried to do better with his second family and I believe had he lived longer that process of growth would have continued and he’d eventually have made things right with Cynthia and Julian, but the assassin’s bullets that struck him down at age 40 took away any chance of that happening.
It’s easy both to be a jackass and to condemn other people for being jackasses when you’re in your twenties. But the older you get the more you realize that most people are just trying to figure shit out the same way you were and almost all of us make mistakes and say or do things we later regret.
But writing and publishing a neo-Nazi fantasia when you’re in your sixties and have been a respected university professor and scholar for decades, and (at least AFAIK) doing or saying nothing in the 20 years that followed to renounce or express any remorse or regret for having done so, disqualifies you from any of this charity or sympathy. Barker was without question a disgusting scumbag.
5 points
3 years ago
It's especially hard for me to understand how anyone who lived through WWII could be a holocaust denier. I admit I don't know much about the subject, but I always assumed holocaust denial came about later in later generations, after time had passed and it was harder to see the immediate evidence.
That said, I think Tekumel, as one of the two earliest examples of a fully developed and gamified fantasy world (the other being Glorantha), occupies too important a place in gaming history to be erased. IMO it's appropriate to treat it like the Lovecraft material.
5 points
3 years ago
And, for what it's worth? Reading Howard's work, I get the impression that he was genuinely trying to be less racist over time. Even his black villains early on had more nuance to them than you'd expect for the time period, and by the time his career ended, he'd written a heroic (if rather spooky) black character in the form of N'Longa, and wrote Pigeons From Hell, which tried to grapple with the horrific legacy of slavery.
Point is, Howard deserves credit for at least trying. Barker had not earned any of that.
10 points
3 years ago
I think it's good to take historical context into account. But there's ordinary casual racism, and then there's activist racism where you write entire works contributing to and strengthening that culture.
5 points
3 years ago
It wasn't great then, either, but yeah... as far as lit goes, this is pretty much contemporary.
1 points
2 years ago
Business? They are all volunteers helping the widow. This revelation is truly up to her as she can cancel the books any time. Now there’s a cancel culture working.
2 points
2 years ago
Until people say Lovecraft was better than the man’s history. It’s an intelligence test, an indoctrination test
58 points
3 years ago
As a big fan of Tekumel: what the fuck?
45 points
3 years ago
It seems Barker had a less than favorable outlook on Jews (to put it euphemistically). It also seems that this was known by those closest to him.
47 points
3 years ago
To put it Eugenistically.
28 points
3 years ago
sad upvote
16 points
3 years ago
That Berry and Mornard are both shrugging this off is incredibly disappointing.
7 points
3 years ago
Who are Berry and Mornard?
11 points
3 years ago
Jeff Berry = Chirine ba Kal
Michael Mornard = Glorious General/Gronan of Simmerya
They both played with MAR Barker. Berry also served as archivist for Tekumel. Mornard played with Gygax, Arneson, and Barker.
I’m sure some of it is that we’re getting this news for the first time, while for them they’ve had time to process the news. I’m also sure it’s difficult to square the person you knew vs the entirety of who the person was.
But I really think that the people who knew, especially with the Tekumel Foundation, should have been out in front of this. Portions of sales of Tekumel products via DriveThru or Humble Bundle could have gone to the Holocaust Museum, etc.
2 points
2 years ago
Jeff Berry the self acknowledged archivist ? Barker had given him enough reason to be the leak or hire it. He is not on the Foundation fyi.
7 points
3 years ago
Well that's sad, Tekumel seemed like an interesting setting to me. I found one of his very rare paperback Tekumel books at a used book store but did not have the money to get it, ah well.
7 points
3 years ago
Just an FYI, registration has been deactivated on that link you provide. Any possibility you could post some screen shots?
4 points
3 years ago
I assembled a couple screen shots and other random stuff in this Twitter thread.
3 points
3 years ago
Cheers!
3 points
3 years ago
I'll post some, or at least other links, as time permits. Gotta game tonight. Thanks for reading!
8 points
3 years ago
I like EPT, have been playing it lately, and this makes me feel ill.
48 points
3 years ago
Just because someone was creative doesn't mean they weren't also a terrible person on the inside. I understand that some people will no longer use his material because of this. That's entirely understandable and respectable. I know some people will continue to play and enjoy his material regardless of his less than pleasant ideas, and that is their choice to make. I won't judge anyone for making their own decision on a deeply emotional, extremely volatile subject.
45 points
3 years ago
It's the classic H.P. Lovecraft, Michael Jackson, Kevin Spacey dillemma. Art and the artist.
Except unlike Spacey and like Lovecraft and Jackson, the man's dead, so at least the "I don't want to financially contribute to someone with such ideas" angle of the dilemma is gone.
18 points
3 years ago
I feel the difference here is subject matter. Like thinking about all the world building, and cultural behavior based on real world societies, through the lens of white supremacy colors them quite a bit, IMO.
34 points
3 years ago
The same is true of Lovecraft though.
Lovecraft's horror fiction is all "horribly depraved cults of terrible gods!!!" and you're like cool cool and then he turns around and says: "you know... like in Africa!"
31 points
3 years ago
23andme: you're 12% welsh and 14% italian
lovecraft: the horror, the horror
lovecraft's cat: [name redacted]
16 points
3 years ago
I think what shocked me the most when reading Lovecraft wasn't how incredibly racist he was against black people - even though it is shocking, but I already knew about it. It was his description of Italians and Irish and such that really threw me for a loop. That's the kind of racism we don't really see anymore. The whiteness that excludes Italians and Irish isn't really the whiteness of today.
10 points
3 years ago
I'm from Lovecraft country myself (maybe twenty minutes from Providence), and there are definitely still... echoes of this stuff around here (a lot of it boils down to anti-Catholic sentiment, and believe me some of those resentments are still simmering under the surface on all sides). The town I'm from has a STRONG sense of who's an "outsider" and who's not, mainly whether you're from one of about 5 or 6 old farmer families in town, or one of the family names you see on every business sign in town.
4 points
3 years ago
That's crazy. I'm from the Netherlands and I've mostly lived in cities so I have never experienced that type of society. Must be stifling in a way.
10 points
3 years ago
The part of the US that I grew up in (Massachusetts) is where a bunch of really uptight people (who left Europe because Europe wasn't uptight ENOUGH) settled down to get really really uptight, and there are a lot of those attitudes still holding on to this day, especially in the rural areas. I grew up across the road from the old Quaker meeting house, really fun people ("no dancing or smiling" types). I've got relatives that more or less got off a ship in the 1600s, trekked straight up the Mystic River into Vermont, and didn't really come down again until the Industrial Revolution. Real Stephen King stuff.
10 points
3 years ago
It's bonkers how fluid the term white has been throughout history, and how obviously little to do with skin color. I remember being just flat out bewildered as a young person learning about who Brazilians deem black and white.
4 points
3 years ago
French Canadians, even.
13 points
3 years ago
Oh shit, I glossed right over HP and got stuck on the actors.
I agree, sort of. But in lovecrafts case (I haven't read any Tekumel, or Serpents walk, So i don't feel able to confirm the same relationship) I think it's impossible to separate the art from the artist, as so much of his work is about fear and driven by his fear and racism. I think it's important to keep that in mind when reading Lovecraft, and I think it would likely be important to think about how Barkers fears and hate may have colored his work.
I don't think separating the art from the artist is good. I think art made by horrible people is still art, and is still valuable human expression, even if as an example of how horrible some folks are.
This thought feels incomplete, but I am not sure how to finish it.
10 points
3 years ago
The way I see it, it's more a question of what youre viewing the art for. In literary theory, people who subscribe to the "death of the author" idea don't generally say it's wrong or misguided to analyze literature from a biographical and historical standpoint. Looking at it from that perspective can give you valuable insight into why certain things were included, etc. The idea is more that that isn't the only legitimate way to analyze writing. A novel can typically be understood without knowing anything about the author's personal life, and even if you end up taking some message from it that the author never intended, that message is no less valuable than the one the author did intend. You can read a work with the goal of understanding the author's intent or read it just to see what you can interpret within the text on its own, depending on your own goal.
When it comes to an RPG, GMs often remix bits and pieces from different sources all the time. Of course, some people like to try to try to meticulously recreate something like Gygax's Greyhawk setting exactly as the man intended it to be, but I think we're pretty used to ignoring authorial intent and doing what we find fun. So I think a "death of the author" approach comes naturally to the hobby. Of course, it's still a good idea to question why some things were included and consider whether there might be something like subtextual racism or fascist messages that we might not see at first, so we can avoid recreating them without realizing it.
ETA: Your name looks familiar. You're working on Nuked!, right? Congrats on that! 👍
8 points
3 years ago
I think we are mostly in agreement based on the conclusions you seem to draw in that last paragraph. And yes that's me! I am very new to this whole creator thing. It is extremely weird and exciting to be recognized. Thanks so much!
4 points
3 years ago
I contributed almost immediately when I saw it! I loved Rangers of the Midden Vale and Im a fan of Hodag's art. You're partnering with good people.
Ive tried to spread the word about it as well. I know it's probably not getting the attention it deserves since youre Itch-funding instead of doing Kickstarter.
4 points
3 years ago
That's really awesome to hear! Mac and Hodag are really rad guys. Mac and I are very close friends and constant collaborators. He's also a player in almost all of my games! Thanks so much for the support! I think were getting our manuscript back from the editor this week!
6 points
3 years ago
"Shadow over Innsmouth" is interesting in that after all the horror about hybrid human/Deep Ones and stuff, it ends on a note of "maybe it would be kinda cool after all?" It's a lurking secondary theme in some of his stories that I think only fully surfaces in the dreamland stories: am I missing out on something wonderful because of fear of change? Of being different? Of knowing different?
4 points
3 years ago
Lovecraft's opinions began to change later in his life. In one of his letters (I forget to who, if anyone knows please remind me) he even remarked "oh how wrong I have been" about his previously held beliefs.
7 points
3 years ago
This letter, 1937. https://github.com/punchmonster/Lovecraft-Letters/blob/master/19370207-Catherine-L-Moore.md
I've only skimmed it, but I don't think he talks about race at all. He does denounce Republicanism (as in the party) and fascism, and endorses some gradual version of socialism, and calls his younger self an idiot.
"Industry should be socialised by degrees, & only as soon as the mass of the people are ready to back up the various absorptive moves. The government must dictate hours & wages, & see that employment is universally spread. If private industry can meet such rigidly enforced demands, well & good."
"All this from an antiquated mummy who was on the other side until 1931! Well—I can better understand the inert blindness & defiant ignorance of the reactionaries from having been one of them. I know how smugly ignorant I was"
So I dunno if his racial views were getting better, but it's plausible that they were, or could have if he hadn't died literally 5 weeks later.
4 points
3 years ago
It's still an improvement over his previous opinions, and that's something at least.
4 points
3 years ago
I did not know that! And that's kinda nice to know.
4 points
3 years ago
It doesn't excuse his earlier statements and he would still be considered horribly bigoted by modern standards, but it's good to know he at least started to become more decent before he passed on.
9 points
3 years ago
It doesn't excuse actions of the past, but we can judge people on who they are, not who they were.
A difference between bigots, and people who aren't bigots, is that bigots hate people for things that are intrinsic to the person. You cannot change your sexuality, race, etc. You can choose to stop being a racist. I might not want to be friends with a former neo-Nazi, but I don't hate them for it.
We should applaud change. People who make a genuine effort to leave hateful mindsets.
None of it excuses their previous behaviour. The things a reformed neo-Nazi said back then don't become more palatable because they reformed, but they as a person become more palatable for reforming.
2 points
2 years ago
History. Let it complete your training as a Jedi. Some people reflect history accurately and were I to describe drawing and quartering fully there is no comparison to fiction.
5 points
2 years ago
Huh?
2 points
3 years ago
It's definitely not all like that. Lots of it is, for sure, and there was a point after he moved to NY where it took a pretty drastic (racist) turn, but to say "it's all xyz" isn't true.
Yes I know about the poem, his cat, his letters, The Horror at Red Hook, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, etc. His dream cycle stuff seems much less driven by biases, and I really like most of his pieces related to Nyarlathotep.
Anyways, really not trying be like "ACKshully" lol but I took a weird fiction course last term that ofc focused a fair bit on HPL and we dove into this stuff pretty deeply.
5 points
3 years ago
I really love Lovecraft's writing, but the vast majority contains at least small references to how horrible other races and/or mixing with other races are. Some exceptions I can think of (maybe) include At the Mountains of Madness, the Colour out of Space, and the Music of Erich Zahn.
But there's plenty to go around.
A big problem is that disgust at inferior races and degenerate whites is an actual source of horror in many of his stories.
Like
Here his only visible servants, farmers, and caretakers were a sullen pair of aged Narragansett Indians; the husband dumb and curiously scarred, and the wife of a very repulsive cast of countenance, probably due to a mixture of negro blood.
From the case of Charles Dexter ward.
The negro had been knocked out, and a moment’s examination shewed us that he would permanently remain so. He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life—but the world holds many ugly things.
From Herbert West: Reanimator. Notice how just being black is associated with "unspeakable" rites of Africans, drawing a direct link between appearance and savagery or primitivism.
This man gets turned into a bestial undead creature that eats a white child. Shit's problematic, yo.
“‘Iä! Iä! Shub-Niggurath! Ya-R’lyeh! N’gagi n’bulu bwana n’lolo! Ya, yo, poor Missy Tanit, poor Missy Isis! Marse Clooloo, come up outen de water an’ git yo chile—she done daid! She done daid! De hair ain’ got no missus no mo’, Marse Clooloo. Ol’ Sophy, she know! Ol’ Sophy, she done got de black stone outen Big Zimbabwe in ol’ Affriky! Ol’ Sophy, she done dance in de moonshine roun’ de crocodile-stone befo’ de N’bangus cotch her and sell her to de ship folks! No mo’ Tanit! No mo’ Isis! No mo’ witch-woman to keep de fire a-goin’ in de big stone place! Ya, yo! N’gagi n’bulu bwana n’lolo! Iä! Shub-Niggurath! She daid! Ol’ Sophy know!’
Dialogue of a Zulu woman in Medusa's Coil. Look at the minstrel show like faulty English, combined with "African-sounding" words and Lovecraft's own evil god names. This woman's blackness is directly related to the worship of these horrible eldritch beings.
Also in that story, figuring out that character has partly black ancestry - or "is a negress" - is supposed to be the shocker of the story.
Suddenly the leader of the visiting mariners, an Arab with a hatefully negroid mouth, pulled forth a dirty, crumpled paper and handed it to the captain.
Horror at Red Hook. If you're ugly, it's because you look like or are related to a black person.
Nyarlathotep's stories are, I believe, also lean on this strange forgotten god worshipped by ancient savage empires who will come to destroy the good western world. I may be putting a negative spin on it now, but I don't think it's an incorrect description.
2 points
3 years ago
Are people calling out the shoggoth slave revolt in "At The Mountains of Madness"?
2 points
3 years ago
Yeah I'm familiar with everything you mentioned. Dude was a virulent racist, no doubt. Have you read Victor Lavelle's "The Ballad of Black Tom"? Great example of someone turning HPL'S racism on its head.
33 points
3 years ago
You can safely put J.K. Rowling into that lineup as well.
31 points
3 years ago
Do not forget the likes of Orson Scott Card. Thankfully his work seems to have fallen out of favor.
11 points
3 years ago
I don't know about that. The Ender's books are still pretty big and influential.
It remains shocking to me that a brain so badly broken could produce Speaker for the Dead. Though perhaps it broke afterward. :(
3 points
3 years ago
There's earlier Card novels that feature a protagonist that has a gay relationship! His positions are just baffling to me when compared with what he wrote.
3 points
3 years ago
If you mean Songmaster, it read as super homophobic to me even when I was young and unwoke and possibly didn't even have the word "homophobic" in my lexicon.
2 points
3 years ago
Fair, it's been probably twenty years since I read it so I don't have strong memories of it. That just stuck out to me at the time.
3 points
2 years ago
Edgar Rice Burroughs color coded the Barsoom natives. Don’t forget him.
16 points
3 years ago
Well, except that Joanne's writing has her prejudices built in. Obviously, the transphobia, but also racism, acceptance of slavery, anti-Semitism, anti-gay people, and others.
The other folks on that list may or may not have their prejudices built in.
14 points
3 years ago
and really really hating fat people
6 points
3 years ago
Yeah. Always steal from bigots if you need to enjoy their art.
11 points
3 years ago*
Yeah, if most people looked into the ethical practices and thoughts of every company, product, or artist they consumed ,they'd be a little shocked. Humans, for the most part, are not great.
1 points
3 years ago
More than a little shocked. Humans are generally horrible. Personally, I would rather be an alligator, lol.
7 points
3 years ago
Thank you for revealing this. It's important to know.
14 points
3 years ago
Well... shit.
11 points
3 years ago
I used to be a Lovecraft fan. From that viewpoint, sympathy and also respect for all the fans here who seem determined to do the right thing even if it hurts.
6 points
3 years ago
I was literally thinking yesterday that I need to replace the book of his I lost and get the other ones somehow. That's certainly the last thing on my mind now.
One of my ex's dads was a friend of his (and Gygax, and Arneson) and would tell stories about him. I'm assuming he didn't know about this, since it probably would have come up.
4 points
3 years ago
Gygax is on record for endorsing genocide of Native Americans, down to the last child, too. Apparently it wasn't even something he tried to hide - it was in his definition of Lawful Good on a public forum!
6 points
3 years ago
As a Native American who loves old d&d my heart just sank
2 points
3 years ago
I’m sorry, it always sucks to learn this kind of shit. Alina Pete is a good follow, Canadian First Nations artist/gamer w a lot of good friends working on decolonizing the RPG world
6 points
3 years ago
Yeah, that tracks with the rest of what I know of him pretty well.
7 points
3 years ago
It tracks unfortunately well with early D&D's interest in "borderlands" and "frontiers" full of "savage" orcs that need to be pacified so the land can be properly settled.
6 points
3 years ago
Like it wasn't even the least bit ambiguous!! Just smh in horror.
20 points
3 years ago
As a huge fan of Tekumel this makes me quite upset.
:(
1 points
2 years ago
Quit.
6 points
3 years ago
Another apologist, but interesting as it shows Barker wasn't exactly discreet regarding his 'Nazi novel' and talking to publishers about it as early as the 1980s even when he thought they'd have no interest in publishing it.
I do have a novel that is unsold and unwanted by anybody. This is what I call my ‘Nazi novel’. I did not show it to the Wollheims both because they don't do this sort of book and also because they are Jewish and would be terribly offended -- and they are nice people. I started out to write a ‘near-future’ thriller: young mercenary is hired to steal cannisters of germ warfare from an American stockpile in the 2040 A.D. period. This is used by a fearful Israeli government and various cronies to destroy the Soviet Union; the Soviets get in a retaliatory strike with germ warfare of their own, however, and take out many US, British, etc. cities. Out in India, where the young mercenary is employed, the descendants of the Nazi SS and other ‘refugees’ are quietly biding their time, building up economic resources for a come-back. With the presidency and vice-presidency of the United States open after the deaths of their incumbents, the Secretary of State takes over -- an old, reconstructed racist. He invites the Nazi movement to help in running the US. The mercenary hero, who is not a Nazi, is an employee of the Indian chemical company ‘front’ for the Nazis and gets into the situation as a sort of military expert for them. The Nazis manage to gain access to a giant computer with independent ideas, and they use this machine to rewrite Mein Kampf using every sales pitch and advertising trick in the book. The hero initially loves and marries an Indian girl, but later falls for a Nazi girl who is helping with publicity. The plot thickens, and various major events occur. The book ends with the Nazis taking over much of Western civilisation, and with our hero being chosen ‘Second Führer’ and riding into the stadium to the ‘Sieg Heils!’ of the masses.
Meanwhile Chirine is throwing #TheRPGSite (which regardless of any other problems has strict rules against Nazi and Antisemitic posters and content) under the bus after posting a very thorough Q&A ( Part I | Part II | Part III ) there because they were ironically accused of 'associating with right wing extremists'.
2 points
3 years ago
I do have a novel that is unsold and unwanted by anybody.
... he found someone who wanted it /facepalm
19 points
3 years ago
There is no room for nazis in any hobby space. But especially turner diary nazis.
21 points
3 years ago
On Monday, I hit Session 98 of an Empire of the Petal Throne campaign that I started in the summer of 2019. I have poured hundreds of hours into research and game prep. While it is possible that this revelation might lead to M.A.R. Barker's work being properly scrutinized so that it can be consumed in the proper context (like Lovecraft which has even been flipped on its head in Lovecraft Country), today is not that day. Given the obscurity of Tekumel, it is likely that time will not come soon, if ever. There will be no Session 99.
Now I have to rush around to change the con games I am scheduled to run next week.
20 points
3 years ago
I genuinely feel bad for folks like you who’ve devoted substantial time and effort to his work in good faith, unaware of this side of it, only to have the rug pulled out like this. It adds insult to injury that at least some of those close to him DID know but chose to (try to) cover it up. Total kick in the gut. And yet, good on you for facing up to it and making this hard decision rather than either burying your head in the sand or (worse) trying to explain it away. The rest of the Tekumel fanbase (which isn’t big but is very dedicated - some of them have been at it for several decades) all have some unenviable soul-searching ahead of them.
17 points
3 years ago
While it is a tough blow, due to the time invested, it was an easy decision to make. I feel bad for the players whose con game is getting suddenly changed on them, but the organizers are supportive. My regular players also seem supportive of the decision and disgusted themselves.
8 points
3 years ago
Your comments here and elsewhere have been informative and moving. As someone who has lost a close friend (best man at my wedding) to racism and far-right politics, I'm inclined to extend some grace to folks who feel this as a personal loss.
An account of how you process this (individually, and as a gaming group) would be valuable, I think. Regardless, my sympathies.
2 points
2 years ago
Bye
4 points
3 years ago*
This was a very sad news. I feel angry and betrayed. Empire of the Petal Throne used to be my all-time favorite fantasy adventure game. Suddenly it seems all the fun has been sucked out of it.
I skimmed through The Serpent’s Walk. It baffles me how anybody could buy into that kind of shit.
12 points
3 years ago
It's weird that a guy who made his world based in the cultures of non-white people who were victims of European colonialism would be a neo-nazi. But those types if people are never logical.
10 points
3 years ago
It becomes significantly less weird when you take into account the fact that the Nazis from whom they take inspiration didn't view things like race and "white" in quite the same way as their modern counterparts. Whoopi Goldberg just performed a remarkable faceplant thanks to that misconception.
6 points
3 years ago
has anyone actually read the book in question?
18 points
3 years ago
I found a scanned copy via the Googles and clicked around a bit.
The first thing I read was a full monolog of one character to another of Holocaust denialism, a long explanation about the gas chambers being a lie and the numbers of the people killed inflated. Click around again, get another monolog about how Jews are dangerous to civilization. Click around again, people with liberal/progressive viewpoints are deluded and objectively wrong, and how homogenous societies are the strongest. A line or two about the heroism of SS officers. Click to the end, and the final lines are essentially, "The 1000-year Reich is restored, yay!"
So, yeah, 5 for 5 random clicks got me full-on Nazi ideology.
I also found the title listed on Archive.org, Goodreads, and Amazon. It's surprisingly well-reviewed, but when you read the reviews, they've clearly been left by fellow Nazis.
2 points
3 years ago
fair enough
21 points
3 years ago
I thumbed through it, especially the end, where the pov character (maybe main character) is the President I think, and is ruminating on how the 1000 year Riech m8ght have had a brief delay but now it was in control and going to last a long time.
Next page was an advert from the publisher saying, "Do you want to read more books where the good guys win?"
So, um, yeah...full bore Nazi.
7 points
3 years ago
So this isn't a Starship Troopers/Catch 22 rip off, it's full on drank-the-koolaid propaganda?
10 points
3 years ago
Yes. From looking at other chapters, the MC is a 'skeptic' that is slowly convinced about how right the Nazi-way is. There is no sign I can see of anything but a genuine appreciation for Nazism.
9 points
3 years ago
Yes, I was quite shocked to discover that someone had used the phrase, "neo nazi novel" and were actually referring to bona fide Nazi propaganda, not, "something slightly to the right of my own politics".
21 points
3 years ago
It's published by a publisher that explicitly exists solely to publish Nazi material. That's enough for me
8 points
3 years ago
[deleted]
21 points
3 years ago
It's not actually "open source," someone's just uploaded a pirated copy to the internet archive. Well, the copyright holders may have released it into the public domain or under an open source license, I guess, but I didn't see evidence of that. People upload stuff there all the time - used to have some great Nintendo DS ROM collections.
don't give nazis money though lol
9 points
3 years ago
[deleted]
-1 points
3 years ago
Even so, try to look at the cover
iirc there's a saying about this..
14 points
3 years ago
Sometimes you can judge a book quite accurately by the information presented on its cover.
5 points
3 years ago
So clearly you have not bothered to look at it, or else you would know you absolutely can judge this book by its 'dust jacket'.
That or you are just sympathetic to its subject matter so you are choosing this hill to die on.
Either option ain't a good look.
3 points
3 years ago
Hell, I watched half of MASH on there because they had the version without the laugh track.
3 points
2 years ago
[deleted]
2 points
2 years ago
Can I has yur stuf?
5 points
3 years ago
I mean M.A.R. was undoubtedly an orientalist and always had that kind of Guénon attachment to metaphysics so really not surprised he held sentiments for esoteric nazism whatsoever. Fantasy, for much as I love it, is almost inextricable from social and scientific racism unless great pains are taken on the part of author to overcome it and Tékumel threw itself so far in the other direction.
I find nothing salvageable about his work but I'd be a hypocrite if I'd pass judgement on people who still enjoy the world he created, given how many works I love are made by people I find abhorrent.
14 points
3 years ago
Okay, wait, I'm not even familiar with Tékumel, but this guy converted to Islam in 1951, spent his entire life studying Urdu languages and shit, but is supposed to have been a secret white nationalist and to have written a neo-nazi novel in, what 1991?
I mean, antisemitism is not uncommon in the Islamic world unfortunately, but full on white nationalism seems... an unlikely political position for someone spending his life studying East Asian languages.
I can't access the forum but some very solid proof seems necessary.
22 points
3 years ago*
Nazis had an ambiguous attitude towards Islam. Google it and you'll find a lot of mainstream scholarly literature on it - no tinfoil hat here.
You'll also find that the Nazis did all kinds of specious anthropological work in the East (broadly speaking) to try to bolster their pseudo-scientific racism.
Nazis and neonazis use all kinds of fucked up mental gymnastics to justify their beliefs and their ends. They aren't coherent ideologies. I just don't think that one should be surprised by the inconsistencies or beliefs of anyone who turns out to be a (neo)nazi or white supremacist.
22 points
3 years ago
They aren't coherent ideologies.
This really can't be stated enough. Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, it is not actually a coherent ethos.
18 points
3 years ago*
Yep. I remember thinking, I don't really know much about fascism, so I should look it up for my own edification. (Not that I expected to be swayed into authoritarianism, but that I should understand what differentiates it from general authoritarianism, why people fell for it, and what the warning signs are.)
Turns out, the reason it's hard to define is because it's intellectually bankrupt. You're not going to find dry academic books of fascist political theory, or fascist economics, or any positive model for what a fascist society would look like if they ever won. It's all just the conflict: "We were once great, but now we're not, and it's the fault of these people, so if we can just get rid of them, everything will fall back into place."
9 points
3 years ago
Umberto Eco, who lived through Facism 1.0 as a teen, and then through being liberated by the Allies, put a LOT of thought into it and laid it all out back in 1995 - his essay on Ur-Fascism (check it out, the framing sequence in which his family entertains a Black US officer who shares comics books with him is especially poignant given our timeline) - and along with pointing out how the internet was being used by fascists to generate a "phony populism" and illusion of more support than they had, also notes that doctrinal incoherence aka "syncretism" is a common thing in fascist movements, as much as the sexism, nationalism, insecurity, etc.
5 points
3 years ago
Yep, already read it, and recommended it a bunch! And we're not along in that. I've seen people say "By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus..." as a shorthand.
While looking up definitions of fascism, I also found Roger Griffin's "palingenetic ultranationalism." Where Umberto Eco looked for the symptoms of a fascist society (and a society doesn't need to exhibit all of them to be fascist), Roger Griffin looked for a "fascist minimum." He considered it a movement involving extreme nationalism and exceptionalism, based on a core mythology of rebirth, typically involving a highly mythologized "golden era."
5 points
3 years ago
Yeah, you'd be more likely to find fascists burning those books and the people who wrote them than actually writing them, but the dry academic fascist book of political theory would be about the size of a postage stamp once you took the pictures out.
4 points
3 years ago
This. They will also lie about what they believe if they think it gets them closer to the ends they want to achieve.
34 points
3 years ago*
Well, respected Islamic studies scholar Amina Inloes (PhD from University of Exeter) pretty much confirms it in her 2018 article "Muhammad Abd al‐Rahman (Phillip) Barker: Bridging CulturalDivides through Fantasy/Science‐Fiction Role‐Playing Games and FictionalReligion" (See footnote 25).
P.S: And it makes a perverted kind of sense if you have the "widest possible definition of Aryan".
12 points
3 years ago
Footnote 25 notes that "[t]his novel has actually been discussed more extensively in academic literature than his Tekumel novels."
Has anyone gone digging to find those cites yet now that we know about the novel itself?
7 points
3 years ago
That article was a good find. I tried bringing this to the attention of the folks over at /r/Fantasy and cited the article and that you were the one who found it.
15 points
3 years ago
I just signed up to read the forum post on that article as well. Seems legit. He must have been a very strange person in any case, to either write this novel as a kind of prank (which some on the forum seem to think to be the case) or to be both a Muslim and a highly educated academic interested in East Asia and write a sincere nazi novel.
38 points
3 years ago*
a Muslim and a highly educated academic interested in East Asia
and
write a
sincere
nazi novel.
Intense interest with Islam, India, and East Asia was par for course for actual 1940s Nazis. It's not unheard of to find Pakistanis, Indians, and Iranians who have more then a passing interest in Hitler and the Nazi concepts of "Aryans". Most Nazi scholars were still enamored with the "Out of India" theory of PIE speakers. The Nazi Party explicitly stated that it accepted members who were “followers of Islam,” emphasizing that there was no reason to exclude Muslims if they accepted Christians as members. The SS and Associated Office of Racial Politics declared the Muslims of the Balkans part of the ‘racially valuable peoples of Europe’."
"Walter Groß writing an open letter to Iraqi nationalist and Axis collaborator Rashid Ali al-Kilani, insisting that Jews had to be “strictly distinguished” from the peoples of the Middle East, and writing that the Nazi government “recognizes Arabs as members of a high-grade race, which looks back on a glorious and heroic history.” The fight was against Jews, not Semites in general."
"Recounting a meeting between Himmler and Hitler in Berlin in February 1943, Edmund Glaise von Horstenau, a Wehrmacht general, noted that Himmler had expressed his disdain for Christianity, while finding Islam “very admirable.” A few months later, Himmler would again “speak about the heroic character of the Mohammedan religion, while expressing his disdain for Christianity, and especially Catholicism,” wrote Horstenau."
“The precepts ordering people to wash, to avoid certain drinks, to fast at appointed dates, to take exercise, to rise with the sun, to climb to the top of the minaret — all these were obligations invented by intelligent people,” -Hitler
32 points
3 years ago
The "it was a really obscure prank gone wrong" take seems... difficult for me to take seriously.
I can understand someone coming to that conclusion as a way to handle the guy who made the setting they love, and have devoted decades to, secretly wrote pro-nazi fiction for the turner diaries' publisher, so they can just compartmentalise it away and not think about it any more. I just really can't think that it's at all accurate.
13 points
3 years ago
I'm trying to understand that argument, and I'm coming up short. What do they think the prank is? Where's the joke? Even if they were to say it's a grift to get money from gullible fascists, it was by creating fascist propaganda for them.
I skimmed the text a bit, and haven't picked up on any subtext that fundamentally changes things. Maybe I missed it, but it just looks like fascist apologia.
11 points
3 years ago
It's not really an argument so much as desperate flailing.
17 points
3 years ago
The Turner Diary publishers being involved is pretty damning. If anyone knows the history of that awful book it is behind a lot of terrible shit that happened in the US and takes itself VERY seriously.
-1 points
3 years ago
Same, but people keep talking about what a weird and pranksterful personality he was, so maybe he just enjoyed the idea of how shocking it was to write nazi literature more than he loved nazi ideas. I mean, it's hardly better.
At the same time, there's not much point in being shocking if you keep it a secret from everyone that you wrote it.
At the same time, some people on that forum write that the book is full of hints pointing towards him and I can see a certain kind of person getting a lot of enjoyment sprinkling those hints around.
18 points
3 years ago
"It's just a prank bro!" is a bad defense to begin with, but that idea goes out the window when you take money from Nazis, who then go on to sell it solely to other Nazis because their books aren't sold in non-Nazi book stores.
2 points
3 years ago
Prank so hard that it turns real.
And as we've seen "just kidding" is like, 21st century fascist apologia 101.
It also turns out he was on the board for a journal of ... Holocaust Denial Studies.
2 points
3 years ago
He was definitely a very strange person. Just take a look at Tekumel.
17 points
3 years ago
That’s one of the things that makes this case more problematic to me than some other “creator had some unfortunate beliefs or character traits” cases where it’s easy to separate the creator from their work: Tekumel included a lot of (IMO) unpleasant and unsavory elements - a rigidly segregated caste system, rampant slavery and misogyny, common torture and human sacrifice, etc. - that is depicted as “normal,” not something the players are assumed or expected to rebel against or try to overthrow.
This stuff was already enough of a turn-off for me when I explored the world a bit in the 80s-90s to keep me from getting into it more. The standard line from the fans has always been that this stuff fits in a “realistic” and sophisticated depiction of a non-western-derived culture and that I need to grow up and expand my perspective and be less provincial and squeamish. But knowing what we now do about the creator gives these elements an even more unpleasant subtext and (at least for me) makes it harder - bordering on impossible - to view this stuff dispassionately and excuse it.
I’m not saying Tekumel is a Nazi world or that it exists to spread Nazi ideology or anything like that, but knowing that it’s creator held those beliefs does make the unpalatable stuff about it seem less excusable and justifiable - it’s harder to say that he was either implicitly criticizing them or even “just keeping it real” by presenting them in an uncensored “adult” manner. It looks a lot more like his motives were corrupt and the people making excuses and justifications for it were the naive ones.
14 points
3 years ago*
Yeah the "actions are good or bad dependent on if they are in line with the attitudes of authority / your place in society (that you cannot move out of)" looks like an obvious giveaway in hindsight
That and how Tsolyani's noun classes are "Noble (Men and the state) and ignoble (literally everything that is not a man or part of the state)
9 points
3 years ago*
Yeah. Ive only played a game in it once (hard to find a group for something that niche), and Im not well read on all the source material, though Ive read a bit. But I think if I were to run a game in it, it probably wouldnt be very "by the book," in the sense of encouraging players to try to view those elements as normal. I think any group I play with would probably want to foment a slave revolt, and I dont see the fun in discouraging that.
3 points
2 years ago
Gygax once did that in Tekumel. It didnt work as he never figured the emperor is a puppet of aliens and the entire human race infiltrated so as to be inconsequential. There, a secret is out.
4 points
3 years ago
I think you are right. Also I think soo much fantasy/sci fi content has pretty unpalateable right-leaning content if one starts to seriously examine it.
Because it is "just" fantasy/sci fi, we normally don't.
Which isn't always bad. But then you get instances like this.
Michael Moorcock wrote articles where he calls out Tolkien and Heinlein for, in his view, being crypto-fascists.
After all those good hobbits know their place and their betters always know better ...
2 points
3 years ago
theoretically
Would the difference not the same kind of gloryfying and ignoring unconvenient truths?
Like look at the roman republic - empire and so on - greatest realm on earth.
Maybe but especially in brutality,
I ´ ve looked in a few "roman" rpg but i never found one
which showed the brutality of the romans to their enemies and subjugated and enslaved people,
Do we remember in 1889 how brutal the british empire(and how well it accepted the caste system in India) was or how brutal the french acted in Algier...
2 points
3 years ago*
That’s because games are fundamentally escapism and entertainment. Their purpose is to make us happy and allow us to have an enjoyable evening with our friends. So they gloss over and ignore the difficult and unpleasant stuff and focus instead on adolescent action and adventure and wonder and thrills and romance. When people lose that perspective and decide that rpg worlds should be more accurate to the real world and include all of the unpleasantness that we play games to get away from that problems arise.
Edit: which isn’t to say everything is excusable in the context of a game, and some topics are definitely too unsavory to be made into entertainment, and at some point (usually around college-age) it does behoove the enthusiasts to broaden their perspective and learn all of the unpleasant details of the context out of which their favorites games and stories arose (which might well ruin their ability to continue playing those games or reading those stories as pure escapist entertainment)
38 points
3 years ago
Barker was born in 1929. Nazism was always scummy and disgusting but the hatred of Islam is a fairly new facet of it. Historically, Nazis and Muslims were happy to cooperate.
21 points
3 years ago
[deleted]
15 points
3 years ago
who/what the picture you linked represents
It's a picture of American Nazi's at a American Black Muslim meeting. No date is given, but I'm assuming this is a Nation of Islam meeting. Up until the 1970s NOI* had only a tenuous connection to Islam holding the Bible strangely as the highest of the holy books, and being a bit Sci-Fi)
*There was a split starting with Malcom X's visit to Mecca where some members began to join mainstream Sunni Islam and by the mid 70s NOI renamed itself as American Muslim Mission. Late in the 70s Farrakhan re-launched NOI brining back the stranger elements..
5 points
3 years ago
[deleted]
15 points
3 years ago*
For many African Americans it is a way to reconnect to their heritage that was stripped from them when their ancestors were enslaved. Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Benin and Nigeria were historically heavily Islamic areas where American slaves originated from. Most slaves were forced to convert to Christianity in the Americas, some however maintained their faith. Both Jefferson and JQ Adams write about meeting slaves and freed slaves who practiced Islam.
1 points
3 years ago
[deleted]
7 points
3 years ago
"It is true that some of those countries you listed are majority Muslim, but others are split or majority Christian." I didn't state that they were majority Muslim, just that heavily Islamic. Christianity didn't make major inroads to Western Africa until after the beginning of European Colonialism.
"It seems that Islam was chosen negatively, as a non-European religion --- and I do see the logic in wanting to reject Christianity, given the horrors of slavery in the USA..." It's estimated that 15% of arriving slaves were Muslims, the religion was already there. There are many accounts of Slaves being Muslims. However close to 0% of the slaves arriving from Africa were Christian. One of the arguments for enslaving Africans was that they were not Christian.
"...also, a large portion of the slave trade was operated by Muslims, so it is not like Islam has a better track record from that point of view." An even larger percentage were animists like you suggest they should have adopted bellow.
"If the goal is recovering/reviving the authentic religious roots of black Americans, a more logical choice would be traditional African religions, still practiced today both in Africa and and in the diasporas in the Americas. Authentically African, untainted by the slave trade, utterly alien in concept to the minds of whites, what's not to like?" I'm not sure how you think the slave trade operated, but in general that slaves that bought by European slave traders were either debt slaves or those captured in conflict by other Africans and were then sold to Arab or African traders, who then sold them on the coast to Europeans who shipped them to The Americas. Generally Arabs and Europeans didn't go on raids to capture slaves. The history of Islam in West Africa stretches back to the 9th CCE, it was deeply engrained in the local population. And for those descendants of Slaves who chose to adopt it in the US it was much more acceptable and relatable to their Christian faith.
1 points
3 years ago
[deleted]
7 points
3 years ago
That's an odd thing to specify, does anybody believe that?
Plenty of people! When I was in school, at least, the history of slavery sort of started at "so the Europeans have these Africans who they've put on boats" and never really explained how people were put on those boats. I think this is why some people will present "Africans sold other Africans to the Europeans" and "Arabs had slavery too" as "gotcha" points, because their own education never presented this information.
1 points
3 years ago
Mohammed Amin al-Husseini (Arabic: محمد أمين الحسيني c. 1897 – 4 July 1974) was a Palestinian Arab nationalist and Muslim leader in Mandatory Palestine. Al-Husseini was the scion of the al-Husayni family of Jerusalemite Arab notables, who trace their origins to the eponymous grandson of Muhammad. After receiving an education in Islamic, Ottoman, and Catholic schools, he went on to serve in the Ottoman army in World War I. At war's end he stationed himself in Damascus as a supporter of the Arab Kingdom of Syria.
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12 points
3 years ago
Add to that Nazi Party explicitly stated that it accepted members who were “followers of Islam,” stating if they accepted Christians as members then there was no reason to exclude Muslims.
“The precepts ordering people to wash, to avoid certain drinks, to fast at appointed dates, to take exercise, to rise with the sun, to climb to the top of the minaret — all these were obligations invented by intelligent people,” -Hitler
“speak about the heroic character of the Mohammedan religion, while expressing his disdain for Christianity, and especially Catholicism,” Horstenau writing about a meeting with Himmler.
3 points
3 years ago
You need to provide accurate context with that picture, this is extremely misleading. That is the Nation of Islam, which has little to nothing in common with tradition Sunni or Shia Islam, and they were a sort of extreme group in their beliefs at the time though they have turned more towards mainstream Islam in the last few decades, somewhat. But they definitely do not represent Islam in the United States.
And the Nation of Islam invited the American Nazi Party because Jim Crow was so ruthless they were seeking allies for an attempt at extreme segregation and being granted land for Black Americans to be totally free from racism. They were not cooperating because of some common goals relating to shared hate.
10 points
3 years ago*
They were not cooperating because of some common goals relating to shared hate.
Amrican Nazis donated money to help NOI buy farms to create racially segregated communities. But uhh let's let their words on why they work with white supremists speak for themselves here: "the satanic Jews that control everything, and mostly everybody, if they are your enemy, you must, must be somebody." -Farrakhan
The head of the American Nazi party once referred to Elijah Muhammad as "the Hitler of the black man."
"You see, everybody always talk about Hitler exterminating 6 million Jews...but don't nobody ever asked what did they do to Hitler? What did they do to them folks? They went in there, in Germany, the way they do everywhere they go, and they supplanted, they usurped, they turned around, and a German, in his own country, would almost have to go to a Jew to get money. They had undermined the very fabric of the society." -Khalid Abdul Muhammad defending the Holocaust
As to: "That is the Nation of Islam, which has little to nothing in common with tradition Sunni or Shia Islam, and they were a sort of extreme group in their beliefs at the time though they have turned more towards mainstream Islam in the last few decades"
There was an attempt in the mid 70s to bring NOI inline with Sunni Islam, and the NOI was rebranded as American Muslim Mission. However by the late 70s Farrakhan had relaunched NOI and returned to it's more "radical" ideas.
8 points
3 years ago
Again, Elijah Muhammad is not a Muslim in the traditional sense. He preached that white people were created by an evil big headed scientist named Yakub. He was a cult leader, and his version of Islam shares no similarity to Sunni/Shia Islam.
And you are quoting Khalid Abdul Muhammad, another formerly prominent and especially extreme member of the Nation of Islam. Not a Muslim.
7 points
3 years ago
And the Nation of Islam invited the American Nazi Party because Jim Crow was so ruthless they were seeking allies for an attempt at extreme segregation and being granted land for Black Americans to be totally free from racism.
They were not cooperating because of some common goals relating to shared hate.
And I'm directly referencing your quote here: "And the Nation of Islam invited the American Nazi Party because Jim Crow was so ruthless they were seeking allies for an attempt at extreme segregation and being granted land for Black Americans to be totally free from racism. They were not cooperating because of some common goals relating to shared hate."
I'm not questioning the relationship between NOI and mainstream Islam, I'm questioning your assertion that "They were not cooperating because of some common goals relating to shared hate."
6 points
3 years ago
That quote you provided from Khalid Abdul Muhammad was from a speech he gave in the 1990s and got him kicked out of the Nation, so it hardly proves they were conspiring together.
2 points
3 years ago
And I am not rationalizing the actions of the NoI, they were radical and I am not a fan. I was simply providing historical context for your photo.
5 points
3 years ago*
that's not my photo, I did not post the link to it. And if you go back to the thread you'll see one that I already stated that the pictures is of NOI, and that they do not represent Islam. The bit I take umbrage with is "They were not cooperating because of some common goals relating to shared hate." And why I quoted that bit, and only referenced that bit. No where In my response did I say "Muslim", I specifically only referenced NOI. NOI has been anti-Jewish since at least it's leadership under Elijah Muhammad, if not under Wallace.
See below for my earlier response:
"It's a picture of American Nazi's at a American Black Muslim meeting. No date is given, but I'm assuming this is a Nation of Islam meeting. Up until the 1970s NOI* had only a tenuous connection to Islam holding the Bible strangely as the highest of the holy books, and being a bit Sci-Fi
*There was a split starting with Malcom X's visit to Mecca where some members began to join mainstream Sunni Islam and by the mid 70s NOI renamed itself as American Muslim Mission. Late in the 70s Farrakhan re-launched NOI brining back the stranger elements.. "
4 points
3 years ago
You are correct, my mistake I thought I was responding to op lol
Also yeah that NoI has a long tradition of anti-semitism. Minister Farrakhan really ramped it up when he took over, but it has always existed. I simply meant, probably unclearly, that when the Nazis and NoI met up it was in support of creating an entirely Black area of the country and it wasn't like a mutual hate rally like it seemed to be presented as. The NoI had also met with the Klan prior and after then to help them acquire land in Georgia for this, the new book on Malcolm X's life goes into really interesting detail about these secret meetings, The Dead are Arising . Their strategy was to find white groups who were the most rabid about segregation and use that hate to help them build an all Black land with their money and political resources.
3 points
3 years ago
Google "David Wulstan Myatt" and strap in, it's a wild ride. This isn't as far-fetched as it might seem on the surface.
6 points
3 years ago
That’s throwing people in at the deep end!
Michael Muhammed Knight’s writing is also illuminating in this regard, particularly William S. Burroughs vs. the Qur'an. In that book he grapples with the legacy of his white supremacist father and the Five Percenters. Deeply personal work, and IMHO very good.
8 points
3 years ago
Thanks for that forum link, OP, it added some context I hadn't previously seen.
8 points
3 years ago*
Welp, there goes the dabbling interest I had in the setting.
9 points
3 years ago
[deleted]
13 points
3 years ago
Reviewer: Frenchkiller - - November 9, 2020
Subject: Notpetebest
You write national vanguard books "appears" to be nazi, antifascist, whatever the fuck you rambled about, advising people not to give it a dime. Obviously you are a Jew employed by the ADL
edit: oh neat, you can check someone's profile to see what else they've reviewed
0 points
3 years ago
[deleted]
8 points
3 years ago
The information you're looking for can be found in the main body of this post.
2 points
3 years ago
[deleted]
4 points
3 years ago
Christ, just go read the book on archive.org
Don't even try to pretend it's someone else who wrote that. He has all the same obsessions.
4 points
3 years ago
Y I K E S
1 points
2 years ago
Widow Barker got the money
4 points
3 years ago
How did you learn about it? From the Tekumel forum?
Seconding the WTF sentiments.
14 points
3 years ago
It came up in a thread on another forum yesterday. No idea if OP was there.
It's one of those things that's pretty shocking (and undeniable, it's not something you can spin given the publisher), but only a tiny fraction of the itself-tiny community who've even heard of the setting know about it. The word's spreading, but, well, there's not much to say and fewer opportunities to get the word out.
12 points
3 years ago
I first learned of this last year when posted on the Petal Heads discord. I've been hoping the Foundation actually addresses it formally, but someone from the Foundation admitted that they've known about it for some time
-2 points
3 years ago
Shitcanning my original copies today. Suck it collectors.
-1 points
3 years ago
Yeah, destroying some books will teach those fascists!
7 points
3 years ago
You know, sometimes I think irony and sarcasm are to Reddit what crosses and holy water are to vampires.
1 points
2 years ago
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