Didn’t know any other way to phrase the topic title.
Due to the nature of the podcasts I subscribe to, I have found myself listening to an awful lot about the modern white supremacist movement, to my great dismay. As we probably all know, there are a few touchstone pieces of media among followers of these ideologies. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” “The Birth of a Nation.” “Mein Kampf.” “The Turner Diaries.” I have on more than one occasion wondered if I should actually read one or two of these, so that I know a little more about the abhorrent views these people hold.
But then I worry about the damage to my own psyche. Not so much that I would find myself sympathetic to their cause, but just that I would further darken a view toward our society that is probably too dark as it is.
Has anyone delved into materials you find similarly repulsive in an attempt to gain some understanding? How did it go? Did you find that you learned anything? How did you psychically armor yourself, or come back from a dark place after? Or am I overthinking this?
Once out of morbid curiosity I read the first few chapters of the Turner Diaries a long time ago. What I remember about it is that while its ideas and underlying ideology are horrible, the book itself is not too badly written. Which I guess makes it all the more dangerous.
Probably so. At most, such media reveals the darkness of its author; the darkness of its disciples belongs to them, not to society as a whole.
I haven’t read any of the documents you listed, but I did read the Unabomber Manifesto some years ago:
I couldn’t point to specifics anymore, but I recall agreeing with some of its points about what industrial society does to people and where it’s headed. Contrary to what ol’ Ted advocated, I never felt compelled to smash the machinery.
Everybody’s different. Some people can’t stand the sight of gore, others become surgeons. If you know yourself well and know that you would probably suffer ill effects from reading certain material, it may be a smart choice to avoid that kind of thing.
Yeah I’ve never read Turner Diaries, Mein Kampf, etc. but that’s not because I think I will be seduced in Nazism by their compelling prose or psychically damaged, but because from everything I’ve heard they are boring unreadable tripe. In fact its been commented on, that if Hitler was a better writer he may never have been able to seize power, as while lots of people owned Mein Kampf during his rise to absolute power, no one actually read it and heard how awful his plans were, because its such a shittily written book.
I don’t have problem with people reading abhorrent extremist literature to understand what the extremists are saying, as long as they don’t give the extremists money or publicity in the process.
I read part of the Protocols because I wanted some context and background for Eco’s Prague Cemetery and Eisner’s The Plot (both brilliant btw). The original is turgid nonsense; you have to be damaged in some way to get out of it what its creators intended.
I’ve also seen some Riefenstahl movies, including Triumph of the Will. The opposite of turgid nonsense: that woman could really make a movie. Shame what her career was (initially) dedicated to.
I watched quite a bit of Fox news for a time. At first it was a sincere attempt to hear firsthand what kinds of things they were saying. Then it was just hate watching and now I tune in once in a while but I usually can’t last very long.
I’m not sure if it’s what you are thinking of but I look at the combat footage reddit page. Lots of videos of people being killed by murder robots. Probably not good for me.
As a horror movie fan, I’ve seen some stuff that really goes beyond the pale, and which has been prohibited in western countries. A great comic writer I once knew quipped “If it’s not banned in Canada, it’s not worth having!” I’ve got the Criterion disc of Salò, which was a struggle to get through (I watched it, and plan to again, but couldn’t make myself sit through the banquet scene). And I’ve watched A Serbian Film, which is maybe the ne plus ultra of offensive boundary-pushing. It’s thought-provoking, and one of the thoughts it provokes in me is that somethig that’s so obnoxiously edgelord as the film is on paper shouldn’t be as expertly shot and acted as it is.
I watched a podcast by a woman. She would show short videos of offbeat trans persons.
After awhile the awful things she said about them started sounding right to me.
I actually had to deprogram my brain about it.
I used to have a job that basically amounted to watching a machine do stuff with occasional interaction, with nobody else working within a hundred feet of me. I was able to listen to radio on earbuds all day. I tired of constant music, so I listened to a lot of talk radio. Which included humor stuff like The Don and Mike Show but also hours per day of G. Gordon Liddy and preachers ranting about shameless women walking around in public while visibly pregnant and about the purpose of traffic cameras being to record everyone with a Bible on their dash so that Christians could be rounded up and put in a concentration camp.
When I signed up for Netflix in the mid 00s, the second DVD I got from them was “Pink Flamingos.”
Incredibly, TCM aired it a while back, and yes, I did TIVO it.
As an online bookseller, I have some things in my collection that could raise eyebrows (Dinesh D’Souza books, that kind of thing) but I obtained them for free, so it’s all profit for me.
The library I volunteer at has one book that is not considered pornography, etc. that I will not put out in the self-service bookstore, and the directors agreed. It’s the “Babywise” book, a book that, when followed to the letter, has resulted in the deaths of babies.
I read The Turner Diaries. The only damage was to my IQ level. I don’t know why it has any notoriety at all. It’s societal collapse fiction on the level of a precocious 8th-grader (which is something I’d normally I’d be happy to read or write, sans racism of course).
Unless you’re a liberal who gets the vapors over the mere fact that such a hideously racist book could even get published, it’s just dull, dumb, and boring. There is nothing to understand, nothing to learn, no new insights whatsoever. Somehow a dirtbag racist found a way to get a dumb book published, the end.
I tried to read it and got the same impression. It’s not a very long book, and I didn’t even finish it.
(FWIW, I also thought “The Handmaid’s Tale” was a terrible book, although I did finish that; who cares what it’s about, it’s poorly written and has very unlikable characters.)
I also post on Kiwi Farms, although I was led there by a Google search on one of their LOL Cows, and am not interested in, for instance, trans bashing just to do trans bashing. They go on and off Tor, primarily because they allow uncensored use of the “N” word. I have asked people there what they plan to do about, as they call it, the “N” problem, and get crickets.
I used to post on a gardening site called homesteadingtoday dot com and stopped because they were heading in that direction. Ahem, folks, if you’re homeschooling your kids because you don’t want their eebil pubblik skool teechirz to find out about your massive unlicensed gun arsenals, you probably shouldn’t be bragging about it online.
Hm. Can one be invisibly pregnant?
I once read the satanic bible, which is abhorrent, but recollected nothing.
I have read most of Ann Coulters books. Some may think them abhorrent but reading only one side of something makes one close minded. Imho.
I learned long to stay away from certain content, particularly disturbing videos that show humans and animals getting abused, injured or killed. I don’t know why people love watching that sort of stuff, but it is very disturbing to me and I can still recall one particular video of a beheading that I never would’ve watched if I had known. Cop shootings, skateboard wipeouts (why does everyone think I want to watch these), etc. I mistakenly watched a very early UFC match when you had to pay for it and learned I never needed to watch humans maul each other again.
I try to stay away from the comments sections of most media as well. Only educational YT videos seem to have decent comments that you can learn from. The rest…garbage.
I used to think that to construct a properly informed world view, I needed to sample a bit of whatever was out there. I now think that there’s more out there than anyone can sanely cope with, and the best thing to do is build your world very selectively.