Forbidden Texts

This movie was not what I had expected when I heard about the premise but I enjoyed it still. It made several statements on the political nature of leadership in the modern day. As well as the dynamic of power between countries. 

It was a funny movie that also brought up the nature of a dictatorship that in the modern day may be hard to compare to Hitler’s. In small parts of the movie you can’t help but wonder the comparisons and the power Hitler held and how it is similar to the dictator Gen. Aladeen.

The first time I had seen Jesus Christ Superstar it was a remake with Sara Barflies and John Legend and I didn’t really care or try to understand what was going on. Now that I understand the premise and was actually interested in the play it follows the readings in class well, the backlash Andrew Lloyd Weber got for the musical makes sense. While it is great and entertaining, it follows the themes of the text how Judas and Mary were closer to Jesus and how he wasn’t a hero in the eyes of everyone leading up to Judas’ betrayal. 

This text shows the imapct the war had on Russia and it’s people, as well as the younger population. We have all heard the saying history is written by the winners but this book kind of proves that. After the war Russia taught their children what was in this book, some of it is correct but some of it is also straight up wrong. Just making their country look better to their people.

It also brings up the point of how we tell history after it’s happened. History is created when there are no first had accounts left to hear. Sure, today we still have WWII veterans alive, but once they die, the stories of the war truly become history to be preserved in museums. Leaving it up to the people to decide the importance of the history of a singular event, as well as how we educate the future generations.

Written by William Luther Pierce, The Turner Diaries covers the story of Earl Turner in a violent revolution. It depicts a world set in the near future of 1978, where Earl Turner is a hero in a world taken over by minorities, where the government is run by the entire jewish population. Throughout the book, Turner describes what happened and how the actions of different groups of people led to it, demonizing minority groups of society as he goes along. Ultimately leading to Day of the Rope in which he Is painted a hero for saving the country. 

A focus in the book was an authoritarian government which we had connected to 1984. The point made in the book is one of a controlling and authoritarian democracy that is wrong for the people, but in The Turner Diaries, a noticeable difference is that the government still operates under the guise of a democracy. 

The Industrial Society and its Future was one of the more interesting forbidden texts I have read in the class so far. I am a fan of tru crime documentaries and podcasts, so going into the topic I had already seen something on Netflix about a year ago that gives some background information. Even then reading the texts itself was odd. It provides a view on the dangers of a technological world, that are somewhat correct. Looking at where we are today, Kaczynski wasn’t wrong when he predicted how our society would become so dependent on technology that it is now irreversible. 

I intend to make the psychology behind the Unabomber my final research topic so having done some research, the level of intelligence he has in connection to what he believes is weird to see. Even today, from prison he still advocates for what he believes in, commending green anarchists and even publishing a second book.

From reading the very first sentence of the SCUM Manifesto, you can tell this text is meant to be aggressive, and blatantly goes after every single man who has existed, and will exist. It was written by Valarie Solanas in 1965 and was first self-published in mimeograph form and was sold to women for $1 and men for $2.

The writing opens with Solanas stating that men are genetically deficient  this causes them to be emotionally limited, egocentric. and incapable of passion or genuine interaction. They obviously lack empathy, and are unable to relate to anything apart from their own physical sensations. One of the points she makes further in the text is that men spend their entire lives envying women and attempting to be female, which is the reasoning behind the constant fraternization and infatuation with women. Which in my mind goes against todays idea of feminism against the standards of toxic masculinity and the idea of femininity being weak that is seen throughout society. 

Some people have stated and analyzed the text as a parody or a satire, as a result of the exploration of Valerie Solanas’ mental state. She was close with Andy Warhol in the 60s and in a fear that he would’ve taken her work as his own shot him and a gallery assistant, nearly killing Warhol. At trial she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia but still stood trial to plead guilty and spend 3 years in prison for assault.

Theodore John Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber is a homegrown terrorist with an IQ of 167, who in an attempt to bring about a different society against an industrial revolution, conducted a campaign of bombings that killed 3 and wounded 23 for 17 years. 

Throughout his childhood researchers have taken note of a couple of events that might have contributed to the worsening of his mental state and ultimately the bombings. He was extremely smart and showed that when he was younger, but then was forced into hospital isolation as a child which psychologists think impacted his emotional development, and later in life is a part of an unethical experiment at Harvard at age 17 by Henry Murray, that is often described as abusive and extremely unethical by today’s standards. Kaczynski spent 200 hours in the study, lasting a total of three years and as a result, he has said that he didn’t think Murray’s experiments had a result on his life.

However, just looking at the experiment on a superficial level we can see how future actions mirror those of the experiment. at the time 17-year-old Kaczynski was told he was to write essays of his detailed beliefs and aspirations, these were then read by another student who would confront and belittle the author about their personal beliefs, in an extremely abusive psychological attack that continued for three years, and is now rumored to have been used as a part of the CIA’s Project MKUltra. 

In 1995 Kaczynski demanded the publishing of his 35,000-word essay titled “Industrial Society and Its Future”. Many psychologists have studied the work in connection to his mental state and have tried to break down the science behind human behavior and how our childhood and crucial moments of young adulthood form what we value as adults.

The Anarchist’s Cookbook was written by a 19 year old William Powell in the height of the counterculture era and the concern for the Vietnam war.  He saw himself and others like him as a part of the ‘silent majority’, being the group of people not in power but wanted societal/political change. He took it upon himself to expedite change for the silent majority and began to educate himself more and more after there was a rise in violence in the pacifist movements of the 60s, and over four years finished writing The Anarchist’s Cookbook.

The contents of the book cover his original intentions of the information, which includes drugs, electronics, and weapons. The foreword goes into Powell’s thoughts on why this text might be useful to the people which is a result of his view of the US declining into communism at the time period, so he saw the text as a necessary step needed to guide the people to their revolution, and to bring America back to where she was 200 years ago. 

One of the most interesting things about the book for me has to be the legal battles it has been through. At the time of publication an FBI memo described it as “one of the crudest, low-brow, paranoiac writing efforts ever attempted”, but later concluded it couldn’t be regulated due to an issue with limiting free speech and publication. However they do keep tabs on the book, in 2010 they released the information they had under the Freedom of Information Act, although it was mostly complaints as well as crimes that could have possibly been committed after reading but not even proven. 

Reading Mein Kampf a couple of specific things surprised me, one of the major things being the number of times Hitler lied throughout the book. I never had thought he would have been truthful but just lies about history and his upbringing that were proven later and put in the footnotes was not what I had expected. The reference to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was also not something I expected, but that passage was definitely interesting to me, he brought up the situation of Esperanto as a language and referenced the head of the snake from the protocols several times.

Things that remind me of today goes back to the same passage where he mentions Esperanto and while what he says in the book was not a main point or a popular one at that, it echos a certain political argument of today about immigration and the issue of the US not having an official language and immigrants coming to the US and not speaking english. “as long as the jew has not become the master of others he speaks their language” 

Major themes that are presented through almost every chapter in his book are ones of Social Darwinism, stating the how the Aryan race is deserving of survival while the jewish are lucky to get what they have because they are just naturally inferior. National-Socialism is brought up a lot when Hitler refers to the german political structure as well as the political parties. He words it as socialism for us and only us, which feeds in to the further separation of the jewish people in the community.

While I was not anticipating this read to be particularly good, it was worse than I had originally expected. The writing was hard to get through and while reading through the intro was tough, it gave some insight into the main characters of Hitlers youth and life growing into a dictator. 

Hitlers education as a child never went beyond a secondary school. He recalls in some of the early chapters that he was a good student and it was up to him to decide if he wanted to pass or fail a class, however a couple of footnotes scattered through the chapter show that he lies about his educational record more than once. This further proves his narcissistic personality that is clearly seen throughout the book. We are also introduced to the man who sparked Hitler’s interest in nationalism, his high school history teacher Leopold Poetsch. Poetsch later distanced himself from Hitler after being considered an enemy of Austria, even though hitler gives credit to Poetsch as a defining factor in his future.

Following Hitler through the book he speaks a lot of his rise to power, and his motivation behind those actions. After joining the German Worker’s Party he took more of an interest in propaganda, which led to him climbing in the party’s power structure. But it also opened the doors to the propaganda tactics he used in the Nazi party. One of his many criticisms of the war he states is that Germany lost partly because of British propaganda, and goes in depth into how propaganda should be used and how people are so easily influenced. All of his statements in this book about himself, his upbringing, and the Jewish people of Germany and Austria show the narcissistic mind of the man who created arguably one of the most famous books to follow a political movement.