Sette's Reflections of Forbidden Texts

The Turner Diaries are weird. I read through a few of the chapters and, ignoring the racism for a moment, it was written… fine… I guess. I didn’t think it was a super great work, but it wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever read. (On a side note, It doesn’t really read like a good sci-fi book, it’s lacking that something that really makes me get drawn in and immersed in the world, but part of that could be my dislike for sci-fi books whose whole plot is a world governmentally divided by discrimination.)

So, while I was reading- I jotted down my thoughts as I went, so I’ve put a few of those here.

• He’s pretty much role playing in a different timeline in the introduction; writing from the perspective of somebody who uncovered this lost document, and publishing his findings.
• This man does not have a skill for naming things.
• His lack of ability to name things makes me wonder where some of his more creative names came from.
  • Cohen act? Where did he get Cohen from? Was that the name of an act that was proposed and denied or did he come up with that on his own? The Clinger-Cohen Act is a real thing but has no relation to guns
• Why must he add sex into this? It has nothing to do with what he was talking about. It came out of nowhere and was completely unnecessary.
• Why the hell did he make this a love triangle?

Honestly, for me, the most interesting part of this is the part where he explained the code that they were using to communicate. I like codes and conlangs, I find them interesting, so his short and unhelpfully vague explanation on that was the most interesting thing for me to read. He describes how they have almost 800 messages that each have a three-digit numerical designation. (The example he gives is 2006 meaning that the operation scheduled by unit 6 is to be postponed until further notice; so 200 is the code for a schedule being postponed and 6 specifying the unit.) He mentions how the dictionary is “arranged in a very orderly way” and that there is a basic structure used to memorize it, which I think it would be interesting to figure out but I don’t think he actually put in the effort to make a code, but instead he just said that there was one.

Fanon published The Wretched of the Earth while the Algerian War of Independence was nearing its end (Algeria was fighting for independence from the French); but as Fanon supported the Algerians and had mentioned the war in his book, the French kept his book incredibly censored. In his work, Fanon writes about colonialism, the negative effects it has on society, and the natural progression to a violent uprising of the colonized.

• Part of Fanon’s philosophy comes from his time as a soldier during the second World War. While fighting in the French forces, he faced racism from all sides, including his fellow soldiers and the people he helped to save.

The Algerian War was violent, guerilla tactics were the norm, and torture wasn’t hard to find. 12x more Algerians were killed than Frenchmen and other white Europeans. The effects of the Algerian War are still very much felt today.

While reading this, his predictions for technology in the future stood out to me.

My granddad works in technology and patenting. So, I asked my granddad about his thoughts on this, y’know, when you were working on tech in the 1990’s, did you think that it could ever reach the level that technology is today?

His answer was yes. He gave a speech once where he mentioned that in the future everybody would be able to have access to the internet, have a computer in their pocket, and that tech would eventually integrate itself into every aspect in the daily life of people across the globe. And look at where we are now.

I think that this goes to show how both people who are at the forefront of creation and those who care to take a close look can both see the extent to what has been made can and perhaps will, be used.

In his later years, Powell came to regret what he had written. ]

He wrote the book in a period of general political turmoil, in no small part due to the currently ongoing Vietnam War, and he wrote it as a hot-headed 19 year old. I can say as someone of roughly the same age, yeah, I can vibe with some of the things he’s written, key-word some.

Honestly, I think that while he may want to take back alot of the details of what he said, the overall themes of arming oneself with knowledge in order to more safely speak against things pushed by people with great power are still extremely relevant. ]

Our current generation is one in a long line of political protesting, and it is important to protect yourself, as the government and governmental agencies have a ton of power and not always the best intentions.

The anarchist cookbook was honestly a fun read, he had a few one-liners and some of his drawings were kinda silly. He did approach everything with an air of caution, which made sense due to the material covered.

For example, in the section on drugs, he gave some of the most detailed explanations in the entire book on the more harmless drugs like pot and lsd. While conversely, brushed off some of the more dangerous stuff, he didn’t bother at all with heroin, and strongly advised against its usage, saying that anything injected was bad suggested to never go there. With hydrangea leaves, he flat out said no, this will kill you, I put this in there because I’ve heard about the stuff and don’t want people to be uninformed- ignorance is dangerous and inexcusable (he goes over this many many times.)

Throughout the book he gave locations and/or postal addresses on various resources, which made me wonder what came of it. Did they see an increase of sales? Or were they investigated by law enforcement? Side not, this man is both repetitive and inconstant. he goes over caution and safety a thousand times (which in some cases can be appreciated), and he hammers into your head that ignorance is not bliss, it is deadly, and that there is no excuse for ignorance.

At the same time, he messes up basic counting- ‘there are five points marked on the bridge,’ my dude there are six. ‘here you can have three to four explosives and should have six explosives in these places.’ Four plus six is ten. On the diagram there are eleven. My guy. I get that you’re nineteen but you should know how to count by now.

But in all he was pretty informative, he even listed some common household substitutes for some of the things that are harder to find. You can use black pencil lead as a substitute for lead, salt for sodium chloride, and dutch fluid for ethylene dichloride.

We were planning to just read the important parts and particularly eye catching sections, but ended up reading the whole thing.

So, my dude starts with a disclaimer. Something to the lines of, “This movie is about tricks, fraud, and lies. Every movie is in part a lie. Except for all of this, this is true real facts.” Now, the guy who tells us this is a magician. So even without the title or description, I think that sets the tone pretty well.

So, I’mma be real honest here. I can’t write a good reflection on this, because this movie was confusing and my thoughts are tv static. It’s a movie about fakers, who, a good portion of what we think we know about them could very well be a lie, but we believe it to be the truth.

First of all, Ibiza. Ibiza seems like a fun place to vacation for like, a week, and say that it was nice and you enjoyed your time there, but you’re purposely blocking out the experiences you had with the people there.

Elmyr de Hory is an interesting man, if not a bit eccentric. He couldn’t achieve fame with his own paintings, so he turned to forgery, and became quite famous for it. The things the movie focused on the most were Modiglianis and Picassos.

One kinda quote kinda paraphrase from the movie I jotted down has very little to do with the actual contents of the film is thus: “France was now suffering from August. The time when an invader could take the country by telephone, if they could get anyone to answer it.”

The narrator then tells of how a lovely woman named Oja Kodar vacationed in the same village in France that Picasso lived in. He was so entranced by her that he created 22 different paintings of her; All of which she took back home with her. He later found them in a museum, then found out they were forgeries. Oja then took him to see her grandfather, who forged them. At the end of a long conversation, Picasso demands his paintings back, but her Granddad says that that’s not possible, as he burned them.

He then says that he only promised to tell the truth for an hour, and that hour has passed. “For the last 17 minutes, I’ve been lying my head off.” The entire thing with Oja and Picasso was fake- gotcha! I guess.

This girl. Had issues.

To preface, she wrote a play called Up Your Ass, and she went to Andy Warhol to try and get it produced, but, as he was already in a bit of trouble for some of the stuff he produced, and that the play was incredibly vulgar, he thought it was a police trap and said no. But, he offered her a bit of money to act a minor part in something he did end up producing, and they seemed to get along fine. But, she still wanted her play to be produced.

So, when trying to talk to get her play produced, and the person she was talking to kept saying no, she supposedly pulled out her gun and said, “Yes, you will produce the play because I’ll shoot Andy Warhol and that will make me famous and the play famous, and then you’ll produce it.”

And then she did it. She actually went and did it.

She went to the building, loitered around, got told to go home, did not go home, rode up and down the same freaking elevator until Andy and his pal walked in, then went and shot them. Then turned herself in. “For the fame,” I guess.

And then, she was deemed to be too mentally unstable to stand trail. How! Shocking!

I mean, she was an open lesbian in the 1950’s, which was pretty brave of her. But she also seems the type to not listen nor to hear what other people say, which in some situations, is a good thing, in other situations, is maybe a bit, uuhhh, not great.

Solanas had some… interesting points.

Some of what she said was silly, some of it was so extreme it was scoffable, but, some of it actually kinda made sense.

The whole prevention of conversation bit? It was pretty much a mix of men talking more than women, talking over women, and mansplaining. Some of the ways she explained it was a bit.. odd…. But the basic idea is there.

Similar to this are her ideas on ‘Great Art’. She mentions that almost all of what is called “great art” was made by a man and that we consider it to be great because the men said so. Which, I mean kinda, most art critics are also men, so…, I guess??

The thing about all of this that got me the most is that she’s serious about this- like, this isn’t satire. She genuinely believes that all men should die. No, let’s do a series of protests or riots to get our demands for equality, no no no, none of that. Death. Men should die. End of. Like, girl, please try to cool down a bit.

In terms of how it’s written…. it reads as a rant with slight refining. The same points are gone over, over and over again, but all the different points do reinforce the central idea. But, the lack of sense, occasionally meandering sentences, giving too many examples for any one point, the spelling and grammatical errors, all point to a hastily written rant.

No Man’s Land is a movie that takes place in the Bosnian War.

Because of circumstances, three men all end up in a ditch in no man’s land. One Bosnian Serb, and two Bosniaks, one of whom is lying on a land mine, in which if he moves, it will explode, and everybody would die. This is, of course, thanks to the Bosnian Serbs.

There’s a whole debacle of getting help. The two sides agree to a cease-fire, while the UN sweeps in to save them. The UN is at first ordered to leave, however, one of the people in charge decides to go back to help them. A bomb unit is called in for the land mine, and the two men not lying on a land mine are taken out of the ditch, but tensions between them are high.

The bomb man, when shown what type of bomb the other guy is laying on says that there is nothing he can do, there is no way to defuse it. While this is going on, the Bosniak and the Bosnian Serb have a shoot out, the Bosniak lands a killing shot, and a UN member shoots the Bosniak for the sake of peace. This all takes place in a few seconds.

As if all of this was not enough, a worldwide news crew is broadcasting the whole thing live. So, to keep face, the two out of the ditch are told to be in not good shape and on their way to hospital. A body is carried past on a stretcher, fully covered by a blanket. It’s told to the news that this is the man that was laying on the bomb, and he is in very not good condition, and will be going to hospital immediately.

Cut to the man still laying in the ditch.

And they just leave him there. In the middle of nowhere, with no food, no water, no shelter, and nobody coming to help him.

It’s ambiguous if he laid there until he died of natural causes, well, as natural a cause can be in his situation, or if at some point, he got up, and let the mine kill him.

He knows his friend is dead, he knows there’s no way to help him, he knows nobody is coming to help him, and he knows he’ll never see his loved ones again. He knows death is the only thing life has left for him. It’s just a matter of when.

For me, the worst thing about all of this is that, given the right circumstances, this could happen. It’s more likely that the ground troops of the UN would either not come to the rescue at all due to the risk or would follow through with the order to retreat.

For many people, no man’s life is valuable enough to lose more.

I found the Holocaust Museum to be very sobering. I’m well aware of the atrocities committed against Jews and the other victims of the Holocaust. In the hall of pictures, I saw a portrait that strongly resembled my great-grandma Pearl, who was a Polish Jew. I saw portraits that reminded me of my grandmother and grand-uncle.

I had to take a break somewhere in the middle.

There’s an example train car in the museum for the guests to walk through, getting a glimpse of the feelings the would-be prisoners felt while they were in transport. As I was already slightly overwhelmed, I chose not to walk through, I could vividly imagine it, and that was enough for me.

And while this is not directly related to the museum itself, more so the other people in the museum at my time of visiting, it still contributed to my overall experience.

Guests at the museum make a big difference aswell. During my visit, there was a pair of people, a lady and a gentleman, dressed in business casual. From what I could tell, the lady was someone who had studied the Holocaust, most likely in a professional sense. She was pointing out the different things and elaborating on them to the man with her, getting close to the exhibits and remarking on how interesting things were.

And I get being enthusiastic about something you’re interested in, I get it, I think it’s nice to have something that you’re passionate about. But it made me, as a Jew, feel like the museum was a zoo, and that we, the victims of the Holocaust and other genocides, were the animals on display; being pointed at and treated like an object instead of a living human being.

Which is the opposite of what the museum was trying to convey.