Month: December 2024

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.