Nazi Wisdom? Hard-core genocide-talk is akin to hard-core pornography: the author has to keep upping the ante, super-charging every adjective, mercilessly slicing away any word that doesn’t make the reader hard
John Eskow is a writer and musician. He wrote or cowrote the movies Air America, The Mask of Zorro, and Pink Cadillac, as well as the novel Smokestack Lightning. He is a contributor to Killing Trayvons: an Anthology of American Violence. He can be reached at: johneskow@ yahoo.com
women that they try to immunise themselves by loathing women in return. When they talk – and the first lesson I learned about hard-core racists, travelling 120 miles with them in a beat-to-crap station wagon daubed with Rust-o-Leum – is that everybody talks; you don’t join a racist group in order to keep silent – they keep crashing into the contradictions of their badly-cobbled-together world-view. The Holocaust never happened – but it was great. Black people are too stupid to do white people’s jobs – but black people are doing white people’s jobs. The prevailing sense you get – the “wisdom of the (Klan/Nazi) crowd,” if you will – is that even though black people are simian, lust-maddened imbeciles, like other jungle creatures they are relatively harmless as long as they’re confined to their native habitat. Ah, but the Jew! Those hook-nosed mosquitos feasting on the blood of the goyim! (They say “good taste is timeless,” but so are antisemitic cartoons – the stuff floating around on the internet is indistinguishable from what you’d see on a 1930s German broadsheet.) The Hebrews are comicbook evil geniuses – every Jew a Lex Luthor – who mind-controls black and white alike. Jews invented hip-hop, for example. Jews ghost-write all the raps, from Public Enemy and Tupac Shakur straight through to Kendrick Lamar. (“Hymie! Hurry up and finish that gangsta rap, ya big schlemiel!”) And by seducing white teens with its sinister beats, Jews infect them all with irresistible urges for inter-racial sex. These super-Jews transcend time itself; the semites of 2017 are executing Talmudic plots dreamed up in the Middle Ages. It’s enough to make Alan Dershowitz blush. But, like those crude black-and-white mosquito-Jew cartoons, the Final Solution never changes. Hanging them from lampposts. Gassing them with Zyklon B. (Arcane debates about the efficacy of various gaseous poisons are common.) Rendering them
36 ColdType | September 2017 | www.coldtype.net
into lampshades. It’s a nonstop tape-loop of race-hatred and genocide-dreams. And this is where the outsider – no matter how well-versed in the rhetoric, no matter how he steels himself against it – begins to falter. I was an eager infiltrator, but this is where I lost heart. Because to live through that ongoing conversation – and not just to endure it, but to be a laughing participant in it – is something that my nervous system was not wired for. The synapses of any faintly decent human being are wired to short out and shut down at this point. You have to keep kick-starting your brain. And in the end it’s too exhausting. Hard-core genocide-talk is akin to hardcore pornography: the author has to keep upping the ante, super-charging every adjective, mercilessly slicing away any word that doesn’t make the reader hard. There is a dismal but very real art to it. I can only imagine that years of reading and speaking this porno-racist lingo permanently alter the brain. How many of these full-blown psychos move among us? Probably no more now than there were in the Utica of my childhood. But no less – Bill Clinton made sure of that with NAFA and GATT, thus gutting whatever blue-collar jobs, and whatever chances for self-respect, were left in all of America’s many Uticas. What’s so strange about this moment is that – whatever the number of hard-core racists–now they have open sympathisers in the White House. I once read an account of the Warsaw Ghetto in which a survivor, an old woman, said that at first the Nazis would kidnap Jews at night; you’d wake up to find that two of your neighbours had disappeared. But she could make a kind of queasy compact with that reality, because it happened in the night, when everyone was asleep. Then one morning she woke up to see bodies hanging from the lamp-posts, and her first thought was: oh, God – now they’re doing it in the daylight. I’m not sure which is worse. CT