Many of us in the Dieselpunk community have discussed our fear that contemporary racists would use Dieselpunk for racist means. Primarily we’ve been concerned about Fascists. Recently some racists have used patriotic material from World War II for their own perverted propaganda.
In January of 2017 Fascist writer Jared Taylor began posting perverted versions American posters from World War II. These perverted posters included one of Rosie the Riveter where here replaced the words ‘We Can Do It!’ with ‘Don’t Apologize for Being White’.
If you don’t know who Taylor is, he’s an American white nationalist who believes that intelligence and race are connected and that whites are the superior race. He founded the white supremacist organization New Century Foundation, which uses pseudoscience to promote the philosophy that whites are a superior race. In addition, he’s the editor of the Foundation’s magazine American Renaissance. He is a former member of the advisory board of The Occidental Quarterly, and a former director of the National Policy Institute, a Virginia-based white nationalist think tank. He is also a board member and spokesperson of the Council of Conservative Citizens.
Taylor isn’t some uneducated hick. According to Newsweek magazine he’s Yale-educated and is trilingual in English, Japanese, and French. In addition, Traylor has a Masters of Arts in international economics at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po), graduating in 1978.
So why this appearance of racist posters? When Taylor was asked why he launched his poster campaign, he response was, “We just got inspired…. The timing is good, given all of the controversy around the Trump presidency.” Such views should not be a surprise since as the Conservative newspaper Wall Street Journal reported Taylor supported Donald Trump's presidential campaign, and recorded robocalls to support Trump before the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary.
On a personal note, I find Taylor and his beliefs repugnant. This recent stunt of taking American World War II posters and twisting them into racist propaganda perverts what men and women were fighting and dying for. When Dieselpunks acknowledge the racism of the Diesel Era (circa 1920s - circa 1954) it’s to combat it, not celebrate it.
I intentionally didn’t post images of the posters. If the reader wants to see one, visit the Newsweek article. That article not only has several examples but an in depth analysis with a great video.
1 comment:
Alternate history fans in general are having the same problem. I've seen far right sites describe Amazon's The Man in the High Castle as what would happen if "liberals win". There is so many things wrong with that argument, I don't know where to begin debunking it.
On the flip side, I've also seen leftist sites use the term "alternate history" when referring to far-right interpretations of the past. Our best defense to that is to educate those who may be ignorant of our favorite genre...which is honestly an uphill battle sometimes.
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