LOIE
Gold Member
- May 11, 2017
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Excerpts from "My Life After Hate" by Arno Michaels, former skinhead, which I believe can be helpful in understanding the mentality of groups like the ones that stormed Charlottesville.
I thought of this first part when I watched the video of the guy branding his weapons, looking very fierce, then crying as he became aware of a warrant for his arrest.
“Maybe I was looking for something to believe in. I was drawn to racist ideology because I felt like white people were getting shafted. We were the underdogs. It was us against the world in a epic battle for forever. Hitler did it with torch-lit ceremony and iconic swastika. It felt like you were Beowulf, Siegried and Conan all rolled into one. Just a big fucking game of Dungeons & Dragons, till death and prison inevitably show up. Then the shit is real. Then comes the real challenge, the true test of will. Do you back down then? Are you a coward? Or just a fool? That’s when you gather all the suffering you can endure and produce and you devour it, because it’s the only thing that nourishes you anymore. And you let that fire rage on till it’s all you can see.
You damn well can’t see how burnt and disfigured it makes you – how it scorches your life. It’s impossible to see how the hurt you emanate feels on the receiving end, because you have no empathy for other humans. Even your own crew, whom you truly love, is barren of empathy for each other. You would die for your brothers and sisters, but you are unable to put yourself in their shoes. You don’t really care about or understand individual hopes and dreams, because like you, they have none outside of the movement. Your feeling for them is one of primal pack-mentality. Survival melded with a perverted sense of honor that won’t permit you to suffer insult to them any more than to yourself.
Did I always know in the back of my mind, at the bottom of my heart, that I was wrong? Or did I truly believe in racial holy war? How about a little of both? Is that possible? Can you be so committed to something so fucked up and go about that business with passion and fervor – for years – while having doubts?
Any time someone would say we were stretching the truths or making unfair accusations about the living conditions of your typical black person, we would point them to our kindly neighbors. We used them as a device to justify our ideology; not only while proselytizing but also during the constant internal reinforcement that racism requires. If you’re going on the premise that the white race is something special and that it needs to be saved from “non-whites”, you need to be able to justify the hows and whys of that – namely the whys. Why your people are superior to their people.
Never mind that your way of life is almost indistinguishable from theirs. Never mind that you’re a raging alcoholic and that you work a shitty minimum-wage job and that you go around and start fights with honest people on the street. That’s all really beside the point, because you are “fighting for your race,” and your race is something worth saving because pretty much anything worth anything was, according to us, invented by white people. We made a point to overlook any contributions to culture or technology made by ancient Arabic, Asian, and especially African people. In our own twisted way we associated any of their accomplishments with that of our own people. “
I've personally seen similar statements to these last ones from folks on this board.
This man's book is remarkable and everyone should read it.
I thought of this first part when I watched the video of the guy branding his weapons, looking very fierce, then crying as he became aware of a warrant for his arrest.
“Maybe I was looking for something to believe in. I was drawn to racist ideology because I felt like white people were getting shafted. We were the underdogs. It was us against the world in a epic battle for forever. Hitler did it with torch-lit ceremony and iconic swastika. It felt like you were Beowulf, Siegried and Conan all rolled into one. Just a big fucking game of Dungeons & Dragons, till death and prison inevitably show up. Then the shit is real. Then comes the real challenge, the true test of will. Do you back down then? Are you a coward? Or just a fool? That’s when you gather all the suffering you can endure and produce and you devour it, because it’s the only thing that nourishes you anymore. And you let that fire rage on till it’s all you can see.
You damn well can’t see how burnt and disfigured it makes you – how it scorches your life. It’s impossible to see how the hurt you emanate feels on the receiving end, because you have no empathy for other humans. Even your own crew, whom you truly love, is barren of empathy for each other. You would die for your brothers and sisters, but you are unable to put yourself in their shoes. You don’t really care about or understand individual hopes and dreams, because like you, they have none outside of the movement. Your feeling for them is one of primal pack-mentality. Survival melded with a perverted sense of honor that won’t permit you to suffer insult to them any more than to yourself.
Did I always know in the back of my mind, at the bottom of my heart, that I was wrong? Or did I truly believe in racial holy war? How about a little of both? Is that possible? Can you be so committed to something so fucked up and go about that business with passion and fervor – for years – while having doubts?
Any time someone would say we were stretching the truths or making unfair accusations about the living conditions of your typical black person, we would point them to our kindly neighbors. We used them as a device to justify our ideology; not only while proselytizing but also during the constant internal reinforcement that racism requires. If you’re going on the premise that the white race is something special and that it needs to be saved from “non-whites”, you need to be able to justify the hows and whys of that – namely the whys. Why your people are superior to their people.
Never mind that your way of life is almost indistinguishable from theirs. Never mind that you’re a raging alcoholic and that you work a shitty minimum-wage job and that you go around and start fights with honest people on the street. That’s all really beside the point, because you are “fighting for your race,” and your race is something worth saving because pretty much anything worth anything was, according to us, invented by white people. We made a point to overlook any contributions to culture or technology made by ancient Arabic, Asian, and especially African people. In our own twisted way we associated any of their accomplishments with that of our own people. “
I've personally seen similar statements to these last ones from folks on this board.
This man's book is remarkable and everyone should read it.