Tense White People From...
Vibrations, fascism, and why we all must listen more closely
Years ago I was doing contract work with a small company an ex worked for. The pay was decent, and like all contract creatives forever and always, I needed the money. As a given, I don’t recommend working with an ex anything (lover, friend, legal partner) however, knowing someone close for a long time can translate well when it comes to making money, if you have a good business flow together. Survival is often times about making an opportunity with who you already know.
The business owner was absolutely nuts, as many are, but I had no direct issues, so what the fuck do I care about this guy or his business and drama. Now, there was drama, involving a lot of money and something that’s happening all over the country—private equity cock gobbling up all the small businesses, retail and homes sitting on prime locations in growing suburban areas. But that’s a whole different essay.
What was interesting about this experience is that I met this business owner’s girlfriend (whom he was divorcing his wife and leaving his two small children for) and her father. We met and interacted a few times, didn’t think much of them, maybe a little tense.
Tense white people with a vague accent I could never quite place. It wasn’t Afrikaner, either. I hear that accent and my ears perk up, as should yours now that those violent racists are fleeing to the Great White Failure we call America.
One day I asked my ex, where the fuck are they from?
Argentina.
Now, it’d been the holidays, and it was the year my father died, so I was wearing his Star of David all the time.
Tense white people with an accent I can’t place, from Argentina. It wasn’t a Spanish accent. It was an accent that could speak fluent Spanish, yes.
I’ve met some Juans from South America who had a great-grandpapi named Claus or Hans who settled in the 1920s (by which they mean, 1945) from the Netherlands or Spain (by which they mean, Nazi Germany.)
These families still exist because plenty of high ranking Nazis were allowed to flee in exile and keep making new generations. Look at how many techbro fascists are connected to South Africa, and then look back further at their great-grandfathers and associates. You didn’t think Elon was the only one, did you?
This shit isn’t rocket science, it’s white supremacy. It’s textbook.
We were never really suppose to believe that everyone in those Nazi lineages had a great change of heart for minorities. I mean, for all the big media cases and some truly legitimate remorse from descendants of top Nazi officials, there were hundreds that disappeared into the shadows without one ounce of remorse, let alone justice. For most of them, they lived good lives post WWII with their spoils of genocide, dying peacefully at an old age in a comfy bed shit.
Who do you think inherited their beliefs and money?
Nazism didn’t die. Jews and Palestinians both know this better than anyone right now. The Cold War never stopped either.
We live in a modern world haunted by the policies of dead men, and they’re still killing us. The ideology of fascism is not bound to human lifetimes; it never goes away, it only simmers down. That’s why we keep the social contract wall strong… well, strong-ish, imperialism isn’t going to abide by humanity any further than we push. And we never fucking pushed far enough. We haven’t. Clearly, look at the results.
This is why there’s a new Nazi fuck popping up every day, a new “liberal” sell-out voting for white supremacy, a new insanely illegal action violating several core constitutional rights, and oh, yes, more dead children here, there, and everywhere, more cuts, more cruelty, more fear…
Fascists don’t die, they multiply. We have to push back, every fucking day.
But, there’s all these words and constant noise that blur the path of how we push back. It is impossible some days for me to make sense of what is happening in our world, and how polluted and twisted language has become.
The words and noise don’t have any inherent meaning. Spoken words are just vibrations we make at each other, complex grunting with tongue thrusts. Written words are the (often ludicrous) printed version of those vibrations we make. The words in a highly complex dissertation have no more inherent value than the words you yell out when you come really hard.
It’s not the words, it’s the vibrations, that do the communicating. The words and the sounds are whatever the fuck we want them to be. And it’s getting harder to read vibrations because the communicating is buried in meaningless words. This is why AI is incredibly appealing to both corporate and functional fucking idiots (multiple oxymorons) as it allows the complete removal of human vibrations and intentions from our primary means of professional communication, to say nothing of interpersonal relationships.
Why bother when words have no meaning, right? Sooo much noise, never-ending. Why try making sense and clarity at all?
If you stop defining your words, your values, and your beliefs, authoritarians and their rapidly multiplying bootlickers will do it for you. Quiet is dangerous. Quiet is not safe.
Loud and surrounded by community is the only safety we will find moving forward. It’s hard work, staying in community. The only way I’ve ever found it to work is if we make sure our vibrations are in alignment with root beliefs we carry within.
People will not meet you halfway if they don’t care where you’re going. That is a warning about association and loyalty as much as it’s an opportunity to grow your social and liberation network from shared values that guide your life; not superficial time-waste that makes everyone feel good.
None of this is easy, and it does require us to slow down, prioritize, think hard about who’s with us, and who’s just around us. And sometimes, if you listen closely, you can feel the root vibration through the noise.
Shortly before the sale of that company I contracted for, I overheard the tense white people from (???) doing a little boisterous talk about the family post lunch cocktails. As they are want to do, my ears perked up. Sure enough, that immigration timeline to Argentina is suspicious.
Do I know that those people were descendants of those who committed a genocide against my Jewish grandmother’s people?
No.
But I do know they aren’t good people from what I know of them, regardless of their lineage or root beliefs. And I remain to this day more sure that they would support a genocide, than not. Because I listened to their words closely, and authoritarians, and the bootlickers that follow, love to boast about their alliances, and connection (however distant) to important events in history. Fascists can’t help but give themselves away.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.
-Lord Acton, 1887
When we stop listening closely, and when we go quiet, we invite this corruption into our lives. People find themselves doing terrible things under fascist regimes because they stopped listening past the noise and they stopped talking about objective reality, shared by large communities.
I wrote all of this to point out something I noticed about this time early yesterday morning. I committed to the 40 Days and Escalate: Veterans and Allies Fast for Gaza, which means I’m up before the sun to eat, and then I only consume water (some caffeine or this writing ain’t happenin’) until sunset, until June ends. After that the commitment is an escalation of calorie restriction and/or advanced actions. I haven’t decided which path I’ll choose, which is the point of a political and spiritual fast.
So, I’m up chewing on calories, watching Reuters, and there’s full coverage of the two Israeli embassy staffers murdered in DC. A friend of the couple in Israel was speaking about them in remembrance and I listened closely. What struck me was the focus of words about their engagement, as they were a young couple, and this was later focused on... every outlet.
It’s not odd about their starting a life together being a direct contrast to their murders. What’s odd is where they were traveling to announce the engagement and then later be married.
Yechiel Leiter, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., told reporters the pair was a “beautiful couple,” and said Lischinsky had purchased an engagement ring “with the intention of proposing to his girlfriend next week in Jerusalem.”
An American and an Israeli-German were going to announce and plan their wedding 47 miles northeast of an ongoing genocide. The United Whites of America, Israel and Germany are committing a genocide against Palestinians. These are objective facts.
Do I believe that couple should be dead for a destination genocide wedding?
No.
Do I believe this couple to have been good people?
…
I remember asking my father what the fuck the Good Germans were doing while the minorities were rounded up, robbed and shipped off for the mass murders everyone pretended weren’t happening.
“Most of them kept on living their lives, sugar.”
“Most of them kept on living their lives" hit hard.