February 2017 – PADAWAN PATH

Part I goes here.

Felix is no such person. If anything, he’s a decent fellow. His jokes sometimes stretch too far, and he uses a lot of clickbait. He’s no anti-semite: it’s like saying Sacha Baron Cohen was anti-semite because he made “The Dictator”. He has made a few Hitler jokes, and has used the swastika sometimes in clickbait images.

Let’s talk about it. The imagery is frightening because of its association, not because it’s inherently bad. The swastika, for example, is a symbol of good luck and prosperity, transcending religions and even cultural boundaries. A good article on it can be found here.

Just like his book, Adolf Hitler’s symbolism is given too much power in the west. Charlie Chaplin reduced Hitler to a laughing stock, caricaturing him in his famous film The Great Dictator. People need to shake off these associations. These don’t give fascists power. What gives them power are our fears.

At a time when technology is making people, many of whom are too old to learn something new, lose jobs, fear is at its highest. Where certain ideologies are making people, innocent in other ways, take up arms and fight for twisted lies, fear is driving the cause of global conflict. Far before Global Warming or rising sea levels, a large scale war can be a fatal blow to our already precarious environment.

Fascism uses these fears. It puts up a symbol of strength: a man who’s calling on ancient customs and shows the way forward to an utopia. People rally around him; people do whatever they can to get back a glorious past or an imagined glorious future. The one party with a majority uses fears and propaganda against a group of people, isolating them from a national narrative. Targeting them, they use this group of people as a common enemy uniting their followers. This is fascism, as defined by Benito Mussolini, who was a journalist and therefore knew about the power of a national narrative. If this sounds insinuating, you may find fascism working somewhere around you.

And the media is silent.

That’s the second tenet of fascism: silence your opponents. No one can break the national narrative, which is aggressive and loud. Mussolini and Hitler did it by assasinations; one can say a similar thing about Japan. If you do not participate in the ideology of the ruling party, your life is forfeit.

It’s no wonder fascism is a favourite with dictators; it gives them immense power without opponents. Voldemort’s system was a classical fascist system: riling fear and hatred towards a common opponent and institutionalizing oppression and elimination of undesirables. Even the newspaper of the wizarding world, the Daily Prophet, went towing Voldemort’s line after he took control at the Ministry of Magic. Any other publication, like ‘The Quibbler’ (which is run by Luna Lovegood’s father, Xenophilius), that tried to challenge Voldemort was silenced. Rowling knew what she was doing. This is the worst phase of human history, after the colonization centuries.

But Mussolini or Hitler weren’t Voldemort. Voldemort had real power, but the others were simple humans. They could have been killed and gotten rid of if only people had questioned.

voldemort1-640x480 — The one you should really be scared of. The rest, pooh.

That is the fourth estate! That is where the media comes in. You would imagine with all the connectedness the world has, one wouldn’t find these things happening, but they are.

They are happening because our media is out of touch with the people, chasing their own agendas and advertisement money. Trying to persecute an innocent swedish guy who shouts and screams for living as a Nazi-monger. This is sad, because I don’t want Voldemort to come back. Nobody wants to hear a patronus in a wedding party say, “The ministry has fallen. Scrimgeour is dead. They are coming.”

We only need to know that happiness can be found in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.

Wow, I didn’t realize there was something so drastic going on in the world right now. PewDiePie is a racist and a Nazi patriot! A BREAKING NEWS! We have to tell all the world about this because we don’t have anything important to talk about today!

For the people (which in this case is mostly everybody) who are wondering what all the fuss is about, the Wall Street Journal, that iconic newspaper idolizing the mecca of capitalism, wrote an article about PewDiePie’s apparent Nazi messages. Be careful world! Here is a Swedish YouTuber from the south of England ‘normalizing‘ Nazi rhetoric, imprinting it in the minds of impressionable twelve-year olds.

Looking at the grave concerns of a corporate herald, Disney cut ties with an independent creator, relegating him to a ‘hopeful’ tier of internet anonymity.

Oligarchies have once again won against individuals.

Continue reading “PewDiePie and all the Swastika: Part I” →