IDSG Ep53 – Afterword to Episode 52
This time, we chat about our previous episode, ‘52: Genocide and The Right Stuff‘. Hopefully more interesting that it sounds.
Content Warning.
Chapter Three: The Unique Details and Methods of a Crime (The Judge of All The Earth)
Part of the difficulty in tracking the fallout of Moore’s split with DC is simply that it’s so extensive. Once the rupture began it spread quickly, fueled in no small part by Alan Moore’s tendency to, as he’s put it, burn his bridges when reacting against something so as to make sure he’s never tempted to go second guess himself. But in this case the fractal repetition of Moore’s grievances with DC have served to make the initial issues harder to see, to the point where the standard wisdom is that Moore’s break with DC came over a dispute in the handling of the Watchmen trade paperback when, in reality, he had made his decision not to accept any new work from DC in January of 1987, eight months before the trade paperback even came out, and five months before Moore was actually done working on it. This decision came during a wider dispute about DC’s proposed creation of a ratings system for their comics. And even that point is not a single discrete cause that can be separated out from all of the others and identified as the original, true rift, but at best the third issue to arise between Moore and DC in quick succession.
There are of course two ways to look at this. In one, the subsequent retellings of the dispute on both sides have thoroughly muddied the waters such that the original dispute over comics ratings has been obscured. And there’s a degree of truth to this – the latter focus on the rights to Watchmen and DC’s broader exploitation of the property has largely eclipsed what was a real and acrimonious dispute in the early months of 1987. In the other, however, it is the wider perspective that looks at the full extent of Moore’s myriad of grievances that is more accurate, even about the initial dispute. In this view, just because the rating’s system was the straw that broke the camel’s back doesn’t mean that the bale of hay as a whole wasn’t the cause. And this view has a wider support within Moore’s career, which by the start of 1987 was already characterized by a string of disputes with his publishers. Indeed, by the time Watchmen started Moore had already broken with all of his UK publishers, although his departure from IPC had not yet taken on the tone of finality that his rifts with Marvel UK and Dez Skinn had. Indeed, if one wanted to be unsympathetic to Moore – and it’s worth stressing that there are no shortage of people who are very much invested in being more or less completely unsympathetic to Alan Moore – one could suggest that getting into fights with his publishers was simply what he did, and that he was, consciously or unconsciously, just looking for a reason to get mad at DC.
Certainly Moore would have had little reason to see DC as essential to his career. He had, after all, succeeded with essentially every company he’d worked with.…
Chapter Two: Places That Aren’t Even There Anymore (Absent Friends)
This is, perhaps, why so much ink has been spilled within the War on attempts to argue that this gap, in effect, does not exist – that Watchmen can be understood purely, or at least primarily, in terms of its influences, thus allowing those living in its wake to exist as though they are free from its vast and monolithic splendor. It is, after all, the easier option; it does not require staring too long at the cavernous depths within. It gives the comforting illusion that Watchmen is, at its heart, an easily solved mystery – a question with a definite answer. Nothing could be further from the truth, but for those who would otherwise find themselves caught in its blast, reduced to mere shadows cast by its incinerating radiance the idea that the book is simply some inevitable consequence of what came before is a useful delusion.There are, of course, other factors involved in the particular obsession with Watchmen’s influences, most notably the fact that Moore and Gibbons have both asserted consistently that Watchmen was envisioned as a creator-owned book, a claim that makes the degree to which its ideas originated with Moore and Gibbons relevant. More broadly, the fact that Moore has made a number of provocative statements about the ways in which DC Comics and, more specifically, Grant Morrison have profited off of the recycling of his ideas has led to a small cottage industry in attempting to demonstrate Moore’s hypocrisy. And since Watchmen is both Moore’s most prestigious work and one with several well-documented influences, it has long been Exhibit A for these attempts.
Most attempts to argue that Watchmen can be explained primarily in terms of its influences have focused on its relationship with characters DC acquired from the failing Charlton Comics. As a company, Charlton was formed in 1944, and published comics in a number of genres. But for the purposes of Watchmen, only six of Charlton’s characters are actually relevant: Captain Atom, Thunderbolt, the Blue Beetle, the Question, the Peacemaker, and Nightshade. These characters come from a fairly narrow set of sources. Three of them – the Peacemaker, Nightshade, and Captain Atom were created by the astonishingly prolific Joe Gill, the latter two alongside Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko, who also created the Question. They also generally originated in a fairly narrow band of time – Thunderbolt, Nightshade, and the Peacemaker all debuted in 1966, while the Question debuted in 1967 and Captain Atom in 1960. Only the Blue Beetle forms something of an exception, having existed in two forms – a Golden Age version that predated Charlton, created by Charles Nicholas Wojtkoski in 1939 for Fox Comics, and the Silver Age version created for Charlton in 1966 by Steve Ditko.
The relationship between Watchmen and these six characters is both well-documented and oft-misrepresented. In the eyes of his detractors, Moore’s contribution to Watchmen amounted to little more than changing the names of some obscure 60s superheroes, as in Dan Slott’s suggestion that “the real Before Watchmen comic would show Alan Moore reading stacks of Charlton comics.”
IDSG Ep52 – Genocide and The Right Stuff
Special episode this week, as Daniel explodes the bullshit of the ‘Right Stuff’ / ‘Daily Shoah’ chuds. Contains clips from Nazi podcasts.
Let us know how you like this new format.
Content Warning
Show Notes:
Brenton Lengel Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrentonLengel
Nationalism Vs Antifascism Debate: https://t.co/Bo3sZfoEKl?amp=1
Lewontin’s Fallacy at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genetic_Diversity:_Lewontin%27s_Fallacy
Matthew Q. Gebert identified by the SPLC. https://www.splcenter.org/gebert
Angry White Men covers the Daily Shoah episode from which the “Unironic Exterminationism” clip comes. https://angrywhitemen.org/2017/04/01/daily-shoah-promotes-suidlanders-event-and-interviews-self-proclaimed-ex-mercenary-who-wants-to-exterminate-blacks/
Magnus Hirschfield at Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Hirschfeld
Timeline.com, “How the Nazis Derailed the Medical Advances Around Sexual Reassignment Surgery.” (Enoch reads this text in the episode.) https://timeline.com/how-the-nazis-derailed-the-medical-advances-around-sexual-reassignment-surgery-eb8d4f21c463
TDS446: The Adolf in the Room Full Video at Bitchute https://www.bitchute.com/video/imERn7oJEKb0/
Dario Gabbai Tells His Story. https://www.neveragain.com/genocide/dario-gabbai/
Excerpts from Goebbel’s diary entries, March 1942 at Nizkor: http://nizkor.com/hweb/people/g/goebbels-joseph/goebbels-1948-excerpts-02.html#1942-mar-7
Holocaust Controversies, “Goebbels on Liquidation.” http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2010/04/goebbels-on-liquidation.html
Holocaust Controversies, Index of Published Evidence of Gas Chambers at Auschwitz. http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2012/10/index-of-published-evidence-on.html
Chapter One: A Machine That Kills (At Midnight All The Agents)
Previously in The Last War in Albion: In 1979, two men got their starts in the British comics industry. One, a young Scotsman named Grant Morrison, largely sunk without a trace, writing only a few short stories for a failed magazine called Near Myths, a local newspaper strip, and a couple of sci-fi adventurers for DC Thomson’s Starblazer, a magazine renowned for only ever giving the editorial note “more space combat.”
The other, a decade older man from Northampton named Alan Moore, steadily worked his way from some low rent gigs writing and drawing his own strips to a career in the mainstream British industry, pulling together a living writing disposable short stories for 2000 AD, superheroes for Marvel UK, and low-selling but critically acclaimed work like V for Vendetta for Dez Skinn’s Warrior, before making the jump to American comics to try to salvage the failing title Swamp Thing, which he did in spades, taking it from a book on the brink of cancellation to one of DC Comics’s crown jewels.
Meanwhile Morrison, having largely failed in his goal of being a rock star, and inspired by Moore’s work, particularly his postmodernist superhero tale Marvelman in Warrior, got back into comics, following the trajectory of Moore’s early career by securing a strip in Warrior (unfortunately for Morrison, his first appearance was Warrior’s last issue) and beginning to write short stories for 2000 AD.
In 1986, DC Comics published the first issue of Watchmen, a new superhero series from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.
The result was the outbreak of the last great magical war in Albion.
Yellow smile in bloodpool as panel one, single stain on right eye. An image and synecdoche, it is Watchmen’s true face. Marketing and trade dress have made it a precisely defined sigil of Watchmen, just as the Guy Fawkes mask is the sigil of V for Vendetta and the serpent of Alan Moore. It is a Harvey Ball style smiley, a type first drawn in 1963, linked with a host of 1970s culture both kitsch and psychedelic. The bloodstain is four-pronged splash in the upper left, three droplets petering out before the eye, a fourth traversing the eye at a sharp angle like a pair of clock hands converging on midnight. In some renditions there are six precisely placed patches of white, as on the cover, but in the first panel the badge is already in the midground, framed by a monotone slate of red upon purple-grey bricks. There is a gutter in the lower left which the blood flows into. It is an iconic opening panel of comics as an artform, setting up the book’s aesthetic approach from the beginning. The War begins thusly, in the middle of a cataclysmic battle the history of which will serve as its own battleground.The close-up, a cover-to-panel transition, defines a mystery even before the comic’s six-panel pan up from the street to a man staring out a broken window many stories up.
IDSG Ep51 – Conspiracy
This time, Daniel and Jack consider the 2001 film Conspiracy, a dramatisation of the infamous Wannsee Conference, a wartime meeting of Third Reich officials on the subject of the ‘final solution to the Jewish question’.
Content Warnings.
Notes/Links:
Wannsee Conference Wikipedia Entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Conference
Speaking the unspeakable: the portrayal of the Wannsee Conference in the film Conspiracy by Alex J. Kay: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17504902.2019.1637492
Die Wannseekonferenz (1984): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URSNN5mnI2g
English translation of the Protocol: http://holocaust.umd.umich.edu/news/uploads/WanseeProtocols.pdf
The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting by Mark Roseman: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Villa-Lake-Meeting-Wannsee-Solution/dp/0141003952
Hitler, vol. 2: Nemesis by Ian Kershaw: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hitler-1936-1945-Nemesis-Allen-History/dp/0140272399/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1VX5FLJJ3LS7I&dchild=1&keywords=kershaw+hitler+nemesis&qid=1589291029&s=books&sprefix=kershaw+hitler+ne%2Cstripbooks%2C159&sr=1-1
Hitler’s American Model by James Q. Whitman: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hitlers-American-Model-United-States/dp/0691183066/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=hitler%27s+american+model&qid=1589250377&s=books&sr=1-1
…
IDSG Ep50 – Michelle Malkin
New IDSG.
Jack returns to the podcast to chat with Daniel about Michelle Malkin, reactionary star since the War on Terror era, who recently started snuggling up to Nick Fuentes and the Groypers. Plus a bit of chat about the old coronavirus and the recent protests, including the armed ‘storming’ of the capital statehouse in Michigan.
Content warnings, as always.
Notes/Links:
Michigan Protests, “Operation Gridlock.”
MLive, “Protesters angry with Gov. Whitmer’s stay-at-home order gridlock Michigan capitol.” https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2020/04/protesters-angry-with-gov-whitmers-stay-at-home-order-gridlock-michigan-capitol.html
“But people are still allowed to protest, and thousands took the opportunity to do so in Lansing Wednesday as part of an “Operation Gridlock” protest. Organized by the Michigan Conservative Coalition and supported by the Michigan Freedom Fund and other conservative groups, the idea was to create a traffic jam in front of the Michigan Capitol to create gridlock.
“This is a statement to show people’s frustration,” said Meshawn Maddock, a member of the Michigan Conservative Coalition, ahead of the protest.”
Mother Jones, “A DeVos-Linked Group Promoted the Right-Wing “Operation Gridlock” Tantrum in Michigan” https://www.motherjones.com/coronavirus-updates/2020/04/a-devos-linked-group-promoted-the-right-wing-operation-gridlock-tantrum-in-michigan/
“The whole charade was facilitated by the Michigan Conservative Coalition, a conservative political group that doubles as a front for Michigan Trump Republicans, and promoted by the Michigan Freedom Fund, a conservative group with ties to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, a Michigan billionaire philanthropist power broker before she joined the Trump administration. The Detroit Free Press reported that the fund was listed as one of the protest’s hosts on Facebook. The organization also promoted the event on Facebook.
MLive, “Protesters brave the rain to send message to Michigan leaders as coronavirus state of emergency debate rages” https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2020/04/protesters-brave-the-rain-to-send-message-to-michigan-leaders-as-coronavirus-state-of-emergency-debate-rages.html
“Members of the Michigan Liberty Militia patrolled the grounds, armed with guns after being hired as “security detail” by the organizers. One of the members of the militia, Phil Robinson of Barry County, said the group brought nine people to serve on the detail.
“We are strictly here running security, making sure everybody has a right to peacefully assemble,” Robinson said. “That is our only mission here today we are not here as protesters or rally goers were strictly here, exercising our Second Amendment right and to make sure that everybody has a right to peacefully assemble.””
Antifash Gordon thread on the Michigan Liberty Militia: https://twitter.com/AntiFashGordon/status/1255976396913930240?s=20sdsdfdfsdff
Michelle Malkin and “America First”
Goldsea, “Michelle Malkin: The Radical Right’s Asian Pitbull.” http://www.goldsea.com/Personalities/Malkin/malkin.html
Booknotes Transcript, December 8, 2002. “Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores.” https://web.archive.org/web/20071013191746/http://booknotes.org/Transcript/?ProgramID=1705
“MALKIN: Why did I write my book? Well, September 11 was obviously a galvanizing event for me, seeing the lapses in our immigration system that allowed the September 11 hijackers to come in, exploit our weak enforcement, work underground and live her comfortably. And that is a theme that I`ve been talking a lot about over my career in journalism, for more than a decade. I started out in Los Angeles, and it`s hard to ignore the negative consequences of lax immigration enforcement when you`re in the middle of it in Los Angeles.…
It’s Funny, Isn’t It? (The Pirate Planet)
It’s September 30th, 1978. Between now and October 21st, three people will be murdered by Bruce John Preston in the Australian town of Mount Isa, numerous people will die in Cambodia following a Vietnamese invasion, and an unknown number of people die in the African National Congress following an attempt to poison 500 people to kill an unidentified infiltrator. Also, Frederick Valentich dies in an aviation accident shortly after encountering what he described as an unidentified flying object, Jacques Brel dies of cancer in France, the world comes closer still to the eschaton, and The Pirate Planet airs on BBC One.
In The Pirate Planet, Doctor Who presents one of the most confused central metaphors of its long and generally confused history. The concept is admittedly ingenious: Zanak, a hollow planet that materializes around other planets and then consumes them in their entirety. On top of that, as is gradually revealed over the course of four episodes, all of this exists to feed power to the elaborate machines keeping the tyrannical Queen Xanxia alive and with a facsimile of her youthful body. So on the one hand we have a brutal metaphor for capitalist/imperialist expansion and the way in which it leads to devastating destruction purely for the benefit of a handful of parasitic elites.
On the other hand the final episode, in which Douglas Adams creates an added source of tension by establishing that Zanak’s next target is Earth, comes dangerously close to misunderstanding the entire affair. Suddenly the subject of the metaphor becomes a curiously guiltless victim of it. More to the point, however, this collapse of a story largely concerned with metaphor into a story in which the Earth is in imminent peril serves to highlight the fact that the central conceit—a planet that consumes other planets for wealth—dramatically misses the reality, which is that planets consume themselves.
This is doubly interesting when taken in the context of Douglas Adams’s larger career. Adams is an extremely easy writer to like—a jaw-dropping prosesmith with one of the wickedest senses of humor in literary history. And yet it is hard not to come to the conclusion that his reputation was helped enormously by the fact that he died in 2001. A brief perusal of Adams’s social circle, after all, does not turn up a long list of people who have enjoyed cancellation-free dotages. Instead you get people like Richard Dawkins, rightly pilloried as a racist, sexist old windbag, or Monty Python, whose surviving members seem increasingly determined to become edgelordy Brexiteers who complain about how people are easily offended snowflakes. Douglas Adams, meanwhile, has spent the time in which his friends have squandered their own reputations keeping quiet and, for that matter, only taking a slight dent to his productivity compared to the last decade or so of his life.
But even if he’s avoided sticking his foot in it, he remains fundamentally a technophilic humanist. He admirably had more of an environmentalist streak than many in his cohort and wasn’t nearly as invested in utopianism as many, finding more of interest in computers than space travel.…
Changing Times
Just a quick announcement. Dalek Eruditorum has been proving frustrating to write—I think I was overly optimistic in thinking I could get to 39 posts out of the idea, and in practice around 13 or so it started becoming an exercise in pulling teeth. Posts were going out to Patrons on Fridays or later after having been written in short spurts of 3-400 words that took all day to even begin to figure out. It’s been pretty miserable. And so I’ve decided that I’m going to accelerate a decision that I’d been planning on making when I finished Dalek Eruditorum: I’m refocusing on longer form writing.
What this means in practice is that this site is not going to be a weekly maintained blog. I’ll still put things up here—the first thing I’m doing is going back to Last War in Albion, and that’ll still get posted here in chapter-sized chunks. And other sub-book stuff that I write will probably find a home over here. But I feel like the 2000 word blog post is not really working for me anymore, and like I need to get out of that format and sink my teeth back into some stuff that facilitates mad ambition. I’ve got the Pirate Planet essay nearly done, so that’ll go out Monday, but that’ll be the last weekly post here for the forseeable.
I’m still running the patreon over at https://www.patreon.com/elizabethsandifer, and still dependent on your support. Patrons are currently getting work in progress updates—written chunks of text and also behind the scenes peaks at my research notes, outlines, and the like. I’m planning on targeting the same monthly word count as I’ve been doing, if not higher because it won’t be quite so torturous, but a lot more of it will be gated to Patrons for a longer time before it makes its way out here.
And if you want updates, a lot of those will be on my Twitter at https://twitter.com/ElSandifer. I’ll still post big things like book launches over here, but if you want regular notification of what I’m up to, those sources are going to be your best bet going forward.
To do a quick spray of likely questions: Eruditorum v6 reprint needs me to spend a day or two’s work on it. The added essay is written, but with Amazon not really shipping paper books I haven’t felt a ton of pressure to get it typeset. Figure the next couple of weeks there. Volume 7 is now three essays from completion, and is going to be a major focus of May. And the next chapter of Last War in Albion is… well, started. And exciting. And requiring a lot of reading, which I’m going to get back to now.
Thanks to all for the support. I can’t wait to show you some big, new, exciting stuff.…
We Change Things. We Make Things Happen (The Sun Makers)
It’s November 26th, 1977. Between now and December 17th, an airplane carrying the University of Evansville basketball team will crash, killing the entire team, another plane crash at Madeira Airport in Portugal kills a hundred and thirty-one, and sex worker Marilyn Moore is injured in an attack by the Yorkshire Ripper. Despite the relative paucity of major disasters, the world still creeps ever closer to the eschaton and The Sun Makers airs.
The usual observation about The Sun Makers is that Robert Holmes attempted to whine about his taxes and accidentally wrote a Marxist parable. Annoyingly, the usual observation is in this instance correct. The Sun Makers is, on a superficial level, about taxes—there’s a joke about a “P45 return corridor,” several cracks about needing a “wily accountant,” and the basic fact that all of the crippling payments the population of Pluto is forced to make are explicitly called taxes. And yet any attempt to interpret it as the whinging of a conservative writer grumpy that he should actually be expected to contribute to the greater society swiftly runs aground in the face of practically everything that isn’t one of these details.
The biggest problem is that Pluto is not so much a state as a work colony. And while there are countless tax jokes throughout the story, the larger focus ends up being on the labor conditions, with emphasis put on the fact that everybody works double shifts and gets precious little allotment of “sleep time.” Perhaps most importantly, the “taxes” are levied by “the company,” which is also the planet’s sole employer. This fundamentally shifts what the story is about away from taxes and towards exploitation, since what’s happening is effectively that the “taxes” are just a failure to pay wages disguised as taxation.
There are complexities here that can’t be reduced entirely—if one wants to be precise what Holmes has depicted is a grotesque form of state capitalism, which is to say that Holmes is still making an attack on the left, at least as understood by the right—Thatcher railed against state capitalism by name in the House of Commons, declaring that “where there is state capitalism there will never be political freedom” around the time this was being written. And the decision to make The Collector a visual parody of Denis Healey ultimately makes it hard to remove the idea that this story is just a flat-out endorsement of Thatcherism in the buildup to her eventual triumph in the 1979 general election.
And yet all of this has to be balanced against the fact that this is a story in which the workers stage a mass revolt to secure the means of production in the face of a system that sees them as nothing other than raw materials to exploit for profit and then abandon to die, where the ruling class is literally hurled off the roof of a building, and where all of the focus sits upon the dignity of the common worker and the horror is at the degradation he experiences.…