Hm.

You know that you may have a substantial body of work when you’re pretty sure that you’ve written about something but you can’t find it. I’m encountering this problem more and more these days, I think that I have written about something but it might have just been me thinking about writing it. Going through over 1500 pages of these things is no small chore let me tell you. Even with the aid of ctrl-f, when you have to open document after document, it’s a time consumer.

And being that finding free time is a rare thing for me, despite my best intestions, I find myself not terribly inclined to go over it all.

So if I repeat myself from the past, forgive me. I’ll try at the very least to put some new spin on it.

I don’t like to call myself naive.

I don’t suppose that anyone does, but between the life that I’ve lead and the fact that I work very hard to constantly educate myself it’s typically a bullet that I manage to dodge. Between the time spent living out of garages and off of peoples couches, the years downtown and just the wide array of experiences that come from playing in a band in some of the less than upscale venues that I have played you get to see quite a bit.

But a few months back, I saw something that sent me completely ass over teakettle.

Nazis. In public. In S.S. uniforms.

I’ve seen more dead bodies than I can count, I’ve witnessed terrible accidents and terrible acts of violence. I’ve seen people OD. I’ve seen things that disturbed me to the point I very rarely even talk about them.

None of that prepared me for the reality of seeing a group of people in full nazi regalia.

I know that there’s racism. I’m not naïve about that. I see the typical “quiet” racism where someone comments on the way that they perceive a certain ethnic group to drive, or how another ethnic groups food smells, or how another ethnic groups work ethic is somewhat lacking, and I always make a point of commenting on the inherent ignorance that statements like that reveal. To be sure, attitudes like those are indeed racist and ignorant, but ninety percent of the time, I’m able to at the very least get the person who uttered the comment to think about what they’ve said, and usually they leave the conversation somewhat embarrassed.

Which is good.

Because if someone is embarrassed, that means on some level they recognize at the very least a potential for something being wrong with their approach. Perhaps they’ll think about it, perhaps they won’t, but for a moment, those stereotypes weren’t ok.

Now nazis, they’re a different breed entirely.

You can’t reason with a nazi, they need someone to blame and typically they’re far to much the cowards to allow that person to be themselves. The whole idea of blaming your problems on another race is so that you don’t have to take responsibility for them yourself. The net result of someone thinking that way is a person who will (obviously) go to extreme lengths to avoid facing their own issues and taking responsibility for them. It’s an extremely selfish mindset and you simply can’t educate someone out of that mindset.

You can’t teach someone who doesn’t want to learn.

I can understand the basic appeal of the philosophy. You get to be the best thing that ever was, almost nothing is your fault and there’s always someone else to blame. Unfortunately it’s all a lie and any even partially self-actualized person quickly realizes that they are not the best thing that ever was, there’s plenty that’s their fault and blame is more of a distraction than anything.

So bottom line is this, you can’t reason with a nazi.

Since that encounter a few months back, I’ve been afraid that I’ve been missing something. Resurgence in nazi thinking isn’t something that happens overnight, it’s a process that takes time. It’s been years since I’ve seen anyone that open with a nazi lifestyle, so to see them out and about in public was, to me, a sign something wicked was this way coming.

It wasn’t much after that the whole business with the pipe bombs started up.

I’ve always been a somewhat active “anti-racist” on a social scale. My friends know that when presented with ignorance, I’m usually one of the first to speak up. But recently I decided to spend some time researching what was going on with the white supremacist/nazi movement here in Calgary. Are there actually flag waving violent Nazis running around our city?

The answer, sadly, is yes.

Spend some time digging and you’re bound to find something. While the supremacist movement in Calgary is somewhat splintered at the moment, the individuals are all still there. And they aren’t all who you might think they are.

There’s the stereotypical supremacist/nazi who is covered in racial tattoos with swastikas and the like. You know the ones, shaved heads either wildly over or underweight with that constant state of aggression.

For the records, and it seems obvious to me but it’s worth mentioning, not all skinheads are nazis. The skinhead style started nazi free. I still buzz my hair from time to time, I love army surplus clothing and I never wear anything that’s not a steel toe boot, but I would like to think I’m about as far from a nazi as you can get. Let’s just get that common misconception out of the way.

More significantly, some of the Nazis that I have come across are surprisingly well educated. University students. Professionals. These are the stealth nazis who have learned that they can operate in both the extreme world of the supremacist as well as the “normal” world. They will sieg heil with the worst of them, but then they will head to class to learn how to be teachers or back to the office.

The scary thing about these people is that they are convinced in such a fundamental way that their way of thinking is correct, and that thinking is such a deeply ingrained part of their identity there is almost nothing that you can do to get them to change their minds. By default, these people are not critical thinkers. Even a simple logic exercise escapes many of them, simply because despite the conclusion they can choose to believe differently.

They claim to be enlightened, but they are the very definition of ignorance by choice.

Here’s the bottom line.

If the thing that defines your value as a human being, the thing that you are most proud of and the one thing that you believe sets you apart from everyone else is the colour of your skin, that is a tragic and extremely revealing statement on what you have done with your life and what you have accomplished.

Period.

The clumsy construction of a philosophy that tries to justify that fact doesn’t change it, it’s just an attempt to rationalize it.

I’m starting to realize something.

As a species, we haven’t come nearly as far as I once might have hoped. I’m getting this now. For years I thought that things would “get better”, but now I’m starting to realize that humanity is forever in a state of cyclical homeostasis with the repetitions of these cycles increasing in frequency due to greater technology.

We don’t really move forwards. We just keep finding different ways to move sideways. We’re not getting better, just faster.

The fact that Nazis still roam the streets?

Just more proof of that fact.

The Shit List