Thank you for the reply and for contuing to talk with me about this.
imo, throwing fashists and neo-nazis like David Duke into one bucket with Rowling is problematic, if not borderline totalitarian (and also just tasteless), because she simply isn’t.
I understand why you think I am flying off the handle and comparing two things that aren’t the same. But there are a couple points I want you to keep in mind,
A) Rowling herself has actively promoted self described faccists on multiple occasions. Matt Walsh in the US who repedatly calls for, and his followers commit acts of violence at hospitals.
And Posie Parker in the UK. Who has a large nazis following her show up at her protests. And rowling herself was critical of the counter protesters at faccistic events.
Posie has actively called for her supports to carry guns in to womens bathrooms to look for trans folk, clearly calling for violence.
“I’m talking about you dads, who maybe carry – I think that’s what you say, I’m so down with the American lingo. Maybe you carry, maybe you don’t. Maybe you consider yourself a protector of women, maybe you’re that sort of man. Maybe you have a daughter or a mother, or a wife, maybe you have a sister. Maybe you have friends, maybe you just think women are human and you don’t need any absolute connection with them to feel compelled to protect us. I think you should start using women’s toilets, men.”
B) TERF transphobia is deeply rooted in the history faccism, the first books the nazis book burned were at a queer college studying trans topics.
The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end. The breakthrough of the German revolution has again cleared the way on the German path
-Jospeh Grobels who gave a speech at the burning.
C) According to Nazi’s, trans people are a jewish plot
“One thing that it’s crucial to understand about the far right, the extreme right, the Nazi guys, is the way that they obsessively see absolutely fucking everything as a Jewish plot,” says author and hate researcher Talia Lavin, author of Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy. “And the existence of trans people is a huge one.”
Rowling is an active part of a violent fascist movement both from a historical sense, from her current actions and in the books she writes. Harry Potter has many antisemtnic tropes in the goblins, overtly racist names like the black wizard Shacklebolt and transphobia by repeatedly describing female villains to have “man hands”.
There is ample evidence to put JK Rowling and David Duke in the same fascist basket.
blueberry@diagonlemmy.social 9 months ago
Ok, so she allies with some weird people. Didn’t know that and its not great, but it doesn’t make her a fascist. Being a fascist corresponds to a fascist mindset. I think her books, opinions and also the fantastic beast films show that she has liberal mindset, and she is strongly against fascism.
But I hear you, I guess the whole cultural fight has a bigger urgency for you. I’m also panicking that we really drift towards fascism again. But for me, I analyze the problem different and therefore draw different conclusions.
For me, this is about a bigger conflict within the democratic forces in general and especially within the Left. For years now, the common mindset was that of deconstruction, that of dismanteling structures and hierarchies. However, turns out that if you see in every structure and hierarchy the possibility for “colonialism” and “micro-aggressions” and you dismantel that on and on, you end up with no structures, which, surprise: leads to evil, anti-democratic structures to develop. For me, the Post-Colonialist-Left has lost all credibility after the terrorist attack by the Hamas on Israel, because many of them openly appreciated or at least downplayed it. Antisemitism is a problem on the left.
So yeah, Rowling has a point that anti-liberal-tendencies have grown over the years, as holds for a limiting of free speech (Salman Rushdie also signed the letter that she signed a few years ago calling for more free speech). But for me, this comes from the post-colonalist-left, which is currently kind of shattered anyways (and also right-wing-populism, of course). However, Rowling argues that the queer/trans movement is anti-liberal and that’s also were she loses me, because thats a talking-point of the right, on which, like you said, they only too eagerly jump on. In russia, they have declared LGBTQ as a terrorist group, which is really bad for the people there.
But the forces that are pro-democracy quickly need to unite again. In this sense, from my point of view, by building something that is not perfect from the beginning, I do something to strengthen liberal democracy, which is also good for trans people.