I take a stand!

(An early draft of this essay bore the cheeky title, “Come to think of it, I guess I am a Nazi sympathizer”. But why invite needless trouble?)

The other day I removed, from a telephone pole by my building, a sticker advertising the white nationalist website Stormfront.org. The first time I passed by I thought, “Meh, none of my business”; but on second thought I decided I ought to do what I could to forestall the inevitable media meltdown when someone else noticed it – “Community Rallies To Oppose Wave Of Racism” – so on my way home I stopped by the pole and, after checking to make sure no-one was watching, scraped off the sticker. I assume it was left by one of the little jackasses from the nearby high school who pass under my window hooting and swearing every day at three o’clock.

I felt a little conflicted about what I’d done, because I’m pretty much a free speech absolutist; I think even the most imbecilic speech ought to be tolerated, even in sticker form. It never crossed my mind to tear down the many posters I saw around town this winter, put up by local socialists, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Russian revolution; but then, I’m pretty sure the local media won’t be reporting worriedly on the Wave of Communism that all decent people must stand against. My removal of the Stormfront sticker was purely self-serving; as someone who harbours mildly subversive thoughts, I was trying to prevent the more dimwitted of my fellow subversives from making the rest of us look bad. So it seems I’m not all that committed to free speech after all.

While I have no sympathy for Nazism, an idiotic creed, I do sympathize with Nazis; or rather, I sympathize with people who believe all manner of idiotic things, having believed various idiotic things at various times in my life; and being unable to declare with certainty that I don’t believe one or more idiotic things right now.

I don’t think I’ve ever met an actual Nazi. There was an older kid – eighteen, but no bigger than a fourth grader, with leather jacket, long hair, and a wispy moustache – who when we were introduced by a mutual friend greeted me with, “Are you a Jew?”

“N-no,” I replied. Only then did he extend his tiny hand to shake mine, in the “clasped-thumbs” style favoured at that time and place by stoners, longhairs, and cool kids. (Sometimes the clasped-thumbs shake would be combined with a finger snap, a trick I never mastered.)

How sincere was his anti-Semitism? We lived in a part of Canada where you could greet a hundred people a day with “Are you a Jew?” without much danger of encountering an actual Jew. It was a low-risk, low-effort way for that physically unprepossessing kid to stake out the most outrageously antisocial position in a subcaste where antisocial attitudes were celebrated and rewarded.

I fantasized afterward about standing up to the shrimp: “Sure, I’m a Jew. You wanna make something of it?” (I’m not a Jew.) But what would that have accomplished? Despite his weirdly high status among the longhair crowd, it’s obvious in retrospect that the kid was mildly mentally retarded. I think his friends played along partly because he was known to be unstable and maybe dangerous, but also out of something akin to pity. To defy him would’ve meant risking a shanking; but even if he’d backed down, it would’ve meant humiliating him in front of the only group of weirdos who’d tolerate him.

That’s the only incident of overt anti-Semitism I can recall from my youth in small-town Saskatchewan in the 1980s and ’90s; though for a time it was a fad with some of my high school friends to use “jew” as a verb meaning “to rip off” – “that vending machine jewed me out of a loonie” – which got on my nerves, but I was too cowardly to say anything. I’m quite conflict-averse, and I was as uncomfortable defending an unpopular position at sixteen, when I was the most bleeding-heart among my redneck friends, as I am at forty-one, when I’m the most redneck among my bleeding-heart friends.

I used to feel ashamed of my cowardice, but looking back I’m glad I never took an off-puttingly self-righteous stand over what I now realize was harmless posing. It only took a couple years of university for most of my redneck friends to turn into censorious progressives of the modern type; and if the pendulum ever swings back, and mild homophobia and racial slurs again become signals of coolness, my friends who’ve conveniently forgotten the then-fashionable things they claimed to believe in high school will forget the fashionable things they claim to believe now. My beliefs, too, have mutated over time, in response to the changing political climate, and it’s probably some quirk in my character that makes me feel like I always wind up wearing a fur coat on a sunny day.

But to return to my small Saskatchewan town: the one time I recall speaking up was in junior high when I learned that a few of my friends, in my absence, had spent the evening drinking Slurpees and vandalizing the playground equipment at a local elementary school with symbols of rebellion: heavy metal band logos, anarchy signs, and KKKs. “Mmm,” I responded mildly, when my friend told me what he’d been up to the night before. “I dunno. I mean, what if people think you’re serious about all that KKK stuff?”

“Yeah,” my friend agreed – a little abashed, I believe – and we never spoke of it again. Back then people kept incidents like this in perspective. The newspapers weren’t notified, the graffiti was painted over a few days later, and probably only one or two little native kids, as opposed to every native person in the city, decided based on my friends’ asinine prank that white society was irredeemably prejudiced against them.

My preference is to refrain from throwing gasoline on fires. Groups scrape along best when there’s a consensus that we should ignore, rather than amplify, each other’s idiocies; and the idiots themselves, I feel, are likelier to respond to quiet reason than angry howling. But then, I’m pretty sheltered. I recall chatting with a Scottish visitor who told me and my friends about the low-level conflict between Catholics and Protestants in her country, and how brawling among sectarian gangs was an ordinary rite of passage for working-class males. “Gosh, I’m glad we don’t have anything like that in Canada,” I said; and a fellow Canadian piped up that, well, actually, his older brother and his cronies had regularly gotten into rumbles with native gangs back in the day. I’ve never heard directly from anyone who participated in such rumbles. Maybe, as I rather supect, my friend was exaggerating; or my friend’s older brother was exaggerating; maybe even our Scottish visitor was exaggerating. But such violence does happen, whether or not I find it believable; and having gone through it would probably make one snigger at the impotent finger-wagging of armchair geezers like me.

Why am I sharing any of this? I guess I’m hoping that, since I did my small part to Oppose a Wave of Racism, the Commies will cut me a bit of slack when they take over.

M.

—

Last year, inspired by a poster left on another nearby piece of urban infrastructure, I worried about progressives’ ever more flexible definition of Nazism; and the year before that, I wondered whether pre-war German Nazi Party members were really as dumb as their opponents claimed.