At one point, I read the Turner Diaries in a similar spirit and, while I normally encourage people to read challenging literature, this is the one book that makes me hesitate. It’s absolutely vile and it requires a very skeptical mindset to get any actual value out of it. But, having read it anyway, it did teach me a lot about the worldview of the modern white supremacist.

Firstly, let me just say that the book is god awful. Like, not in terms of its ideas but in terms of what makes a novel well written. The characters are all emotionless as planks of wood, the romance between the main character and his lover is so sterile it could only be written by a virgin who views women as property, the main character constantly fucks things up and the story bends to save him from the stakes that it had just established, etc. Not a lot of people dwell on that part because of everything else wrong with it, but I thought I’d point that out.

I also learned that the modern day cryptofascist has to be profoundly ignorant about just about everything. This book exists to explain a white supremacist’s worldview and it lays out a lot of takes about things like feminism, biology, law, etc. that are all as confident as they are flat out wrong. What I took from this is that the modern day white supremacist has no interest in actually learning anything about the things they hate or even understanding the world that they actually exist in. For whatever reason they choose it, they live for the hate and the hate becomes the single thing that defines everything in their world, no matter what actual facts say.

It’s also a very specific guide on how to conduct a guérilla war against the US government. Like, there are a lot of passages where the main character will describe things like his cell building a bomb by taking whole pages outlining step by step how the bomb was built, what components were used, how they obtained them without the government noticing, and how the bomb is intended to be utilized. The idea that this book is a work of fiction and not a very specific plan for terrorists is pretty flimsy. Mind you, the information is all half a century old and didn’t really work out when actual white supremacist terrorists tried to use it, so don’t go getting ideas that the info is useful. But, when you hear rumors about white supremacists doing things like plotting to attack the power grid or kidnap politicians or infiltrate city councils, understand that that is 100% something they talk about doing and absolutely would do given the right opportunity.

Lastly, and I think this was the biggest insight, cryptofascists believe that they are the antifascists. That sounds ridiculous, but I swear: this book talks at length about how the enemies of the white supremacists are literal fascists, calling them by that name, and declares the white supremacist terrorists freedom fighters against fascist tyranny, even as the book ends by talking about how Hitler was great and we should follow his example and describing the terrorists’ new society as being even more brutally fascistic than the society they just overthrew. It sounds crazy because it is, but if you remember conservatives calling mask mandates during covid fascism and state control, it doesn’t seem so hard to believe. You can’t get through to a cryptofascist by pointing out their hypocrisy because they already wear that hypocrisy like armor.

• George Orwell
  • animal farm
  • 1984

++++

• Leon Trotsky’s
  • “The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects”.

And perhaps additionally:

• My life
• The Revolution Betrayed
• The Spanish Revolution, 1931–1939
• Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence

++++

• Joseph Stalin
  • “History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks)”

And perhaps additionally:

• Marxism and the national question

Hopefully you can then school everyone, including me, on Trotsky vs Stalin when talking about Orwell’s famous books.

I recommend doing the opposite. Read good texts and widely so that you can recognize the flaws in others’ rationales and school them when they try to pretend thst the Lexicon of one capitalist weirdo is somehow respectable. Some of this is philosophy but I would say that history and media criticism are even more important. Many arguments about “human nature” or how things should be vs. how they are are clouded by false histories and being unable to recognize manipulative thought processes.

Reading, say, Mein Kampf to learn about “the enemy” is of little value. “The enemy” didn’t become who they are because Hitler wrote a convincing book and you won’t argue them out of a position because you call them out when they quote it incorrectly or something. To understand Nazis you have to place them in their historical and political context. Who funded them? What was their class composition? Who opposed them and how? What were they a reaction to? And in modern times, who do they now appeal to? Are the mainstream cultural elements that overlap witg Naziism? Not just Trumpers, but mainstream liberals and “apoliticals”?

I would recommend starting with authors like David Graeber, Michael Parenti, Mike Davis, Michael Zinn, or Malcolm Harris for easier political-historical reads. To dive deeper you can read the texts they reference. And FAIR.org and the Citations Needes podcast for media criticism.

I skimmed Seej to see why neo-Nazis believed it was a game changer (skimmed, because it becomes very obvious very quickly that it’s not worth the paper it was printed on. A food wrapper is more informative)

It doesn’t explain much one already doesn’t pick up from its followers, there’s no real theoretical depth or rationale. It’s really just a syncretic mess that quotes revolutionaries from various movements , including anarchist and communist revolutionaries, as inspiration rather than actually understanding them. If anything, it just conclusively confirns how hollow that subculture is. It’s a characteristic of syncretic Franken-ideologies, they can have (for lack of the right word) populist appeal but won’t accomplish their goals no matter how hard they push. It’s like a kid trying to complete an exam by peeking at the other student’s essays on each desk around them, copying a few random sentences from each, not understanding that these sentences don’t mean much when taken away from their foundation. The few correct points (e.g. some remarks about police) are poorly reasoned and its ‘lessons’ can’t be generalized to synthesize correct ideas in other contexts. It’s ultimately glorifying a tactic history proved doesn’t work back in the 1900s, and the rallying cry in the conclusion is basically “just do things”.

By the way, the author has been charged with taking nude photos of a minor, which they vowed to get back from police, and for threatening an ex-girlfriend (underaged) and her boyfriend with a handgun, along with other charges of minor exploitation.

I’ve forced myself to read Mein Kampf, Atlas Shrugged, Imperialism by Lenin and various other political works from various philosophies. Do these count?

I’ve found many of them to be dry at best and abhorrent at worst (thanks Hitler).

None of them have changed my mind in drastic ways but have helped me understand the viewpoints of people I talk to.

Won’t be too much of a hate read like fountainhead, but most of Richard Dawkins work will have a large effect on your informity.

What did this friend say, I cant read a salacious lemmy post without precious details

There’s bound to be numerous Rand critiques written throughout the 20th c. just do a web search. Otherwise The School of Life on YT does good philosophy primers. Don’t forget Diogenes the cynic either