Don’t Harsh on My Genocidal Fantasies!

I posted a piece over at Splice Today earlier this week about Priest, in which I pointed out that it’s a giant racist piece of crap. And, on cue, commenters have gone ape shit. Check this one out, for example:

If we can’t make a movie with a fictional being or group being the bad guy without being called racist we’re all doomed.

There’s much more along those lines. Click over if you can stomach it.

4 thoughts on “Don’t Harsh on My Genocidal Fantasies!”

No time to write further right now, but your basic premise is pretty solid.

Those comments are priceless.

But how dare you suggest that the Bard is racist! Shakespeare can’t be racist because I like his plays!

One of the Splice Today comments:

——————–
disposable
Racism is a by-product from the age old Us. Vs. Them mentality. Just because a story uses that particular phenomenon of human nature, doesn’t mean it’s Racism with a capital R…
——————–

That a story uses the “Us. Vs. Them mentality” actually indicates it’s plugging in, consciously or not, into the very same root of racism itself.

I’d always been troubled by how making an enemy group vampires, sub-human mutants, and such, thereby made it OK for fictional heroes to pursue genocidal policies against them.

A tactic brilliantly satirized — along with many SF tropes — by Norman Spinrad in his “The Iron Dream”:

——————–
The book has a nested narrative that tells a story within a story. On the surface, the novel presents an unexceptional pulp, post-apocalypse science fiction action tale entitled Lord of the Swastika. However, this is a pro-fascist narrative written by an alternate-history Adolf Hitler, who in this timeline emigrated from Germany to America… [becoming] a successful science fiction writer, telling lurid, purple-prosed adventure stories under a thin SF-veneer. Spinrad was intent on demonstrating just how close Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces — and much science fiction and fantasy literature — can be to the racist fantasies of Nazi Germany…
——————–
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Dream

As an old SF fan, it’s worth mentioning there’s a world of difference between thoughtful SF, which is fascinated by and even encourages empathy with and understanding of exceedingly strange cultures and beings, such as the Mesklinites of Hal Clement’s “A Mission of Gravity,” “centipede-like intelligent beings about 50 centimeters in length” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Clement ), with one ideal of alien characters being, in the words of famed and influential SF editor/writer John W. Campbell, “something that thinks as well as a man, but not like a man”…

…and the entertaining but brainless “cowboys in space” stuff; with blasters taking the place of six-guns, rockets instead of Ol’ Paint, and lots of robots and aliens kidnapping/menacing lovely human women!

http://www.philippalmer.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/3-1.jpg

http://daleksinmanhattan.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Earle-Bergey-Startling-Stories-Jan-1950.jpg

http://xa2.xanga.com/c5ec832567735194786772/b150352980.jpg

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_7HqO4e1M-Aw/S7_IuoeVE5I/AAAAAAAAD7M/xzlxI2QxWNU/s1600/startling_stories_194809.jpg

http://inlinethumb60.webshots.com/39675/2175965870103494218S500x500Q85.jpg

http://destroyingmyart.typepad.com/destroying_my_art/images/italiapulp.jpg

http://manifestfuture.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/post-540-11910969551.jpg?w=420&h=546

Oh, and there’s “King Kong,” of course…

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_2InR-3SoDus/TLFTjLtJ6WI/AAAAAAAAAIE/GNxV2Nj5x3E/s1600/1935_10_spicyadv.jpg

Ooops, wait, that’s not SF! Thus, no similarity whatsoever to the covers above.

(From a site featuring “Yet Even More Pulp Covers that Figure in a Study of Race in America”: http://textmex.blogspot.com/2010/10/yet-even-more-pulp-covers-that-figure.html )

Now, this I like!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Planet_Stories_March_1951_cover.jpg
(And she’s a redhead, too! *Swoon*)