"we're inclusive and accepting!" says #gamergate, before drawing racist caricatures of women they dislike. pic.twitter.com/zbFnWBOmdn
— Sarah Nyberg (@srhbutts) November 1, 2014
The other day, I posted a screenshot of an 8chan comment featuring the drawing above, a crude caricature of Anita Sarkeesian that’s a not-very-subtle variation on a racist and anti-Semitic cartoon that originally ran in a neo-Nazi newspaper.
Here’s the original, in all its crapitude:
Let’s face it! That is one fucking awful cartoon.
Now, if that picture — or at least the grinning fellow on the left — looks familiar, it’s because he’s been that’s turned into a meme (“Le Happy Merchant”) that’s proven popular with 4channers and Stormfronters alike.
Given that GamerGate itself has its origins on 4chan — and in an IRC channel populated mostly bey 4channers — it shouldn’t come as a complete shock that #GamerGaters, some of whom refer to Sarkeesian as “Jewkeesian,” have repurposed the image into a caricature of one of their most hated foes. Sarkeesian isn’t actually Jewish, but for whatever reason this doesn’t seem to faze her anti-Semitic non-admirers.
GamerGaters like to claim that this sort of bigotry “isn’t what GamerGate is really about,” and that anti-Semites and other bigots are fringe elements in their movement, if not “false flagging” feminazi shills trying to make GamerGate look bad. Here, one GamerGater makes that point with as much sarcasm as he can muster:
https://twitter.com/JakALope044/status/525839519161917440
This would be a much more convincing argument if GamerGaters weren’t so quick to excuse and/or explain away the anti-Semitic imagery every time it rears its ugly head.
Here’s one active GamerGater who wants everyone to know that, actually, it’s about ethics in game journalism.
https://twitter.com/SlushStuff/status/524266371069517824
But she has a pretty unusual notion of what “not hate” is, given that she posted this picture several days later:
This lovely little drawing combines the racist caricature of Sarkeesian with another bit of neo-Nazi propaganda that’s been floating around the internet for a while, and which had already been repurposed as an anti-Muslim comic. In other words, @SlushStuff has posted a mashup of a neo-Nazi cartoon that’s already been used in another bigoted mashup.
We can’t blame @SlushStuff’s glee in posting this on her ignorance of the sources of the cartoon in question; she’s well aware that the picture is based on anti-Semitic propaganda. She just thinks this isn’t a problem, because reasons.
https://twitter.com/SlushStuff/status/526342650375704576
https://twitter.com/SlushStuff/status/526396368609615872
Then again, @SlushStuff doesn’t seem to have a problem with straight-up racism either.
https://twitter.com/SlushStuff/status/521793824621088770
This is a common reaction amongst GamerGaters when confronted with this particular work of, er, art. When srh, who tracks GamerGate bigotry on Twitter, posted the tweet at the top of this post, here are some of the reactions she got, in a seemingly unending discussion that extended over hundreds of tweets. (These aren’t all successive tweets; see here for the whole thread.)
Yep. That’s right. A guy whose avatar is a white dude in an American Indian headdress (comedian Jim Norton, FWIW) is lecturing people about what is and what isn’t racism.
At this point I “noped” out of reading the rest of the thread before my head exploded from all the nonsense.
GamerGate claims to have an anti-harassment squad, but when someone posts caricatures of Anita Sarkeesian that are not just inspired by but probably literally traced from Nazi propaganda, these are the guys who show up.
To quote the robot bartender in The Fifth Element, do you want some more?
Here’s more.
After one anti-GamerGater posted a screenshot of Mary’s post featuring Sarkeesian painting fake threats on a wall, one #GamerGater had this response.
Here yet another GamerGater claims that the caricature is mocking Sarkeesian, so therefore it can’t be anti-Semitic:
https://twitter.com/NappalmSam/status/526385714968428544
Oh, wait, is this yet another GamerGater making the same terrible “argument?” Why yes, it is:
I ask #gamergate why they are condoning/reposting Ann anti Semitic cartoon. They respond: Jews Are Not A Race pic.twitter.com/Ef1mhYw6Dy
— Joshua Idehen (@joshuaidehen80) October 26, 2014
And, oh, it gets weirder. Here a GamerGater responding to a critic who was pointing out an instance of GamerGaters using “Le Happy Merchant” in an infographic … by suggesting he was “Jew-shaming.”
https://twitter.com/emvarez_dota/status/526379494580695041
And here’s a GamerGater who uses “Le Happy Merchant” as his fucking avatar … accusing Sarkeesian of anti-Semitism. And spelling it wrong.
I could keep going, but after this, is there any point?
Bottom of the barrel, consider yourself scraped.
EDIT: Added more info on the source of that second Sarkeesian cartoon.
Esoteric.
Hitlerism.
http://tancafeconleche.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/wv964g.jpg
Esoteric Hitlerism? Is that, like, we find new and exciting minorities to oppress?
It’s like Naziism but fresh, I guess?
Falconer, thank you. I couldn’t even think of an image for that one!
Reminded me of this Twilight Zone: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0734572/
Maybe it’s when you use really obscure new age crap as your excuse for persecuting people.
I will never understand how someone could think, “Oh, yeah, I should totally emulate Hitler.”
I mean, seriously, what?!
Is this SlushStuff an actual woman or a sock puppet? If so, what a sad waste of a vagina. I hope she never reproduces.
You know, our culture can really create a disconnect between the idea of Hitler/the Nazis and the actual historical person. We filter him through the lens of all the media he’s appeared in, from Downfall parodies to Hellsing to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade to Castle Wolfenstein, so I think it’s very easy for people, especially young people, to come away with the impression of a movie villain rather than a real person.
So my hypothesis is that for a lot of these young internet neo-Nazis who don’t come from white supremacist backgrounds, they think Hitler is awesome in the way you might think Darth Vader is awesome. You know, he was really good at being bad and all the uniforms were super stylish looking and what not. But I suspect they don’t really see the difference between liking a movie villain who fake-killed lots of people and liking an actual person who actually killed lots of people.
At any rate, even the ones who really, sincerely believe all the Nazi ideology certainly act like it’s all a make-believe game that could never affect the real world.
A waste of a vagina? Srsly?
Not a human being. Just a body part. Creepy shit going on there.
Yeah, I mean, why can’t that vagina be put to better use?
You’re creepy, ktrantingredhead. Either be less creepy or go be creepy somewhere else.
Waste of a vagina? Ewww. Yeah. No. No. Nope.
Ick. Ick, ick, ick.
Also, hello transphobia. A vagina doth not a woman make.
How can a body part be wasted, exactly? Well, apart from brains, we’ve all seen how MRAs and assorted fuckwits waste those. But for other bits, it’s a rather baffling idea.
But Kittehs, any vagina that ktrantingredhead doesn’t want to put his dick into (because it’s attached to a woman he doesn’t find fuckable) is clearly wasted. Because the only reason for women to exist is as vagina-carriers for ktrantingredhead to fuck.
The level of entitled objectifying homophobic and transphobic misogyny is astounding.
also great sense of priorities there, ktrantingredhead. Sure @SlushStuff is a racist asshat but let’s concentrate on how that affects her fuckability. Not, you know, the people she is harassing and offending.
Slow down, people. ktrantingredhead is a woman, and her previous posts haven’t been remotely trolly. Yes, I side-eye the vagina comment completely, but I’m guessing it’s a misfired joke.
Also, can we not make every thread about trans or not trans? Two explosions on that subject in a short time are more than enough.
I apologise, ktrantingredhead, for the assumption and for my conclusions.
Seems like a comment that sounded better in ktrantingredhead’s mind than it did in print.
This comes from an ugly place, ktrantingredhead. Why would it occur to you to sexualize a stranger woman in this fashion? I don’t see you similarly sexualizing the male tweeters, and calling them wastes of penises. It wouldn’t be okay to do that, but it’s weird that you reserve this sexualization for the person identified as a woman.
Re: Esoteric Hitlerism
That’s a thing, and it’s not new. Google Miguel Serrano, Savitri Devi or Julius Evola. It’s actually quite popular with some Neonazis because it gives them an excuse to say “I’m not really a Nazi, I follow this particular philosophy that’s different from historic National Socialism.”
The historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke has written an exhaustive and accessible book about the different connections between occultism and Neonazism after ’45 (Black Sun).
Re: emulating Hitler
A Zambian friend of mine, whom I bring books when I visit, once requested Mein Kampf. When I asked him why he wanted to read such convoluted racist crap, he told me that he thought he could separate the racism from genuinely good information about how to become a leader.
Btw, I found this article on the tactics of Gamergaters and where they (might) come from quite informative:
http://designislaw.tumblr.com/post/100651306295/the-gamification-of-terror-manufacturing-gamergates
Literal. Nazis.
He was also white, surrounded himself with tall blondes, and killed mainly people who are easy targets for hate, like Jews, gays and Roma.
cassandrakitty-
That’s what the worst of the atheist community and the Gamergators have in common. Heck, what they have in common with a lot of racist and nativist movements as well. This all consuming assumption that they own something, whether it be an identity, a hobby, or a country and that filthy others are trying to pollute that with unwanted other stuff through the crime of existing in that thing (identity, hobby, country). This is proof of a great threat and a great theft of what is “theirs” deserving in kind a proportional response of violence and elimination of the “threat” that is going to change the thing into something they hardly recognize anymore (aka, mostly the same, but occasionally acknowledging minority voices and thus stronger for not being based in hate and denialism anymore).
Overall, I think the whole structure and its entitled repetition really hammers home the heavy cost we pay as a society for letting rich white cis het dudes be treated as the default identity. They’ve been shown all their life that the world revolves around them and they should expect absolute dominance of everything they touch and eventually the world has to respond to the reality of people’s diversity and suddenly the people who have been petted and told they are the world are filled with entitled rage at no longer being treated as the entirety of whatever their thing is.
Mix that toxicity with already existing toxicities (rich white male atheists who want all the benefits of a racist classist sexist society, but not to be inconvenienced for their lack of religious beliefs, gamers viewing their hobby as an alternative means to establish “masculinity” for toxic masculinity, or nativism) and you’ve pretty much have why all these movements are appalling and vile to the max.