Premature Antifascism Redux

The DTRPG thing that happened a few weeks ago has since sunk beneath newer waves of controversy and internet turmoil and far-right activist chicanery, but I keep thinking about it. It touched a nerve with me, obviously, provoking me to bleat (or skeet, if you insist, you degenerates) more in one thread than I think I'd done in all my prior days on Bluesky. I've since lapsed back into relative social-media quietude, but I keep thinking about punching Nazis (and being told not to).

As I said then, I don't think it's crazy for small businesses to err on the side of caution in cases like this (I'm also sympathetic to itch.io in their recent mess; of course they could have communicated better and more promptly, but when somebody threatens essentially to cut off your revenue entirely, what can you do?). It is plausible, in these benighted times, that you might be brought up on terrorism charges, or God knows what else, for having committed (or abetted, or financially benefited from) “hate crimes against Republicans,” never mind that they aren't in any sense a protected class. Hate crimes against Christians, maybe. Against white people. Who knows!

At any rate, I stand by the rest of what I said too. DTRPG's defense of their actions was weaselly and dishonest, pretending that the preface to Rebel Scum was far more violent and inflammatory than it actually was. “We didn't want to get sued or prosecuted for hate crimes,” unfortunately, would be a valid position; these are bad times. But pretending that the whole thing was obviously dangerous and unhinged and beyond the pale sidestepped the real question. Another comprehensible response might be “We personally thought that the level of vitriol in this material was more than we were comfortable with.” Hard to argue with a personal opinion, right? And I'd rather have seen that answer than a dishonest one. I still wouldn't have liked it, though.

The crux of the issue, and the question they dodged: Is it time to take a stand against fascism, and if so, what does that look like? If not, when is the right time? Does it ever come? (The corollary, of course: Can you talk about it on the internet? Hopefully, yes, as long as you keep everything vague and hypothetical.)

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It's easy for me, a semi-anonymous schmuck with a blog that 40 people read, to call for people to be ready to man the barricades. People whose livelihoods depend on selling stuff from their small-business storefront? I understand why they'd prefer to keep a lower profile. But I think there's a broader cultural phenomenon at play here, something that's not easy to grapple with.

If you’re anything like me (i.e., the kind of nerd who’s been fascinated by the Spanish Civil War since he was a child), you are surely familiar with the concept of “premature antifascism.” In case you're not, though: American leftists who had gone to Spain to fight for the democratically elected government between 1936 and 1939 got tagged with this label even as, during the Second World War, leftism and antifascism were partially rehabilitated. The Soviet Union was an American ally and we briefly thought—or asserted to the public, at any rate—that communism was A-OK after all. But we still didn't trust people who'd been sympathetic to communism even back when the mainstream of American opinion leaned more toward sympathy with fascism and Nazism.

Somebody whose principles or internationalist political allegiances are stronger than his conformism and willingness to just do whatever his government tells him, right or wrong, is a problem. Somebody willing to break the law, whether for the purposes of revolutionary terrorism or good old American nonviolent civil disobedience, is a problem.

To wit: If you could go back in time and kill Hitler, when would be appropriate? We have the old “would you kill baby Hitler?” conundrum, of course. Nobody could believe how dangerous this baby would become; you'd be seen as a monster. But forget baby Hitler. What's the youngest adult Hitler you could step out of a time machine to bump off and not be tarred as a cold-blooded killer and commie terrorist? In 1940, sure, you'd be a hero—if you could get away alive. Even just two years earlier, though, in 1938, you'd be a much more ambivalent figure. Maybe it was for the best, people would say, but assassination? How uncivilized. What about 1933? What about 1928? You'd hang, of course.

We can't really talk about political violence, of course. I'm not going to propose that anybody break the law, and I'm certainly not going to propose that anybody do harm to anybody else. But we can at least talk about how we find ourselves in a cultural moment that demands ideological purity in art, but excuses the gravest moral cowardice in our real-world politics. And I don't mean the way we self-interestedly tiptoe around these real-world questions (and delist shit we might get sued or deplatformed over). I mean the way our ostensible opposition party dismisses everything the government does as a “distraction” while taking no action, the way our supposedly liberal media flatter our would-be dictator and downplay the enormity of his actions.

Meanwhile, art that asks people to sympathize with or identify with people who are morally compromised or who have done, or are planning to do, terrible things has never been met with more discomfort, even outright hostility. Each of us wants to believe that we're pure and good and uncompromised and would never countenance doing awful things nor admit any kind of ambivalence about the cause of righteousness. And yet here we are, watching the country sink into Nazism, and our resistance is haphazard, bewildered, ambivalent. Many people—many of the same people who want our movies, our games, our literature to outline a black and white morality, to present only flawless, pure-of-heart protagonists, are also dismayed that fascist politicians should be harassed in public or that awards shows taking blood money from war criminals should meet mild, measured censure.

“Games about punching Nazis are good, but when you start to talk about punching Nazis in real life, you've crossed a line” is a morally deranged position. In make believe, we should be comfortable trying on all sorts of positions (we murder and steal on the regular, in TTRPGs). It's in real life that we need to draw a line.

Ancestral Knowledge

So, like I said in the last post, I've been reading, and loving, Outcast Silver Raiders. One of the choices it makes that I'm enjoying is presenting the players with no racial (ancestry, species) options up front—everybody's a human by default. The game gives the GM a bunch of the trad demihuman options in the back of the book…but then actively discourages them from actually using those options. An all-human party makes a lot of sense for the Mythic North setting in particular (weird, grimdark 13th-century Scotland, more or less), but it also helps punch up any fantasy setting by making whatever non-humans the players encounter truly unusual and strange.

Besides, the menagerie of D&D demihumans, those intended for players and those intended as NPC foes alike, just isn’t very interesting. I'm not going to belabor this point too much (other and wiser folks have written at great length about it before), but they’re almost all just crude racialized exaggerations of real groups of people.

Most “monstrous” demihumans represent the Western archetype of the “savage.” They're primitive people hanging around on marginal land (swamps, jungles, mountains, caves, deserts) basically just waiting to be colonized or slaughtered. They might do a little raiding, a human sacrifice or two, or some quasi-cannibalism to remind us that they're evil (in case we don't have an alignment system to assure us that they're Evil), but mostly they're passive objects of imperial violence. They've often been given recognizable trappings of indigenous American cultures, or at least stereotypes thereof—feathers, tomahawks, blow guns, spear throwers, and so forth. Goblins, kobolds, and lizardmen fit into this category, among others. It's super racist!

Other monstrous demihumans, rather than being uncivilized savages, represent the anti-civilization of The Horde, threatening to turn the world upside-down and displace the point-of-view culture from its “rightful” place on top. Orcs, hogoblins, and their ilk get a bunch of cultural markers that suggest nomadic steppe people, particularly the Mongols (the centaurs of the Warcraft franchise are an especially ugly, heavy-handed example of this).

Several categories of “civilized” humanoids are just real human beings dressed up in fantasy trappings. Halflings and gnomes are basically “what if little people were magic?” (with an extra coat of racist paint on the halflings in WoTC's “they're also Romani” characterization). Dwarves are a bit of the same, although at least they have solid roots in folklore…although of course in contemporary fantasy fiction, their culture tends go heavy on a lazy mashup of Scottish and Jewish stereotypes.

In all these cases, one of the major problems is that there's little or no attempt to imagine demihumans as anything other than simplistic analogues for real groups of people. There tend to be few, if any, internal distinctions within the racial categories. Each group gets one pantheon, one language, maybe two cultures if they're lucky. (Sometimes, what should be a distinct culture gets spun off as an entirely different species.) Maybe a few different tribes, all of which behave more or less identically to each other. Some of the latter-day D&D ancestries have had sense enough to step away from “These guys are Mongols” or “These guys are Aztecs” analogies, but they still paint with a too-broad brush. Dragonborn? They're just some dudes, but with scales. Tabaxi? Well, they're naturally curious, of course. Meow.

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Okay, but what about the two most popular non-human 5E species? Elves and tieflings have been conspicuously absent from my diatribe. And why? Because they're actually pretty interesting, they're probably popular in part because they're interesting, and they show two good ways forward for character ancestry.

Elves have the important distinction of being older, wiser, haughtier, and generally better than humans. At least elves think so, and that makes them novel. Most D&D demihumans exist, both in the game and outside of it, for humans to dump on (and by extension for people in dominant real-world groups to dump on minorities). They're barbarians, savages, animals, misshapen creatures. Elves, on the other hand, look down on humans. Elves are smarter, more beautiful, better at magic. More cultured. More civilized. You can kind of map an envious awe of an older “race” by some young upstarts only recently emerged from barbarism onto, say, the 19th-/20th-century German (and Western European, more broadly) obsession with Greece and Rome, but it just doesn't work that neatly. Elves aren't Greeks or Romans. They're more complicated.

Much more complicated, in fact! They get real internal cultural differences. They get multiple languages. They get varied religious practices. It tends to be a bit thin, still, and it's mostly derived from Tolkien (so no need to give TSR or WotC any credit), but a few different elven nations and some kind of conflict among them is a lot better than halflings or orcs get. Elves are also distinct, surprisingly, for having real physiological differences from humans that actually matter in the game, like resting via trance rather than sleeping. They could certainly be weirder—if we stuck closer to their folkloric roots, they'd be stealing babies and drinking blood—but they're at least a little bit alien.

Tieflings represent the opposite end of the spectrum: not alien and strange like the elves of folklore, not merely foreign like the myriad demihumans who ought to just be replaced by distinct human cultures, but uncanny. Almost normal, almost like “us,” but off somehow. Tainted. Marked. Problematically literal infernal ancestry aside, tieflings are a richer and truer analogy for being a despised minority than the essentially antisemitic dwarven trope of “They’re hardworking and smart and by golly, they just love gold” or anything like it could ever be. To their neighbors, they almost seem like normal people, but something in their deep ancestry is different, wrong, corrupt. They can't be trusted. They're probably up to no good. And there are signs. Blood will out. (Aasimar, on the other hand, aren’t the least bit interesting, because they don't represent anything authentic or recognizable; nobody in real life ever believed that some particular racial other in their society was actually inherently better than them, and descended from angels no less.)

The Ends of the World

We're all freaking out, right? We're all coping in different ways. One of my least productive, most unhealthy ways of coping has been to trawl through some of the darker corners of Reddit not actually looking for concrete advice about how to arm myself or how to prepare myself for disaster but just sort of…window shopping for unhinged behavior. Determining that if I did belatedly decide to become a gun guy, I would get a Mini-14. That if I did decide to gird my proverbial loins for the crumbling of American society, I should have two months' worth of rice, beans, and water down in the basement.

That's right: I've been on r/preppers. And you know what? They have lots of good advice! Good advice about first aid training and water purification techniques and home gardening and lots of other stuff I intend to learn about. But you know what else they have? Well, yes, guns. Way too many guns. But also jargon! Jargon for days. More initialisms than the DoD. And there are several initialisms they particularly love that communicate something dark about the prepper mindset (and maybe about the American mindset in general): SHTF, WROL, TEOTWAWKI. These are when the Shit Hits The Fan, when we are living Without Rule Of Law, and The End Of The World As We Know It.

SHTF is a bit vague, kind of an all-purpose label for “things get bad enough that I actually get to put my preps into action.” Not so sinister on its own, but in light of what it turns out many preppers' strongest fixations are, the yearning for that moment starts to feel ugly. WROL is probably the most telling one, because “rule of law” actually means something, and it's not this—a society without rule of law is something we've struggled with, to a greater or lesser degree, for pretty much the entirety of civilization, or at least the part of civilizational history that actually aspired to establishing rule of law. We're definitely living without rule of law in the United States right now, in a particularly significant and dangerous way. But to the gun fetishists, the survivalists, the far-right fantasists, a state “without rule of law” is, in short, one where they get to shoot Black people without consequences. Or, excuse me, rioters and looters. Bandits. Criminals breaking into their houses.

It's an imagined emergency scenario that blends the fictions of postapocalyptic games and zombie shows with the quasi-history of the American frontier and decades of deranged right-wing news coverage. It's not something that has ever really happened in human history; periods of true anarchy tend to be extraordinarily short, because there's always some wannabe government (a barbarian tribe, a rebel general, a gang, a guerilla army, a crime syndicate, a militia) ready and willing to step in, for better or (usually) worse, when the preceding government recedes or collapses. Looting is something soldiers do in wartime; it's not something neighbors do to each other in emergencies, even prolonged ones. The preoccupation with “looters” and “scavengers” is closely tied to news coverage of American riots and natural disasters (as well as films, shows, and games that have reproduced the concept, often in even more lurid form), and that news coverage is propaganda. People steal the occasional TV, sure, but they mostly take essentials—food, sanitary products—that they have no other access to. And they take them from abandoned stores, not from each other, not from family homes.

But we have a lot of people yearning for this fantasy scenario, itching for a lawless state in which they can become the law (and gun down dangerous dark-skinned criminals). They keep dreaming even as actual rule of law dissolves and the Republic with it.

It's TEOTWAWKI that really gets me. Child of the 90s that I am, the phrase never fails to conjure up for me the REM classic “It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” and specifically the Roland Emmerich classic Independence Day. Alien invasion! The White House blowing up! Mass destruction across the world, governments decapitated, military forces obliterated. This is essentially what a lot of preppers seem to have in mind as TEOTWAWKI—maybe not the literal aliens, but some cataclysm that obliterates all governments and most of the world's population. Global nuclear war, or in recent years an impossibly virulent and deadly pandemic. A vanishingly improbable event that, if it does come, they will almost certainly not survive.

Meanwhile, the world is ending every day, in ways large and small. The change is usually gradual enough not to feel jarring, but the world never stops turning. Think back to just 10 years ago. How inconceivable did a Donald Trump regime and all its attendant absurdities and humiliations seem? Think back 25 years. Could anybody imagine the erosion of American hegemony, the failure of the new international order, imperialist or revanchist states invading each other across the globe in naked attempts to impose puppet regimes or seize territory? Go back 40 years. Forget the fall of the Soviet Union; who could have imagined the internet? Smartphones? Machine translation?

There's some worldbuilding advice here, something to keep in mind when putting a TTRPG campaign setting together: There is no such thing as global collapse. The Black Death didn't do it; nothing short of complete annihilation will. We will not reexperience the Dark Ages and see worldwide technological regression. (The supposed Dark Ages weren't really all that dark, anyway, even in Europe.) There's arguably not even such a thing as regional or civilizational collapse. The histories we have of collapse, of decline and fall, of civilizational ruin, are nearly all elite narratives. If you were a Roman patrician in 476 CE, the Ostrogothic conquest of the city surely felt like the end of the world. If you were a plebe, or a slave, you could have been forgiven for hardly having noticed. Local government didn't change. The Senate didn't go away. Everybody still spoke Latin. No perceptible catastrophe occurred. The world kept turning. It always does. Things change, and often for the worse, but often in dreary, grinding, unspectacular ways.

There are lulls in history, too, of course, but they're shorter and more contingent and more localized than you might think. The European Middle Ages, particularly in Western Europe—the basis for the traditional fantasy settings that underpin so much of the TTRPG world—seem fairly socially and technologically static to many contemporary observers, but at the same time than England and France were slogging through their Hundred Years' War and building the zillion frontier castles that dot our imagined fantasy landscapes, enormous changes were taking place as nearby as Iberia, and of course French and English people were sailing off to the Crusades (and extraordinary things were happening in the Americas, and in Africa, and in Asia).

And there are counterparts to even the relative lulls. “There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen,” as Lenin actually probably never did say. The shit is mostly definitely hitting the fan now. None of us were prepared.