Category: justice

This Blog Is Anti-Fascist

September 11, 2021 / / 1 Comment

And anti-Nazi too.

Awhile back, I discovered dungeon synth and thought it was super-cool. The Italian punk label HDK put out cool tapes (Kobold, Gnoll, Basic Dungeon), and I thought, “Hey! This is fun RPG music I can listen to and get inspired!”

Then the YouTube algorithm led me to other bands: Fief, Thangorodrim,  Elador, Quest Master, Midnight Odyssey. I was digging all this new, evocative music.

But just the other day I stumbled (whilst looking up RPG stuff) onto a Reddit thread where people were talking about the Neo-Nazi, Neo-fascist dungeon synth scene and I was like, “Whoa! What?!” and started feeling all icky and gross because what if I had been listening to some disgusting fascist crap?

So now I am trying to research every album that popped up on YouTube and finding very little information about most of these bands. From what I can tell Fief and Thangorodrim are anti-fascist. And the stuff from HDK seems like leftist/anarchist; no Nazi stuff there, from what I can tell.

But I don’t feel safe listening to this genre anymore. It’s hard to find info about a lot of these bands, and I don’t want to listen to anything even remotely connected with racist or fascist ideology. I think HDK is still okay, especially considering they are more punk/diy/arthouse and seem to be coming at dungeon synth from the left. But it’s incredibly frustrating and upsetting that what seems like an innocuous subgenre of electronic music is very much attached to horrific Nazi stuff.

So just an explicit announcement: this blog is anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-Nazi, anti-white supremacy. From now on, I will probably leave off listening to most dungeon synth and just groove to old soundtracks from 80s movies.

“Replacing the objective of growth”

January 29, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Consider, for example, the distance between our need to protect and regenerate Mother Earth and an economic model that regards growth at any cost as its prime objective.

Of course, some regions — very underdeveloped areas, or countries recovering from war — need their economies to grow rapidly to meet their people’s basic needs. But in the wealthier parts of the world, the fixation with constant economic growth has become destabilizing, producing vast inequalities and putting the natural world out of balance. Unlimited expansion of productivity and consumption assumes human dominance over creation, but the environmental disaster it has brought about has shattered the assumptions of that thinking. We are part of creation; we do not own it: to some extent, it owns us; we cannot live apart from it. This crisis or breach is a sign of our time.

The disruption of Covid has turned the tables, inviting us to stop, alter our routines and priorities, and to ask: What if the economic, the social, and the ecological challenges we face are really different faces of the same crisis? What if they have a common solution? Could it be that replacing the objective of growth with that of new ways of relating will allow for a different kind of economy, one that meets the needs of all within the means of our planet?

Pope Francis, Let Us Dream, p. 60

“Kick out the devil’s sin, pick up a good book now”

January 7, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Right now, all I want to do is sit back and listen to the new LPs I got for Christmas. Just listen and close my eyes and let the music absorb into me. I’m exhausted. Burned out by the craziness. Fed up with authoritarians and conspiracy mongers and fascists. Tired of everything. I just want to escape for a few hours into something beautiful, something resonant and good.

Art, music, literature, cinema — all of these provide sustenance. They can be “escapism” in a sense, but as Tolkien noted, the ones most threatened by escape are the jailers. I don’t want to be imprisoned in the small-minded, selfish, petty, arrogant, racist country that the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol yesterday want to build. The country they want to build is a nightmare world, a world where might makes right, where selfishness and bullying and entitlement rule the day, where votes don’t matter only the will to power. So I’ll escape from that hellhole, if I can. And if that means listening to Tea for the Tillerman or Tales from Topographic Oceans for an hour, just to escape, then that’s what I’m gonna do. Then I’m gonna go read a book.

Being Whole Life

June 5, 2020 / / 0 Comments

As a Catholic, it angers me to no end when I see certain (white) Catholics in America dismissing the Black Lives Matter movement, as if the issue of racial justice isn’t something we as Catholics need to worry about. “What about abortion?” many of these folks often retort. I do believe that abortion is an evil, and that we need to work to help women not choose abortion, but being against abortion doesn’t mean we can’t also be against racism. I mean, this isn’t hard, people! Racism = evil. Systematic racism = evil. This is Catholic social teaching 101.

And yet, there are some Catholics in the U.S. who always want to put a stop to any discussion about injustice or oppression by saying, “What about abortion?” As if that’s all we need to worry about. No other problems here, folks! No siree!

The Church’s teachings about the dignity of the human person, it’s teachings about the sanctity of life, it’s teachings about justice: all of these things compel us, as Catholics, to do something about racism, to do something about inequality, to do something about violence perpetrated against marginalized people. If the person in the womb matters, then so do black lives.

Pope’s Francis’s words should be ringing in the ears of every American Catholic today:

“My friends, we cannot tolerate or turn a blind eye to racism and exclusion in any form and yet claim to defend the sacredness of every human life,” [the pope] said on Wednesday.

I hope that this moment can be a turning point for my fellow Catholics, especially those who don’t see the need to fight for racial justice. I know that I too need to do more. We are called upon to do this work. And if we don’t, we will be judged for it.

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Copyright 2015 Chloe Bensinger

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