Native American History isn’t a Meme
One of the new memes in my corner in the woods tries to put a comic angle on the current situation with illegal immigrants in Europe which is so tasteless and vulgar that it must be the work of either an ignorant bigot or someone with a political agenda. It looks like a double burger of racism: we see a photo of native Americans carrying rifles with the line “we also had problems with immigrants, now we live in reservations” right underneath. You don’t need a high IQ to see who the “we” refers to. It’s the perfect example of twisting a historical narrative to match your own. The predicament of Native Americans after the arrival of Europeans settlers is not a secret. By now, their tragic history is common knowledge and rightly so. However, this recontextualisation hides darker undertones that have nothing to do with satire. Primarily because the immigrant crisis is not a joke. It doesn’t really matter some of us treat it as if it were one indeed.
Judging by the prevalent discourse in populist media, we live in a real-life version of Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission. The book garnered quite a bit of notoriety with the vision of a future where European secularism is overthrown by Islam. He highlited cultural prejudices of nationalists who feel threatened by an imminent change at the very gates of fortress Europe the walls of which are slowly starting to crumble. I’m sure most of the people who share racist memes like the one above have no idea who Michel Houellebecq is in the first place and haven’t read any of his books. Maybe Submission would be on their reading list along with Mein Kampf. Of course, seriously comparing the two is a mistake on quite a few levels, not least because the French author isn’t trying to establish a new world order based on genocide and persecution of scapegoats. Quite the contrary, he’s a wealthy weirdo with a penchant for raising eyebrows.
Social media and other various news outlets are filled to the brim with the conflict between Israel and Palestine while still trying to keep up with what’s going on in the Ukraine. It’s all very overwhelming and makes you want to hide in a comfy cocoon with nothing but an endless supply of warm cocoa, a blanket and feel-good streaming. Just when you think you’re far enough from the noise you get dragged back into the eye of the storm. The exhaustion and excitement of the whole thing kills your empathy trigger sooner or later. Or to quote a character from Agatha Christie’s novel The Clocks: “when you see what I saw in the Great War, you know that a dead man is nothing to be scared of.” I still remember staying at a hotel in Berlin when a fire alarm went off in the middle of the night. I only managed to grab my phone and passport, while a friend managed to drag her whole suitcase down to the reception desk. War taught her how to do it, she said.
The immense cacophony and clash of ideological echo chambers makes it difficult to navigate the current crisis from an outsider’s perspective. When people take sides, they easily subscribe to certain things they’d never endorse. I’m referring to Queers for Palestine, an absurd idea due to the fact that those same people aren’t exactly welcome in Palestine. An article in the Jerusalem Post mentions a Pew Research according to which 93% of the Palestinian population is completely opposed to homosexuality, a percentage among the highest in the world. It has also been named by Forbes as one of the worst countries in the world for LGBTQ+ travelers. That’s why, as a gay guy myself, I find it ignorant at best and masochistic at worst to show support for a system that’s explicitly homophobic like this. It gets easily lost in the greater picture where you don’t see the forest from the trees. That’s the difference between hypocrisy and blatant ignorance.
The uncomfortable truth is that few people are capable of talking about a hot topic like this without picking a side and sticking to it no matter what. It shows our tribal instinct overdosed on steroids. Opposing voices tend to be confronted or ignored altogether. A great example was Slavoj Žižek’s speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair which turned out to be highly controversial due to his intent to approach the issue from a historical context where Israel itself isn’t exactly as clean as a whistle either. It was compared with the situation in the Gaza throughout the years and their historical experience. He drew a connection between Israel’s settlement policy and Hamas ideology of annihilation which sparked angry reactions from the audience, according to a DW article by Elizabeth Grenier.
Postponing the award ceremony for Palestinian author Adania Shibli ruffled quite a few international feathers, especially in the literary scene. To be honest, I have no idea who she is. What I do know is that she’s really of no importance in this scandal. The jury’s decision to award her was a political statement in itself that mirrors many things that don’t necessarily have anything to do with literature. If it weren’t her, it would be someone else and it still wouldn’t matter. Coincidentally, I won a major literary award in Slovenia in 2014 and the following laureate turned out to be Ukrainian. At the time, Russian annexation of Crimea was in full swing. Of course, this by no means diminishes the valuable work of Kateryna Kalytko which I had the pleasure to meet and share the stage with back then. She’s very engaged in spreading the work about the situation in her country through her writing. She also didn’t need a ride, just a keyboard.
Language can convey many things and fool us into seeing something that’s not necessarily there. This what the meme with the armed Indians is about. Those people weren’t bigoted, racist simpletons afraid of people who were supposedly about to wipe out their whole way of life and turn their communities into colonies. Some of these voices come from countries whose racist legacy is so cruel that its atrocities reverberate to this day. Their melodramatic apologies for crimes of the past walk the fine line between pathetic populist kitsch and performative surface-scratching that’s little more than a good photo opportunity, as witnessed in Sydney, where the word “sorry” was spelled out in the air as a symbol of reckoning with the colonial blood they spilled, instead of a patronising moral autofellatio. We’ve seen it often enough so there’s no use in dissecting it all over again.
You might have an illegal rifle in your posession but that doesn’t make you a Native American. Rather an idiot who reads into their history whatever he sees fit and cherrypicks appropriate parts to double down on his rhetoric, however inappropriate the name might be for inarticulate ramblings of people who look for information in the depths of dark conspiracy holes all over the internet. But at least Fox News can help you deal with bad digestion. However constipated you are, it’s so full of shit that your own will be flying out before you can grab a piece of toilet paper. The holy trinity of American populism consists of Donald Trump, Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan. Primarily because more often than not, the target audience of one equally appeals to the other two. In Europe Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orban are self-appointed guardians of the galaxy, anointed by the masses to deal with intruders that want their jobs and country for themselves.
In the grand scheme of things, those that object so much to the changes in Europe are either completely shielded from it or at the bottom of the food chain, afraid they’ll lose the benefits they’re relying on. Instead, they should see this for what it is: the pie is growing bigger and we need more plates, but the oven doesn’t work as good as it used to. There’s a myriad of factors that brought us to this point of no return, we might as well try to adjust as good as we can. Demagogues can try but won’t be able to stop the flood of immigrants that’s now hitting the continent. We should finally cut the crap with racist memes since the world is already dotted with a special kind of modern reservations: gated communities for the wealthy and privileged, with valets, security staff and cameras all over the place.
Whatever happens in the future those douchebags are so scared of, it won’t be as severe as you might think: those at the bottom of the barrel will likely stay there and vice versa. If you’re scraping for leftovers, it’s of no consequence who they belonged to unless they covered with gold dust. But you’d have to take a dip in an Arab oil barrel to find those. That’s one of the few upsides of liberal capitalism: money doesn’t wear a hijab or a crucifix, but something much more important: the pricetag of your soul. Don’t believe for a moment nationalist crusaders care for whatever they profess their identity to be. They just don’t want to share the perks. Even if you say you don’t really have any of those, trust me. You do. Those with nothing to lose don’t have anything worth keeping. If you really have a problem with immigrants, follow Žižek’s example and have a look in the mirror. Because that kind of issue is like an underwhelming blowjob: it always takes two.
