“YOU’VE BEEN DRINKING POISONED WATER FROM THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH…”

[fpb]

By now, all my friends, as well as a very large number of people who will never be my friends, know that I have a kind of gift for online brawls and battles. I once made carlanime laugh by remarking that there was something unnatural about having a great big online brawl without me. That was a joke; in point of fact I am not particularly happy about this, but it is a fact, and I am hardened to it.

Not everyone, however, may be aware that there are times when the opposite is the case: where, having come to conclusions that I really thought would offend readers and bring about major rows, having effectively steeled myself for ferocious opposition, rage, insults -- I found supposedly incendiary arguments simply sink into an ocean of silence, or perhaps receive a few unconcerned remarks from people who could not see what the fuss was. This can be a deflating experience, and on the whole is not much more pleasant than being covered with insults; at least the latter means that someone takes an interest in what you said.

Of all such experiences, by far the most surprising to me is the repeated lack of interest that has greeted three versions of an essay originally printed on my old fanzine THE COMICS IRREGULAR , reprinted here: http://fpb.livejournal.com/883.html , and reworked here: http://fpb.livejournal.com/195754.html . Each time I published it I did so in fear and dread, but also determined that the horrific interpretation I proposed had to be put before some sort of public; and each time the reaction was a yawn – if it went so far. Of all the readers I had, only the then patchworkmind, now affablestranger, seemed to catch and agree with my meaning. Each time, I felt like a man who had tried to rouse my neighbours to wonder and terror, only to find that everyone found it perfectly normal and of no great interest to have an enormous and very angry-looking elephant in the room.

For the record and in no uncertain terms, the thesis I proposed in those essays was that the doctrine that underlay the X-Men franchise, not from its very beginning, but certainly from about Uncanny X-Men #141 (the “Days of Future Past” two-parter), is a variant of Nazism. Not just racism, not just historicism, but Nazism, plain and simple. Consider:
- human beings are divided between genetically superior (homo superior) and genetically inferior races.
- The ultimate goal of mankind is to evolve, and therefore
- anyone who for any reason interferes with the evolution of mankind is in the wrong and must be stopped. However,
- groups that are incapable of evolution themselves somehow feel and resent their inferiority, and are therefore ridden with fear and hatred for the numerically smaller bearers of a glorious future. This is the exact reason why Nazis supposed Jews and other “genetically inferior” races to hate them, plot against them, attempt to destroy their genetic purity, and in general to be enemies that must be faced and defeated.

I am saying that the most popular superhero franchise in modern America has a black ideological core. I am saying that the spirit we thought crushed under the ruins of whole nations and drowned in oceans of blood has been reborn, while nobody was looking, in the very heart of American popular culture. I am saying that Sauron sits near the throne of Numenor and whispers in the King’s ear. Is this not something that should concern us?

The appalling idea of genetic evolutionism had already been introduced to the Marvel Universe before Len Wein and Chris Claremont resurrected the X-Men. It was invented by Roy Thomas and Steve Englehart – the representatives of the hippy generation among Marvel authors – and used to explain the obsession of two cosmic empires for distant little Earth. The reason why the Skrull and Kree Empires were so obsessed with Earth is that they both represented evolutionary dead ends, and somehow hoped that the humans of earth, who still had the potential to evolve, would provide some sort of way out of their predicament. To Thomas and Englehart, however, it was mankind as a whole that was superior to these imagined and remote Empires. They had resurrected the Nazi image of the Jew in his resentment, his native inferiority, his nevertheless colossal and far-flung power; but they had done so on a wholly imaginary level, to underline the exalted and glorious nature of mankind itself. This was a standard hippy idea (remember Up With People?) which Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams treated with some force in Uncanny X-Men #69, of all places, where Professor X gathers the mental force of all human beings on Earth, and defeats an alien army with the sheer power of polychromous, many-faced humanity.

When Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (both Jews) conceived X-Men, they had no idea of making evolution as such a moral issue. To the contrary, Kirby – the one of the two who was most interested in the issue of genetic mutation – repeatedly said that genetic change made no difference to the moral issues of human life. As he said in his last strip on the matter, Silver Star, “Man by any other name is nothing more than his old sweet self”; what changes is the amount of power available, not the natural history of good and evil. Kirby would have agreed with Chesterton and Tolkien:

"Reason and justice grip the remotest and the loneliest star. Look at those stars. Don't they look as if they were single diamonds and sapphires? Well, you can imagine any mad botany or geology you please. Think of forests of adamant with leaves of brilliants. Think the moon is a blue moon, a single elephantine sapphire. But don't fancy that all that frantic astronomy would make the smallest difference to the reason and justice of conduct. On plains of opal, under cliffs cut out of pearl, you would still find a notice-board, `Thou shalt not steal.'"
(from The Blue Cross)

“How shall a man judge what to do in such times?”
“As he has ever judged. Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a Man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.”
(from The Two Towers, bk.3, ch.2, The Riders of Rohan)

I do not think it is exaggerated to say that this sort of view, coming from the Jew Kirby or from the Catholics Chesterton and Tolkien, is in absolute contradiction with the basic notion of the Marvel mutant ideology. For the central point of the latter is that, since mutants have appeared on earth, the quality and content of moral choices really has changed. Morality really is one thing among homo sapiens without mutants, and quite another in the relationship of homo sapiens with mutants; or, if you will, one thing among Men and another in the dealings of Men and Elves. The poisonous step taken by Claremont was to bring down to earth, and place among men themselves, the imaginary distinction between imaginary alien races unable to evolve and a real mankind that is. Men are distinguished between mutants and those who hate mutants; and the hatred for mutants is something instinctive, unreasonable, repulsive.

Marvel’s mutant genetic evolutionism is a kind of Calvinist heresy of the all too well known fad of Eugenics. While Eugenics is in principle will-centred – if we do such and such, the race will improve – Mutant evolutionism is inevitabilist: the race will inevitably improve, unless we do such and such. The premise that the improvement of the race is a good thing is the common point. However, the theory as such is secondary: what matters is that it is the pseudo-scientific version of a mentality, not the root of the mentality itself. Karl Popper and CS Lewis called it Historicism; but I think that the man who came closest to its essence was, as so often, G.K.Chesterton, who spoke of “the [Prussian] vice… which is to regard success not as an incident but as a quality” – as something that is inborn in you. What, if not this, did it mean to suggest that one’s race was the height of human evolution, and the channel through which further evolution was to come? You are born into the race of the successful, the race through which further evolution is to come. (Of course, this is roughly as scientific as Stan Lee’s superhero stories – which, in turn, are a scary indication of what an intelligent, articulate middle-class American of the mid-twentieth century thought scientific. I wonder whether the public at large has ever understood science. They certainly did not understand Evolution; the misconception of it having anything to do with progress is almost universal.)

The opposite term to this idea of evolution/progress/improvement is not stability or even stagnation: it is vicious regress. Claremont lives in an imagined America full of murderous mobs ready to pour on the streets to hunt down and murder anyone they perceive as “different”. Such an America has indeed existed in the past, but even then as a minority grouping, largely in the rural south; and it was dying out even in Claremont’s youth – hunted, broken and finally made impotent by the great FBI campaign of the sixties against the Ku Klux Klan. Claremont does not acknowledge either fact: his monster-America may be found everywhere (particularly, I have the impression, in suburban areas) and has no time dimension whatever. Far from being in retreat or in any way defeated, it waits to be unleashed at every street corner. To him, they are ever-present, ever real. He does not have to argue that there is an innate tendency in homo sapiens to hate and fear that which is superior; he just has to parade images of lynch mob violence, of twist-faced spit-mouthed racism, of raving group brutality, and he feels the point is made. He grew up with these images, after all; they were still a live problem in the American fifties and sixties. He is haunted by them: as repulsively alien, as uncomprehending, as it is incomprehensible to him. One can envisage him as a young man, watching on TV (he is hardly likely to have met them in person!) these people who are supposed to be his fellow-countrymen, speaking the same language, under the same laws – behaving in this wholly alien way.

It is of course all too easy to point out the flaws in Claremont’s conception. The KKK’s hatred was, no doubt, a reactionary and destructive element; but that does not mean that its objects were in any special way endowed with the chrism of evolution. The connection between American blacks fighting to be treated like any other free person, and mutants incarnating the road to the future, and destined to supersede Homo Sapiens, simply does not exist, and indeed, if stated in so many words, is nothing but ridiculous. Nobody imagines a future world in which a superhuman black race will replace the current run of mankind. Far from reacting to a perceived threat of obliteration from a more powerful and promising race, the KKK and its supporters were disgusted at the idea that what they regarded as inferior should be treated as their equal. Their reaction was based on an injured self-love that demanded that blacks (and, originally, Jews and Catholics) should be kept in permanent inferiority, so as not to challenge their self-image. What they opposed was not evolution, but equality – another of those permanent principles which, as Chesterton said, grip the remotest and the loneliest star.

And this points out another important feature of Claremont’s nightmare America. Claremont was not black, Jewish, or even Catholic; nothing in his writing suggests familiarity with the favoured targets of KKK hate and prejudice. However, there can be no doubt that he regards that kind of world as directly hostile to him. The fear and hate embodied in his stories leave no doubt that he regards them as a personal threat. That is not the way someone like me would regard the KKK, or any of the other murderous movements and conspiracies that left their bloody tracks across history. My attitude is one of indignation, even anger, but, in a sense, from outside. I do not regard them with the real terror – one might say the paranoia – that pervades the X-Men franchise as Claremont shaped it, with its hideous futures and the horrible things that come from them. The hatred of Claremont for his nightmare America is personal and comes from a direct sense of menace.

(I keep on saying Claremont because he is the man who shaped the mutant mythos. Even after he lost control of the X-Men continuity, those who followed had to live within his parameters, keeping such things as the Sentinels, the hatred of sapiens for superior, the fear of concentration camps, etc. A few sane people, foremost among them Alan Davis, tried to open the road to a more breathable and tolerable atmosphere, but I am afraid that at this time of day, X-Men without a persecution complex would cease being X-Men.)

The sense of direct menace connects with an identification of the party of good with the party, not so much of progress, as that has progress built into itself. And you can also see the kinship and derivation from the ill-grounded hippy optimism of Thomas and Englehart, designing an imagined opposition to their adoring view of mankind: to both, “evolution” was the one live issue, and resisting it for any reason the one evil. The succession of mutants from human is both positive and inevitable; unless of course the hate and fear of Claremont’s nightmare America (or nightmare human race – by now it does not make much difference) manages to stop it. And if it does, it will turn the future into one of the many nightmare scenarios with which the X-Men mythology is so rich.

I hardly have to argue that the identification of reader and writer is with the “mutant” world; “the others” are the enemies of progress, and as such guilty of perverting the future. In other words, “ours” is the party of progress and evolution, and “theirs” that of destruction, regress, and tyranny. This is the moral world of the X-Men franchise.

A few things should be clear. First, while the vehicle of these values is imaginary – nobody believes that super-powered human mutants exist or will exist – the values themselves are to be taken very seriously indeed. They reflect on the real world. Consciously or unconsciously, Claremont has drawn on his own experience of his country (although derived from the media rather than from personal encounters) to create and organize the imagery of the mutant mythology. It is his horror (and ignorance) of small-town and suburban America that generates those nightmare visions of Sentinels and death camps; it is his belief that progress and evolution are good in and of themselves that generates the whole notion of mutant mankind. (Of course, he had found the concept of mutants ready made in Lee and Kirby’s original idea; but, as I pointed out, neither Lee nor Kirby were ready to equate evolution with moral improvement. As a matter of fact, in one of their later Thor stories, mutants were presented as a future degeneration, rather than an improvement, of mankind. This mutant race, of course, had nothing to do with the X-Men’s Homo Superior, and I suspect that by the time the ever-busy Lee and Kirby, owners of the two worst memories in the Western hemisphere, had got to that story, they had both forgotten their sixteen issues of X-Men.)

And there is one further matter that adds to the poisonousness of this cocktail: the identification of America with progress as such is so dangerously easy to make that in such minds as Claremont’s it was probably present literally from the word go, practically from birth. The best explanation for the abiding, disjointing shock that vibrates in his imagery, is that Claremont had understood, from a child and without doubt, that his country stood for progress, and that progress was in and of itself good. To be then faced with the “Missisippi Burning” version of America – rural, uneducated, “backward”, reactionary, violent, and clearly in the way of what young Claremont regarded as progress – would indeed be dislocating. Who are these people? Is this my country? Why do they hate everything we stand for?

However, although Claremont is at the core of this appalling process, we cannot speak as though it concerned him alone. He has long since ceased to be anything more than a bit player on the sidelines. Dozens of other writers – in the end, practically every other writer at Marvel – have joyfully taken up his ideas and run with them; and hundreds of thousands of comics readers and hundreds of millions of film and animation watchers have bestowed on them the chrism of sustained sales success. That is what is really horrifying about the X-Men ideology: how many people are willing to live with it, work with it, accept and enjoy it – how many people find it a suitable foundation for an imaginative reaction to reality. With Civil War, it has come to dominate the whole Marvel Universe. I repeat: the spirit we thought crushed under the ruins of whole nations and drowned in oceans of blood has been reborn, while nobody was looking, in the very heart of American popular culture. And that being the case, we must ask: where did it come from, and why is it so hard to kill?

My answer is as follows. The tendency of Western politics since 1775 has built a way of thinking about politics and society which is at heart profoundly false. Not only we, but our fathers and forefathers, have lived in a world in which politics was largely a process of presenting demands, struggling against a conservative resistance that predicted that the world would be ruined if those demands are granted, and eventually finding that the demands could be granted without any particular form of universal collapse. It took from 1775 (battle of Lexington) to about 1867-8 (establishment of constitutional rule in Austria-Hungary and of the brief “Empire liberal” in Napoleon III’s France) for representative and constitutional government to become the norm for Western nations; even longer for slavery to be abolished, and only a bit less for trades unionism to become legal and accepted, and for the working classes to receive the vote. Then came feminism and the welfare state; and each demand was received with less difficulty and adopted more swiftly than the previous one. By the time we got to sexual liberation, the demand was almost as soon made as granted.

What was not recognized is that this represented, in effect, a return to the norm and wellspring of Western civilization, which had been literally born with representative and limited government. Monarchy “by divine right”, absolute monarchy, was a sixteenth-century French fad which amounted to a series of usurpations by central government, and which had spread because of its perceived greater efficiency as compared to musty, fusty old assemblies and laws and guilds and internal borders. After a brief period of splendour, this monarchy that was the admiration and terror of Europe underwent a series of humiliating defeats and eventually collapsed, proving itself fabulously inefficient. The very political theorists who had admired the power and control that French institutions gave a single man now made it a cliché, endlessly repeated, that the French monarchy had died of its own waste, because, as Macaulay put it, the court of Versailles cost the equivalent of fifty battalions. The lesson was reduplicated when the new republic arisen from the ashes of the collapsed monarchy suddenly proved able to unleash immense armies at will across Europe.

What I am saying is that the whole progressive mindset is built on sand. They imagine that all history – at least, all recent history – is a moral progress from worse to better, from tyranny to freedom, from racism to egalitarianism, from sexism to feminism. That is basically nonsense. The reason why the political progression that took place across the face of Europe and related countries for the last two and a half centuries felt so much like a progression from bad to better is that it was a restoration of the natural values and structures of Western civilization – societal openness and mobility, independent associations of tradesmen and workers, representative government, carrière ouverte aux talents including women. These were all things that were practically universal in Western Europe about 1200, and reduced to a few surviving outposts in 1750. In Spain, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, old and traditional liberties had been squeezed out of existence. Russia is universally regarded as the home of reaction, caste government and autocracy; few people realize that the notorious Russian caste state was only really established in law by Catherine II “the Great”, Russia’s “enlightened despot”. And this corresponds to developments across Europe; from Spain to England to Italy, caste features were more firmly in place, and inequalities more profound and rooted, as the sixteenth century moved into the seventeenth and eighteenth.

Political progress since 1775, then, has been in the nature of a recovery of the natural balance of a civilization that had been nearly devoured by the virus of absolutism. It was, indeed, a process of liberation, and a progress – a progress towards a definite goal. But it taught people to think that progress of any kind is always positive, and that evolution is improvement. That, of course, is nonsense. From about 1400 to 1750, progress was always towards a more absolute and caste-ridden state. The forces of Darwinian selection of the fittest, as Machiavelli and Guicciardini saw, favoured royal tyrannies with large resources and endangered small, easily divided republics with vast accumulated riches but insufficient armed forces; while on the other side of the sea the immense Turkish tyranny moved apparently at will, picking off Egypt today, Hungary tomorrow. To say that progress was good then would mean that the caste state and the divine right of kings were good things then; an opinion I firmly reject. They may have been, for a time, more efficient; they may even have been politically inevitable, as Machiavelli thought. But that does not make them right, let alone admirable. The doom of the French monarchy, collapsing under the weight of its own irresponsibility and unrepresentativeness, might stand for the verdict over that whole tendency. Let us rather say that a free commonwealth is inherently morally better than a slave one, and often if not always more efficient too; and move on.

It will have escaped no-one that a belief in progress as positive is not easily distinguished from a belief in success as positive. This creeping syllogism is of course particularly dangerous in a nation that has historically experienced both tremendous progress and tremendous success while being, from beginning to end, basically a free commonwealth. It would be natural, though disastrous, to confuse the three, and many people do. And this leads to a further dislocation: if it is felt that progress, that is success, is in the nature of the party that calls itself progressive, then a defeat, let alone a series of defeats and a serious check in its “progress”, can only be felt as a reversal of the proper order of things. Where that is identified with the nature of a free commonwealth (illegitimate though the identification may be), then the opponents of progress and the opponents of liberty are understood as one and the same. And when we speak of an American such as Claremont, if his perception of his country’s values is centred not in what is enduring but in what is progressive, then to identify anything regressive with what is politically wrong is merely natural. He will feel right, justified, indeed patriotic, in believing that the enemies of progress in his country must be fought and defeated. The idea that the party of progress might indeed be permanently checked, that progress might be stopped in its tracks, is, to him, a genuine horror, terrible, unthinkable. All the value, all the strength, has gone out of any notion of liberty that he possesses, and his idea of liberty depends exclusively on progress. He is incapable of imagining a stable or conservative state of freedom, and he equates regress with tyranny. Hence the vast production of dystopias in our day, in which Claremont took an enthusiastic part: if anyone brought up in a “progressive” mentality ever finds him or herself contemplating the dreadful possibility that his or her version of “progress” might be halted or reversed, the inevitable product is dystopia.

As I said, belief in progress means belief in success; not, I mean, in small things – even a dyed-in-the-wool progressive will not believe that his football team is under an obligation of everlasting victory – but in one’s view of the purpose and tendency of human society. This means that it is not only difficult, but literally impossible, logically impossible, to locate an ideological centre to the belief in progress. Those who identify it with Socialism, Communism, Marxism, Gramsci, are plainly wrong; doubly wrong if they realize that the likes of Hitler, Mussolini, or the KKK president Woodrow Wilson also regarded themselves as “progressive” – and therefore conclude that they, too, must have been socialists.

Progressive politics means valuing as morally good that which seems to you to be prevailing in your time. Indeed, it is usually behind the times, because the progressive mentality tends to be formed in youth. Hitler grew up in a time when the growth of Germany to world power, in fact to proto-superpower, dominated the landscape; his “progressive” politics therefore involved the everlasting growth of Germany and at the same time the purification of its essence into an “Aryan” super-Germany – since the “Aryan” barbarians who had settled from Spain to India in the centuries before Jesus Christ were to his mind the first image of this inevitably conquering nation/race. Likewise, Woodrow Wilson grew in a world where the white race not only dominated but expanded across the globe at vertiginous speed, building cities out of nowhere in the Americas, in Africa, in Australia; and he took this to be progress and to be morally right and doomed to last. The rise of the socialist and trades unionist movements across Europe and the European West during the nineteenth century was another apparently unstoppable and inevitable development; and so it was that many progressive minds attached themselves to these movements. The join between socialism and progressive politics is no more inevitable than that between racism and progressive politics. The only essential matter is the short-circuit between success and moral value; and the thing to remember is that progressive politics inevitably involve a claim on the future, and the belief that anyone who works against them works against the future.

It cannot be irrelevant that the Nazi version of progressivism has been reborn in American popular culture; we must a priori suppose that it reflects real, living and effective features of American culture. And our analysis has led us inevitably to connect the Marvel mutant ideology with one definite area of political views, and one alone. To argue that the mutant ideology had anything to do with conservatism, or even with libertarianism, would be ridiculous. To connect it with neoconservatism, barely better. No: the thing which hates small-town and suburban America, which regards the movie Deliverance as a kind of documentary, which reacts with horror, even more than with hatred, when it loses an election, which is calmly and even politely convinced that its adversaries are “fascists” and that if they win they will sooner or later get going with the death camps, which regards political power as something due to it on account of its “progressive” views, and which, when it loses a poll, blames not itself but the ignorant, ill-informed public – we all know which group we are talking about. It is the group now in power; and which, speaking personally, struck me as extraordinarily unpleasant, fraudulent in the struggle and odious in victory, when the great historical triumph was scored. The authors of the musical Cabaret made a ludicrous botch of trying to invent a German patriotic anthem suitable to be sung by a handsome young Nazi; their sorry list of “German” clichés only shows that they were not really suited to understand what was going on in Germany in the 1930s. One thing, however, they did get right: a single line - tomorrow belongs to me. This is the progressive claim down the centuries, and the sentence that came naturally to me when I was contemplating the sorry effects of Obama’s victory on his less well-advised followers.

Comments

[expectare.livejournal.com]

What if you had a brawl and nobody came? I'm afraid I can't give you an argument because I don't really like X-men. I really liked the third movie, which everyone who genuinely likes the X-men said was worst. Anyway, I thought that it was the BAD X-men thought that? Magneto, not the wheel chair guy...

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You have to be familiar with the set-up of the series, which, as you yourself admit, you barely are. The premises are as I described them (and I have read Uncanny X-men since the first issue): mutants good, mutation good, any attempt whatever to even register super-powered mutants, let alone control them, not only bad but the premise to the death camps. Anyway, if you hate the X-men for any reason, it means that you are not susceptible to this particular poison.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Your old essays seemed initially compelling, but Wright's reply to the second was a sobering antidote. Your analysis works, but it can as easily be inverted, with mutants as the Jews/blacks, X and Magneto as MLK and Malcolm X, etc. The pseudoscience about "next step in human evolution" and the Kree/Skrull stuff may fit your theory better: the deeper the analysis, the more noxious it seems... but I suspect most analysis is never that deep, including on the part of the ever-changing stable of writers.

There is something individualist and anti-social about the superhero, and much fantasy in general.

As for this essay... yes, medieval Europe seems to be due more credit than it's given, and much of what liberals don't like about the past is relatively recent. OTOH, serfs, religious warfare, and religious oppression are not 16th century innovations; don't whitewash the past too much. And there's real progress in technology, which can lead to beneficial or harmful social changes. (E.g. domestic appliances and markets in mass-produced consumer goods releasing most women from the home.)

I suspect your critique of "progressive" reads too much significance into the label, but I have no time for further criticism.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Thanks for reminding me of serfdom in the Middle Ages - it points to another point in which the civilization of the eighteenth century had greatly degenerated from its ancestors. In the Roman Empire, slavery had been the norm; in its later years, it had effectively been extended to the whole class of cultivators by the reforms of Diocletian. However, by the twelfth century slavery had been reformed out of existence in Europe. Serfs were not slaves: they were tenants with obligatory, fixed dues to be paid to their landlord - dues which over the course of time were monetized and turned into pure rents. Medieval European society had no slaves. However, the concept was reintroduced in 1436, when the Portuguese, trading on the coast of West Africa, received a supposedly temporary permission from the Pope to trade in human beings. With the discovery of America in 1492, the trade in African slaves ballooned, while at the same time the rising autocracies of continental Europe, especially France and Russia, drove down the status of serfs in various ways. In Russia especially, serfs, who had been a variety of tenants in the first written Russian code, were reduced practically to slaves by Catherine II's rule, and were not coincidentally freed from their obligations at the same time as America was freeing her blacks with gunpowder. In this field, too, we observe how atrociously the Europe of absolutism - including even free commonwealths such as the USA - had degenerated from its medieval ancestry, and what a price it cost to recover our soul.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

As for the mutants as Jews/Blacks, I already answered that. The defining characteristic of Marvel mutants is their role as genetic saviours. To imagine that either Blacks or Jews or, for that matter, Catholics, could be seen as the genetic future of the race, is to commit the most ludicrous absurdity in the history of analysis. We are talking about an entirely different idea. In fact, the use of Jews as types for the "persecuted" mutants is, to me, deeply offensive.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Hmm, fair point, and I'm not an expert in mutantology. OTOH, I'd wonder if the "defining characteristic" really is a role as genetic saviors, or if you're reacting to one theme in an incoherent mess. I'd have said the defining characteristic is simply being mutant, different, and sometimes powered. Aren't the majority of mutants relative wusses? (Then there's Wild Cards, with an explicit division between aces -- powers -- and jokers -- ugly mutations -- sometimes coincident.) But the stories get told about the superpowered ones, not the one who looks like Nightcrawler but doesn't have any cool power.

I'm relevantly Jewish; the analogy isn't obviously offensive to me.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Read, if you can find a reprint, Uncanny X-Men Annual 12 (I think), the one drawn by Alan Davis and featuring Wolverine in a space temple. The centrality of mutancy as the genetic future of the human race - even as its sacred future - could not possibly be made clearer; it even includes a nasty depiction of Wolverine as the genetic saviour, dying and being reborn to save the genetic future of mankind - a description I found odiously similar to the Nazi "Aryan Christ" who "died to save us from Jewish degeneracy".

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

I believe you; and the description of alien races on genetic trial to be "allowed to evolve" was offensive and ludicrous in so many ways. I just don't know if that's a dominant theme; it's certainly not one I'd picked up from casual exposure to X-Men stuff.

The movies did the death-rebirth thing a few times, but differently: Rogue and Wolverine to save thousands of people in the first movie, Jean Grey to save her friends in the second.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's actually one of the things that went wrong, in my view (and not only in my view) after Chris Claremont lost it following the original Phoenix' death. Deaths and resurrections, sacrificial or otherwise, became way too common in the X-Men. By now, Phoenix and Wolverine together must have had deaths in double figures. But that is chiefly a matter of bad taste and bad writing, and of the unpleasant suffering-porn that was often evident in the series.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I am also surprised at your stating that "you suspect that most analysis is not that deep". The point is whether I am correct or not. If I am, then the fact that most people do not realize how poisonous is the content of Marvel comics today only makes it worse. The content of a story is determined by the world-view of the author, and that does not change whether author and reader are conscious or not. You almost seem to be implying that, by discovering certain ideological features in the stories, I am placing them there! The opposite has to be the case: either I am correct - partially or totally - in my analysis, in which case these features are present and damaging; or else I am wrong, in which case these features were never there at all, and nothing I can do can place them there.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Well, the poisonous features could be there, but not perceived even unconsciously by most readers. If you think about something more, or know more about relevant things, you can get more (for good or ill) out of it. Lewis meant the Narnia stories as guides to Christianity, but for a lot of readers the allusions just went *whoosh* past them, I think not even particularly predisposing them to Christian ideas.

So no, I don't think you're placing elements there, but the actual poisonous effect may be minimal. There's also that a story can have multiple legitimate readings, especially if we're talking about cultural elements thrown together semi-consciously by a bunch of authors. Pseudo-biology and intimations of racial superiority are there; *so are* the archetypes of the peacemaker and the revolutionary, co-existences and violent struggle, with the authorial side of 'good' being pretty heavily on the former camp. Mutant stories support both "Nazi eugenics" and "persecuted minority" readings. Which reading is more significant for most readers, that's another matter.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I think it goes deeper than you think because it works together with the suffering-porn and repeated dystopia that are a major feature of the mutant world. There is also the fact that Lewis was conscious, almost to the point of allegory, of what he did; whereas I doubt that Claremont and his followers were awake to any of the implications of the world they created. The unconscious assumptions are what I wanted to bring out.

[thefish30.livejournal.com]

The thing is, it is precisely the unperceived poison that is the most dangerous. When ideology is obvious and upfront, you can accept or reject it on your own terms. But when an ideology is wearing a play-costume--one that attracts or excites while hiding its true form--then people can be lulled into adopting mindsets that dispose them toward ideas that they would have spit on 'unprepared'.

Lewis understood this from his own conversion experience and meant for readers to *whoosh* past the allusions, in order to sneak truth by the "watchful dragons" of the mind and "baptize the imagination". I believe the cagey Rowling was up to much the same thing.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Maybe so, but I do not see JKR's stories - whatever her beliefs - as Christian: http://www.fictionalley.org/authors/fabio_p_barbieri/AGWBC01.html

[affablestranger.livejournal.com]

A while back I decided to be silent to most folks about my view of the X-Men, especially the movies, because I was almost invariably met with disbelief, a few times with (close to) indignation.

Again, you have explained my point of view better than I could have.

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

Well, it it makes sense. But I don't think I agree with you that "the spirit we thought crushed under the ruins of whole nations and drowned in oceans of blood has been reborn...." As far as I can see, it was never entirely crushed, only rendered unfashionable to speak of openly, to be sublimated until the embarrassment of Nazi Germany's insufficiently gradual race to the bottom could be forgotten. As evidence of this: generally speaking if you try to talk about topics like Margaret Sanger's eugenicist racism, or what Hitler owed to private American patronage (Henry Ford's in particular), you will get a similar lack of response. Whether or not your listeners are on your side of the question, they either don't want to think about it, or else they aren't really shocked by it.

If you want to look for this sort of thing in popular culture generally, it is not actually very hard to find. The universe of the X-Men is distinguished largely in the degree to which certain tendencies have become particularly distilled within it.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You imply that this sort of thing can be found elsewhere than in Marvel comics. Out of scholarly interest (I am not out to start witch-hunts, but culture history is my subject), could you give some examples?

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

As far as I can tell, the X-Men are basically representative of an entire subgenre of science fiction (and perhaps also fantasy) story, which is characterized by the following:

1. a particular race or some portion of a population begins to exhibit unusual characteristics/powers
2. certain "normal" characters hate/fear/attack them due to least one of:
   • ignorance/prejudice
   • a desire to acquire or retain power
   • irrational hatred/insanity
3. those characters are shown to be in the wrong when the "mutants" turn out to be the "next stage of evolution"...
4. ...which puts the mutants above merely "human" moral categories

I'm afraid I'm terrible at remembering specific titles of things I have seen/watched, but at the moment the clearest example that I can think of (which might be of particular interest to you since it predates Claremont's tenure with the X-Men) is the 1972 Doctor Who serial "The Mutants", where by the end the mutant Ky eventually "evolves" into a radiant superhuman being who (with the writers' apparent approval) proceeds to execute summary judgment on the lesser beings who had persecuted his kind and had nearly succeeded in interrupting their evolution. If I remember correctly he even declares himself to have risen above merely human categories.

Interestingly, "The Mutants" invites the same sort of dual interpretation as Claremont's X-Men: its writers say they intended to write an anti-racist story, and were surprised to find that some people thought it instead to preach a doctrine of racial superiority.

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

Hm, and what would you say about Van Vogt's Slan (1946)?

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

By the way, I think addressing the symptom rather than the cause is an easy trap for writers to fall into when they seek to write an anti-racist story, because the temptation is to simply invert the roles of persecutor and persecuted without adequately addressing the error which leads to racism (and many similar evils) in the first place: the idea that one's human worth is based on the degree or possession of particular attributes or capabilities rather than upon one's nature as a human being per se. (The discussion going on in johncwright's journal just now is immediately pertinent, actually.)

This error, when combined with the progressive evolutionary determinism (for lack of a better term) also pervasive in our culture, would seem to very easily amount to a proto-Nazism. My argument (which I am not sure I have adequately supported with examples yet) is that, firstly, neither of these errors were introduced (or even re-introduced) to our culture by Marvel writers, even if they (among others) picked them up and ran with them, and that, secondly, the modern X-Men in fact belong to a larger and older sub-genre predicated on these ideas.

[thefish30.livejournal.com]

I've read very little X-Men since the early 90s, so I've missed some of your reference points. But you make a good argument. I always felt that mutant-hatred was more of a conscious parallel to 'gay-bashing'. Which I suppose does tie in with your theory insofar as homosexuality is a rising star in our age and though 'un-evolving' in itself, is part of the Progressive divorce of sex from reproduction highlighted in johncwright's recent post on the Pope in Africa.

[baduin.livejournal.com]

Do you remember our discussion about the subconscious racial-based thinking in Kirby's work? (Of course, I proposed it and you opposed).

It is well to remember that evolution in the Western thinking started as spiritual evolution; the materialist version of Darwin came much later than Goethe and Hegel.

The last version of the theory of spiritual evolution was the theory of the successively more developed root races of men, as invented by Theosophy of Blavatsky and developed by Anthroposophy of Steiner.
http://www.shoaheducation.com/rootrace.html
http://www.defendingsteiner.com/misconceptions/r-race.php

In 30-ties it became a commonplace for fantasy writers, eg Howard or Lovecraft. Tolkien of course doesn't accept it, but the influences are clearly visible (eg, his elves have only very limited free will; the superior long-lived race from Atlantis). The elements which you noted:

"- human beings are divided between genetically superior (homo superior) and genetically inferior races.
- The ultimate goal of mankind is to evolve, and therefore
- anyone who for any reason interferes with the evolution of mankind is in the wrong and must be stopped. However,
- groups that are incapable of evolution themselves somehow feel and resent their inferiority, and are therefore ridden with fear and hatred for the numerically smaller bearers of a glorious future. "

describe precisely Jews (and other obsolete races) according to Anthroposophy.

BTW, future devolution was as common as evolution in that school of thinking; see for example:

http://www.mega.nu:8080/ampp/PeterMorton/vs_contents.htm
The Vital Science Biology and the Literary Imagination,1860-1900
(originally published 1984; copyright Peter Morton)
http://www.mega.nu:8080/ampp/PeterMorton/vs4_degeneration.htm

[8bitbard.livejournal.com]

I'm only familiar with X-Men through the tv cartoon and the movies, which I don't think pushed these themes as hard - I don't remember them suggesting that mutants are superior (though there might have been some of that in the third movie; I've tried to block that one out of my mind since it was awful in just about every way), though the "ordinary humans hate mutants" stuff was definitely present. I have to say that after reading this I have no desire to bother with the comics. Do they really refer to mutants as "homo superior"? That's pretty damn blatant.

IMO the movie Idiocracy is another example of Nazi-esque tendencies in pop culture. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/ The premise of the movie is that "the wrong people" are reproducing too much, which will eventually result in a dystopia. What's especially disturbing is that I've come across this attitude not a few times in person, often among people who quite vocally declare themselves anti-bigotry.

[starshipcat.livejournal.com]

Probably because the "wrong people' in this case don't belong to any one particular stereotyping group in the traditional sense, but are scattered through all races, ethnicities, classes, etc. Clueless people are found in every group of human beings. So it's easy to say that we're not being bigoted, we're judging on actual individual character flaws. Not to mention that cluelessness is often passed memetically rather than genetically -- clueless parents who can't or won't parent properly instead leave their kids to be raised by their peers, virtually guaranteeing that their kids will grow up even more clueless because peers simply cannot provide the wisdom that comes from adult life experience. (Not to mention that people who might raise a child badly at one stage of their lives may well develop into excellent parents with the maturity a few more years provides).

It doesn't help that movies just don't lend themselves to depth and nuance, so they often fall back on various forms of visual and narrative shorthand. Especially if it's a comedy rather than a serious drama, it's very likely they'll just simplify what is in fact a very complex set of factors which is leading to the dumbing down of our society in order to take the "if this goes on" to the point of absurdity, without realizing that the simplification has some truly ugly overtones. But trying to convey such things as the progressive dumbing down of education and the factors behind it would be truly hard in a movie. David Weber just barely conveys it in his Honor Harrington novels, with the loss of acumen experienced by the People's Republic of Haven as a result of their education system being gutted for political ends, and it still slides by a lot of readers.

[stigandnasty919.livejournal.com]

I suspect the reason you get few comments on pieces like this is that Livejournal is designed for instant responses. An essay like this deserves a more considered answer.

Its the sort of thing I liked to mull over in my old APA days. Hmmm, now there is an idea, there must be a way to put together an electronic APA, articles like this published on a monthly or bi-monthly basis with responses in the next issue? Long, considered responses instead of immediate answers? I'd like to see more of you writing on comics.

I'd like some examples from the comic to look at to see where you are coming from. The morality in the X-men has been discussed ever since the "snickt" incident way back in the Claremont/Byrne days. Now it is even more questionable with good guys forming murder squads and bad guys leading the good guys.

I have other objections to the titles, why, for instance, is it that all x-women have to wear fetish gear... They must be freezing all the time.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That, unfortunately, is hardly restricted to X-women alone - even disregarding Wonder Woman, you can go at least as far back as when Dave Cockrum was commissioned to put all the Legion of Super-Heroes girls in bikinis and hip boots.