The Best Laid Plans

I had so many things planned to write about today….

I was going to re-publish the first post in the blog series on past lives and ancestral guides which accidentally published itself back in June, and then work on the remaining three posts, so that they could publish in the coming weeks.

I was going to work on some posts about work/spiritual life balance, and on how we might handle things such as grief while following a Norse Path.

But suddenly, all of that seems like “small potatoes”. You see, I came back from my delightful vacation to face the real world, plastered across news headlines which make my Facebook feed look like a modern day version of the aftermath of Kristellnacht. And I cannot be still; I cannot be silent. None of us should.

Of course I’m talking about the “detainment” camps which have cropped up along our southern border, and the ICE Crackdown, and Trump’s defense of all of the above, which has included literally not caring that White Nationalists now view him as some sort of “national hero”. And, yes, I’m aware that a lot of people are going to read this blog and say “I love your blog because you never get political, but now suddenly you’re getting political, and I don’t like that one bit”. To those people I would say: this issue is no longer simply political.

This is becoming a human rights issue on a scale that our world has only rarely seen: in the former Yugoslavia in the 1980s; in nazi Germany during World War II. This is a form of ethnic cleansing, and until everybody wakes up and smells the coffee that’s currently brewing, we are officially screwed.

“Detainment” camp is a polite way of saying concentration camp. The official definition of a concentration camp is:

“A place where people are detained or confined without trial.”

theholocaustexplained.org

The first concentration camps in WWII Germany were supposedly built to house political prisoners, according to the infamous Heinrich Himmler. Now, one might ask, what types of political prisoners? Anyone who was deemed an “enemy of the state”: this included communists, socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, Roma (often called “gypsies” by those who don’t know any better), and so-called “asocials”. Asocials were people who were deemed hostile or disruptive to “normal standards” of social behavior in society. In other words: anyone who went against the volkisch folkish regime of nazi Germany. By selling the German people the concept that concentration camps were built to protect them and the whole of German society, Hitler enabled the extermination of 11 million people, including 6 million Jews.

I have walked this planet for fifty-four years, and I never thought I would see a day come when I would kick back in my office chair and watch almost the exact same thing play out on American soil. Don’t get it twisted: I’m under no lala-illusions about the status of racism and nationalism in this country, here and now in the 21st century, nor in America’s tattered past. Growing up AmerAsian, I learned early in life about the Japanese “Detainment” Facilities of WWII America, and about the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and about the fact that “we all look the same” to the white administration. I lived in the American South for twenty years, and saw firsthand the racial divide–on both sides of the color equation–that still exists a hundred plus years later, in the wake of enforced African slavery. For the past few years, I have walked the many-colored path of a Norse faith, only to constantly find myself bombarded with the cruel fact that the birth of American Heathenry took place in a cesspit of nationalist, racist volkisch folkishness birthed out of the ashes of the nazi phoenix. So, no, I’m not living in any sort of fantasy world where “we all just get along”, nor do I have any delusions of a “rainbow nation” wherein “no one sees color”, for if we refuse to see color, we will miss the rainbow that actually makes America great, and it will cease to exist entirely.

I also have no delusions of grandeur in which “Connla Freyjason saves the world”: I’m just one guy. But I’m also “just one guy” with an audience, and I well know the effects of even the tiniest pebble in the biggest pond….

So, yeah, there were a lot of other things I could’ve written about today, but none of those things remotely matter beside this. If we cannot truly learn from history, why should we care about past lives or ancestral guides in the first place? Clearly right now, everybody is ignoring all of the above. What is the point of talking about work/spiritual life balance, when we are just a step to the left from having camps in our country over whose doors could just as easily be placed again the words “Work makes you free”? Why talk about how to handle grief, when too few are grieving for the children lost in those camps down south? Maintaining such a “status quo” is how shit like this happens in the first place; it’s how people go blind and become desensitized. And I refuse to be blind. I also refuse to let you be blind.

For the past six months, I’ve found myself growing steadily more angry with the state of Heathenry in modern America, and for a lot of that time, I honestly couldn’t put my finger on precisely why I was so damned pissed off. This morning, writing this, I have realized that why: because so long as we cling to this “status quo”, it allows room for what I’m talking about right here. So long as people are still saying things like “but we need the work of Guido von List, because he was the first one to really illuminate the runes from a divinatory perspective”, while ignoring that he was also one of the people instrumental in providing the nazis with their volkisch folkish regime and its propaganda in the first place, we are enabling people like Trump, things like the ICE crackdown, and concentration camps on our southern border. And I can hear that one dude now, saying “but, but, but Connla: you’re blowing shit way out of proportion!” But, but, but–am I? Am I really?

So long as people are still quoting the works of known racists, and holding those people up as the “gold standard” of “Heathen knowledge”, we are enabling not only those people, but all of the other people like them. Sure, people can try to argue “but they weren’t known racists when they wrote that stuff, and it is valuable stuff”. Hitler wasn’t a known racist when he came to power in Germany and then had those camps built, either, but that doesn’t make Mein Kampf a volume that I keep on my bedside table!

So long as people are arguing for a blood-based “ancestral anchor” to participate in Norse/Germanic practice, we are still upholding the volkisch folkish base on which American Heathenry was built in the 1970s. We are enabling racism and nationalism to live quietly beneath a seemingly polite veneer, dressed up in the fancy clothing of social justice warriors seeking to eradicate “cultural appropriation”.

Yet I continually sit back and watch the people who are doing all of the above rise to the top of the crop, while I sit back and try to rub two pennies together to make a buck, all the while fearing the firestorms every instant that I step one toe out of the goose-stepping line. Angry? You’re damn right I’m angry! But I’m not angry because they’re gaining success for which I somehow ache (success is a fleeting thing, and should be self-defined, not crowd-defined), or because I so often feel attacked when I try to make very necessary change. I’m angry because we’re living in this type of world in the first place; a world where remaining blind and desensitized and accepting the “status quo” is more comfortable–perhaps even more “polite”–than rousing people towards true justice-bringing.

I refuse to fall in line. Perhaps that makes me a bit of a pariah, but I can at least hold my head up at the end of the day as a proud pariah. I name and claim the injustices I see, and I encourage you to do likewise. Silence is complicity. In the immortal words of German Lutheran Pastor Martin Neimöller, which have been memorialized on Holocaust Memorials across America:

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

Perhaps we should update those words, to shake people out of the comfort of the modern status quo:

First they came for the South Americans
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a South American

Then they came for the Muslims
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Muslim

Then they came for the LGBTQ+ community
And I did not speak out
Because I was not LGBTQ+

Then they came for the asocials–anyone who spoke out against their brutality
And I did not speak out
Because I was unwilling to rock the boat

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

I will not wait for them to come for me. Do not wait for them to come for you. Speak now. Act now. Or we may all find ourselves forever holding our peace….