Your Story Matters

The world is filled with advice about how we should live our lives. One of the most widely loved is the recommendation to “live every day as though it’s your last,” or “live as if there’s no tomorrow”. For most of us, I think that’s good advice. It’s hard to get by, and we’re told it’s always our fault when we struggle, and that the only answer is to work more, live less.

And every once in a while, you’ll get a reminder that few people end their lives wishing they’d spent more time at the office. Live as if there’s no tomorrow because you’re holding yourself back from things you want, because you’re afraid of what would happen if you didn’t. Live as if there’s no tomorrow because you matter, and because you have a right to joy and satisfaction in this brief life.

Well, today I want to tell you to live as if there are tomorrows without end, and give a little thought to those in the future who are looking back at us, even now, and trying to figure out what we’re doing. Today I am making the case for you to write down your own story, in whatever way seems best to you.

For most of the last six years, Tegan has been studying early modern English musical culture. Since I’ve been along for the ride, I’ve had the opportunity to watch a historian studying something from a new angle. It’s been an interesting journey, and one of the things that really stood out to me is the degree to which history, at least as it’s practiced today, isn’t so much written, as it is pulled together into a collage that forms a sort of impressionist painting of the past. One of the more famous examples of this from the early modern period is the diary of Samuel Pepys, who kept a detailed, candid record of his own life from 1660 to 1669. As a politician and a naval officer, it can be argued he had more of an impact on the events of his time than most men, but he is not generally considered a major historical figure in the conventional sense.

What he became, however, was one of the best sources of information about life during that period. Most notably, he lived through the Great Plague of London, and the Fire of London, and kept records of the goings-on surrounding those disasters.

Another example would be good old Ea-nāṣir, the most famous mediocre copper merchant in history, whose business records, including a number of written complaints, survived to give us a window into life in the ancient city of Ur.

I don’t think Ea-nāṣir intended to be a source of historical information, but Pepys did, and historians of his era are grateful for it, not because his life was uniquely interesting, but because much of it was quite mundane, and he wrote about it anyway.

So you, dear reader, should consider writing about your own life.

This is very much a case of “do as I say, not as I do”, because I have trouble making myself follow this advice, but that’s the case for “live like there’s no tomorrow”, too. My point is this: You matter. Your life matters. It matters in the sense that everyone deserves to have a good life, but also in the sense that you are a part of history. I think that’s an easier sell during a time of historical upheaval, but it would be true even if we lived in a nice, stable, boring era, if such a thing ever existed.

We don’t know what the future holds, but if it’s a future containing humanity, then some of us will be looking back and trying to tell the story of how we got there.

And for that your perspective matters as much as, if not more than, the perspectives of the rich and powerful people who are driving so many of the world’s problems. We are often taught history as “the biographies of great men”, but the reality is that history that cares about the truth tries to look beyond what the rich and powerful pay to have written about themselves. In that regard, I think you, whoever you are, are far more worth listening to than any of our rulers. They don’t understand what life is like in the world they’ve created.

You do.

From Step Back History: A history of Rhodesia, and why US Nazis can’t let it go

If you want to know the intentions of the people currently running the US government, it’s helpful to understand their perspective on the world, and to look at what messages they are sending to their base. One of the ways we could predict the current ethnic cleansing being carried out by federal “law enforcement” is the fact that Stephen Miller was a known fan of the French white supremacist novel The Camp of the Saints, which presents a scenario in which the only way to save France is to massacre a vast flotilla of refugees from India. The book describes the Indian people in grotesque and dehumanizing language, and laments that modern society is took weak and liberal to defend itself from this zombie-like invasion of brown people. If you want a more thorough review, I recommend José’s video essay on the subject.

As the ethnic cleansing has been carried out, the White House has put out several dog whistles for America’s neo-Nazis, as Mother Jones reported back in February:

 

There has been not one, but two posts from our government institutions that reuse a phrase ripped straight from William Gayley Simpson’s book Which Way Western Man?. It was published and promoted by the National Alliance—considered one of the “best organized” neo-Nazi groups in the United States. The book is antisemitic, racist, and explicitly states that Adolf Hitler was right.

[…]
This past year, official social media accounts from the Department of Homeland Security, the White House, and other government agencies have adopted a distinct voice online. The posts look like memes, utilizing dramatic AI-generated art, general patriotic slogans, and cinematic language about “defending the homeland” and shaping America’s future.
But if you look closer, a pattern emerges.
Many of these phrases, images, and attached media aren’t just regular social media content. They repurpose language, symbolism, and cultural references with direct connections to neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements. It’s content that experts say is instantly recognizable to those who are in the white supremacist know, but can be largely invisible to everyone else.
So, let’s look at a couple of the more egregious examples that reveal this pattern.
There has been not one, but two posts from our government institutions that reuse a phrase ripped straight from William Gayley Simpson’s book Which Way Western Man?. It was published and promoted by the National Alliance—considered one of the “best organized” neo-Nazi groups in the United States. The book is antisemitic, racist, and explicitly states that Adolf Hitler was right.
When reached by email for comment, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said “There are plenty of poems, books, and songs with the same title,” apparently referring to Which Way Western Man?. But a simple search across a variety of online music and literature libraries shows that isn’t necessarily true. One song by the same name did pop up with lyrics like “a war against Antifa, a war against the radical feminists, a war to take back our soul.”
“To cherry pick something of white nationalism with the same title to make a connection to DHS law enforcement. It’s because of garbage like this we’re seeing a 1,300% increase in assaults against our brave men and women of ICE,” she continued.

Just two days after ICE officer Jonathan Ross killed Renée Good in Minneapolis, DHS accounts shared a post with a song titled “We’ll Have Our Home Again,” by the Pine Tree Riots. According to a variety of reports, the track is regularly used in white nationalist circles for its evocation of a race war. And it is easy to see that some of these posts imitate slogans nearly identical to those used by Hitler and the Nazi Party. One of the more brazen examples is from the Department of Labor. It features a bust of George Washington super-imposed over a montage of images the administration regularly use to evoke white Western culture, with the caption “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage.” Reports have noted the resemblance to Hitler’s infamous slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer,” or “One People, One Country, One Leader.” (The White House and Department of Labor did not respond to requests for comment.)
Individually, each post could easily be dismissed, but taken together, they seem to form something more deliberate: a stream of repurposed Nazi propaganda for the everyday person’s feed.

 

I once heard someone say that when people deny the Holocaust, it’s because they want to do it again. With these dog whistles, the White House is telling committed white supremacists (and anti-fascists who keep up with these things) that if they sign up with ICE and all goes according to plan, they’ll be carrying out something similar, with ICE taking the place of the SS. Dog whistles are a way for a group to communicate in code, in full view of the public.

Like most Americans (I hope), I knew some Nazi iconography from school and from movies like Schindler’s List and the Indiana Jones franchise. I didn’t learn about dog whistles myself till maybe 10-15 years ago, when YouTube brought me into contact with left-wing video essayists, and the shift in US politics gave me motivation to look into the subject more. I also, apparently, made the mistake of assuming most other reasonable people had done something similar, especially as Trump and his movement gained ground. Recent events have demonstrated that was me projecting my experience onto others, so while I have some problems with the ADL, I’ll direct you to their huge (but not exhaustive) list of white supremacist symbols and signals, complete with explanations (PDF). I think it’s worth spending a little time on this stuff, especially because these people currently run the US government, and they’re literally carrying out an ethnic cleansing.

I’m familiar with many of these, but not all, and I’m familiar with a few that aren’t on that list, including symbols relating to the rather bizarre white supremacist mess that was Rhodesia. I learned of that dog whistle when neo-Nazi terrorist Dylan Roof shot up a Black church, killing 9 worshipers in 2015. He wore a Rhodesian flag patch, and at the time I got a brief rundown of why. I have to admit, though, that I don’t really know the history of Rhodesia, or how that attempt at a white supremacist nation came to be replaced by Zimbabwe.

Well, I should say I didn’t know, because I just watched the latest video essay from Step Back History, and now I know a whole lot more. It’s a deep dive not just into the story of Rhodesia, but also how it came to be such a big symbol among white supremacists in the United States. They’re not going to go away when we remove the Republican Party from power, any more than the Segregationists vanished after the Civil Rights Act was passed. I think it would be a good idea if more people kept an eye on them, and knew what signs to look out for, so maybe we can head off the next attempt to enact fascism in the US.