I am going to put aside my regularly jackassery to address a serious issue and I would appreciate it if people didn't make light of the following post as it is all very real.
As many of you know I have strong ties to the Punk Rawk community and several Counter-Culture groups and organizations from my youth. One such group were
skinheads. Although I myself was never a member of
the skin head movement I was for a good many years a member of S.H.A.R.P. (Skin-heads Against Racial Predigest). It is my experience that it is
very easy to say that it is all insanity from where you are sitting but understanding it is dangerous so I only sugest that people read on if they are grounded in their beliefs and conciser the following content with maturity and receive the information as it was intended (to be educational) and not subversive or racist.
The easiest thing to do in the world is hate someone else. Love and Hate are two things that people understand intrinsically as part of the human condition and as grieved as I am to admit it, loving is the more difficult of the two. Unfortunately these two aspects of our nature are
not exclusive to one another. It is possible to love hating something or hate loving someone... even hate someone because you love them. More often than not hatred comes from envy or jealousy and a primal school of thinking that most people never really evolve out of but often evolve into. This is what has happened with the Coalition States.
Before I continue If you have never seen the film
Romper Stomper, it is about
the skinhead movement in Melbourne and I would recommend taking the time to rent it from iTunes or check it out. Although this film is about a group of racists bound together in hateful crime and not an organization bound together in hate it does explore this culture (and disturbingly accurately) and it will help you to relate to the mindset of the fanatics who live by these ideas. In the film you will watch the evolution of a young man into a fanatic loyalist skinhead and see what their world is like. Although not a perfect mirror of the Coalition States the methodology used to brainwash the people would be exactly the same (except on a larger scale) and it will help the readers here see beyond common social preconception of the Neo-Nazi Skinhead movement and see into the frightening charisma of the men (Like Karl Prosek) who breed this kind of thinking in lost souls looking for order and control over their lives.
In real life racism unions are more common than people might suspect, although we see the flyers with caricatures of ugly money hungry Jews and scoff them off the propaganda on those pamphlets is disturbingly accurate. This is not because Jews are money grubbing stereotypes but because it is easy for you or I to limit our view so that we perceive them as such and the Jews, and the Blacks, and the Whites, and the Chinese and every race of man has sins and flaws and moments of shame that can be used to exemplify the evil or inferiority of that specific group. Racists grab hold of these shortcomings and exemplify them in others and use the weakness of others to blind themselves to their own weakness and rise against a single common enemy.
Within the skinhead community there is a process called "Getting your red laces" which is a coming of age process by which new recruits head out into the city, stalk a (normally African American man) and beat him savagely. The initiate then curb stomps him or beats him to death (often with a baseball bat) and then is welcomed into the ranks. Now before you start imagining a bunch of men with para-military uniforms crudely slapped together stomping an unfortunate blackman to death keep in mind that female skinheads are JUST as common as men. This isn't some adolescent testosterone driven gang impulse. It is a way of life. I would not be surprised if the Coalition has similar
unofficial initiation traditions for new recruits that the senior officers know about and look the other way on as a sort of hazing ritual. Now as you read this you are no doubt thinking "this is inhuman" but to these cultures this is a great cause for celebration and something people really get worked up over. It is better than swearing on a bible or taking some half-assed oath. The red laces mean you are
for real and you're now
part of the family and are always followed by drinking and raves.
But
HOW right?
HOW can someone justify living this way?
Lack of information mainly, not theirs, yours. Its shocking isnt it. They're the ones that are ****** up so how is he turning this around on me?! Well, the fact is... you don't know what they do. You have not lived the lives they have and are not able to reach the conclusions they reach because you are not looking for someone to blame for why everything in the world is so messed up. And if you are (like myself) I doubt that you would have been insane enough to explore these dangerous counter-culture philosophies. Its not that I think you are naive or stupid or there is something wrong with you, I just know from personal experience that getting that close to these organizations and being able to get back out while retaining clarity is actually a very difficult thing to do. The Coalition is a state based around hatred, they are a standing army, every man woman and child are raised and conditioned to lash out against things that are different and before you start making more pre-conceptions...
I have seen half naked children barely able to walk with swastikas painted on their baby-bellies screaming blasphemies and squat $hitting on pictures of President Obama. I'm serious here. Children are far from innocent. It is SO easy to teach a child to hate irrational and throw around racial slurs. Its terrible to watch but that's reality--babies are empty save for what we fill them with. Does this mean that these Skinheads (or the Coalition) are evil? By no means, they may do evil things but they still love their family and are doing what they think is right for God, for me, for you, for America. Well, unless you fall into one of the categories that they classify as social cancers. And that is how it is. Its terrible but there are some that are just regular everyday people that you could not pick out of the crowd who just think that the black man served society better as slaves and do not vocalize this or even express it outside of their homestead for fear of persecution. What you need to remember is, in their minds it makes sense. This hatred though often irrational by the standards of you or I, is not insane. It is often VERY calculated and thought out, almost a religion. You can expect that for every point you could raise against (any) member of the Coalition States (even the children) against a set course of behavior they could give you two that justify it. That is just how they're raised and educated and specifically why subversive material is illegal. As a single unified body rallied against the enemies of mankind the Coalition can prevail! As a bunch of free thinking left-wing hippies complaining about occupying Tolkeen they are divided and weakened and those protestors have been
corrupted (maybe by magic) but most certainly by subversive D-Bee propaganda and must be purged before the infect the rest of the
pure community.
Its a horrible way of thinking and by no means does it mean that Coalition Soldiers or Citizens cannot be stand up people who are great to share a coffee with or have a conversation with, you might not even notice they are a member of the CS until they start ***** about how Deadball and Juicing is a proud human tradition and what a crock it is that now they're allowing all these prissy D-Bee players into the leagues. It is the nature of hatred, like love, to be charismatic. Racist jokes are funny. They are. From the Irish man's submarine with screen doors to every black guy joke about fried chicken. We've all laughed at least once. And well, if you haven't you're either lying, more mature than is good for you, or taking life WAY to seriously and need to chill out. Racial profiling does not ALWAYS mean you are a racist. However as you will notice from shows like
House M.D. and other
Magnificent Bastard personalities in entertainment that people
LOVE jerks. They are highly entertaining and usually rather endearing. This us or them mentality thrives in Rifts, and don't think its just the CS because short of Lazlo there are few-to-no accepting communities, so you can be guaranteed that there are Flooper and Brutosaur jokes about humans that we would find in poor taste that they would find hilarious and no doubt weekly gathering where they slag off how stupid and undeserving of their power humanity is. With the exception of races like the Almana who have evolved into an almost loving ("D-Bee Communists!!!" roar the CS masses) species there are really very few species that would not look down on other species who are different than themselves. That is how people (and things) often build their communities.
I guess my point is, from a moral and ethical standpoint yes the Coalition State's treatment of non-human persons is horrific and wrong but at the same time...
In our world, since 2003 Dolphins have been classified as intelligent Non-Human persons with IQ's exceeding that of chimps and several traits that we had previously thought to only exist in humanity, and yet most people reading this will not care or take an active stance against their slaughter and if a technology was developed that allowed us to translate their language (something I have been talking about developing for years with Diana Reiss) and these
stupid fish claimed that the ocean was their ancestral home and we had no right to trawl it for fish or pump oil and to stick to the land you can be guaranteed that peoples sympathies for these
loving angels of the sea would quickly give way to a territorial feud over resources. Generally people are only as evolved as the immediate needs allow them to be.
Everyone is looking to do whatever is easiest to get the most out of life and life is
much MUCH easier when you can blame someone else for everything that is wrong in your life. Existing in a state of mind where you are aware of impulse and whim and do not allow these things to dictate your actions (obtaining a truly unbiased point of view and reaching for the truth and not what you want the truth to be) is a constant struggle.
Stereotyping groups, beliefs and trying to simplify life to "This is wrong" is really a dangerous path of thought and way of thinking when what we really should be asking is "Why is it wrong?" before an action is taken. We have empathy and common sense and for everything else that seems like its too hard, we have perseverance and God.