A brilliant film emerged from these skirmishes – but its core insight still takes work to unpack. For generations, a persistent myth that black families were irreparably broken by sloth and hedonism had been perpetuated by US culture. Congress’s landmark 1965 Moynihan Report, for example, blamed persistent racial inequality not on stymied economic opportunity but on the “tangle of pathologies” within the black family. Later, politicians circulated stereotypes of checked-out “crackheads” and lazy “welfare queens” to tar black women as incubators of thugs, delinquents, and “superpredators”. American History X made the bold move of shifting the spotlight away from the maligned black family and on to the sphere of the white family, where it illuminated a domestic scene that was a fertile ground for incubating racist ideas.
Resurgence? it never went away.
Yeah my favorite is people who say things like “I’m the 1940s USA/Canada/aus/etc fought fascism, what happened”?
No, they fought GERMANY. tons of those soldiers came back home and became John Birchers or klansmen or Christofascist evangelicals any other kind of fascist.
Shooting nazis does not an anti fascist make, perplexingly.
Also, the US was VERY hesitant to enter the European war. There was a lot of support for the Nazis in the US. From some high ranking people. Like the first director of the OSS and the Dulles brothers (instrumental in forming the CIA and NATO). They wanted a separate peace with Germany, and to enter the European war against the Soviets. But luckily FDR was unmovable in his support of the Soviets against the Nazis.
The latter point is not particularly surprising. Many people fight in wars because they have no choice or out of patriotism, or a combination of those plus other factors.
Another important point is that there are varying degrees of racism. Some people might have the badly mistaken view that a certain skin color is better or worse at certain jobs, for example, but that doesn’t mean that they would endorse genocide.
Some skin colors ARE worse at certain jobs
Like, I’m white, I could never play Mike Tyson in a movie
Counterpoint: that would be hilarious
Edit: without blackface only
Just get the voice right and people will suspend disbelief.
Also, talk about toads. A lot.
And a lot of guys just want to kill someone. They’ll listen to anyone who says someone’s a bad guy who can be morally murdered.
Another important point is that there are varying degrees of racism.
No, not really. You could, if you really wanted to, distinguish between two different “wings” or “traditions” of white supremacist ideology (which, of course, is the only “racism” there actually is) - the eliminationist and the exploitative.
They are not mutually exclusive - the Nazis, for instance, followed both policies when they exploited Slavic people for labor with the full understanding that all Slavic people would be eliminated as soon as their labor was no longer needed by the (so-called) “master race”.
What an astonishingly reductive and inaccurate statement.
Here’s but a small token of FDR’s statements on the matter.
https://youtu.be/qrNDwyj4u1w?si=c-ZuF7_UOWJQH0wz
Anti-fascist rhetoric was clear and popular, even in nations that would be arguably considered fascist themselves today, like Segregation Era America and the British Empire.
Tons of those soldiers might have continued being a racist after being drafted to fight Nazis, but just as many learned exactly what path they were following and changed course.
FDR’s political coalition even pretty much directly evolved into the Civil Rights Movement.
The simple reality is that 20th century politics was never simple but progressive thought thoroughly won out over ideologies of hate and actively worked to undo the centuries of damage done by colonial era white supremacist thought.
It was hardly a perfect process, and it’s one that continues to this day, but to pretend it was simply just nations butting heads to the common man is dangerously revisionist.
The allied nations fought fascism. They knew what it was, could describe it better than many do today, and the leadership was clear in their opposition, even if often confusingly hypocritical, and often beset by internal opposition. That not every person in 1940 was completely on board with it is simply the human condition.
Mostly agree but in my own experience it’s not WW2 vets that went Birch/KKK etc., but their kids.
Your experience is wrong. KKK and others existed just fine before and during WWII.
It’s high water mark was the 20s for sure, but when we talk about the outwardly visible racists, goddamn the baby boom represents
As opposed to their parents who protested Ruby Bridges?
My grandma wrote letters to American GIs deployed in Europe during the second world war. She kept the letters she got back.
There were letters outright praising Hitler and hoping the allied powers would take up the fight against the Reds.
It’s been smoldering and festering in the background for so long the internet just gave us a clear view into it. If they really think there’s a resurgence they’ve never been anywhere rural for the past 40 years as a minority.
Or anywhere near the punk subculture I guess. I feel like it’s something that I’ve been hyper aware of my entire life.
You need to point out you mean the skin head punks from American History X.
As there is a vast variety of sub cultures of punk, most of which despise the Neo Nazi Skins.
Most skin head punks have nothing to do with being a Nazi.
I was a SHARP skinhead involved with anti racist action, so my acquaintance with the situation was… Intimate.
I was a SHARP skinhead
Thank you for your service!
Fuck yeah man. You’re more hardcore than me that’s for sure.
Fuck racists, racist punks especially so
deleted by creator
I remember watching it and it being a comment on racism at the time, no foreshadowing of the future involved.
Same with Romper Stomper for Aus which was released 6 years before American History X.
Yeah, I’m from an area of the country where the events of the movie aren’t far fetched. It wasn’t predicting anything, it was just showing you what was going on in the places where people don’t like to look.
Same. I saw it all around me. Like I knew openly neo-Nazi folks. I could have 100% seen it happening.
Growing up in the So-Cal punk scene I saw these people every time I went to a show. Dudes with boots and “wife beater” tank tops holding a confederate flag at a Voodoo Glowskulls show come to mind especially.
The punk shows I’ve been to I think would kill any Nazi punk stupid enough to show up. I’m relatively newish to the scene though and in Seattle. Is this a regional thing, different eras thing?
Different eras. There was a whole punk skinhead subculture, and a sub-subculture within it that were Nazis. Most skinheads were explicitly anti-racist, so needless to say the two factions did not exactly get along…
The Dead Kennedys even wrote a song called “Nazi Punks Fuck Off”
When it came out tho I remember thinking that a neo-nazi/nationalist movement could never happen (on a large scale) in any Western nation … yet here we are with that exact thing almost worldwide now.
I remember thinking that a neo-nazi/nationalist movement could never happen (on a large scale) in any Western nation.
I have to ask, how old were you when you thought that?
Those already existed in the UK and other western nations for decades.
This is England is a movie about the skinhead/nationalist groups in the Uk in 1983.
Hell, The Blue Brothers had a joke about Illinois Nazis in 1980.
Groups like this have existed for decades.
Here’s the Blues Brothers scene that first introduces them. In case anyone else was like me and instantly wanted to watch it.
Yes, but that’s the thing… the media portrayed the far-right as laughable “fringe movements” back then - we didn’t have the internet, and the connection between capitalist societies and the far-right (whose violence protects them) was pretty much hidden from us by the very people who empower the far-right when working-class people get uppity.
Worldwide they haven’t.
My version of this is seeing losers on 4chan trying to be edgy, didn’t know it would be a fucking breeding ground years later that would lead to the storming of the US Capitol and multiple militia groups forming.
Exactly. It was annoying but not overwhelming. Now we’ve got politicians catering to the nazi/nationalist crowd like they’re some kind of demi-god.
Tbf it’s always been overt the top, but after moot sold it, it got way worse.
When it came out I was dealing with National Alliance, Baltimore Hammerskins, and to a lesser extent the Pagans motorcycle gang in my area of Northern Maryland. It was far from historical if you were actively around white supremacist areas, particularly the rust belt or around orange county California. I remember visiting OC in the aughts and everyone confused me for a nazi, some waitress chick showed me her Himmler tattoo.
Why would you think that a nationalist or fascist movement could never happen in the Western world given what had already happened during the twentieth century? I’m not trying to be a piece of shit, I’m honestly curious.
Not answering for girlfreddy but I’d also like to chime in. I don’t know how to say this, but like America used to feel different 30 years ago. Even though rights were slow coming for women in the workplace and eventually gay people, it felt like we were always either stopped or moving slowly forward. Maybe it was just a sheltered existence, having all of the benefits of a pretty damn good public school system in a quiet corner of the suburban area, but I fucking swear, there was like a clear line to this nation becoming some kind of next civilization and it felt like everyone shared it for a minute there.
I don’t know if it was 9/11 or the Neoliberal creep. Maybe the 08’ crash, or the Obama election and the feelings that came after. I can tell you though some time around 2010-2011 I started telling people that white supremacists and fascists were coming. I’m sure it was a bunch of little things, but they all started to click around then. I watched this movie with my mom, and now I’d largely consider her the equivalent of a Nazi. She doesn’t think she is, but she’s also brainwashed to the point where she gave up our relationship over being unable to confront her christofacist ideas. She liked the movie and was disturbed by the racism back when we watched it.
A lot of all this can be pinned to Regan and his welfare queen bullshit that he purposely put out to race bait and fire up the right. Still, they all kinda stood by and just stewed in their closeted prejudice to the point where all this shit felt like a legitimate surprise when it began to snowball together. A lot of it is intertwined with their feelings on Obama for sure. A half black guy made most of the people around him look like lame dumpy hicks. A lot of America couldn’t process that so they started to try to delude their reasoning, rather then coming to terms with it. He’s a black Muslim, with a fake birth certificate. He’s a weed smoking smooth talker. He’s a new world order pawn of the elites. They still hate him so much that Q made a detour and said his wife is a secret transsexual and by reason he a closeted fraud…
Anyway, got off track. But again, I’ll stand behind it that none of this somehow felt possible pre 2000, and largely still into like 08’. At least to a much younger and naive me.
Edit: rereading this, I kinda wander a lot. Sorry if it detracted at all from the convo. I’m gonna leave it though cause it still feels personal and true, and I’d be sad to delete this after all the memories I got to think back on. I am old.
Got to add, it didn’t just happen in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan.
There were fascists in every country in the world, and a lot of them stayed in power after WW2.
Most of Asia was fascist ruled at one point or another. South America was almost completely ruled by various fascist dictators for most of the second half of the century.
But the more on topic point is that a large percentage of Americans of the time, had wanted the US to join WW2 on the side of the Germans. There were men who were sent to kill Nazis who had marched in support of the Nazis at Madison Square Garden.
That’s not even counting the KKK, which was falling apart due to the leadership embezzling funds, but just a decade prior had enjoyed hundreds of thousands of members.
In 1930 the Klan had membership counting 11 Governors, 16 US Senators, and roughly 75 members of the House.
The Klan then had a resurgence in the 1950s, and well into the 70s all in response to the civil rights movement.
The Klan might be treated like a joke these days, but the sort of families that have multiple generations of klansman, don’t teach love and understanding to their children.
There are little towns in the south that have been cultivating their racism since long before the civil war.
Hell, the state of Oregon was so racist that the banned black people entirely. The people who did that had kids who joined the Klan, so on and so forth, and now there are still places in eastern Oregon that black and brown people have to avoid on fear of death.
White nationalism has been part of who we are as a nation for a very long time. Thankfully its popularity is fading, which only makes the adherents louder and more dangerous.
… on a large scale.
In the 90’s it was still not nationwide. Now it is, in America, Canada, the UK, Israel, China, and even some African nations have become nationalist … but back when this movie came out that was unheard of.
Yeah, that’s a lack of understanding on your part. John birch society, national alliance in the US. OKC bombings were largely inspired by literature put out by the thankfully dead founder of the national alliance. National front in the UK. Israel… I mean was founded in coalition with nationalist terrorists so I don’t know where that’s coming from.
And stormfront has been around forever. Preceding Alex Jones?
I’m over 60 so not misunderstanding anything. And you’re calling Jewish people “national terrorists” is fucking nazi bs.
Gtfo asshole.
I’m calling Irgun nationalist terrorists, who were in coalition in founding Israel alongside Labor Zionists(who I don’t believe are nationalist terrorists). If you don’t think that label applies to Irgun you’re a whole hell of a lot more fascist adjacent than I am.
Being 20 years older than me and ignorant ain’t something I’m impressed by.
Israel… I mean was founded in coalition with nationalist terrorists so I don’t know where that’s coming from.
I hate to tell you, but this isn’t hyperbolic. Israel was absolutely founded in part by an ultra-nationalist, ethno-supremacist, terrorist organization. Founding members of Lehi went on to form Likud as well.
Not going to claim to know their thoughts, but they said Israel, not Jews. There is a real difference. One is a government the other is a cultural identity/religion.
Exactly. I knew kids from middle school who ended up getting really radicalized and became white supremacists. Moved away but at least one of them became a murderer so… yeah.
It reminds me of how everyone was amazed by Gamergate in the 2010s and then the rise of trump around the alt-right. Or the current “angry males” bullshit with tate and the wannabes.
Mostly it just made me think of being a gamer in the late 90s/early 2000s. Plenty of message boards were full of “weird comments” and some folk even pointed out how blatantly a few neonazi handbooks were being followed in terms of recruitment. Like, I distinctly remember feeling really uncomfortable in my Unreal Tournament clan because one of the guys “was an asshole” but nobody else thought it. I didn’t want to deal with him but I also couldn’t play UT unless I did. Fortunately I ended up breaking ties because nobody else wanted to play OFP/ArmA after UT2k4 was “fun but not the same”.
Its been the same shit for decades. And even today, if you care about something as simple as “maybe don’t call people ‘gay’ as an insult” or “that comment is insensitive”, people lose their shit and call you the modern day equivalent of an SJW. And, in the interim, neonazis are following those same publicly available recruitment handbooks and are doing a great job of making people comfortable with spewing bigotry because “it is just a joke”. Until it isn’t.
And we also see the same “oh, they are just misguided” kid gloves. It makes me IMMENSELY angry when influencers like Disguised Toast or Ludwig or Charlie/Moistcritical (although, he has let his chud flag openly fly a few times) will try to position themselves as “a left leaning centrist” but will openly praise and defend people like ishowspeed or sneako who threaten women with rape and scream misogyny but “are really talented and great at building their brand” or “just have a difference of opinion”. Rather than call them deranged right-wing lunatics. Its the same as Jimmy Fallon rubbing trump’s head to show he was just a loveable goofball.
No. American History X was pretty on the mark for the state of the US in 1999.
Trump ‘telling it like it is’ and how he was going to make Mexico pay for the border wall were what brought all the racist scum out of the woodwork.
Political correctness gets a lot of flak, but what it did was raise the bar. If you have to be careful to call one group of students ‘first years’ and not ‘freshmen’, then you know damn well calling different ethnic groups slurs is not acceptable. The PC movement drove the racists further into the closet, and then Trump was a big dinner bell to bring that shit back out again.
This ^ Neo Nazis and Militia Groups were both very real threats in the 90s and American History X is very much a reflection of that.
The fact that things have gotten WORSE and the idea that a history program like “American History X” would be outright banned from being taught in certain states, is a failure of imagination.
I’m a 90s kid, and I haven’t watched American History X partially because of how uncomfortable I think it’ll make me feel. Seems like a culturally significant film, but not one people watch more than once.
feeling uncomfortable when you’re watching it doesn’t mean you’ll regret it afterwards, just make sure you’re mentally in the right place to watch something serious
Oh, NGL, it’s a tough watch. But some of the best films are.
I mean he definitely didn’t make it better, but I tend to associate the “racists coming out of the woodwork” moment with Obama getting elected. Which also corresponded with the increase in Internet usage. The racists suddenly weren’t confined to their small groups of like minded people wherever they lived, but connected to all the other dip shits who believe the same disgusting shit internationally.
Political correctness gets a lot of flak, but what it did was raise the bar.
It boggles my mind that anyone could live in the United States for any amount of time and have the takeaway that the problem in this country is too much political correctness.
Great film, but I’d argue what was ahead of its time was the criticism of toxic masculinity. And it avoided the Fight Club trap of people misunderstanding that it was a critique of that mindset and glorifying the dark side of the protagonist/antagonist.
Wrt Fight Club, I took it as that’s a mental health break from a reality of desperation. Can that happen going to a soul-sucking day job? Then how much more incidences of those who lose jobs, homes, cars, SOs and kids? Then we criminalized desperation and symptoms thereof.
Oops we accidentally put Nazis in charge of our intelligence agencies.
No. The answer is no it did not. What a weird question
If you add a question mark to the end of your headline, do you sound like a non-committal ass?
Only say said question wearing hipster glasses while releasing a butterfly.
That’s OP’s headline.
That’s BBC’s headline…
Yes and the handmaid’s tale solidified it.
deleted by creator
No.
Counterpoint: yes.
This movie has a some seriously cringe-worthy moments in it. For instance, it blames the main character’s extremification on the actions of one black person - the white firefighter dad being shot by the (thoroughly stereotyped) black drug dealer - without addressing the fact that being extremified by that would necessitate pre-existing white supremacist beliefs on the part of the main character. And that’s just where it starts.
This movie pretty much does the opposite of what it purports to do. It’s basically liberal “non-racialism” that doesn’t challenge, queston or even acknowledge the existence of the very thing the current normalization of overt far-right ideology draws upon - the fundamental white supremacist ideology the US (and the rest of “western civilization”) was built upon.
without addressing the fact that being extremified by that would necessitate pre-existing white supremacist beliefs on the part of the main character
But they do explore that. They clearly show that he was already developing racist ideals influenced by his father even before the murder. The father’s death was just the tipping point.
They clearly show that he was already developing racist ideals
I don’t remember seeing that… I could be wrong - I saw it a long time ago and it’s not really a movie I’d return to. It simply doesn’t tell you anything useful about the far-right or the intimate connection it enjoys with the status quo we exist under.
I have never seen USian media that isn’t terrifically negligent when portraying the true nature of right-wing ideology - and I’m afraid I don’t see anything about this movie that makes it an exception.
You are wrong about the plot, quit squirming
The flashback where he’s eating dinner with his family and talks about his cool black teacher and his father goes on a racist tirade. It shoes the seeds of racism were put in him since he was a kid. The whole point of the scene is to show he didn’t just wake up hating blacks one day. It was a process that started home.
Anyway, I respect your opinion even if I don’t agree with it.
There was definitely a scene where they’re sitting at the dinner table and the father is railing against affirmative action because his department hired a black firefighter.
Yeah, someone’s forgetting the movie. Derek Vineyard’s dad was your classic closer white racist who had no problem dropping n-bombs at the table, and Derek was an impressionable teen at the time. And in the midst of this, his hero firefighter father is murdered, and Derek takes what can be construed as a realistic, however irrational, tack, by following his father’s words in an effort to determine why his father was murdered.
dad was your classic closer white racist who had no problem dropping n-bombs at the table
It seems people are still having a really hard time understanding the difference between personally-held bigotry and institutionalized white supremacism. Placing the blame on Vineyard’s father for his children’s white supremacist beliefs is exactly the liberal “non-racism” I was referring to - it protects institutionalized white supremacism by pretending that “racism” is merely “bad feels” perpetrated by those “other/uneducated/poor/non-liberal bad whites.”
Unfortunately - that is not how white supremacism works… and the movie completely ignores that.
What do you want? Do you want a shot in utero where the switches for white supremacy are flipped? I’m not sure you’ll ever find what you’re looking for. I think the whole inherent racism thing is a switch that is or is not flipped during one’s development and the movie tried to tackle the issue within the 100 or so minutes it was given. At the very least it identified a facet of white supremacism.
I suppose perhaps I’m ignorant, but you seem to say that the interactions we experience in the film are secondary to something more systemic, and while I suppose I can say yeah, I agree, to just shurg off these things and say no, that want it, Derek was born hading black dudes, I think is a little shortsighted. Frankly, if you don’t put stock in the interactions the movie depicts, then what hope do you have?
I was born in the 80s and grew up with racism at my dinner table in a similar fashion, and when I was 15 I didn’t quite understand this movie in the same way I do at 36. I make efforts to not flip the switch for my kids at every opportunity. To hear you say it’s institutionalized makes me feel like it’s hopeless, and my babies, in spite of their colorblind nature now, will ultimately latch on to some rationale to hate people who don’t like like them, because it’s just in our nature.
What do you want?
Lots of things.
Do you want a shot in utero where the switches for white supremacy are flipped?
No.
I think the whole inherent racism thing
There is no such thing as “inherent racism” - in the same way that there is no such thing as “inherent Islamism” or “inherent monarchism.”
but you seem to say that the interactions we experience in the film are secondary to something more systemic
Yes.
Frankly, if you don’t put stock in the interactions the movie depicts, then what hope do you have?
Actually, if white supremacism worked the way the movie depicts it would be utterly hopeless - we’d be left with no option other than to declare that white supremacism and the reason it exists defies understanding… which it simply doesn’t. That is the liberal conceit of the movie - that racialization is (somehow) “natural” to humans when it so obviously isn’t.
To hear you say it’s institutionalized makes me feel like it’s hopeless,
That which is institutionalized can be dismantled - we are literally dismantling a small piece of it right now.
and my babies, in spite of their colorblind nature now
Your babies are not “colorblind” - not being able to see “race” is not some disability (you know… especially considering that “scientific racism” is literally pseudo-science despite the fact that it dictates so much of our reality in “western” society). What you meant to say is that your children have not been socialized into viewing the world through a white supremacist lens.
That is impossible to avoid - white supremacism is not something you are born with, it is something you are born into. White people don’t get to opt out of it, black people don’t get to opt out of it - that is what is meant when we talk about our society being fundamentally white supremacist. It cannot be avoided - but it’s conceits can be understood, it’s camouflage ripped away, it’s tenets debunked, and, ultimately, the institutions that rest upon it can be thoroughly discredited. That is one of the main reasons the alt-right exists - people becoming more and more aware of how deep the white supremacism iceberg goes frightens them. There’s a good reason we call their ilk reactionaries.
