Thankfully, this hasn’t come up yet. This march in Ohio is probably going to be the smallest (10 people) but certainly won’t be the last.

As we won’t see the sort of blowback we did with Charlottesville this time around given the wildly different political landscape, this isn’t a one-off.

After discussing with other site leaders, this feels like the best compromise. Such art can be triggering for some, but open Nazism in the U.S. can’t just be ignored, and photos can be of more utility than text in some cases.

  • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    1 month ago

    I like this. 👍🏼

    We want to explicitly make a nice little corner of the internet where we can hide from racist, sexist, ableist, colonialist, homophobic, transphobic, and other forms of hateful speech. We want a space where people encourage each other, are nice to each other, are supportive and exploratory and playful.

    We are all well aware there are Nazis out there right now, and text is more than sufficient to convey reminders of that.

    I think it’s also worth noting that a lot of media pictures of Nazi/ Christofascist/ RWNJ marches use photographic techniques (e.g. low-angle shots) for dramatic effect to drive clicks, rather than a more direct and undramatic approach, and it’s hard to see that as anything but giving them exactly the kind of attention they want.

    Charlottesville was a great example of this.

    Likewise, one article about the Ohio march showed the Nazis through a cafe window, as people inside looked on, with the camera set low against a table. The photographer was trying to convey a juxtaposition of Nazis against people living their “everyday lives”, but if they’d just taken a picture of the 10 assholes at face level, walking down the sidewalk, it would have better conveyed the reality of them being a tiny group of Nazi cosplay losers.

    “We’re coming to your neighborhood” is the message that Nazis want to sell, and media is doing it for them for free half the time.