Black Gate published Foz Meadows’ analytical essay “Unempathic Bipeds of Failure: The Relationship Between Stories and Politics” (archived version) on December 7.
As it originally appeared, the post included these lines —
For the past few years, the Sad and Rabid Puppies – guided by an actual neo-Nazi – have campaigned against what they perceive as the recent politicization of SFF as a genre, as though it’s humanly possible to write a story involving people that doesn’t have a political dimension; as though “political narrative” means “I disagreed with the premise or content, which makes it Wrong” and not “a narrative which contains and was written by people.”
Vox Day, who was not named in Meadows’ piece but is the subject of the linked We Hunted the Mammoth article, immediately published an objection to her “neo-Nazi” characterization, and asked Black Gate to remove it.
I have written to John O’Neill, my former editor at Black Gate, asking him to remove this false, malicious, and materially damaging libel directed at me, and by extension, the Sad and Rabid Puppies. As I was a long-time contributor to Black Gate, Mr. O’Neill knows perfectly well that I am neither a neo-Nazi nor a National Socialist, I have never been a neo-Nazi or a National Socialist, I do not belong to, or subscribe to the tenets of, the German National Socialist Workers Party or any subsequent facsimile, and I do not appreciate the libelous attempts of Ms Meadows, to publicly and falsely assert that I am “an actual neo-Nazi”.
On December 11, Black Gate truncated its version of Meadows’ post. What remains now are two introductory paragraphs and a link indicating the rest can be read at Amazing Stories. (The link is not yet operative, for reasons outlined below.)
Foz Meadows explained for File 770 the steps that led to her essay originally appearing on Black Gate:
I pitched John a piece about the relationship between politics and SFF back on November 14th; he expressed an interest, and I turned it in to him on December 8th. He read, approved and posted it to the site himself.
The day after it appeared, O’Neill wrote to Meadows discussing reaction to the post.
Checking my email, I found two missives from John on the subject. The first warned me that there was some ugliness about insults and doxing me in VD’s comment thread; he said he’d been getting threats from VD’s readers, that VD himself had sent a lengthy email demanding a retraction, and to let him know if I started getting harassed.
The second email was longer: as VD lives in the EU where there are laws about Nazi affiliations, John said, he (VD) was concerned that being called a neo-Nazi could have adverse legal consequences for him, and though John expressed his agreement with and support of what I’d written, he nonetheless didn’t want to risk Black Gate being the source of an actual legal difficulty for someone else. As such, he asked if I’d consider changing my wording as a personal favour to him. I didn’t want to do that for a number of reasons, not least because we’re at a point in history where refusing to acknowledge the neo-Nazism of the alt-right, with which VD is openly affiliated, is a major contributing factor to its normalisation. To me, this was a statement worth defending. VD denies being a misogynist while saying that women shouldn’t have the right to vote, denies being racist while spouting white supremacist dogma, and denies being homophobic while defining queerness as a defect and a moral failing: that he would additionally deny being a neo-Nazi while defending anti-Semitism and espousing xenophobic, ableist and ultranationalist views, among others, fits the established pattern of his behaviour. His dislike of the label doesn’t moot its applicability, and as I pointed out to John, I’m hardly the first person to call him one, whether online or off. John agreed again, but reiterated his preference that Black Gate not risk responsibility for getting someone else in legal trouble, however hypothetically.
O’Neill proposed several ideas for removing the controversy from Black Gate.
Initially, it was suggested that I could either change my wording in the piece and write a footnote explaining why, or else move it to my own blog with a link remaining at Black Gate. However, John also mentioned that Steve Davidson of Amazing Stories had contacted him in support of what I’d written and was willing to back me up on it, and would I consider transferring the unaltered piece to his site? After a further back and forth with both Steve and John, I agreed to that. However, owing to various emails getting caught in spam filters, there was a miscommunication about timing between Steve and John: Steve wanted to research and write a footnote of his own before posting the piece to Amazing Stories, while John assumed it was good to go. Hence the current state of affairs where the truncated version is up at Black Gate, but linking to a URL that hasn’t yet posted the rest.
Essentially, then the issue is this: a man who happily uses feminazi as an insult, gives commenters who think Nazis are preferable to feminists a space on his blog, and who has publicly said that people have a right to be anti-Semitic, thinks my calling him a neo-Nazi is both inaccurate to the point of being libelous and concrete enough to potentially get him in trouble. Rather ironic, really.
Meadows’ expects the essay to reappear before long at Amazing Stories.
Black Gate’s O’Neill published the essay without having committed to keep it online when the inevitable objection came. That one would be coming could be predicted based on Vox Day’s success in extracting apologies from Tor Books’ Tom Doherty and Irene Gallo after Gallo referenced the Rabid Puppies as a neo-nazi group on Facebook in 2015.
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
Personally, I wouldn’t give a crap if Mr Beale got in trouble because of my article.
as VD lives in the EU where there are laws about Nazi affiliations, John said, he (VD) was concerned that being called a neo-Nazi could have adverse legal consequences for him,
Then maybe Mr Beale should either: 1) Not live in the EU, or 2) not espouse views that could be credibly called neo-Nazi.
Bonnie McDaniel: Then maybe Mr Beale should either: 1) Not live in the EU, or 2) not espouse views that could be credibly called neo-Nazi.
Yeah, O’Neill is a good guy, but I’m mystified as to why he thinks he would be responsible for getting VD in trouble, simply for publishing the truth. If it quacks like a neo-Nazi duck, it’s a neo-Nazi duck.
If VD doesn’t want to get in trouble for being a neo-Nazi, he should stop behaving like one.
One imagines that if Mr Beale were anything other than an insignificant pipsqueak with delusions of grandeur then he might have come to the attention of EU authorities.
Meanwhile if his gait, utterances and pronouncements are anatine, then I have no doubt that he belongs to that species. The description ‘neo-nazi’ seems most apt.
I expect Beale won’t be happy about being presented as someone who wants an article changed out of fear, because being scared of what might happen if the authorities are given reason to look at him is not really the manly image he likes to project.
But hey, if the foo shits…
Yer what?
Exactly what kind of legal strife is he claiming?
As Vox Day lives in the EU where self applied arson to ones pants can have adverse consequences…
Camestros, I’d submit that DIY trouser ignition has adverse consequences not limited to the EU. If that was the reason for Brexit, then the sheeple will be sadly disappointed.
Why are Neo-Nazis like Theodore Beale so frightened to claim their legacy? I’ll never understand.
It bears repeating:
Vox Day – technically not a neo-nazi.
In some countries yes, in some countries no. Beale lives in Italy. AFAIK, Italy does not have such laws (just as Sweden does not). There it is still legal to discriminate against people of different religion or ethnicity.
Looks like O’Neill has been conned.
I think VD has successfully pulled the wool over O’Neil’s eyes here. There are no “EU laws” about this or anything else, all law is national but may have to meet standards laid down by the EU. There are various national laws against being an actual nazi, so in most EU countries if you go on a demonstration wearing nazi uniform, holding a nazi flag and chanting anti-semitic slogans then you’re going to Have Problems, but regrettably the vast majority of neo-nazis have enough brains not to do that.
Sadly, so long as you have a little bit of discretion in how you name yourself and operate it’s quite possible to be effectively neo-nazi without legal consequences.
It’s certainly possible that espousing neo-nazi beliefs could rise to the level of breaking some hate-speech laws, but being a neo-nazi has nothing to do with that – those laws apply to everyone. All VD has to do is not actually break them, and it won’t matter how many people on the internet call him a neo-nazi.
In short, VD’s real complaint isn’t that being called a neo-nazi is wrong, it’s that calling attention to some of the things he’s already said might cause him trouble.
Yeah, don’t call him a neo-Nazi. There’s nothing “neo” about him! 😀
On the slightly different subject of whether Vox Day is actually a neo-nazi, personally I wouldn’t bother calling Vox Day a neo-nazi because he’ll just play tedious semantic games about it (see also: his claims that Native American heritage immunises him from being a white supremacist) such as quibbling about whether or not he’s a member of an organisation with “nazi” in the title.
However, if you wonder why many many people call Vox Day a Neo-Nazi, you have only to look at his Alt Right manifesto (archive.org link) which contains at point 14 the so-called “14 words” of classic White Supremacism. He may be technically-not-a-neo-nazi-in-the-strictest-sense, but he’s dogwhistling really loudly in the direction of actual neo-nazis.
I dont know of any laws that would prevent you from calling yourself nazi as long as you dont
-carry the uniforms, showing insignitia like swastikas etc
– dont break any laws, like assault etc
– dont claim the holocaust has never happend.
There are no “ideaology laws” in the EU. Your ideology doesnt matter. Its the actions that matter. So, being called out as a neonazi wouldnt have any effect on him. So yes, John has been conned unfortuntly.
When he aped the 14 words, Beale finally stopped beating around the bush and came out firmly as a Neo Nazi. His coquettish flirting with fascism is done. His denial is pathetic backpedaling. He may think he can Aristotle himself out of it, the way he imagines he has out of all his other reprehensible statements, but the 14 words is explicitly Neo Nazi.
As far as I could understand the Brexit campaign its argument was that the Tory government would stop punching people in the face if only they were free of the terrible laws of the European Union which required the Tory government to punch people in the face. Unfortunately, during post-Brexit vote negotiations, the Tory government has discovered that due to arcane rules* it has to continue punching people in the face for the time being. However, setting people’s pants on fire may have been another reason.
*[specifically the ‘we like punching poor people in the face’ rule]
So, does this all not strike people as odd? OK, the answer to that is both ‘yes, obviously’ and ‘no, we are all getting used to this kind of absurd bullying now’, but bare with me.
Vox demands that BlackGate takes the article down and gives a clearly spurious reason for doing so. BlackGate has conceded but has done so as minimally as possible. The article is still there (but now incomplete with a link to Amazing Stories instead). The comment section still discusses the neo-Nazi remark and other blog posts that mention the neo-Nazi remark still link there. In terms of shielding Vox from some kind of prosecution against some non-existent EU law about being vaguely a neo-Nazi, this seems to be minimal protection.
So why bother? I see that it saves face for both Vox and BlackGate but it doesn’t actually address Vox’s complaint and make BlackGate look a bit silly/cowardly without actually covering them legally – assuming Vox had some legal basis for complaint which he clearly doesn’t.
Ugh. Good point. The whole thing is just Ted getting attention.
Clicky
@Camestros
I have sympathy for Black Gate in the sense that a small website can get a whole lot of trouble from just the potential of legal trouble, and it’s for then to decide when it’s more trouble than it’s worth. I mean, I’d love to urge them to keep it up but it’s not my blood sweat and tears that’s gone into making Black Gate.
An interesting thing is that despite blustering about libel to his followers VD appears to not have threatened BG in those terms – he’s tried some sort of “reasonableness” tactic with O’Neil while declaring victory to his minions.
The test will be whether VD continues acting against the new host – Davidson will clearly not be taking VDs calls so VD will have to put his money where his mouth is.
Regardless of my quackings, I am not a duck nor have I ever associated with the tenets of duckdom. In the future, kindly refrain from ruffling my feathers or I’ll send you my bill for reparations.
It’s Foz telling the truth about Beale, and a tortured and wailing response from Beale trying to shut her up. OTOH, as Mark points out, Black Gate winds up getting on the firing line for it.
Ugh.
Oh, so Beale is both a neo-nazi AND a liar. I for one can’t wait to see him being returned to his country of birth.
Beale is a neo-Nazi.
In a slightly odd coincidence, an example of what neo-nazis have to do in the UK to get in trouble has just surfaced.
“National Action” are to be proscribed by Order (that is, a piece of secondary legislation) for having progressed from being common-or-garden neo-nazis to actually celebrating the death of an MP and calling for further murders, plus some nasty anti-semitism that I won’t repeat.
And that’s the line VD claims to be worried about “adverse legal consequences” from crossing?
I sketched a cartoon of a guy with a toothbrush mustache, decked out in a complete Third Reich uniform, angrily telling someone else (in Fraktur lettering, ideally), “What did you call me? That’s a Godwin! I win automatically!”
Camestros:
The possibility of Italian prosecutors taking notice of an article on a relatively obscure American SF website is basically zero. If Beale is truly worried about Italian authorities taking notice of his ideology, it would be smarter to lay low than to draw attention to the allegations against him by complaining loudly about them.
Since I doubt Beale is too stupid to have heard of the Streisand effect, I must assume that the grab for attention is deliberate. Which, incidentally, also fits with most of his other behaviour the last years.
So I think this adresses Beale’s real complaint quite well: His real complaint is not that someone calls him a Neo-Nazi, it is that people haven’t been talking enough about him lately. And now he feels that he’s back in the spotlight.
@Kip W: any post-third-january-nineteen-forty-one Nazi should abolish Fraktur as Judenlettern, no?
This is funny, it’s one of those “careful what you wish for” scenerios for Beale. He whines to John, John gives him what he asks for, but the end results are an article with Beale’s name directly attached to the term Neo-Nazi 14 times on File770, John O’Neil portraying Beale as a coward, and the original article staying in print in print.
But of course this is a victory for him, 27 dimensional chess and all.
@Ryan. Aristotle would approve of your logic.
The article will be appearing on Amazing Stories later today.
I would like to respond to many comments here, but at this point in time it appears that being circumspect is probably my best course of action.
As Foz so eloquently pointed out in her response to Mike, “not least because we’re at a point in history where refusing to acknowledge the neo-Nazism of the alt-right, with which VD is openly affiliated, is a major contributing factor to its normalisation.”
I requested that Foz give me a day or so to do a little research, most of which will not be appearing appended to the article, but necessary nonetheless. Foz agreed; I should have written one additional email to John to get scheduling straightened out but local circumstances interfered a lot over the weekend. Additionally, Foz and I are 12 hours apart so things have been affected by the world’s turning as well.
I would prefer to discuss this issue with those interested privately; PM me on Facebook if you are on FB; find someone who is on FB to send your email to me if you aren’t.
*sigh* The other thing this does is shift all the attention to whether or not Beale is a neo-Nazi, and Beale getting to go into the “O Horror They’re Calling Us Nazis” spiel, when the entire actual article was about something rather different.
@Ryan. You got it wrong. 27-dimensional cheese.
To me, this goes back to being very careful with labels. Of old, many left-leaning movements have been quite free about using terms like fascists or nazi (neo or not), and then various right-leaning movements have started to use terms like “feminazis”.
The result is that the terms are diluted, and that fake outrage is generated.
If Foz Meadows had provided some actual evidence of Beale being a neo-nazi I wouldn’t have had any problem calling him that. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case, but it needs to be demonstrated to a greater degree than We Hunted the Mammoth does.
I have nothing against calling a spade a spade, but one needs to be sure it’s a spade and not a shovel, and ready to demonstrate it as such.
Jubal
I pondered it briefly, being aware that the Nazis considered themselves too au courante to embrace the old-style lettering. I don’t really care about their feelings, though, and in the minds of most people, encouraged by our own propaganda at the time, it’s the lettering they talk in. In this case, I’m happy to promulgate a stereotype, especially if it gives them eine Schade.
This is akin to people in my area who don’t want public associations with the KKK but espouse all of the organization’s poisonous beliefs. I refuse to let them sanitize themselves by distancing themselves from the hate group.
Beale happily parrots Nazi ideology on his blog and has been doing so for years. No one needs to see a swastika on his arm to know he is a Nazi. Like the people in my area, Beale’s actions speak louder than his words.
I stand by my original suggestion. She should have added a parenthetical comment “Vox Day denies that he’s technically a neo-Nazi” with a link back to his site.
“Officially” would work too. 🙂
@T. Frohock
He claims he disapproves of their economic policies.
“If Foz Meadows had provided some actual evidence of Beale being a neo-nazi I wouldn’t have had any problem calling him that. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case, but it needs to be demonstrated to a greater degree than We Hunted the Mammoth does.”
No it doesn’t. He’s a Nazi, plain and simple, and the evidence for that is every single thing he’s ever said or done.
Oh, well, if Beale (who is technically not a neo-Nazi) disapproves of their economic policies, what could anyone possibly have to complain about? It’s not as though they did anything else objectionable, after all.
{exit sarcasm mode}
If Foz Meadows had provided some actual evidence of Beale being a neo-nazi I wouldn’t have had any problem calling him that.
There is plenty of evidence for Beale’s adherence to Nazi ideology. His “alt-right” manifesto espouses every major Nazi policy.
@ Steve Davidson
Glad you’re giving Meadows’ piece a home. It’s a very good article.
The correct response to this spoiled-brat offspring of a convicted tax evader, who persists in wrecking what other people do, and who is apparently a tasteless, opinionated, fugghead, is to ignore him until he has the courage to go to court with his ridiculous claims.
It even includes the ’14 words’ slogan of the modern neo-Nazi movement.
@Kip: it’s still quite infuriating that they managed to blame Jews even for that change…
@MsB. Thank you.
@All. I am out the rest of the day for medical appointments for my wife. Please do not misconstrue silence as non-engagement.
Peter J
Our prospective Attorney General claimed to have considered joining the Klan, but stopped because they smoked pot. I wonder if any of them are going to regret voting for Trump after this yahoo starts putting his ideas into action.
Jubal
There is that, of course.
You know who else disapproved of the Nazis’ economic policies? Hitler!
That’s my take as well. He objects to any label applied to him because that draws the most attention to himself. It’s incredibly tedious.
@Greg Hullender He claims he disapproves of their economic policies.
If it’s the “socialism” in “National Socialism” then I guess we could say he considers the Nazis dangerously left-wing?