I’ve been thinking for a while that I ought to start a feature leading up to the (upcoming) 5th anniversary of Geekery Today, called Dumb Things I’ve Said. The basic idea being that anyone who spends five years writing regularly on controversial topics is likely to change their views over time, and it’s better to spend your commemorative anniversary posts hammering out your own errors than clapping yourself on the back, because you’ve probably said things you later ended up thinking were pretty dumb. I’m no exception, and what I wrote a couple years ago in belated recognition of Bill of Rights Day is a case in point. I doubt that I’ll actually start the feature, but that won’t keep me from ragging on myself for today, at least.

It’s been 214 years today — December 15th — since the first ten amendments, commonly known as the Bill of Rights, were scribbled onto the end of the United States Constitution by order of the several states and the Congress of the United States. Folks with too much time on their hands have dubbed it Bill of Rights Day and think you ought to celebrate the grand legacy of those ten amendments. A couple years ago, I took the opportunity of the 212th anniversary to sing the praises of the Bill of Rights, to bemoan the erosion of some of their traditional protections, and hope that a brighter day would dawn soon. It was a bunch of nonsense, and I should have known that it was at the time, but it took me a while to really see through the dust that the canonical fairy-tales about legal history kick up.

Not surprisingly, I had started doubting the usefulness of leaning on the Constitution when I became an anarchist. But old cognitive habits die hard, and it wasn’t until last year, when I really started reading about William Lloyd Garrison and the rest of the disunionist abolitionists, that I began to feel anti-constitutionalism in any serious way, and it was largely through the Garrisonians that I came to realize the importance of making your arguments from moral basics rather than from legal hermeneutics. Voting abolitionists, and even Lysander Spooner, insisted on twisting the Constitution every which way they could to avoid the conclusion that it was (1) a pro-slavery alliance, and thus (2) an objective force for evil, the covenant with Death and agreement with Hell that Garrison denounced. But as interesting as Spooner’s argument was, it was really Garrison that was right about the Constitution (as I think Spooner came to realize later in his career); the important thing wasn’t constitutionality, but justice, which is not subject to legislative fiat. The Garrisonians, because so many of them were fervently religious, talked about a higher law than the Constitution; that’s partly right, but in a sense it’s also a matter of a lower, more human law; any serious theory of justice has to start from our ordinary claims to justice and dignity, the kind of demands that we ordinarily address to our fellow human beings (don’t attack me without reason, don’t trash my stuff, mind your own business if it’s not hurting you) rather than the ritual incantations that you might utter before a Court (Eighth Amendment, Public Use Clause, penumbral right to privacy, blah blah blah).

But as of a couple years ago my recognition of all this was nowhere near complete, and so my half-complete anti-statism didn’t stop me from singing the Bill of Rights’ praises, piously hoping that other branches of government would force the Bush administration to stick more closely to it, and absurdly describing it as that good old parchment barricade against tyranny.

Well, the thing about parchment barricades is that they don’t hold up very well against pressure. (That’s why you usually want to make barricades out of mud or bricks, at a minimum.) Constitutions don’t protect liberty; people do. Or don’t, which is the legacy the Constitution of the United States leaves us with today. Whatever protections the Bill of Rights was supposed afford white male citizens from the federal government, and whoever those protections were supposed to be extended to in the present day, we have (just to pick a few arbitrarily-selected examples) the FBI spying on us in secret, increasingly arrogant and militant paramilitary police ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5]) occupying our cities, a rampaging global war machine, deliberate and systematic gutting of habeas corpus, and a Justice Department that seems to believe that it can threaten and arrest people for failing to comply with secret laws whose terms they refuse to disclose. Either the Bill of Rights permits this kind of abuse, in which case it does not deserve the praise of rational people, or it forbids it but is incapable of stopping it, in which case it is useless.

In either case, my whining that this sort of thing oversteps this or that clause is bloody well irrelevant; the problem with invading people’s lives with unwarranted searches and seizures, government-sponsored religious persecution, seizing guns, maintaining a standing war machine, inflicting cruel and unusual punishment, or rounding people up and throwing them in prison forever without charges, is not that they’re unconstitutional; it’s that they’re evil. There may be cases where something is wrong just because it violates some bit of positive law — respect for human life demands that you drive on the side of the road other people drive on, but it’s a matter of arbitrary convention which side that should be — but these are certainly not that sort of case. The right to your own body, to self-defense, to your conscience, to peace and freedom, are prior to any law or compact, the only possible foundation for any just law or legitimate authority at all, and therefore not dependent on the Constitution saying one mumbling word about them.

Human rights don’t need to be written on scraps of paper to be worth defending, and wasting your time and energy wrangling over the right enchantments to invoke The Law on your side is a distraction and a sucker’s bet. I’ll take my rights. You can keep the bill.

Further reading

• GT 2005-09-17: International Ignore the Constitution Day
• GT 2005-09-02: Definition 2
• GT 2005-07-04: Burn, baby, burn
• No Treason! 2005-12-11: Bush Gets it Right

Everyone’s got their own Friday afternoon game to play, and this one’s mine. I’m introducing a new recurring feature for the Rad Geek People’s Daily: Over My Shoulder, quotes (mostly without commentary) from something I’ve been reading this week. Irony to one side, this isn’t really intended as bragging about my reading list; the point is that what I’m reading is a way of getting at things I’ve been thinking about, even if I don’t yet have a confident position to stake out yet; and also that there are a lot of people out there who are smarter than I am, and not everything they write is something I can link to in online commentary or read the whole thing weblog posts. So here’s the rules.

1. The quote should be something that I have read, in print, over the course of the past week. (It has to be something I’ve actually read, and not something that I’ve read a page of just in order to be able to post my favorite quote.)

2. It should be a matter of one or a few paragraphs.

3. There’s no commentary above and beyond a couple sentences, more as context-setting or a sort of caption for the text than as a discussion.

4. Quoting a passage doesn’t entail endorsement of what’s said in it. Sometimes I agree and sometimes I don’t. Whether I do or not isn’t really the point of the exercise anyway.

If you like this idea, feel free to repeat it or adapt it as you see fit on your own page or in the comments. (Just please don’t call it a meme: there’s no such thing. Thanks.)

And we’re off. The inaugural selection is a bit I read yesterday on the bus, from the first chapter of Paul Buhle’s Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor (all emphasis is in the original):

Fraina argued that what he called state capitalism, an expansive capitalist state embracing administrative centralization and militarization, had rendered the old socialist expectations irrelevant. Liberalism, as it had taken ideological form (Fraina found fault in the philosophy of pragmatism), now offered the intellectual counterpart to AFL unionism, narrowing the range of radical thought, aiding and assisting the upper classes and upper strata of labor against the threat of the irrational lower classes and of the world’s suffering peoples at large.

Fraina directed the sharpest of his polemics against William English Walling, a renowned socialist intellectual en route to becoming an AFL spokesman. Walling had observed shrewdly that socialists had been blind to the inner strengths of capitalism, the increased power and strength that it will gain through state capitalism and the increased wealth that will come through a beneficent and scientific policy of production. Being regulated, the system would be successively transformed by the mechanics of a complex struggle: a state capitalism under the hegemony of big and petty bourgeoisie would besupplanted by a state socialism under the petty bourgeoisie and the skilled workers. In the process, the allegedly messianic character of socialism would fall away entirely, and the social question would become no more than the struggle by those who have less, against those who have more in matters of income, hours, leisure, places of living, associations, and opportunity. Such a struggle could be properly ordered, guided by reform through existing institutions. The disorder implied by the ideas and very constituency of the IWW was, finally, a danger to the social détente which could make this benign process possible.

Even in AFL circles, confidence in such a benign outcome wavered. As the class conflicts of 1909-1913 took shape, skilled workers once again began to perceive that the emerging system often delivered fewer benefits for them than thinkers like Walling predicted. Solidarity campaigns of mutual support in strikes, like a dramatic one by railroad workers over several years, violated the AFL norm of workers with union contracts crossing picket lines and in effect scabbing on those still striking. The attempt at coordination by railroad brotherhoods, the appearance of metal trades councils, and (by the time of the war) the appeal for solidarity among the skilled and unskilled often bypassed the idea of political or electoral socialism altogether for a more popular American idea: workers’ control of production. Many local AFL members and even leaders unmoved by socialism mulled the idea, while Gompers’s circle rejected it out of hand as impossible and undesirable, an erasure of the line between labor’s prerogative and capital’s rights.

Conservative chiefs of AFL unions ranging from the hatters and pattern-makers to tailors, sheet metal workers, carpenters, and machinists, all lost their offices to socialist-backed candidates during 1911-1912 on grounds of solidarity versus conciliation with employers. A combination of administrative manipulation, political alliances with Democrats inside labor, and forceful support of labor conservatives by the Catholic Church was required to bring anti-socialist functionaries back into union office. The renewed victory of Gompers was sealed by the events of the First World War. As labor surged forward, anti-war ideas were in many parts of the country forbidden in published or spoken form, and those who voiced them faced deportation, arrest, beatings by vigilantes, and even lynching. The IWW, which carefully refrained from any political statements, was nevertheless suppressed in a fashion unknown hitherto in the United States, save perhaps for the attacks on Reconstructionist radicals in the post-Civil War South. This time, the modern version of the Ku Klux Klan had the presidential seal of approval and top labor leaders’ avid cooperation. Gompers demanded political acquiescence to the war, or at least silence, as the price of admission for newcomers to the AFL’s own swelling wartime bureaucracy. Upwardly mobile intellectuals around labor, like Walling, made their contribution by insisting that the U.S. economic empire that had expanded dramatically in wartime was benevolent, and that the leaders of the AFL, in their appeals for loyalty to government and indifference to those suppressed, accurately represented the interests of the working class.

Regulated state capitalism did indeed take shape, even by 1917, though it more resembled Fraina’s nightmares than Walling’s dreams. As newspapers were suppressed, Socialist Party offices destroyed, and local and national anti-war spokespeople, including Eugene Debs, sentenced to long terms in prison, Fraina acutely observed that the newly regulated system included the extension of the functions of the federal government, regulation equally of capital and labor, the Strong Man policy of administrative centralization, and the mobilization of everything by a national administrative control of industry. Having failed to organize an international system to regulate the transfer of profits among ruling groups, capitalism now rended the world, and (as Fraina correctly anticipated the worse horrors to come in the next world war and after) prepared the basis for future global conflicts. In that process, Fraina argued, leaders like Gompers could be depended upon to serve their true masters, while former socialists like Walling would tag along and rationalize the process–as perhaps termporarily dreadful but inevitable, and ultimately beneficial.

— Paul Buhle, Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor, pp. 69-71.

On 6 December 1989, sixteen years ago today, Marc Lepine murdered 14 women at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique. He killed them because they were women; he went into an engineering class with a gun, ordered the men to leave, screamed I hate feminists, and then opened fire on the women. He kept shooting, always at women, as he moved through the building, killing 14 women and injuring 8 before he ended the terror by killing himself.

6 December is a day of remembrance for the women who were killed. They were:

• Geneviève Bergeron, aged 21
• Hélène Colgan, 23
• Nathalie Croteau, 23
• Barbara Daigneault, 22
• Anne-Marie Edward, 21
• Maud Haviernick, 29
• Barbara Maria Klucznik, 31
• Maryse Leclair, 23
• Annie St.-Arneault, 23
• Michèle Richard, 21
• Maryse Laganière, 25
• Anne-Marie Lemay, 22
• Sonia Pelletier, 28; and
• Annie Turcotte, aged 21

I don’t have much to add today, except to repeat what I said last year:

The Montreal Massacre was horrifying and shocking. But we also have to remember that it’s less unusual than we all think. Yes, it’s a terrible freak event that some madman massacred women he had never even met because of his sociopathic hatred. But every day women are raped, beaten, and killed by men–and it’s usually not by strangers, but by men they know and thought they could trust. They are attacked just because they are women–because the men who assault them believe that they have the right to control women’s lives and their sexual choices, and to hurt them or force them if they don’t agree. By conservative estimates, one out of every four women is raped or beaten by an intimate partner sometime in her life. Take a moment to think about that. How much it is. What it means for the women who are attacked. What it means for all women who live in the shadow of that threat.

On what seems like an unrelated topic, I’ve been asked before, and I’m sure I’ll be asked again, what it is that makes me so sympathetic to, and inspires me in, radical feminism, and Andrea Dworkin’s version of radical feminism specifically. That’s a question that gets tossed at anyone who expresses sympathy for or interest in Dworkin’s work, but I guess it’s supposed to be especially puzzling in my case, as someone who’s (1) male and (2) pretty stridently libertarian in my politics. There are a lot of things to say in response, but the one that means the most is to say that Andrea Dworkin takes violence against women seriously. What it means for violence, and the threat of violence, to be so pervasive, systematic, intense, and socially invisible or culturally excused. The demands that places on all of us. The urgency and seriousness of the struggle that it calls for. The fact that I’m male (and that I’ve had to make the painful realization of how often what I’ve said and what I’ve done hurt women, how much it was shaped by, and participated in, the same system of male supremacy that has hurt some of my dearest friends and family so badly) harldy overrides the fact that, well, what she says is true. (I know it’s true, because it’s happened to my friends.) And the fact that my politics are centrally concerned with a radical and comprehensive commitment to human freedom makes the insights offered by Andrea Dworkin (and Catharine MacKinnon and Susan Brownmiller and Robin Morgan and…) more, not less urgently needed. As I’ve written elsewhere (with my friend Roderick Long):

Brownmiller’s and other feminists’ insights into the pervasiveness of battery, incest, and other forms of male violence against women, present both a crisis and an opportunity for libertarians. Libertarianism professes to be a comprehensive theory of human freedom; what is supposed to be distinctive about the libertarian theory of justice is that we concern ourselves with violent coercion no matter who is practicing it—even if he has a government uniform on. But what feminists have forced into the public eye in the last 30 years is that, in a society where one out of every four women faces rape or battery by an intimate partner,2 and where women are threatened or attacked by men who profess to love them, because the men who attack them believe that being a man means you have the authority to control women, male violence against women is nominally illegal but nevertheless systematic, motivated by the desire for control, culturally excused, and hideously ordinary. For libertarians, this should sound eerily familiar; confronting the full reality of male violence means nothing less than recognizing the existence of a violent political order working alongside, and independently of, the violent political order of statism. As radical feminist Catharine MacKinnon writes, “Unlike the ways in which men systematically enslave, violate, dehumanize, and exterminate other men, expressing political inequalities among men, men’s forms of dominance over women have been accomplished socially as well as economically, prior to the operation of the law, without express state acts, often in intimate contexts, as everyday life” (1989, p. 161). Male supremacy has its own ideological rationalizations, its own propaganda, its own expropriation, and its own violent enforcement; although it is often in league with the male-dominated state, male violence is older, more invasive, closer to home, and harder to escape than most forms of statism. This means that libertarians who are serious about ending all forms of political violence need to fight, at least, a two-front war, against both statism and male supremacy …

Here is the speech that Andrea Dworkin gave at the University of Montreal, a year and a day after the massacre:

Feminists should remember that while we often don’t take ourselves very seriously, the men around us often do. I think that the way we can honor these women who were executed, for crimes that they may or may not have committed–which is to say, for political crimes–is to commit every crime for which they were executed, crimes against male supremacy, crimes against the right to rape, crimes against the male ownership of women, crimes against the male monopoly of public space and public discourse. We have to stop men from hurting women in everyday life, in ordinary life, in the home, in the bed, in the street, and in the engineering school. We have to take public power away from men whether they like it or not and no matter what they do. If we have to fight back with arms, then we have to fight back with arms. One way or another we have to disarm men. We have to be the women who stand between men and the women they want to hurt. We have to end the impunity of men, which is what they have, for hurting women in all the ways they systematically do hurt us.

–Andrea Dworkin (1990): Mass Murder in Montreal, Life and Death, 105-114.

And, as I said last year:

To be serious about creating a free and just society, we have to be serious about ending violence against women. As Andrea Dworkin puts it (speaking about sexual assault), I want to see this men’s movement make a commitment to ending rape because that is the only meaningful commitment to equality. It is astonishing that in all our worlds of feminism and antisexism we never talk seriously about ending rape. Ending it. Stopping it. No more. No more rape. In the back of our minds, are we holding on to its inevitability as the last preserve of the biological? Do we think that it is always going to exist no matter what we do? All of our political actions are lies if we don’t make a commitment to ending the practice of rape. This commitment has to be political. It has to be serious. It has to be systematic. It has to be public. It can’t be self-indulgent. And the same is true of every form of everyday gender terrorism–stalking, battery, rape, murder. How could we face Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Barbara Maria Klucznik, Maryse Leclair, Annie St.-Arneault, Michèle Richard, Maryse Laganière, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, Annie Turcotte, and tell them we did anything less?

Take some time to keep the 14 women who were killed in the Montreal massacre in your thoughts. If you have the money to give, make a contribution to your local battered women’s shelter. As Jennifer Barrigar writes:

Every year I make a point of explaining that I’m pointing the finger at a sexist patriarchal misogynist society rather than individual men. This year I choose not to do that. The time for assigning blame is so far in the past (if indeed there ever was such a time), and that conversation takes us nowhere. This is the time for action, for change. Remember Parliament’s 1991 enactment of the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women — the glorious moment when every single womyn in the House stood together and claimed this Day of Remembrance. Remember what we can and do accomplish — all of us — when we work together. It is time to demand change, and to act on that demand. Let’s break the cycle of violence, and let’s do it now.

Remember. Mourn. Act.

Elsewhere

• Toronto Star 2005-12-06: Montreal Massacre victims remembered
• Anarchocyclist 2005-12-05: revolutionary women puts many pieces together nicely.

This Halloween, the (mostly white) women’s softball team at Stetson University in Florida decided to live it up by dressing as the (mostly Black) women’s basketball team for an off-campus Halloween party. Some of the nice little details that they decided to add to their costume included: gold teeth, corn rows, thug poses for photos. Oh, and also blackface makeup.

We’re told by a student from the campus who knows them that I do not think the girls were trying to be racist; I honestly believe that they do not understand what they did. That’s probably true. It’s also very sad. Fortunately, though, careless ignorance of recent American history and blackface fun-and-games at college Halloween parties aren’t at all pervasive or common among affluent white college students. This is, of course, just an isolated incident; it’s not like there is any kind of festering racism in the American campus culture at all. Nothing to see here, citizen; move along.

Completely unrelated links

• Tolerance.org 2002-09-25: Jim Crow Bizarre at OK State
• GT 2002-05-13: Here we go again – frat racism ad Syracuse
• GT 2001-11-14: And the other shoe drops – Delta Sigma Phi dissolved in frat racism scandal
• GT 2001-11-14: One down, one to go… – Beta Theta Pi dissolved in frat racism scandal
• GT 2001-11-09: The Context of racism at Auburn fraternities
• Tolerance.org (2001-11-08): University of Mississippi Fraternity Suspended Until 2002
• GT 2001-11-06: Virulent racism at Auburn fraternities
• Tolerance.org (2001-11-19): Hate in the News List of Campus Incidents

Historical note, free of facile sarcasm

I don’t just say this because I know people in the Auburn fraternity system who are not the sloped-brow, amoral, reactionary meatheads that the Greeks’ history on Auburn’s campus might lead you to believe they would have to be–although this is definitely true; I have friends in the fraternity system who neither have nor want any part of that mindset. I also say it because I really regret that the meatheads that were directly involved will probably never understand just what they did wrong. They will understand that they did some dumb things that got them caught. And they may look back and grumble at the P.C. Thought Police Bastards who ruined their college career. But will they ever understand that there really was a very deep cut of wilful cruelty in what they did? They didn’t put on those costumes in order to be malicious racists (although I believe that there was certainly some overt malice involved). They put them on to have a roguish bit of fun, that old irreverant frat boy panache. Meaningless images of MTV gangstas and some documentary on the Klan they saw in school or on the History channel–trivial, ultimately, like the whole flux of images across our consciousness. Anything can be funny, right? If you don’t really go out and attack Black people, the images don’t mean anything, do they?

But words, images, costumes, historical scripts do mean something; they mean a hell of a lot. The images and rituals, the signs of white supremacist brutality in this country have a meaning, a meaning they are rooted to by centuries of blood and chains. But we live in an age in which the detached image and the spectacle is omnipresent, and yet the prevailing laid-back liberal ideology tells us that we have no reason to care, indeed, that if we do care it’s a sign of pretentiousness, humorlessness, a general need to lighten the hell up. And it’s slowly, surely killing our conscience, eating away at the possibility of being moral agents. Which has what to do with frat boys in Klan robes? I really fear that this soul-killing laid-back liberalism, the impetus behind the costumes in the first place, will also cripple the boys at Beta and Delta Sig from ever understanding what they did wrong, the cutting cruelty that they were willing to ignore in order to have a laugh. Just as much as their hate party outrages me against them, what it means also saddens me for them.

— GT 2001-11-14: One down, one to go…

The worst part about it all are the smiles. The goofy, clueless, happy-go-lucky grins of white college students who don’t understand a goddamned thing about what they’re doing, and just don’t care.

This is a picture of a Jolly Nigger Bank. During the 1880s these were a remarkably popular mechanical bank for children; place a coin on the black man’s hand and he pops it into his mouth as his bug-eyes roll back into his head. the Jolly Nigger Bank was just one of hundreds of popular children’s toys, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, that used grotesque caricatures of Black people, based on the images and conventions of blackface minstrel shows. It’s hard to believe, today, how pervasive these images were: they were everywhere, not just in children’s toys but also staples of the most popular forms of music and theater, film, cartoons, even advertising brands for everything from pancake mix to washing powder. Blackface caricatures surged in popularity in the decades after Reconstruction, and continued well into the 1940s before the rise of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s did it in. Blackface imagery was a pervasive feature of American pop culture for over a century, a feature intimately connected with casual racism, militant white supremacy, lynch law, race riots, and Jim Crow (you may recall that the system of segregation was itself named after America’s first known minstrel show stock character.

Now, there are two different ways that horrible things can end in the wake of coordinated cultural pressure. The privileged can remember them, and take responsibility for them, as hateful reminders of a shameful past. Or the privileged can do their best to pretend that they never existed, avoid mentioning them for fear of giving offense, drop them down the memory hole in the name of propriety, and drive them into the cultural underground rather than addressing them in the daylight.

Affluent whites in America — that same college-educated professional class that we daily hear praising itself and berating the redneck, reactionary white working class — decided to do the latter, not the former, with blackface when Black people made it clear that they weren’t going to stand for it anymore. Down the memory hole they sent it, and they taught that response — by not teaching that history — to their kids. You are seeing the affects of that decision on white college kids’ consciousness with every passing school year.

Thanks to Amanda, I recently found James Lileks’ new hobby, Patriotica, a loving collection of genial homefront propaganda from World War II. Lileks’ tone is jokey and sometimes downright satiric. But he makes it clear enough that that’s just his usual campy, self-deprecating schtick, applied at the level of his nation-state; part of the point here is that he’s collecting WWII propaganda because, deep down, he believes in it, and he thinks we have something to learn from it. And it’s clear enough that his audience on the Right is getting the message. (As he comments in the Daily Bleat: New update to Patriotica here, a sad reminder of the days when nearly everyone agreed there was actually a war on, and it had to be won. As a fan at the Independent Women’s Forum puts it, Those were the days when our media supported our troops! Pro-Victory writer Dadmanly wistfully remarks: For all those who think that the current administration is over-hyping the Global War on Terror, a little reminder of how they REALLY knew how to whip up the masses in WW II.)

Let’s everyone get in on the campy collecting fun! Here’s some submissions I’d like to see Lileks put in Patriotica. I’m sure you can soon find these collectibles from the Last Good War on loving display in Lileks’ collection.

We begin with Private Joe Louis clearing it all up for us. We’re going to win because we are acting as the Sword of God:

Next, there’s nothing quite so genially amusing — especially for conservatives — as absolute government command over the economy. Obey the price controls, and make sure you get your meat ration, citizen! (We’ll be taking the rest of it.)

On a similar theme, we have the following adorable bit of naked attempts at intimidation, in order to whip the masses into line:

Here’s some more choice bits for Lileks, also on the topic of intimidation. Specifically, a genial reminder from the government to shut the fuck up, citizen.

That last image is actually pretty famous. This one isn’t quite so famous, in spite of being a classic combination of two great themes of American World War II propaganda: overbearing commands for silence, and violent racist caricature.

Speaking of which, here’s several more I just can’t wait to see in Lileks’ gallery. Submitted for his approval, without further comment.

… Yeah.

I really fucking hate World War II propaganda.