"What it means is: the fucking Nazis are with us again. Skinheads. David Duke. In France, Jacques Chirac…and Jean-Marie Le Pen—demagogic leader of the neo-Nazi mouthpiece group, the Nationalist Front Party. Istvan Porubsky, the racist thug of Hungary. Benito’s granddaughter Alessandra Mussolini had her Italian Social Movement. Pamyat in Russia and the Ku Klux Klan at Rulo Farm, Nebraska. Klas Lund, the 23-year-old convicted Nazi killer, leader of Sweden’s underground White Aryan Resistance, known as VAM. The British thug Ian Stuart Donaldson and his Nazi Blood and Honour Brigade. Alejandro Biodini and his anti-Semitic Argentinian Nationalist Workers’ Party. Gerhard Frey’s neo-Nazi Deutsche Volks Union; the notorious Nazi and historical revisionist Walter Ochsenberger in Austria; the 52-year-old German-Canadian anti-Semite, Nazi, and “Auschwitz liar” Ernst Zündel. Tom Metzger. The Church of the Creator. Croatian president Franjo Tudjman (“The estimate of Holocaust victims is based on biased testimony and exaggerated data”) and U.S. Presidential candidate for the Republican nomination, right-wing columnist Patrick Buchanan, beloved of the television camera’s eye, who put forth the certain theory that the Zyklon-B gas chambers at Treblinka couldn’t have functioned as “a killing apparatus.” Gordon Kahl and the Posse Comitatus. Fourth Reich skinheads. What it means is: the proper names change but the drooling lunacy is self-perpetuating. Anti-Semitism. What historian Robert S. Wistrich calls a “miasma of nightmarish paranoia, millennial fantasy, homicidal hatred and sheer political cynicism…Free-floating anti-Semitism, for which the actual presence of Jews is almost immaterial, thrives on archetypal fears, anxieties and reflexes that seem to defy any rational analysis.” What my story means is: one cannot hide, one cannot rest, one cannot relax or seek salvation in anonymity or the good offices of gods who may or may not wear their true faces. What it means is: The Nazis are with us again. Still. Yet. They never went away. And with the spread of cultural illiteracy, historical amnesia, mass communications obfuscation…their puke-coated message is out there once again. For thirty years, they had to keep their rotten bigotry to themselves, but with the passing of time they have emerged into the light, to poison the generations of rock’n’roll that have about as much of a sense of the past as a ground-worm. They can say anything, pass off any kind of obscurantism or illiterate lunacy—like UFO abductees—and there will always be dopes and jerks and illiterates and brain-damage cases who give what they cobble up some credence."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Fantasy authorsHorror authorsScience fiction authors from the United StatesNovelists from the United StatesEssayists from the United States
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Afterthoughts (comment on the story Twilight in the Cupboard; p. 69)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Harlan_Ellison
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Harlan Ellison
Harlan Jay Ellison (27 May 1934 – 28 June 2018) was an American author (mostly of speculative fiction) and media critic.
91 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Harlan Ellison →
Related Quotes
"Now he had form and substance. He had become a personality, something they had filtered out of the system many decade…"
"Where did he get jelly beans? That's another good question. More than likely it will never be answered to your comple…"
"HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED…"
"TO HELL WITH YOU. BUT THEN YOU'RE THERE, AREN'T YOU?"
"Love Ain't Nothing But Sex Misspelled."
"Art was not reality—it was only the appearance of reality."
"And thus I arrive at the foundation of my theory about art as a vehicle for dissent: the fury and purity of the creat…"
"Christmas is an awfulness that compares favorably with the great London plague and fire of 1665-66. No one escapes th…"
"He was demonstrating to the world the writing was a craft, that it was not an act of magic."
"You’re so far out you’d have to masquerade to get back in."