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Alas, Tekumel (Alas, Barker!)


g33k

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Dunno if folks have been following the industry news...

So, it turns out that M.A.R.Barker was a closet Nazi.  😡

TL;DR --

  • published an entire neo-nazi novel, at a known neo-nazi publishing house
  • was editor at a pro-nazi / Holocaust-denial pseudo-academic journal for over a decade
  • other shite; but these 2 are, IMHO, the irretrievably-damning ones


More detail (and further links) here --
https://www.rpg.net/columns/advanced-designers-and-dragons/advanced-designers-and-dragons63.phtml
 

Well, FUCK.

(n.b. for those who still want to pursue their Tekumel -- at least sales/etc aren't going into his pocket, as he passed away some years ago; and that world has no obvious glaring nazi'isms)

Edited by g33k
fwiw, it's not funding a nazi any more
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I was just reading this. WTF!

 

--

The Voralans presents Glorantha's magical mushroom humanoids, the black elves. "Absolutely phenomenal" - Austin C. "Seriously weird-ass shit" - John D. "A great piece of work" - Leon K. The Electrum best-selling The Children of Hykim documents Glorantha's shape-changing totemic animal people, the Hsunchen. "Magisterial ... highly recommended" - Nick Brooke. "Lovingly detailed and scholarly, and fun to read" - John H. "Absolutely wonderful!" - Morgan C.

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4 hours ago, g33k said:

Well, FUCK.

Fuck, indeed.  I wish I was more surprised, though.

4 hours ago, g33k said:

(...and that world has no obvious glaring nazi'isms)

Well, if you discount the extremely authoritarian military dictatorships he proposed for his imaginary world.  And that the primary cultural influence he leaned into corresponds to the actual historical Aryans.  And I've never been comfortable with his ethnic portrayal of the Salarvyani.  Yeah, it'll be hard to not make closer comparisons now.

!i!

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9 hours ago, Bill the barbarian said:

I think I will go back to bed. Wake me when it starts to look better out there!

Your only option, I wager, is to fall into an hibernation pod, much like Fry in Futurama! 😜 

And also, embarrassed to report, never heard of him before! 😮😅

Edited by Lloyd Dupont
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4 hours ago, Ian Absentia said:

Well, if you discount the extremely authoritarian military dictatorships he proposed for his imaginary world ...

I ... kinda do (discount that), actually.

"Authoritarian military dictatorships" are frankly a staple of the fantasy fiction/gaming scenes.  Arguably, this includes both Mordor and Gondor (for example).  And, ummm... most of GoT/ASoIaF, etc.  Add Hunger Games.  As Cap said, "I can do this all day!"  😉

 

4 hours ago, Ian Absentia said:

...  And that the primary cultural influence he leaned into corresponds to the actual historical Aryans ...

I think I was somewhere in my early/mid teens when I discovered that the real "Aryans" were brown-skinned Middle-Eastern / Indian types, and had a period of baffled amazement that this was the ideal of Nazi "racial purity."  Unsurprisingly, it turns out their race-based science was abominably bad.

Barker, we should note, was a convert to Islam; he wasn't (I think) so much a "white supremacist" (in the modern neo-nazi sense), as an explicit anti-semite.  I admit I don't care to delve into the material he wrote, to attempt deconstructing his work & his thoughts; I may be being more generous than he deserved.

 

5 hours ago, Ian Absentia said:

... And I've never been comfortable with his ethnic portrayal of the Salarvyani ...

I have always had Tekumel more "on my list" (but never atop it) of "things to look into."  I don't know the Salarvyani, or how they are portrayed.
 

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11 minutes ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

And also, embarrassed to report, never heard of him before! 😮😅

He is kinda like an erudite linguist and world designer, a David Arneson rolled into a JRR Tolkien. He created the most complete, complicated and alien world to be adopted for RPGs and was the second to do it after the Lake Geneva, Wisconsin crew who created DnD. 

Edited by Bill the barbarian
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6 minutes ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

...

And also, embarrassed to report, never heard of him before! 😮😅

Barker's Tekumel remains one of the all-time great feats of world-building; on par with Tolkien's Middle-Earth, and Stafford's Glorantha.

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2 hours ago, g33k said:

I don't care to delve into the material he wrote, to attempt deconstructing his work & his thoughts; I may be being more generous than he deserved.

Two things, and then you can get back to burnishing both sides of the coin.

First, perhaps I should have been clearer in referring to Barker's apparent affection for totalitarian, military dictatorships, or "ethnofascist states" as Shannon Appelcline referred to them in the article.

Second, yes, I know about the Aryans.  And regardless of the quality of scholarship, they're sometimes invoked to evoke nostalgia for a mystical, lost, pure ancestor.  Maybe his wry joke was in re-casting the Aryans for his world using better scholarship.  And there are plenty more dots that might be connected where the Nazis' fascination with "Oriental" mysticism is concerned.

The point I was making is that everything is open to second-guessing now.  Thanks, Phil. 😛

!i!

 

carbon copy logo smallest.jpg  ...developer of White Rabbit Green

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7 hours ago, g33k said:

Barker, we should note, was a convert to Islam; he wasn't (I think) so much a "white supremacist" (in the modern neo-nazi sense), as an explicit anti-semite.  I admit I don't care to delve into the material he wrote, to attempt deconstructing his work & his thoughts; I may be being more generous than he deserved.

I guess he didn't write the back cover blurb on Serpent's Walk, but parts of it discuss the novel's depiction of a "struggle for a White world" taking place underground in the USA, with the heirs of the SS resurfacing "to challenge the democrats and Jews for the hearts and minds of White Americans". The book was published by National Vanguard Books - and, well, you can look them up, they were certainly more than solely anti-semitic.

A little bit of googling finds the book "Conspiracy Theories in American History: an Encyclopaedia" (2003), in which the writer Ingrid Walker Fields attributed the true authorship of Serpent's Walk to the white supremacist William L Pierce, who wrote the notorious Turner Diaries for the same publisher. So notorious that Amazon stopped selling it in 2020. Unlike the UK's largest bookseller, Waterstones, who still offer for sale both the Turner Diaries and Serpents Walk, telling me via email yesterday (I paraphrase), "we are also a bookseller for anti-semites and white supremacists" (their actual words were "provide access to titles wherein the content may not align with every individual customer's beliefs").

I'm a little intrigued by the backstory to all this. The Tekumel Foundation have come out to acknowledge Barker's authorship, and to apologise for having swept it under the carpet for a period of time. But Barker's widow is a member of the Tekumel Foundation Board - seriously, did she not know??

--

The Voralans presents Glorantha's magical mushroom humanoids, the black elves. "Absolutely phenomenal" - Austin C. "Seriously weird-ass shit" - John D. "A great piece of work" - Leon K. The Electrum best-selling The Children of Hykim documents Glorantha's shape-changing totemic animal people, the Hsunchen. "Magisterial ... highly recommended" - Nick Brooke. "Lovingly detailed and scholarly, and fun to read" - John H. "Absolutely wonderful!" - Morgan C.

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On 3/22/2022 at 3:50 PM, g33k said:

Dunno if folks have been following the industry news...

So, it turns out that M.A.R.Barker was a closet Nazi.  😡

I have never seen, nor played, in Tekumel and don't care what someone's politics are, so it really does not bother me in the slightest.

Simon Phipp - Caldmore Chameleon - Wallowing in my elitism since 1982. Many Systems, One Family. Just a fanboy. 

www.soltakss.com/index.html

Jonstown Compendium author. Find my contributions here. 

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13 hours ago, Ian Absentia said:

Two things, and then you can get back to burnishing both sides of the coin.

I am really not doing that; merely admitting several areas where I don't have actual facts (to either fully-condemn, or note any mitigating factors).

 

13 hours ago, Ian Absentia said:

... Second, yes, I know about the Aryans.  And regardless of the quality of scholarship, they're sometimes invoked to evoke nostalgia for a mystical, lost, pure ancestor ...

Yeah, it was some time after I understood the historical truth around the "Aryans" before (rather later) coming to realize how much of the Nazi conception was based on (wishful/delusional) mythologizing -- a "white ubermensch" people to have be the "real" creators of the high cultures of the ancient Vedic & Persian worlds (at a time when the actual pre-Germanic tribes were ... considerably more primitive).  And, of course, glossing their delusions with pseudo-science.

 

13 hours ago, Ian Absentia said:

...  Maybe his wry joke was in re-casting the Aryans for his world using better scholarship ...

I've seen this "wry joke" idea far too much since this story broke, and reject it.  As one person expressed it, you cannot ironically be a nazi.  It's not a joke.  Any "better scholarship" was strictly in service of actually advancing the actual cause of acutual, real-life nazis.  He even served on the editorial board of a nazi pseudo-academic "journal" (propaganda rag).

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50 minutes ago, soltakss said:

I have never seen, nor played, in Tekumel and don't care what someone's politics are, so it really does not bother me in the slightest.

Here's the thing -- nazi'ism isn't "politics."  It's an ideology that includes genocide as a good thing.

It's actual, genuine, capital-E  "Evil," in ways that mere "politics" are not.

If being a nazi "does not bother you in the slightest," you may need to recalibrate a bit...

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17 hours ago, g33k said:

  😉


"Barker, we should note, was a convert to Islam; he wasn't (I think) so much a "white supremacist" (in the modern neo-nazi sense), as an explicit anti-semite.  I admit I don't care to delve into the material he wrote..."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

His book is explicitly antisemitic, being published by the same white supremacist publisher that published the vile Turner Diaries, and he was a member of a holocaust denying group. As such Barker was a neonazi piece of shit. 😡

Edited by Stoatbringer

"Foolish is the king who does not have a personal wizard, and lamentable is the ruler who trusts the wrong mage"

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12 minutes ago, Stoatbringer said:

As such Barker was a neonazi piece of shit.

Yet he was probably also the first person to author a multicultural role-playing game world where all the humans were from non-white cultures, where homosexuality was explicitly acceptable, and so on. The Amina Inloes paper is well worth a read: https://t.co/VHPHOVXzBL.

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--

The Voralans presents Glorantha's magical mushroom humanoids, the black elves. "Absolutely phenomenal" - Austin C. "Seriously weird-ass shit" - John D. "A great piece of work" - Leon K. The Electrum best-selling The Children of Hykim documents Glorantha's shape-changing totemic animal people, the Hsunchen. "Magisterial ... highly recommended" - Nick Brooke. "Lovingly detailed and scholarly, and fun to read" - John H. "Absolutely wonderful!" - Morgan C.

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5 hours ago, soltakss said:

I have never seen, nor played, in Tekumel and don't care what someone's politics are, so it really does not bother me in the slightest.

And yet, here you are.  Welcome to the party.

2 hours ago, Brian Duguid said:

Yet he was probably also the first person to author a multicultural role-playing game world where all the humans were from non-white cultures, where homosexuality was explicitly acceptable, and so on.

Boggles the mind, doesn't it?  I don't know if it was cherry-picking on his part, or cognitive dissonance.  Maybe the doomsday scenario that he proposed for Earth to give rise to Tekumel in the far future killed all the right people in his mind.

So, when people say they don't care about the politics of authors engaged in fictional world-building, I say think again.

!i!

Edited by Ian Absentia
Snipping the snippiness.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Barker was still a neonazi piece o'shit, Brian. His neonazi book is a despicable blueprint for the type of people who put gay people into gas chambers to murder them. 

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"Foolish is the king who does not have a personal wizard, and lamentable is the ruler who trusts the wrong mage"

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5 hours ago, Stoatbringer said:

Barker was still a neonazi piece o'shit, Brian. His neonazi book is a despicable blueprint for the type of people who put gay people into gas chambers to murder them. 

Yeah.

But honestly... if it were just that one novel, as a singular datum, I think many of us would be left wondering if he was just writing a POS-POV novel as an elaborate prank (apperently he could be a bit of an intellectual-elitist jerk with his "smarter-than-you" pranks), or as some sort of experiment or exploration into writing from a very-uncomfortable perspective.  But sitting (for over a decade!) on a neonazi editorial board puts all the needed nails into that coffin, then buries it 6 feet down.

As @Ian Absentiasays above, there's some real mind-boggling discrepancies.   But, at the end of the day... Barker's legacy lies in ruins, at his own (rather dirty) hands.

It remains to be seen if Tekumel itself can&will be rehabilitated despite Barker (as is happening with the Mythos (despite HPL's own awfulness (which is MUCH more evident in his work!)).  Can Tekumel rise like a phoenix, or does its already-niche status mean it's doomed to the ashbin of gaming-history, with too-few fans who have both the passion and the chops to do the needed work?
 

Edited by g33k
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