M.A.R. Barker, author of Tekumel, also author of Neo-Nazi book?

[Dioltach]

HOW DARE YOU

Still friendlier than most online conversations.

 

[Cordwainer Fish]

Still friendlier than most online conversations.

Have been on Usenet [1] since ~1990. Can confirm.

[1] Yes, Usenet is still there [2] .

[2] Barely.

 

[Willie the Duck]

Have been on Usenet [1] since ~1990. Can confirm.

[1] Yes, Usenet is still there [2] .

[2] Barely.

Wow, I should see if I can still access my old account.

 

[S'mon]

I guess you may have deleted, but this isn't critical thinking on your part, brah, this is naivete and a sad lack of genuinely critical thinking.

There are plenty of fascists, even actual Nazis or Nazi-adjacent people who are non-white and follow "non-white" religions. The Nazi leadership tended to oppose/conflict with Christianity, remember.

For example, the RSS in India were directly inspired by and very keen on the Nazis (albeit even more keen on Mussolini's fascists):

Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

It's a common modern fallacy to believe that the Nazis hated people solely based on skin colour or the like. They had a deeply bizarre and almost incomprehensible racial ideology when it came down to (which wasn't fixed, either), which included several non-white groups as "Aryans" (including the Nepalese), and included the usually-regarded-as-white-today "Slavs" as "subhuman".

So the fact that Barker fantasized about a non-white world doesn't mean much. Nor does the fact that he was a Muslim. Islamofascism is as old as fascism, almost:

Islamofascism - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Nor is being a Muslim incompatible with antisemitism, which is rife in Serpent's Walk. So not only do we know that he wrote Serpent's Walk, which is unabashedly pro-Nazi book, none of your reasoning that he "couldn't be" a Nazi holds up to the slightest analysis.

In fact we also know he was on the editorial board of the Journal of Historical Review, which was dedicated to holocaust denial and revisionist psuedohistory.

MAR Barker was absolutely keen on Nazis.

Yep, 100%. I think maybe some Americans confuse standard American racism, with Nazi ideology. The two are very very different.

 

[Umbran]

How do I delete my account?

Mod Note:
If you really want to, you may send a PM to one of the moderators to talk to you about it.

But, perfectly honestly, unless you have some really deep privacy concerns, just walking away and never using your account again works about as well, and takes zero effort..

 

[Some Dude]

My apologies for the drive-by posting.

I stumbled on this thread and was appalled to learn that one of my favorite game designers / world-builders may be a Nazi. As a Jew this offended me greatly. But, then I decided to engage in some critical thinking.

1. MAR Barker spent his life fantasizing and writing about a science-fantasy world, much more advanced than ours, of 'non-white' people. This doesn't sound like a person who subscribes to white supremacy ideology.
2. Barker converted from Christianity (a primarily 'white' religion) to Islam (a primarily 'non-white' religion).
3. Writing about Nazis does not make someone a nazi. Are the writers of 'The Man in the Castle' aired on Amazon Prime nazi sympathizers since they envision a world where the nazis won?

The irony of this thread is that the nazis power base was based on group think and toeing the party line regardless of what critical thinking would otherwise indicate. You guys can do better.

I'll immediately remove my account. But, please consider my words before posthumously destroying someone without evidence.

Worth noting that even if Barker wasn't an actual uniform-wearing, goose-stepping nazi, he can still be (and by the available evidence certainly was) an anti-Semite.

As to his being Muslim, racist movements have a long history of strange bedfellows. Dan Burros, a prominent Klan member in the 1960s, committed suicide when a reporter discovered his Jewish heritage. Nicky Crane, a well-known UK skinhead, Came out as gay in the early 90s, shortly before his death. Anthony Pierpont, one-time head of then-successful neo-nazi label Panzerfaust Records, was confirmed to be of Mexican ethnicity in the early aughts. Leo Felton, half-black neo-nazi organizer, had to be segregated in prison due to his habit of committing racially motivated attacks on other black inmates. Jack Van Tongeren, Australian neo-nazi leader who specifically targeted Asians with hate crimes, despite his own father being part Indonesian. And on and on.

I hate to break it to you, but a lot of these racist types ain't too tightly wrapped.

 

[Some Dude]

Just in case anyone decides they want to challenge this on the basis that Wikipedia is suspect, here's a scanned pdf copy of "The Journal of Historical Review Volume 09-Number-4-1989" on Scribd, which shows Philip Barker, Ph.D. as a member of the editorial advisory committee on page 2:

Spoiler: Anti-inclusive content

Edit: I didn't know a Scribd link would be embedded now. Spoiler tags added.

Barker was on the editorial board of that publication for around a decade. All of the issues are on the Internet Archive.

 

[Myrdin Potter]

Tékumel Foundation - The Tékumel Foundation's Board of Directors Statement on Serpent's Walk.

www.tekumelfoundation.org

This was posted at the time the news came out publically. I have not seen anyone argue that the allegations were not true for quite a while.

 

[BigJackBrass]

The best advice for using and enjoying the fantastical creations of Tékumel without hitching your wagon to Barker's vile ideology comes, ironically enough, from the man himself:

"You have just bought MY Tékumel. Now make it YOUR Tékumel"

- Swords & Glory Vol. 1 The Tékumel Sourcebook, 1983

 

[Aldarc]

I have used Tekumel in the past for inspiration, but it's far too detailed and complicated of a setting for me to use even remotely as is.