strong personal reactions to Tékumel Foundation's disclosure of M.A.R. Barker's nazism

Spring, 2022! Year [mumble] of the Pandemy! The Tékumel Foundation, the people who sit on the dragon-hoard of dungeon maps and such created by Muhammad Abd al-Rahman Barker in a lifetime of Tékumeling, allow as how yes, actually, the Professor was a Nazi, a eugenicist, a holocaust denier. That is to say, a PROFESSIONAL, PROFESSORIAL holocaust denier, one jerk hanging his PhD on the masthead of the Journal of Historical Review, a revisionist rag with a name so bland it had to seem legit. Barker wrote among a numerous gang of scholarly Nazis who, as Nazis, are smart, educated, but fundamentally broken in the thinky-thinky meats, otherwise they'd figure out the Nazis lost and never, ever, in any world could have won against the Soviets, Yanks, and a world with only so much steel and oil, so OBVS you earmark that shit for your death camps, numerous secret weapons, vengeance weapons, ever-stranger aircraft, and plain boondoggles run by fuckin NAZI MAD SCIENTISTS. I've read Hellboy, I know what i'm talkin about.

So yeah, says Tékumel Foundation, the Professor not only thought Nazis had the right ideas, this holocaust denialism journal was a collective act of futility. Their mission: to use their PhDs and academic respectability to polish the biggest turd on earth, make that sumbitch GLEAM, make it sparkle and glow! I imagine them, busy as Poles in a rocket factory, such toil! They fancied themselves laboring like slaves, you know, with footnotes and just the right number of semi-colons, THEY beheld the rays from the Glorious Turd, but (dumb goddamn Nazis!) it's only the Black Sun shining from the future, not the boring old Jewish sun any slinking Untermenschen can see.

And, yeah, the dear Professor also wrote a novel that sounds EASILY the equal of his Tékumel novels, both the two that are in every used bookstore from Utica to Anchorage, and the ones with fancy Tékumel calligraphy covers from a vanity press; a Nazi novel, a Mud Races are Bad M'Kay novel, under a nom de guerre; a novel he endeavored to conceal from his Tékumel pals and gamerdom at large, not to mention the major university that paid him and gave him the prestige and respect of a scholar, but did not cherish him as he deserved, did not love Nazi professors and was downright churlish about whether or not some millions of miserable Jews and Roma and the disabled got tidied away; we're talking fired churlish, lose your full professorship and have to actually teach undergrads at some grubby third-rate school, that's how churlish!

You know what that'd mean? He wouldn't have two nights a week to run games! It would have been the end of Tékumel as we know it, we being his fans and most dedicated suck-ups, which is how the Black Sun Providence blessed us with responsibility for the papers he concealed his Nazi book in. The rumors got out, we're gamers, not a revolutionary vanguard, but we sat on this shit for a decade, Tékumel fandom has tottered on, unblemished by the Nazidom of a founding father of the hobby, until now, and we're sure sorry, oh golly what a to-do.

Ya Haqq. We, the Satrap of Saturn, get carried away with our little frame stories [edit: particularly when not using meds as directed]; the above was supposed to be a quick lead in; any human being reading this blog is going to be a gamer, an OSR gamer even, they know Barker's a disgraced nazi novelist who spent decades in academic holocaust denial, and all that was only to be my lead in so i could say, I KNEW BARKER WAS ROT AND FILTH Y E A R S BEFORE IT WAS COOL.

Allons—y!

I got carried away, too, on a previous occasion, writing a youtube video description in 2018. I’d been hard at my notebookery, pulling Sorq out of threads and tropes, giving it shape and texture. It is exciting to make stuff up fresh, even stuff made out of other people’s stuff, which is how fantasy works! The videos are the one-night-only, one-man performance of a closet drama: I not only like dragon games, I fancy myself a voice actor as well, and I put all the energy of creation and several nights without sleep into reading the jostling views of citizens of Sorq, a science-fantasy world that was my answer to the squick and revulsion of some aspects of Tékumel, and to my tragic inability to suspend disbelief in others.

[edit: somewhere in here begins the text from my video descriptions, where my squick for aspects of the setting first saw textual expression; but I don't see exactly where it starts, and I don't care to check youtube, so enjoy the tonal shifts.]

What to do? Make your own and do it RIGHT for cryin out loud, strain the filth and then do neither a Tolkien-rip-off slash cod-Medieval thing, nor the dehumanizing Orientalist fantasy of Barsoom and Tékumel, because these settings are filled with SO MUCH COOL STUFF. 

We're talkin' a Spanish Imperial assload of lost cities, aliens, monsters, ruins, tube cars, tragic robots guarding old stuff still important to the primitive screwheads walking in the sunlight. 

I love aspects of Tékumel, but as a whole it is not a place i want to run stories, much less learn its conlangs or, as veteran gamers on rpg.net once assured me was the roleplaying fun challenge of the setting, to try to imagine human sacrifice is moral. You have to get into the head of people who believe that shit, who believe in their whole nightmare society of rank and distinction and hierarchy and chains. That's trad, baby!

Sorq has been a-building in my mind the last year or so. M.A.R. Barker's science-fantasy, planetary romance, wargaming and conlinguistic creation of Tékumel and its Empire of the Petal Throne is a monumental work of creativity. I have enjoyed Tékumel and collected roleplaying materials and art since around the time it was clear the PhD was breaking me, ca. 2011. 

It is, however, Phil's playground, and I really love only a few of his toys: ditlána, ritual razing of cities and building anew atop the newest level of a dungeon, and a dungeon that serves its civilization: tombs, ritual spaces, treasure troves, waste dumps for the urn you just HAD TO GO and bind a demon in when the thing is strong enough to snap a continent... And the best of his pets (i mention the reptiloid Shén several times in these videos because they own, as do the Ssú and Hlüss, Hlutrgú and Hláka, and monsters like the Sró). All these are on Sorq, a dungeon fantasy setting where I don't have to think about the Professor's corrupt obsessions.

Corruption, mental and emotional disease arising not from neurodivergence nor necessarily from unchecked neurochemistry, just good old fashioned states and religions running on slavery, spectator-sport mass warfare, casual impalement, concubinage and legal abuse of children, endless demon-orgies and zombie-orgies, and mass human sacrifice for TENS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS WITHOUT CHANGE. Tékumel is a nightmare world. 

I once considered running Exalted there: the PCs would be fantasy superheroes chartered to clean up the sewer, and given persuasive power by some alien or spirit sick of the stench rising from the place. Sorq has plenty of evil and problems of its own, but it will not have sociologically improbable empires unchanged and static across millennia, nor are human sacrifice and sex slavery the centers of cultural and economic life, so who cares for the cheap foreign dancing girl? She is high on consequence-free drugs all the time, she has no time to feel helpless or degraded! 

Some Tékumel fan is going to give me what-for about this someday, and to that fan I say I never met the Professor, I enjoy aspects of his world and its funky monsters, but everyone reveals themselves at all times to those who see with the eyes of the heart. An artist simplifies things by putting reflections and permutations of the topics and themes that artist has in their imagination out into the world. Those pictures are not just words and ideas in a mental pocket dimension, they have a new life and new market for attention in the consciousness of everyone who takes the creation in. 

So when you need to sacrifice a human being for an in-game effect, how does it benefit anyone's heart or anyone's practice of compassion to imagine the act of murdering some slave or prisoner for gain? A fictional person, but a fictional person whose mother loved them, who hid their grief for their mother lest the officer or slaver beat them, a person who will never do anything anymore because their choice has been stolen in an act that the character you put your attention and time into. 

Fantasy — really, all art — is not or should not merely exist as on the level of entertainment or escapism. Escapism means nurturing the places in our beings where we want power, sex, pleasure, fame, uniqueness, authenticity, meaning, simplicity, a world we can love because we can name everyone of any importance there, and their swords and hideouts and arch-enemies: control and certainty, contra the slippage and ambiguity of the world. Real escapism, as I see it, is that mode of interaction with fiction and personal pursuits that one chooses over engagement with the self and its persistent desire for, e.g., slave girls and OP fireball spells. 

Escapism is deliberate non-engagement with the realities of the world and the kinds of thought that keep it that way. It is to squash down one's imagination into a cognitive space isolated from the worlds that contain and shape us. 

I follow Ibn Arabi in conceiving of the imagination,`alam al-khayyal, as a space where we engage with the entire cosmos as we have encountered in the form of images and meanings, and from the imagination, we send pictures and thoughts, deeds and haply compassion back out into the world. The imagination is a powerful, powerful tool, and the best fantasy and other art can help us see heroism, know valor and honor, experience self-sacrifice; likewise, a good villain is a witness to the stench of evil and its glamour; a good villain gives that pang of knowing the horror of seeing our own parents or children slaughtered just beyond our reach. 

Khalas, too much already.

[edit: original post title "I KNEW M.A.R. BARKER WAS A BAD MAN y__e__a__r__s before it was COOL" was supposed to be funny, but humor doesn't always work out when hypomanic eh?]