Substack Winter is here.
Writers plan. Platforms laugh.
I was going to write more, I really was. Engrave that on my tombstone. Then Substack was full of Nazis and Substack decided it was fine with that. Just like Twitter. Just like Facebook. Just like Instagram. I'm so tired of Nazis. Of them being everywhere, aided and abetted by people who want to make money off them and support them in all kinds of ways. What am I supposed to do about that? Is this the digital version of being slowly squeezed out of society by the nationalists and the antisemites? Is it better to become a digital wanderer, or to stay and set up my menorah in sight of their flag?
What a stomach-turning dilemma. In what manner am I willing to abnegate myself, and for whose benefit?
I am working on a novella right now. I have been working on it for years, in the way you work on something for years when you aren't quite sure what it's about. At its core, this novella is about two young people falling in love while scared and stressed and realizing that the adults around them don't have any answers, and are in fact much worse than they thought. It's set against the backdrop of the Blitz, a bombing campaign that was meant to so demoralize the British population that they would not consent to go to war against the fearsome Nazis. That they would demand appeasement, allowing the totalitarian German government to push its colonial borders unchecked as far as the Nazis wanted, until the next time they wanted to push those borders again.
The Blitz did not achieve its strategic aims, though that was a nearer thing than we are ever taught.
World War II is held up as the gold standard of what a war can, should, be. Allied atrocities are waved away, because we were fighting the Nazi. The Nazis! The worst people, we are told. The worst. I imagine—though at this point faintly—that if pressed, the people making the decisions about this platform would say that they are not fans of the historical Nazis. It's whether their rhetorical inheritors are equally repugnant that seems to be causing some trouble, to the Substack Three and their legions of apologists.
Making money off Nazis is nothing new. "It's just business" is something that has been said pretty much every time the people in charge of a for-profity entity want to disavow their own lacking humanity. As if ledgers are more important than lives. What a fascinating leg to stand on for people who don't mind antisemitism while pretending they aren't antisemitic themselves. It's the Jews who only care about money? Do I have that right?
We are living through a digital Blitz, across platforms, across websites, across feeds and TLs and comment sections.
The novella started out as "what if these two people fell in love" and turned into a meditation on the necessity of fighting Nazis. On watching the growing destruction and knowing something must be done. I don't know how to end the story. I don't really need to come to any definite conclusion. The twentieth century did it for me, and how horrifically bizarre, how manifestly irritating, that it took Winston Goddamn Churchill to do it.
Ugh. Merry freaking Christmas.
How many digital beaches will we be forced to cede by the rising fascist tide? We are exhorted by our own better angels and the individual demands of our consciences to leave one place after another in protest. How many more times?
I started this month with grand plans. I am not uncheerful, despite the tone of the foregoing. But then there were Nazis and the debate that will kill us all, and that's just the way it goes.
I started the month with one question. "Can writing be fun again?" And I have answered it for myself.
No. More on that some other time.
Writing will destroy us, and writing will save us, and someday, writing will tell us what happened.
I won’t stop writing. But I will not write here. There are people who want to stay and fight on this platform, keep their voices up, light a candle, etc., and I understand that decision. But for me, this platform is not a country. Its owners and leaders are not a government, no matter how much they try to talk like a bad one. I do not have to stay here. No one is going to ask for my papers at the border.
I will be moving this subscriber list to another service in the New Year, like so many of the writers I truly love here. I’m too tired from difficult family stuff to link them, or plan out loud. That will also wait until the New Year.
As always, yours in a doubtful future,
Miranda