Dear readers,
A week has passed on Totalitariërs.nl and I thought it would be nice to write a little introduction of a sorts.
I started the original Totalitariërs on Facebook with the premise of getting people of various creative fields to come together and work on creating a sort of dystopian setting. The idea behind this setting was to take our current sociopolitical context and take it to (our interpretation) of their next step. In Western Europe we have seen a rise (far right) nationalism, xenophobia and populism. The US, as always, is waging all sorts of wars all over the world. And everybody might be a potential terrorist (especially if they have darker hair/skin/eyes). I envisioned we would represent this next step through music, artwork, fiction, videos, comics and so on and so on. The Facebook page was a place where a small and dedicated group would work together to envision this setting.
However, it quickly became clear that this wasn’t fully the case. As more members invited their friends along for the ride, the less this thing had to do with developing the framework. The group was dominated by articles about repressive politics, strange technology and popular culture. Following the articles were lengthy discussion about them and the question whether religion should be removed from life or not. At first this rather annoyed me. The true totalitarian in me longed for absolute control, this was nothing less than subordination or even treason (and as we all know: “treason equals death”). However, contemplation and Marc getting on my nerves (for which I’m still grateful!) mellowed me out a bit. If Totalitariërs is a critique on authoritarianism, its structure and modus operandi should be the same.
We eventually evolved into something that is more akin to a news group in which we discussed fact that seemed weirder than fiction. This went well for a while. However, some of us longer to take this a step further. We’ve been discussing the potential release of a physical newsletter/magazine and various art projects connected to Totalitariërs. Besides these things, Facebook was also starting to censor our posts and discussions, hence we moved here.
Like I said in the opening, we’ve been here for just a week. Members from our super secret group start to come in slowly. Hopefully we will have more new members joining in and see this thing develop even further. I know a lot of it is still a work in progress, and our IT skilled boys are doing their best to make this place even cooler, but expect a lot of madness to come up in the coming weeks and months!
My salutations to you all!
Stefmanovic