Comments on: “Sheet-heads:” The New Nazis

By: Lois Tilton

Lois Tilton — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 16:17:59 +0000

Jacob, I think your post got cut off.

By: Jacob

Jacob — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 03:59:21 +0000

In the article a huge thank you all for the cause, a lot of people are using

By: Links for 8th August 2008 | Velcro City Tourist Board

Links for 8th August 2008 | Velcro City Tourist Board — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 09:50:33 +0000

[...] “Sheet-heads:” The New Nazis [...]

By: Constance Ash

Constance Ash — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 17:03:23 +0000

One thing one can put up against ‘the sheetheads’ is what we see us doing in Jarhead, the memoir and the movie made from it.

On the basis of what we read and see we could as easily characterize everyone in the U.S. marines and military as brutal psychopaths, who are also incompetents running / driving / dancing / flying around with massive lethal weapons and using them against no one but civilians.

Love, C.

By: Wenamun

Wenamun — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:05:00 +0000

There is at least one book–and I think at least two–on the subject of the Western portrayals of Arabs, chiefly in films. One is Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, by Jack G. Shaheen (Olive Branch Press, 2001[!]). It is an interesting–if disheartening–annotated list of more than 900 films, each of which does, to one extent or another, as the subtitle suggests.

By: Lois Tilton

Lois Tilton — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 17:53:17 +0000

Interesting site!

By: Kevin Andrew Murphy

Kevin Andrew Murphy — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 17:22:11 +0000

Saying the “sheet” thing is anything other than a slur on people who wear headcloths is sophistry–I heard the “towel” variant long before 9/11, as a racial/religious slur, but changing it to “sheet” and saying it only refers to terrorists, when none of the 9/11 terrorists to my knowledge wore any sort of head covering?

The desire to pain some group as the mooks so the protagonist can play two-fisted action hero is unfortunately extremely old. I’ve been reading a lot on tvtropes.org and while there isn’t a specific page for Islamic terrorists–it instead existing as footnotes for the “Western Terrorists” page ( http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WesternTerrorists )–there’s a lot of insightful comments about the desire to not offend leading to not just Western Terrorists but Terrorists Without a Cause.

There’s also a pretty insightful round-up of all the various Nazi tropes.

By: Lois Tilton

Lois Tilton — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:14:08 +0000

Thanks, David.

I couldn’t see whatever it was on my browser.

By: David Louis Edelman

David Louis Edelman — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:36:25 +0000

David @ 1: Not sure why/how that happened, but I’ve fixed the formatting on Lois’ post.

By: Sam Graham

Sam Graham — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:12:06 +0000

Not just limited to books and short stories, this happens regularly in films too: throughout the 80s the Generic Evil Guy was always soviet, come the collapse of the USSR they had to cast around to find some other evil cannon fodder for the good guys to shoot and settled on The South American Drug Runner (or his slightly less well known cousin The Eastern European Drug Runner.) This decade the evil of choice is the terrorist, and the most common lazy-shorthand for that is the Islamic Extremist.

Ticks all the boxes: wears “funny clothes” so you can tell them from the good guys, speaks a “funny language” so they’re obviously evil. etc etc.

As for Muslims or Arabs not being races, oh, so he’s not being a racist bigot, he obviously thinks that makes it ok? Never mind the fact that races emerge from and are basically just longer-lived cultural and social groupings. Not wanting to derail your post but that sort of sophistry really makes my blood boil.

I’d find your position a rather uncomfortable one to be in, to be associated with someone whose publically stated position was so unacceptable to my own beliefs. As you say though it’s lucky that most of the fiction that shows this sort of bigotry is simplistic.

But then, it would be wouldn’t it? Bigotry often comes from an inability to see “the other” as anything other than a one-dimensional dehumanized figure, to fail to see the common points you share and that the other person has motivations and history just like yourself, that they have complex reasons for their actions just like you do, and that from their point of view, what they’re doing makes as much (or as little) sense as your own behaviour.

Not being able to make that connection will always result in poor characterisation when it comes to writing.