“What Professor Barker did was wrong and forever tarnished his creative and academic legacy. As stewards of the world of Tekumel, we reject and repudiate Serpent’s Walk and everything it stands for and all other anti-Semitic activity Professor Barker was involved with.”
Or have a look at this. Suddenly he's as friendless as Kevin Spacey.
It ought to go without saying that I am not in any way defending Nazism, which is a wholly toxic ideology directly opposed to everything I personally hold dear. The tyrannical methods of the Nazis are criminally monstrous and their beliefs are harmful and stupid. The great strength of the human race is its diversity; there are no master races, no inferior breeds. So if Barker was a Nazi then he was a fool. And it seems that he was indeed a fool -- that particular kind of too-clever-for-his-own-good fool that makes ordinary idiots seem quite harmless. But being a fool doesn't make him a Nazi, and what follows are my reasons for thinking that he actually imagined he was just using the Nazis, or whatever white supremacists these days call themselves. If so, he was fatally misguided. He didn't understand, as Von Papen didn't, that the Nazi creed is so poisonous that there is no way to control it other than direct opposition. OK, that being clear, let's go on...
Though not a Christian (or at any rate not a religious one) I’m always reluctant to cast the first stone. Others must make up their own minds, and I respect the Tekumel Foundation people and others for stating what they believe, but I am far from convinced by the closet Nazi theory. Barker's novel wasn't a dark secret kept hidden from public view. He openly mentioned Serpent’s Walk to me and others in his correspondence in the 1980s. He was touting it around publishers (legitimate ones at that time, not the toxic publishers who came later) and I have seen the following letter that he sent about it to a major British publisher at the time:
(Just to be clear, because a lot of people have not understood: that's a short extract from a longer letter that Barker sent to a British publisher with whom I put him in touch to talk about Tekumel novels. SS-GB had come out ten years earlier and Fatherland, another alt-history about Nazi victory, was only a few years away, so maybe he thought the British were obsessed with the War or something. Neither the publisher nor I wanted to hear about his alt-history novel, and in fact found it a pretty unpleasant subject, but he wasn't the only one peddling that kind of story back then.)
And why do that as “Phillip Barker”? The Professor was Phil to his friends, but used his Islamic name professionally. Given its politics and readership, The Journal of Historical Review would presumably not have had anything to do with “Muhammad Abd-al-Rahman Barker, Ph.D”. To infiltrate them he went in undercover.
I accept I could be wrong, and if shown definitive evidence I'll change my opinion. People do change their political opinions as they get older (HPL had veered sharply to the left economically and seemed to be becoming less racially prejudiced before his death) and we do know that Barker in later life had become cranky and embittered. In particular, if I see any statement from Barker that he denied the existence of the Holocaust then that destroys any possibility of a defence. Then guilt is clear. But to tar Barker as a Nazi, it's not enough to cite multiple pieces of "evidence" that all tie back to the novel, because if Serpent's Walk was indeed designed as a literary hoax then all of those collapse at the same time. To conclude that Prof Barker was anti-Semitic, we need separate and incontrovertible facts. For example, he ran roleplaying games twice a week for several decades. In all that time did he ever express anti-Semitic views to his players? Obviously not; they had no inkling of it. Other than Dave Arneson and a few others, Jeff Berry probably knew him better than any of his other gamers and is thus a reliable character witness. Mr Berry doesn't think it likely that Barker secretly harboured such views. Our only "evidence" is a novel, for which Mr Berry gives a credible explanation. As Barker deplored his father's political views, and his father was a fascist and anti-Semite, isn't the balance of probability that Barker was opposed to racism and fascism rather than the reverse?
None of this has anything to do with Tekumel, incidentally. Only an infantile mind mixes up the art and the artist. Even if Barker had been pro-Nazi, it would not have the slightest bearing on games played in the world of Tekumel. But I really don’t think he was pro-Nazi. It’s just one of those firestorms of public outrage that the internet loves: what do facts matter? Here's a mob, they think; let's join it. My own impression from over a decade of correspondence was that Barker's politics were, if anything, progressive rather than right-wing. For example, does this sound like the statement of a white supremacist?
That’s just one of dozens of comments in letters over the years that expressed his delight in human diversity. If Professor Barker was a Nazi, he certainly hid it well. And remember:
Though not a Christian (or at any rate not a religious one) I’m always reluctant to cast the first stone. Others must make up their own minds, and I respect the Tekumel Foundation people and others for stating what they believe, but I am far from convinced by the closet Nazi theory. Barker's novel wasn't a dark secret kept hidden from public view. He openly mentioned Serpent’s Walk to me and others in his correspondence in the 1980s. He was touting it around publishers (legitimate ones at that time, not the toxic publishers who came later) and I have seen the following letter that he sent about it to a major British publisher at the time:
“I do have a novel that is unsold and unwanted by anybody. This is what I call my ‘Nazi novel’. I did not show it to the Wollheims both because they don't do this sort of book and also because they are Jewish and would be terribly offended -- and they are nice people. I started out to write a ‘near-future’ thriller: young mercenary is hired to steal cannisters of germ warfare from an American stockpile in the 2040 A.D. period. This is used by a fearful Israeli government and various cronies to destroy the Soviet Union; the Soviets get in a retaliatory strike with germ warfare of their own, however, and take out many US, British, etc. cities. Out in India, where the young mercenary is employed, the descendants of the Nazi SS and other ‘refugees’ are quietly biding their time, building up economic resources for a come-back. With the presidency and vice-presidency of the United States open after the deaths of their incumbents, the Secretary of State takes over -- an old, reconstructed racist. He invites the Nazi movement to help in running the US. The mercenary hero, who is not a Nazi, is an employee of the Indian chemical company ‘front’ for the Nazis and gets into the situation as a sort of military expert for them. The Nazis manage to gain access to a giant computer with independent ideas, and they use this machine to rewrite Mein Kampf using every sales pitch and advertising trick in the book. The hero initially loves and marries an Indian girl, but later falls for a Nazi girl who is helping with publicity. The plot thickens, and various major events occur. The book ends with the Nazis taking over much of Western civilisation, and with our hero being chosen ‘Second Führer’ and riding into the stadium to the ‘Sieg Heils!’ of the masses.
“The only people I can imagine enjoying this book would be skinheads and Sir Oswald Mosley. It would probably create as much fuss as Rushdie's Satanic Verses, and could not be published under my own name. Both the author and the publisher would become the target of many rude remarks, letter-bombs, hand grenades, and visits from Mossad. I mentioned this book just to show you that I am not completely dead -- yet. Still alive and working. I don't expect you to want to publish it. Nobody will. I cannot even sell it to the Neo-Nazi presses here; they would not accept the idea of an Indian girl marrying the hero.”
(Just to be clear, because a lot of people have not understood: that's a short extract from a longer letter that Barker sent to a British publisher with whom I put him in touch to talk about Tekumel novels. SS-GB had come out ten years earlier and Fatherland, another alt-history about Nazi victory, was only a few years away, so maybe he thought the British were obsessed with the War or something. Neither the publisher nor I wanted to hear about his alt-history novel, and in fact found it a pretty unpleasant subject, but he wasn't the only one peddling that kind of story back then.)
So what is going on here? Some people have discovered that Barker’s father, Loris, was a fascist and they have gleefully concluded that means the Professor was as well. But Jeff Berry has pointed out that the Professor didn’t have a good relationship with his father and abhorred his views:
We have clear evidence that Prof Barker was anti-racist in his younger days, so the conclusion that he later became a Nazi sympathiser needs to be approached with some scepticism. He wrote an alt-history novel with a US Nazi main character, and got the notion of doing it as a literary hoax under a pseudonym. Sort of L Ron Hubbard style only with politics rather than religion. We don’t assume Philip K Dick was a Nazi because he wrote The Man in the High Castle (actually, some people probably do). We don’t imagine that Thomas Harris is a serial killer, that Nabokov was a paedophile, or that Timur Vermes thinks Hitler was a good guy. Authors create characters – even the voice of the author is a character specific to the story they are telling. When they use a pseudonym, they’re signalling that even more strongly. Barker went further. I think he was creating a spoof writer who he could sell as a real person, enjoying the notion that if actual neo-Nazis bought into it he could shock them by revealing his own personal circumstances (an American convert to Islam married to a non-white woman).
Some have discovered that Professor Barker may have been listed on the editorial advisory board of The Journal of Historical Review, a Holocaust-denying magazine. Denial of the Holocaust is a monstrous lie, and to promote Holocaust denial is clearly anti-Semitic. But we still need evidence that Barker denied the Holocaust. A screenshot of the contents page of one issue in the early '90s (when he was actively trying to sell the novel) lists a “Phillip Barker, Ph.D”. Was that the Professor? It might well have been, but let’s not conclude that he’s more evil than Sauron just yet. I was a consulting editor on White Dwarf in the ‘80s – that doesn’t mean I agreed with their editorial or commercial policies. More to the point, if “Phillip Barker” submitted a letter or article to back up the credentials of “Randolph D Calverhall” (the author of Serpent’s Walk) that’s very likely just part of the cover story supporting his literary hoax.
“It's my perception – aided by my reading through Phil's letter files, after he passed away – that Phil was playing one of his involved pranks on Loris Barker, his associates and their descendants.”
We have clear evidence that Prof Barker was anti-racist in his younger days, so the conclusion that he later became a Nazi sympathiser needs to be approached with some scepticism. He wrote an alt-history novel with a US Nazi main character, and got the notion of doing it as a literary hoax under a pseudonym. Sort of L Ron Hubbard style only with politics rather than religion. We don’t assume Philip K Dick was a Nazi because he wrote The Man in the High Castle (actually, some people probably do). We don’t imagine that Thomas Harris is a serial killer, that Nabokov was a paedophile, or that Timur Vermes thinks Hitler was a good guy. Authors create characters – even the voice of the author is a character specific to the story they are telling. When they use a pseudonym, they’re signalling that even more strongly. Barker went further. I think he was creating a spoof writer who he could sell as a real person, enjoying the notion that if actual neo-Nazis bought into it he could shock them by revealing his own personal circumstances (an American convert to Islam married to a non-white woman).
Some have discovered that Professor Barker may have been listed on the editorial advisory board of The Journal of Historical Review, a Holocaust-denying magazine. Denial of the Holocaust is a monstrous lie, and to promote Holocaust denial is clearly anti-Semitic. But we still need evidence that Barker denied the Holocaust. A screenshot of the contents page of one issue in the early '90s (when he was actively trying to sell the novel) lists a “Phillip Barker, Ph.D”. Was that the Professor? It might well have been, but let’s not conclude that he’s more evil than Sauron just yet. I was a consulting editor on White Dwarf in the ‘80s – that doesn’t mean I agreed with their editorial or commercial policies. More to the point, if “Phillip Barker” submitted a letter or article to back up the credentials of “Randolph D Calverhall” (the author of Serpent’s Walk) that’s very likely just part of the cover story supporting his literary hoax.
And why do that as “Phillip Barker”? The Professor was Phil to his friends, but used his Islamic name professionally. Given its politics and readership, The Journal of Historical Review would presumably not have had anything to do with “Muhammad Abd-al-Rahman Barker, Ph.D”. To infiltrate them he went in undercover.
I accept I could be wrong, and if shown definitive evidence I'll change my opinion. People do change their political opinions as they get older (HPL had veered sharply to the left economically and seemed to be becoming less racially prejudiced before his death) and we do know that Barker in later life had become cranky and embittered. In particular, if I see any statement from Barker that he denied the existence of the Holocaust then that destroys any possibility of a defence. Then guilt is clear. But to tar Barker as a Nazi, it's not enough to cite multiple pieces of "evidence" that all tie back to the novel, because if Serpent's Walk was indeed designed as a literary hoax then all of those collapse at the same time. To conclude that Prof Barker was anti-Semitic, we need separate and incontrovertible facts. For example, he ran roleplaying games twice a week for several decades. In all that time did he ever express anti-Semitic views to his players? Obviously not; they had no inkling of it. Other than Dave Arneson and a few others, Jeff Berry probably knew him better than any of his other gamers and is thus a reliable character witness. Mr Berry doesn't think it likely that Barker secretly harboured such views. Our only "evidence" is a novel, for which Mr Berry gives a credible explanation. As Barker deplored his father's political views, and his father was a fascist and anti-Semite, isn't the balance of probability that Barker was opposed to racism and fascism rather than the reverse?
While I think that all books should be available for anyone who wants to read them, I don't recommend you bother with Barker's. He was a terrible novelist, and if Serpent's Walk was intended as political satire then I don't doubt he'll have done it ineptly with wooden characters and laborious prose. Instead, if you are interested in fiction that shines a light on the Nazis, check out the reading and viewing list below.
None of this has anything to do with Tekumel, incidentally. Only an infantile mind mixes up the art and the artist. Even if Barker had been pro-Nazi, it would not have the slightest bearing on games played in the world of Tekumel. But I really don’t think he was pro-Nazi. It’s just one of those firestorms of public outrage that the internet loves: what do facts matter? Here's a mob, they think; let's join it. My own impression from over a decade of correspondence was that Barker's politics were, if anything, progressive rather than right-wing. For example, does this sound like the statement of a white supremacist?
"The lack of interest in South Asia and the Middle East here [in the US] is astounding. We [ie his university department] cover a third of the human race, yet the Regents voted to close us down."
That’s just one of dozens of comments in letters over the years that expressed his delight in human diversity. If Professor Barker was a Nazi, he certainly hid it well. And remember:
Honi soit qui mal y pense.
If indeed Barker embraced Nazi ideas in old age, that would be sad indeed given how outspoken he was in support of progressive ideals when younger. Let us try to remember him from views such as this, expressed in a letter to Startling Stories in March 1951.
That reflects the Phil Barker I corresponded with in the late 1970s and early '80s, a very civilized and idealistic man and the creator of the most original and different fantasy setting in Western gaming. At the time he wrote to Startling Stories, Barker was 22 years old and already developing the world of Tekumel, which should not be tainted by his actions -- or supposed opinions -- half a century later.
