we need to talk...
How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d.
— Alexander Pope
Well, perhaps this is my most bitter story, the one that hurts me, and my mistake. My incurable wound and, unfortunately, my legend. Something I avoided talking about for almost twenty years.
The damned Nazism. Humanity's greatest curse. And for a while — a short, tiny while — it was a place where I planted an experiment.
I was sixteen years old, and as I write this text, I am now thirty-six.
And to explain how it all began, I have to say it was a combination of facts, tragic coincidences, and wrong places. This story is a demonstration of human perversity mixed with a bitter broth of collective hysteria or the Mandela effect — I still do not know how to classify it.
I have always liked history. Always. And I learned early on to be critical. The year was around 2002 or 2003, I am not sure, but I remember one thing: Lula had been president of Brazil for a little over six months. It was his first presidential victory.
Well, I knew history well. I knew the horrors of the German Holocaust and... the Soviet one. And I could not understand how that pseudo-intellectual communist ideology could appear in classrooms with such insistence. I mean, the bias at that time was already to teach in classrooms that capitalism was bad, communism was good, and any student who thought differently was a fascist.
It is funny how socialist ideologies, which are basically Siamese twins, fight for a separation: one has to die, and the other will inherit the body.
I understood one thing: flags.
When I say flags, I do not mean party flags, but something worse: abstractly ideological ones. Both ideologies were equally ridiculous in size and level. But both offered one thing: being different.
And I am not saying this because I embraced an ideology. I am saying it because I saw countless teenagers wanting to be different, wanting to blindly believe in various things. Sometimes without critical thinking or doubt; other times preaching the position of their party.
Then, one morning, the teacher entered the classroom. He was the history teacher. I will not mention names or places. But I will say this: that is how it began.
I was not a specialist in practical economics, much less a political theorist. I knew the subjects well enough to think for myself. And after Mises, the famous Karl Marx made no sense to me.
The teacher came into the classroom talking shit, indirectly attacking the means by which many people obtained their food: capital. The way of life that, rudimentary as it was, was what we had at that moment. And like every good narcissist of utopia, they know how to criticize, but they do not offer better strategies.
You point out the problem, but you do not provide a solution. That is not being an intellectual. That is being a problem-maker.
The difference was that my simple economic theory saw this as an advantage. So the teacher and I got into a heated debate. He tried to ridicule me in front of my friends and classmates in general. Me, a skinny boy with a face full of acne, of Arab descent. He referred to me near my friends as a "Nazi," and that was enough for everyone to turn their eyes toward me.
I admit I did not care at the time, but this would cause me a lot of trouble at different moments in my life.
I remember getting home and thinking about it. Although it had been extremely unpleasant, I was foolish not to tell my parents. I let it go. I think I was afraid they would go to the school and, in a way, cause me even greater embarrassment.
The school's setup was funny. Rich boys carried symbols of communism and anarchy on their backpacks, the opposite of the blood their parents had shed so they could be there, in that elite school.
And I knew where the problem was. It was not an isolated problem; there were three or four. And now the problems were the "cool" teachers.
So my classmates began calling me Nazi because of that infamous clownish teacher. And I thought: hmm, interesting, so they want something to be shocked by?
I began researching what Nazis were, or what existed of them, in the present day. I came across neo-Nazi groups — never in person, but in news stories and magazines. I began reading about them. I watched films about them, from American History X to Romper Stomper. I did not know how to do it, but I had an idea: I thought that maybe, somehow, I could be provocative.
But there was a problem: those people did not like punks.
And I was a punk.
Every week my hair was a different color, and on the eve of the emergence of the emo movement, punks had gained some notoriety. I listened to everything from Ramones to Dead Kennedys, and all of that fascinated me. But I was about to take the most wrong step of my life in order to provoke teachers. I was going to pretend to be a skinhead.
I shaved my head down to zero — a detail: that look bothered me a lot — and then, to give the situation a somewhat Marilyn Manson touch, I also shaved off my eyebrows. Anyone who had ever seen a skinhead and looked at me would have thought I was more of an aspiring drag performer than a neo-Nazi. But the plan worked. They bought the idea.
I had clearly androgynous features, and I was a very peculiar creature like that. I resembled the devil as seen in Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ, and people started looking at me with suspicion. Some people I later spoke to amicably said they had been afraid I might one day become the protagonist of a massacre — remembering that Columbine had happened not long before and was still the hype — not to mention that Gus Van Sant's film Elephant had premiered in 2003 and brought with it an attempted biographical portrait of those two boys' lives.
The young people of the time, with their heads full of Donnie Darko, did not hesitate to make their associations when they looked at me: Look, there goes the maniac.
I did not care. I had been confronted before. Although I recognize that shaving my head was a terrible idea — and believe me, it was the worst of all — it was not my first disappointment at school. When I was even younger and thinner, I suffered a certain amount of bullying in public schools for being the son of the pretty teacher. Some classmates back then would do things ranging from silly to truly nasty, from stealing my snack to cornering me in empty parts of the schoolyard for a beating session. You grow up knowing you need to defend yourself, and you grow up somewhat rebellious, somewhat punk. Thinking there is something wrong with you. But honestly, I am not going to justify myself. I am here to state facts. And I say that all of this happened. It is up to you to believe Pablo by Pablo.
By the end of 2004, I had abandoned the skinhead idea. I had laughed a lot, amused myself enough with their disgusted faces, and displeased plenty of people. I had to study for the university entrance exam, under a certain pressure to pass. It seemed that staying in the city was synonymous with being a "loser," while leaving the small town — even for an even smaller one — was inversely proportional to that. In other words: leave town and you have already won.
My nerves were frayed. I needed to study. I had been diagnosed with ADHD, but I had not given it any importance. It seemed like something that would not bother me. That was my third and greatest mistake: not giving that diagnosis the importance it deserved, even if it was early, because life would charge me for it in the future. But that is another story. Let us return to the story of the boots.
I had abandoned the idea of being provocative. But the idea had not abandoned me.
In 2005, I moved to another city to study law. I would come back to my hometown only once in a while. Money was short, the distance was long, and the route was perhaps the most complicated of all. That meant I could come home only on rare occasions.
Then, in 2009, while talking to some students from the school, one of them turned to me and said:
The teacher said there had been a student here who had a Nazi website.
I was startled. In fact, I was horrified. Why was that guy still talking about me after so many years? I thought it was probably me, after all, I knew of no other pseudo-skinhead in that institution.
Now, what had once become my defense — the shadow of a rotten ideology — had changed shape. And it had turned against me. I heard little murmurs here and there about my stories and adventures, interestingly things I had never taken part in. And as always, I ignored them. I knew people did not have the gift of critical thinking, and that maybe talking would not help me. My ignorance, my unpreparedness, my burden.
Thinking this would change was another mistake.
So, in 2013, I became an extremely reclusive person. I was back in town and incredibly bored, and whenever I met someone new, it did not take long for that person to question me about my adventures in the fictional "Reich." It bored me. And it began to distort my view of things in an extreme way. I did not talk about it, and this text may be the first time I have spoken about it. I was always of the mindset: let it go, it is nonsense.
I avoided confrontation.
I am writing this not as a confession, because I committed no crime, but as a form of relief from something that bothers me — not to say, in other words, something that has disturbed me — for basically two decades.
The less you socialize, the less you want to socialize. I began avoiding the community to avoid these stories.
And I became even more reclusive.
You start becoming paranoid, you know?
By then, the rumors had already spread. I was a legend. No one considered the fact that someone of Lebanese descent, with several Jewish relatives, could not be that shit. I saw a very interesting phenomenon: they wanted to believe the legend.
No one ever seriously asked me about this shit. No one ever came to me wanting to know my version, and I did not want to talk either. The seed developed, became a huge tree with deep roots, and I felt afraid. I was afraid of that story, but not for myself — for my family. For my relatives.
The mark had been made.
But the tiredness, the exhaustion all of this caused me, reflected itself in a lack of energy to fight against it. I was once again being cornered in an empty alley and beaten without being able to scream.
I make this text my scream. I do not know whether anyone will read it. But I record here my version of the facts. This is the story of the gigantic Nazi from the small town. The real story everyone refuses to believe.