2023-05-13 06:28:57
Last Tuesday, a video of the performative act carried out at the doors of a cafe in Glasgow, Scotland, emerged. On the sidewalk in front of the Pink Peacock, a person sets fire to a copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by JK Rowling, and says: “God hates Terfs too” (a term that refers to transexclusive radical feminists). Combusting the book she claims to feel empowered as she applies testosterone gel to her arms. The subtitles indicate that this occurred during the Jewish holiday of Lag Ba’omer, in whose tradition it is to light bonfires.
Given the news published by The National newspaper, where the promoted act is compared to the burning of books carried out by Nazism in 1933, on their Twitter account (@dirozevepave), the Pink Peacock collective justifies the act: “(the Nazis) destroyed around 20,000 research books and archives of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexology) in Berlin, the first research center on homosexuality, intersex and transsexuality, directed by the Jewish doctor Magnus Hirschfeld. In that burning book is supposed to be Dora Richter, the first trans woman to have gender-affirming surgery on her buttocks and was murdered that day.”
“The Nazis considered homosexuality to be intrinsically linked to Judaism and tried not only to murder all Jews, but also to destroy all records of homosexual and Jewish culture. What we did, on the other hand, was burn a single copy of a book written by a billionaire campaigning to ban trans people from public life. Comparing a trans Jewish anarchist collective to the Nazis is really… We are a small cafe! We simply do not have the power to commit murder and genocide!”
Since its opening in 2021, this Yiddish queer anarchist café & infoshop (trans community cultural center) has offered a vegan, non-alcoholic menu, under the “pay what you can” concept, equivalent to what is known in our country as “a la cap”. It is also characterized by attitudes that have drawn the attention of the Glasgow community, more precisely, the police.
In June 2021, they placed a pink sign in the window that read “Fuck the Police”, which was removed by the aforementioned, accusing the person in charge of the premises, Morgan Holleb, for a public order offence. When this happened, they replaced the sign with another in Yiddish that read: “Daloy polizei”. Already in October, they offered keys to escape from police handcuffs to protesters once morest the Conference on Climate Change (COP26) that was held in the same city, unleashing media screams from the authorities. Between political propaganda and promotion, Pink Peacock demonstrates creative ingenuity, which is why this Harry Potter burning falls into that range as well.
The same can be said of JK Rowling, who never lowered the flags of her radical feminism. In English, she has known how to stand up once morest those who accuse her of being transphobic, vindicating the fight once morest male aggression (regardless of the aggressor’s gender perception). At the end of March, the author replicated on Twitter a video of the Australian trans activist Tess Hall where she burned one of her books.
It is that the burning of Harry Potter is a global phenomenon, and apparently dates back to the United States, in 2001, in the state of New Mexico, where several copies suffered fire accused of satanism. As early as 2005, a mother in Gwinnett, Georgia, took her case to the state Supreme Court, alleging that the books in the series promoted witchcraft and the occult among students. That is to say: Harry inflames the spirits for reasons both progressive and conservative, or right and left.
In February of last year, Greg Locke, pastor of the Global Vision Bible Church in Tennessee, United States, broadcast live on Facebook a “combo” burning of copies of both Harry and the Twilight saga, by Stephenie Meyer, to have their followers remove them from the home as items of witchcraft. A Trump fan, Locke himself acknowledged praying and preaching on the steps of the Capitol during the violent takeover of January 6, 2021. It is that Rowling opposed Trump’s anti-immigration measures, which aroused reprisals such as the elimination of the Harry’s books from a Catholic Academy Library in 2019 because “the curses and spells used in the books are actual curses and spells.”
Let’s go back to Scotland. Publishing legend says that the first volume of the series was written in various cafes in Edinburgh. Rowling lives there, but she is originally from the south of England, from Gloucester-shire. In 2014, the author donated 1.4 million euros to the campaign once morest independence from the United Kingdom in the followingmath of the referendum, where the independentistas lost 55.3% to 44.7%. In Glasgow 53.5% voted in favor of the split, and in Edinburgh 61.1% once morest. The working city once morest the administrative capital. Harry was left in such a crack, who should change his magic following another frustrated referendum that was scheduled for 2024.
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