#BenMorea #PanchoVillaSyndrome
"The pages excerpted below pick up the narrative in the early 1970s, at which point Morea and many others have fled New York City to the mountains of New Mexico and Colorado. While recounting his rugged lifestyle and the extraordinary events of these years, which tragically claimed the lives of various friends and even his own brother, Morea introduces one of his most salient political concepts, the 'Pancho Villa Syndrome.' What becomes of revolutionary subjects once their revolutions collapse or are defeated, leaving them to wander in exile? Having risked death to change the world, many will find a return to atomized civilian life unthinkable. What then? The Pancho Villa syndrome is Morea’s term for the deadly undertow that often sets in at such moments, when political ambitions descend into mere banditry and armed struggle gives way to forms of guerilla criminality. Comrades who are 'armed and ready to die,' yet deprived of a transformative horizon to orient themselves, risk turning inwards: 'fixated on their own mythology,' unable to rejoin the flow of everyday life, they burn up their remaining days on Earth in self-destructive rituals of prideful rage, until they eventually expire. Such nihilistic spirals are by no means unique to the American sequence; examples are found in Mexico, Ukraine, Brazil and, notably, Italy. The Pancho Villa syndrome constitutes a perennial danger, to be found anywhere insurgent struggle reaches the threshold of armed conflict with the state. According to Morea, the only hope of circumventing such black holes depends upon a broadening of the revolutionary impetus, which cannot be confined to a narrowly political or materialist perspective. If it is to avoid spinning out into tragic cycles of bloodshed and self-sacrifice, revolutionary struggle must be animated by an idea of happiness that incorporates spiritual components, a vision of our place in nature and the cosmos. While Full Circle initiates this task, it falls to the present generation of fighters to see it through."
https://illwill.com/pancho-villa-syndrome
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