"I think the Gujarat pogrom is the canary in the coal mine, and it's where all the techniques that we're seeing today begin. It's where we first learn that popular violence is not discrediting to the far right when it's associated with them. It actually can be an electoral advantage, and it was for the BJP ... So in this sense, it's hard, muscular capitalism, shorn of politically correct welfarist, environmentalist, fluffy, woke constraints."
#RichardSeymour, 2024
I really must get some reading glasses and a copy of Disaster Nationalism.
I haven't come across someone making this much sense, about something so important to contemporary politics, since I read Excommunicate Me From the Church of Social Justice by Frances Lee, and Exiting the Vampire Castle by Mark Fisher.
"And this was [2011 Norway mass murderer]’s sort of innovation, if you like, with his mass murder and manifesto. He said the mass murder is the marketing for the manifesto."
#RichardSeymour, 2024
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/richard-seymour
Errr ... no. This is an old idea. Which we can easily trace back at least as far as the "propaganda of the deed" strategies of insurrectionist labour movements in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Which in turn were arguably inspired by Bakunin's theories.
(1/?)
But I suspect the "lone wolf" school of white supremacist mass-murder-as-propaganda, as practiced by that Norway van bomber Seymour cites, can be sheeted home to the Unabomber. Partly because they share his utilitarian disregard for individual human lives, but also because their texts tend to include eco-fascist elements remarkably similar to Kaczynski's.
(2/?)
Many who condemned his tactics were scolded by our fellow anarchists and militant greenies, and especially primitivists (people like John Zerzan and Derrick Jensen). They claimed our commitment to nonviolence only served the interests of ecocidal power, which could only hear us if we spoke in its own language; violence.
But unlike them, we could see Kaczynski's crypto-fascism for what it was. Despite it being clothed in the sentiments and language of radical environmentalism.
(3/3)
#NathanJRobinson: "JHelp me better understand how QAnon could become a thing."
"It's a live action role playing game in which you, somebody who knows nothing about politics, can be involved in the most important things that are happening in the world, in which there is an apocalyptic crescendo at the end.
#RichardSeymour, 2024
"His persona is actually Mr. McMahon, the WWE persona. He's basically the evil billionaire boss. I get Trump more than I want to. When I watch him, there's a part of me that goes, okay, yes, I get this. And so I can see the emotional appeal in a way that the liberal technocrats like Obama can't. I think that's one of their weaknesses and why they keep getting beaten."
#RichardSeymour, 2024
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/richard-seymour
(1/2)
"Look at 2016. Hillary Clinton should not have lost that election. She had everything on her side. She had all the money, she had all the media. She could have mobilized just a few critical groups of voters. Wasn't interested. She was stuck in her delusions of mobilizing suburban white moms, and I think to some extent, we may be facing the same situation today."
#RichardSeymour, 2024
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/richard-seymour
(2/2)
Strypey