#to be clear i feel the same way abput gun violence as i do about the guillotine: it won't save you it will only lead to more dead people
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Kay, thanks for this link, reading the essay was almost quasi-religious to this lifelong atheist. It's an absurdly optimistic piece and all the more rebellious for it, I think.
I could quote so much more from it, but perhaps this is the most relevant bit right now...
For radicals, fetishizing the guillotine is just like fetishizing the state: it means celebrating an instrument of murder that will always be used chiefly against us.
Those who have been stripped of a positive relationship to their own agency often look around for a surrogate to identify with—a leader whose violence can stand in for the revenge they desire as a consequence of their own powerlessness. In the Trump era, we are all well aware of what this looks like among disenfranchised proponents of far-right politics. But there are also people who feel powerless and angry on the left, people who desire revenge, people who want to see the state that has crushed them turned against their enemies.
Reminding “tankies” of the atrocities and betrayals state socialists perpetrated from 1917 on is like calling Trump racist and sexist. Publicizing the fact that Trump is a serial sexual assaulter only made him more popular with his misogynistic base; likewise, the blood-drenched history of authoritarian party socialism can only make it more appealing to those who are chiefly motivated by the desire to identify with something powerful.
-Anarchists in the Trump Era
Now that the Soviet Union has been defunct for almost 30 years—and owing to the difficulty of receiving firsthand perspectives from the exploited Chinese working class—many people in North America experience authoritarian socialism as an entirely abstract concept, as distant from their lived experience as mass executions by guillotine. Desiring not only revenge but also a deus ex machina to rescue them from both the nightmare of capitalism and the responsibility to create an alternative to it themselves, they imagine the authoritarian state as a champion that could fight on their behalf. Recall what George Orwell said of the comfortable British Stalinist writers of the 1930s in his essay “Inside the Whale”:
“To people of that kind such things as purges, secret police, summary executions, imprisonment without trial etc., etc., are too remote to be terrifying. They can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism.”
#to be clear i feel the same way abput gun violence as i do about the guillotine: it won't save you it will only lead to more dead people#and they won't by any means all be the 'right kind' of dead people#you make one individual judge jury and executioner and you open to door to others who won't be doing it for the same values#are you all so really devoid of hope that you'd rather grimly cheer an act of desperation than think about how to change the system?#this entire thing is unedifying to watch. the responses are cringe as hell - almost as cringe as your folk hero himself#i don't know do i need to say explicitly that i think the us healthcare system is fucked? it's eugenics by capitalism. it's horrendous.#you can't fix it by shooting ceos though do you. do any of you really believe that??#the most milquetoast hollywoodised folk ballad going on here. this man is no joe hill.#this is like. cheering the class clown for disrupting five minutes of the teacher's time#even though it means you'll all be staying on five minutes late at the end#the number of people i thought better of who seem to think this circus is justice or presents a solution is astounding#anyway maybe that's why this article hit me so hard this morning. i needed that big fat dose of heady optimism to counter#the cynical lust for vengeance i'm seeing everywhere else.#don't you want to be better than them?#things i can laugh at: historical arctic cannibalism. things i guess i can't: this whole mess#i don't mourn the ceo not one bit! but they'll put a new one in place with better security and life will go on much as before#taking any execution as a victory is honestly grotesque to me#crimethinc#anarchy#anti-violence#today i will mostly be listening to let 'em dangle by elvis costello again i guess
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