Gaza is only the start. The new world order is one where the weak are obliterated by the strong, the rule of law does not exist, genocide is an instrument of control and barbarism is triumphant.

Mar 15, 2026

The war on Iran and the obliteration of Gaza is the beginning. Welcome to the new world order. The age of technologically-advanced barbarism. There are no rules for the strong, only for the weak. Oppose the strong, refuse to bow to its capricious demands and you are showered with missiles and bombs.

Hospitals, elementary schools, universities and apartment complexes are reduced to rubble. Doctors, students, journalists, poets, writers, scientists, artists and political leaders — including the heads of negotiating teams — are murdered in the tens of thousands by missiles and killer drones.

Resources – as the Venezuelans know – are openly stolen. Food, water and medicine, as in Palestine, are weaponized.

Let them eat dirt.

International bodies such as the United Nations are pantomime, useless appendages of another age. The sanctity of individual rights, open borders and international law have vanished. The most depraved leaders of human history, those who reduced cities to ashes, herded captive populations to execution sites and littered lands they occupied with mass graves and corpses, have returned with a vengeance.

They spew the same hypermasculine tropes. They spew the same vile, racist cant. They spew the same Manichaean vision of good and evil, black and white. They spew the same infantile language of total dominance and unrestrained violence.

Killer clowns. Buffoons. Idiots. They have seized the levers of power to carry out their demented and cartoonish visions as they pillage the state for their own enrichment.

“After witnessing savage mass murder over several months, with the knowledge that it was conceived, executed and endorsed by people much like themselves, who presented it as a collective necessity, legitimate and even humane, millions now feel less at home in the world,” writes Pankaj Mishra in “The World After Gaza.” “The shock of this renewed exposure to a peculiarly modern evil – the evil done in the pre-modern era only by psychopathic individuals and unleashed in the last century by rulers and citizens of rich and supposedly civilized societies – cannot be overstated. Nor can the moral abyss we confront.”

The subjugated are property, commodities to exploit for profit or pleasure. The Epstein Files expose the sickness and heartlessness of the ruling class. Liberals. Conservatives. University presidents. Academics. Philanthropists. Wall Street titans. Celebrities. Democrats. Republicans.

They wallow in unbridled hedonism. They go to private schools and have private health care. They are cocooned in self-referential bubbles by sycophants, publicists, financial advisers, lawyers, servants, chauffeurs, self-help gurus, plastic surgeons and personal trainers. They reside in heavily guarded estates and vacation on private islands. They travel on private jets and gargantuan yachts. They exist in another reality, what the Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Frank dubs the world of “Richistan,” a world of private Xanadus where they hold Nero-like bacchanalias, make their perfidious deals, amass their billions and cast aside those they use, including children, as if they are refuse. No one in this magic circle is accountable. No sin too depraved. They are human parasites. They disembowel the state for personal profit. They terrorize the “lesser breeds of the earth.” They shut down the last, anemic vestiges of our open society.

“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life,” as George Orwell writes in “1984.” “All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.”

The law, despite a few valiant efforts by a handful of judges — who will soon be purged — is an instrument of repression. The judiciary exists to stage show trials. I spent a lot of time in the London courts covering the Dickensian farce during the persecution of Julian Assange. A Lubyanka-on-the-Thames. Our courts are no better. Our Department of Justice is a vengeance machine.

Masked, armed goons flood the streets of the United States and murder civilians, including citizens. The ruling mandarins are spending billions to convert warehouses into detention centers and concentration camps. They insist they will only house the undocumented, the criminals, but our global ruling class lies like it breathes. In their eyes, we are vermin, either blindly and unquestionably obedient or criminals. There is nothing in between.

These concentration camps, where there is no due process and people are disappeared, are designed for us. And by us, I mean the citizens of this dead republic. Yet we watch, stupefied, disbelieving, passively waiting for our own enslavement.

It won’t be long.

The savagery in Iran, Lebanon and Gaza is the same savagery we face at home. Those carrying out the genocide, mass slaughter and unprovoked war on Iran are the same people dismantling our democratic institutions.

The social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls what is happening “a vast worldwide Malthusian correction” that is “geared to preparing the world for the winners of globalization, minus the inconvenient noise of its losers.”

Oh, the critics say, don’t be so bleak. Don’t be so negative. Where is the hope? Really, it’s not that bad.

If you believe this you are part of the problem, an unwitting cog in the machinery of our rapidly consolidating fascist state.

Reality will eventually implode these “hopeful” fantasies, but by then it will be too late.

True despair is not a result of accurately reading reality. True despair comes from surrendering, either through fantasy or apathy, to malignant power. True despair is powerlessness. And resistance, meaningful resistance, even if it is almost certainly doomed, is empowerment. It confers self-worth. It confers dignity. It confers agency. It is the only action that allows us to use the word hope.

The Iranians, Lebanese and Palestinians know there is no appeasing these monsters. The global elites believe nothing. They feel nothing. They cannot be trusted. They exhibit the core traits of all psychopaths — superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, manipulation and the inability to feel remorse or guilt. They disdain as weakness the virtues of empathy, honesty, compassion and self-sacrifice. They live by the creed of Me. Me. Me.

“The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane,” Eric Fromm writes in “The Sane Society.”

We have witnessed evil for nearly three years in Gaza. We watch it now in Lebanon and Iran. We see this evil excused or masked by political leaders and the media.

The New York Times, in a page out of Orwell, sent an internal memo telling reporters and editors to eschew the terms “refugee camps, “occupied territory,” “ethnic cleansing” and, of course, “genocide” when writing about Gaza. Those who name and denounce this evil are smeared, blacklisted and purged from university campuses and the public sphere. They are arrested and deported. A deadening silence is descending upon us, the silence of all authoritarian states. Fail to do your duty, fail to cheerlead the war on Iran, and see your broadcasting license revoked, as the Chair of the F.C.C. Brendan Carr has proposed.

We have enemies. They are not in Palestine. They are not in Lebanon. They are not in Iran. They are here. Among us. They dictate our lives. They are traitors to our ideals. They are traitors to our country. They envision a world of slaves and masters. Gaza is only the start. There are no internal mechanisms for reform. We can obstruct or surrender.

Those are the only choices left.

SOURCE: https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-world-according-to-gaza

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The phenomenon that is at the root of all problems.

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than evil,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian. Penning this sentence ten years after the accession of Adolf Hitler to supreme power, these words reflected tough lessons soaked in blood. Bonhoeffer formed part of a small circle of resistance to the dictator in Germany, risking his life for an ideal.

It was a dark time in his homeland. Total war had engulfed the world, and a totalitarian regime was controlling the country. Bonhoeffer pondered how this came to be. He thought about the nature of evil, but came to the conclusion it was not evil itself that was the most dangerous enemy of the good. Rather, it was stupidity.

For you can fight against evil. You can expose it. Evil makes people uneasy. As Bonhoeffer continued, “evil carries with itself the seeds of its own destruction.” To prevent willful malice, you can always erect barriers to stop its spread. Against stupidity you are defenseless.

Against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied. In fact, they can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them aggressive. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Understanding the nature of stupidity

After writing down those words, Bonhoeffer was soon arrested. He died two years later, executed in a concentration camp by Nazi henchmen. The man lived in what now seems like a completely different era. Yet, the ideas he left us with have an application in any century. For stupidity hasn’t disappeared. It is eternal.

If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature,” wrote Bonhoeffer in his treatise. And the nature of stupidity has its roots deep in the subconscious. It is driven by the fundamental mechanics of the human experience. As ancient philosophers noted, humans are social animals. It is this very sociability that is at the base of stupidity.

We note further that people who have isolated themselves from others or who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals or groups of people inclined or condemned to sociability. And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Stupidity is a group phenomenon. An individual can act stupidly, but that has no effect on the greater whole. However, when a group acts stupidly, that greatly impacts the individual, compounding the entire effect. In many ways, something with initially positive ramifications, ended up stabbing humanity in the back.

Human nature doesn’t change as the years pass by. The inner workings of individual people are the same as those of their remote ancestors living on the savannas of Africa 50 thousand years ago. Some of these internal processes stretch even further back, millions of years into the past when primitive brains started to develop.

Numerous heuristics evolved in order to help individuals navigate the world. Among these, following the herd is arguably the most prominent. It makes sense. When information is scarce, doing what others are doing is probably the best course of action. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work all the time. In some cases it can bring about bad results, due to cognitive biases.

Herd behavior is among the pre-eminent causes of stupidity. Numerous scientific studies have shown how individual humans can be swayed by the crowd to adopt positions which go against all logic. In a classic examination of human folly, psychologist Solomon Asch looked at how individual people respond to the majority group around them.

Do they conform to the group’s view? Or do they strike out on their own contrarian (but ultimately correct) path? The results were mind-boggling, but incredibly telling for showing how stupidity arises. In the course of the 12 experiments on conformity, around 75% of the participants conformed to the majority view at least once.

This means 3/4ths of the people doing the study were pushed to say an answer which was clearly wrong, just by peer pressure from the group around them. This type of a process is at the core of how stupidity allows evil to rise up.

The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence, and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

As Bonhoeffer quipped, “the power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.” All kinds of populists, political entrepreneurs, and bullshitters take advantage of this mental state of the masses. Without support from the wider aspects of society, none of these power-hungry individuals would be able to access power.

People overcome with stupidity act as if possessed. Their logical part of the brain is shut down. Such a person starts acting as a political zombie, with whom any type of logic or discussion of facts fails. Instead, they function on the level of slogans, catchwords, and low-level rallying cries.

In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Stupidity facilitates the process of the capture of society by spineless, evil forces. A narrative is created that incorporates simple explanations for complex problems, offering “solutions” and scapegoats. Whoever doesn’t conform to this standard orthodoxy becomes the “other”, an enemy to be destroyed.

Of course these stories would never amount to anything if people didn’t believe them. Unfortunately, they do. Stupidity wins out over reason.

Stupidity in our times

The 21st century is seeing these internal failures of the human mind unfold in full swing. The first decade saw cognitive biases create economic bubbles which resulted in the crash of 2008. The second and third decades are seeing malicious forces from different sides of the political aisle hijack the world at large.

While a combination of ideological true-believers and political bullshitters is leading the charge, all this is facilitated by stupidity. Bonhoeffer observed how historical forces and external conditions can exacerbate the problem of stupidity.

It is a particular form of the impact of historical circumstances on human beings, a psychological concomitant of certain external conditions. Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or of a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The German’s reflections describe the current situation in the US and the world perfectly. Even more than 70 years later, they illuminate the forces at play. Recent upsurges of power have infected certain swathes of the population with great amounts of stupidity.

We have witnessed it in the pro-Trump rallies, which resulted in an attack on the US Capitol. We have seen it in the BLM protests, which degenerated into wanton looting. We come across it every day in the filter bubbles on the internet, which often foster vitriolic groupthink. Stupidity is an ever-present danger, lurking at every corner of the political spectrum.

Yet, argue with the individual actors using logic and facts, and you get nowhere. Their brains are locked, captive to pre-conceived notions and biases. As Bonhoeffer noted, it is wiser to abandon all attempts at convincing the stupid person. It’s of no use.

“We must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Brexit is Brexit” was the slogan often repeated by those in power in the UK. What Brexit actually meant, no one knew. Not even them. The impossibility of the entire Northern Ireland situation should have helped them smell the coffee from the get-go, but it appears as if people were on drugs.

Even now, when it became apparent that quitting the EU has meant empty shelves, disrupted supply chains, and more red tape, the Brexiteers haven’t woken up to reality. The same Brexit slogans and chants are still being shouted. The European Union is still the big bad bogeyman at fault with everything. The same thought patterns as in many a cult repeat themselves.

When Leon Festinger studied a UFO cult back in the 1950’s, he came across a curious thing. The cult leader, Dorothy Martin, a housewife from Chicago, foresaw that the world was going to end on the 21st of December, 1954. Seeing that we are still here, it is evident the prophesy was BS. Yet, many people believed it and gathered on that fateful day in a non-descript house.

They sat there, waiting for doomsday. To their great astonishment, it never came. When the hour for the end of the world arrived, nothing happened. What amazed the researchers who infiltrated the group were the reactions of many of the members. Faced with this apparent negation of their beliefs, many of the faithful did not abandon them.

Instead, their belief in Dorothy Martin’s BS grew even stronger. Festinger and his fellow researchers called this the backfire effect. Journalist David McRaney has a great definition of it. “When your deepest convictions are challenged by contradictory evidence, your beliefs get stronger.”

Stupidity in full view. Yet, the case of the whacky UFO cult is nothing out of the ordinary. These types of processes are at play every day with ordinary people. Ordinary people get constantly confronted with facts that prove their dearly held beliefs are not true. Yet, most just ignore them.

This effect is magnified many fold in today’s age. The world is full of chaos. There is too much junk passing around masquerading as information. This makes people confused. Another German who lived through the dark times of Nazism, psychologist Erich Fromm described how trash polluting the ether can mess with a person’s psyche.

The result of this kind of influence is twofold: one is a skepticism and cynicism towards everything which is said or printed, while the other is a childish belief in anything that a person is told with authority. This combination of cynicism and naïveté is very typical of the modern individual. Its essential result is to discourage him from doing his own thinking and deciding. — Erich Fromm

Of Jewish descent, Fromm experienced the stupidity of other people on his own skin. Forced to flee his homeland, the psychologist ended up spending his lifetime studying the behavior of people in chaotic times. He posited that the individual’s use of mental escape mechanisms was at the root of psychological conflicts.

Fromm tried to understand the laws that govern society. He argued that modern society brought with it freedom, but this very thing was also the seed of its destruction. Individuals received a new sense of independence, but this filled them with anxiety and doubt. People end up getting alienated, and seek a sense of security with other like-minded people.

This is what promotes the rise of authoritarianism and other sick ideologies. In a way, you could argue that this sense of alienation leads to a rise in stupidity.

The sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation; in fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society. — Erich Fromm in “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness”

We are living in an insane society. On one hand, you have people believing Trump won the presidency, despite evidence to the contrary. On the other hand, you have people ruminating on the eternal sin of “white people”, whoever they are. As an individual who tries to use reason and common sense, you often end up feeling isolated amid all the madness.

Stupidity reigns supreme

In his book “Fall or, Dodge in Hell”, novelist Neal Stephenson has one of his characters say a very telling phrase, “the mass of people are stupid, so gullible, because they want to be misled.” This captures perfectly why stupidity reigns supreme.

“The mass of people are so stupid, so gullible, because they want to be misled. There’s no way to make them not want it. You have to work with the human race as it exists, with all of its flaws. Getting them to see reason is a fool’s errand.” — Neal Stephenson in “Fall or, Dodge in Hell”

The average person acts as if they willfully wanted to be misled. They fall for lies, cons, and half-truths. The political entrepreneurs, the populists, can come and play them at will. The power of the bullshitters is a direct result of the stupidity of the masses who fall for their BS.

As Bonhoeffer sat in his cell writing his personal reflections, waiting for his final day, the world around him was stuck in madness. While overcome with despair, he did see flashes of light. For him, the majority of people were not stupid in every circumstance. Rather, it was a matter of what those in power expect.

“But these thoughts about stupidity also offer consolation in that they utterly forbid us to consider the majority of people to be stupid in every circumstance. It really will depend on whether those in power expect more from people’s stupidity than from their inner independence and wisdom.” — Friedrich Bonhoeffer

For Bonhoeffer, stupidity was not the problem of the individual. Instead, it was a matter of groups of individuals coming together. Madness finds its force in crowds.

This echoes Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous aphorism, that while insanity might be rare in individuals, it is generally the rule in groups, parties, nations, and epochs.

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

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Written by

Peter Burns

A curious polymath who wants to know how everything works. Blog: Renaissance Man Journal (http://gainweightjournal.com/).

source: Medium.com

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Indeed the reluctance to face squarely and explore fully the phenomena of terror and their implications is itself a lingering phenomenon of the terror.

Those who live with terror are under powerful compulsion not to speculate about it or to increase their knowledge of it. But this does not explain the remarkable reserve and resignation displayed in the face of totalitarian terror by the fact-loving Western world. The West shrank from the facts of the fascist terror, though they were available from reliable sources, until they were forced upon it in the unmasked horrors of Buchenwald, Oswiecim, Belsen, and Dachau. It shrinks today from the facts of the terror which is succeeding the end of the military war. The self-preserving numbness of the terror-ridden countries seems to be matched by a psychological mass-repression, an unconscious flight from truth, in the countries where civilization survives.

Essentially, the modern system of terror amounts to the atomization of the individual. We shudder at the tortures inflicted on the physical bodies of men; we should not be less appalled by its menace to the spirit of man. Terror accomplishes its work of dehumanization through the total integration of the population into collectivities, then depriving them of the psychological means of direct communication in spite of—rather because of—the tremendous communications apparatus to which they are exposed. The individual under terrorist conditions is never alone and always alone. He becomes numb and rigid not only in relation to his neighbor, but also in relation to himself; fear robs him of the power of spontaneous emotional or mental reaction. Thinking becomes a stupid crime; it endangers his life. The inevitable consequence is that stupidity spreads as a contagious disease among the terrorized population. Human beings live in a state of stupor—in a moral coma.

Let us examine more closely the main phenomena of terror in action.

1. Directness And Omnipotence. One of the basic functions of terror is to wipe out the rational connection between’ government decisions and individual fate. The wholesale arrest of people during the first stages of totalitarian terror, the mixing in the concentration camps of the most diverse elements of the population for the most diverse reasons, fulfills precisely this function of elimination of individual differences and claims before the apparatus of power. The qualitative difference between the imprisoned lawbreaker and the rest of the population does not exist between the victims of terror within the concentration camps and those outside. The principle of selection of the forced workers of the camps is direct terroristic calculation. They are in the majority trapped in mass arrests, with no question of individual guilt involved and no hope of limited punishment.

That the concentration camps are far more representative of the population at large than the traditional penal institution is made ominously clear by the fact that they are supervised not by a specialized body of civil servants but by units of that same secret police which oppresses the population at large.

This interruption of the causal relation between what a person does and what happens to him fulfills one of the chief aims of modern terror, namely:

2. The Breakdown of the Continuum of Experience. With the breakdown of legal rationality and its clear relation to the individual fate, this fate itself becomes so enigmatic as to lose all meaning. The individual does not know what he may experience; and what he has already experienced is no longer important for his person or his future. The normal rhythm of youth, manhood, old age, of education, career, success or failure, is completely disrupted. The creative faculties of fantasy, imagination, memory, become meaningless and tend to atrophy where they can no longer bring about any desired change in the individual’s fate.

Of course this transformation of a human being from an individual, whose essence is continuity of experience and memory, into a unit of atomized reactions is carried further among the trapped victims than among the population at large. But the difference is only in degree, and if we only cite examples from reports from the detention camps, it must always be remembered that the population at large was aware of both mass arrests and the terror within the concentration camps. Thus the terror actually visited upon the bodies of Jews, “radicals,” Poles, etc., terrorized the minds of all, which was indeed its primary function.

The breakdown of memory and experience has been described by a German psychologist, Kurt Bondy, who was himself in a concentration camp for a time:

This uncertainty about the duration of the imprisonment is probably what unnerves the men most. . . . They try to forget. The past becomes uncertain and nebulous, the picture of their family and friends indistinct. . . . Here are the roots of hopelessness, apathy, indifference, despair, distrust, and egocentricity. (“Problems of Internment Camps, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1943.)

Thus life becomes a chain of expected, avoided or materialized shocks, and thus the atomized experiences heighten the atomization of the individual. Paradoxically, in a terrorist society, in which everything is most carefully planned, the plan for the individual is—to have none; to become and to remain a mere object, a bundle of conditioned reflexes which amply respond to a series of manipulated and calculated shocks.

3. The Breakdown of Personality. In a system which reduces life to a chain of disconnected reactions to shock, personal communication tends to lose all meaning. The super-ego—the agency of conscience—in which people have stored the mechanism of moral decency, is repressed by what I may call a Hitler-ego, meaning that the inhibitions produced by conscience yield to inhibitions or drives produced by mechanical reactions and imitations. Neither the terrorized nor the terrorist is any longer a personality in the traditional sense. They are mere material conforming to situations created by a power utterly independent of themselves. An underground report by a prisoner escaped from Oswiecim tells how the camp system “destroyed every social tie in a victim and reduced his spiritual life to a fear-driven desire to prolong existence, be it only for a day or an hour.” And a keen observer with personal experience in two camps, Dr. Bruno Bettelheim, now with the University of Chicago, has studied this deterioration to its end in loss of the vital passions:

This outside world which continued to live as if nothing had happened was in the minds of the new prisoners represented by those whom they used to know, namely: by their relatives and friends. But even this hatred was very subdued in the old prisoners. It seemed that, as much as they had forgotten to love their kin, they had lost the ability to hate them . . . they were unable to feel strongly about anybody. (“Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1943.)

A similar shrinking of the personality to a cluster of conditioned reflexes has been observed among the guards. In his report, A Year in Tremblinka, Yankel Wiernik describes the practitioners of terror as automata devoid of passion or remorse, who performed their given tasks as soon as some higher-up pressed a button. Bettelheim describes their dehumanization in these words:

Having been educated in a world which rejected brutality, they felt uneasy about what they were doing. It seemed that they, too, had an emotional attitude toward their acts of brutality which might be described as a feeling of unreality. After having been guards in the camp for some time, they got accustomed to inhuman behavior, they became ‘conditioned’ to it; it then became part of their ‘real’ life.

And there is, above all, the corroborating evidence provided by these automata themselves in the trials currently being held in Germany. They admit the most atrocious crimes but show not the slightest sense of guilt. Their inhuman conduct was justified, they maintain, because it was ordered by their superiors.

4. The Struggle for Survival. The old system of culture, from abstract philosophical metaphysics to the institutions of religion and education, had the result of permeating mankind with the idea that only rational behavior which included respect for the rights, claims and needs of others could guarantee one’s own survival. Under terror such behavior may be equivalent to self-annihilation. Terrorism wipes out the causal relation between social conduct and survival, and confronts the individual with the naked force of nature—that is, of denatured nature—in the form of the all-powerful terrorist machine. What the terror aims to bring about, and enforces through its tortures, is that people shall come to act in harmony with the law of terror, namely: that their whole calculation shall have but one aim: self-perpetuation. The more people become ruthless seekers after their own survival, the more they become psychological pawns and puppets of a system which knows no other purpose than to keep itself in power.

Former inmates of Nazi detention camps confirm this regression to sheer Darwinism—or perhaps one should say infantilism:

The urge of self-preservation, bestial fear, hunger and thirst led to a complete transformation of the majority of the prisoners. . . . In many cases the sense of responsibility towards others disappeared entirely, as well as the least feeling of consideration of their common lot. Many a prisoner carried on a wild, ruthless, and thoroughly senseless struggle for his individual survival. (Bondy, op cit.)

5. Reduction to Natural Material. What the terrorist masters fear most is that their victims may recover their awareness of belonging to a whole, to human history. The complete victory of totalitarianism would be identical with the complete forgetting of history; that is, with a mankind become void of reflection, or in other words with a mankind solely become natural material. To quote Hitler:

A violently active, dominating, intrepid, brutal youth—that is what I am after. Youth must be all those things. It must be indifferent to pain. There must be no weakness or tenderness in it. I want to see once more in its eyes the gleam of pride and independence of the beast of prey. . . . I intend to have an athletic youth—that is the first and chief thing. In this way I shall eradicate the thousands of years of human domestication. Then I shall have in front of me the pure and noble natural material. With that I can create the new order. (Hermann Raüschning, Hitler Speaks, 1939.)

Here, if we discard the flowery adjectives, is a classic admission of fascist aims and ends. Mankind, having become domesticated again, becomes part of the over-abundance of nature. It thus becomes material indeed, for exploitation where needed and for annihilation where not—in any case, mere material to be processed. Modem terror always looks at people with the eyes either of the big monopolist surveying raw materials or of the undertaker anticipating the disposal of the useless human corpse.

This attitude is perfectly illustrated in reports describing the initiation of inmates in the Nazi concentration camps of Eastern Europe:

At the one side we surrendered our baggage; at the other side we had to undress and to surrender our clothing and pieces of value. Naked then, we went into another barrack, where our heads and beards were shaved and disinfected with lysol. When we walked out of this barrack each of us was given a number. . . . With these numbers in our hands we were chased into a third barrack where the reception took place. This ‘reception’ consisted in that our numbers were tattooed on the left breast. Then they proceeded to take the data of each person and brought us, divided in groups of hundreds, into a cellar, later into another barrack, where we were given striped prisoners’ clothes and wooden shoes. (Die Judenausrottung in Polen. Augenzeugen-berichte. Dritte Serie. Geneva, 1944.)

There is a striking analogy between this treatment of human beings and that of merchandise shipped into the inventory rooms of a large department store or factory. It is a planful handling of materials for certain purposes. According to the witnesses, the system became so streamlined that only the really useful human merchandise was tagged. He who got no number was a reject; he was disposed of. And as in any oversized administrative unit, no one cared to take the blame for mistakes. Even if the merchandise had been rejected by mistake, it was destroyed:

Since the prisoners were checked according to numbers and not according to their names, an error could easily be made which would be disastrous. If the ‘block-writer’ had marked ‘dead’ a number which in reality was still alive—a thing which can happen in these extreme cases of great mortality—the mistake was corrected by putting to death the holder of the number.

Wiernik describes the reduction of the human being into nothing more significant or valuable than a potential cadaver:

It was a continuous coming and going, and death without end. I learned to look at every live person as a prospective corpse in the nearest future. I appraised him with my eyes and thought of his weight; who was going to carry him to his grave; how severe a beating would he get while doing it? It was terrible, but nonetheless true. Would you believe that a human being, living under such conditions, could at times smile and jest?

These are hard facts, and they justify one’s saying that within the logic of terror, man has himself become a fact of raw nature. And death gains the rationality of putting surplus human material to use:

The Germans carried out mass round-ups of Jews in the city. They spared neither men, women, nor children. The adults they simply murdered, while the children were given away to the Hitler Jugend squads as shooting targets. (Quoted in News Bulletin, Representation of Polish Jewry, American Division, 1945.)

6. Assimilation to the Terrorists. Terror reaches its peak of success when the victim loses his awareness of the gulf between himself and his tormentors. With the complete breakdown of the personality the most primitive historical force, imitation, becomes openly prevalent in the dehumanized atmosphere of totalitarianism. This ultimate stage in regression is described by Dr. Bettelheim:

A prisoner had reached the final stage of adjustment to the camp situation when he had changed his personality so as to accept as his own the values of the Gestapo . . .

Old prisoners who seemed to have a tendency to identify themselves with the Gestapo did so not only in respect to aggressive behavior. They would try to arrogate to themselves old pieces of Gestapo uniforms. . . . This identification with their torturers went so far as copying their leisure-time activities. One of the games played by the guards was to find out who could stand to be hit longest without uttering a complaint. This game was copied by the old prisoners, as though they had not been hit often enough without needing to repeat this experience as a game.

Other problems in which most old prisoners made their peace with the values of the Gestapo included the race problem, although race discrimination had been alien to their scheme of values before they were brought into the camp.

Can one imagine a greater triumph for any system than this adoption of its values and behavior by its powerless victims? When we again recall that the difference between the effect of terror upon the population within and without the concentration camp is one of degree rather than kind, we have here an appalling index to the magnitude of the so-called problem of re-education in Central Europe.

_____________

So much for the atomization of the individual. What are some of the social consequences of a regime of terror?

It is characteristic of a terrorist regime that its tools and practices increase in efficiency, quantity and cruelty. Terror grows by what it feeds on—its excesses beget the need for ever greater terror. Under this increasing oppression the victims cease to anticipate an end of terror; they hope only for its alleviation.

Thus terror, by its own inner dynamics, perpetuates its sovereignty. Its victims lose the power to envisage a different order of life. They become absolutely dependent, materially and spiritually. They are receivers of doles, from such rewards as the “Strength through Joy” benefits all the way down to the spoiled food and contaminated water of the concentration camp.

This, I think, explains the behavior of a good many Germans toward the Allied armies. It is a continuity of frozen reactions. The aloofness of some and the abject toadying of others to the military powers are alike the result of their long alienation from genuinely experienced values and convictions.

Another result is the emergence of an infantile collectivity. Terrorist atomization has resulted in almost complete destruction of the old institutions of society. Most important, because the family was the basic unity of society, is the weakening of family ties. The complete dependence of parents on the whims of the terrorist hierarchy; the state policy of training children to inform on their parents; the regimentation of youth; the “social engineering” which shifts masses of people about with as little respect for family ties as in the worst phases of chattel slavery; the creation of millions of orphans through mass extermination of adults; all these are practices which the totalitarian governments have made horribly familiar. And all these practices inevitably and designedly disrupt family relationships and deprive the young of reliance upon the warmth and security of family life.

The result is an upsurge of a feeling of adolescent collectivity, rootless and ruthless, in which the concept of the family is supplanted by the image of a cynical, tough, destructive, joyfully cruel and extremely resentful community, frighteningly reminiscent of Hitler’s vision of brutally domesticated and therefore brutal natural material.

Finally, the pattern of terrorist oppression has had its influence on the behavior of liberated groups and individuals. Without moralizing about the legitimacy or appropriateness of revenge, it must be said that reprisals which betray a resort to the means of the totalitarian enemy have a deep significance for the tasks of peace. It has been truly said that the system of terror which Mussolini introduced into Western Europe enjoyed a sinister triumph in the orgy of vengeance over the dead bodies of the fascist dictator and his mistress. It triumphed when French girls were paraded with shaved heads before a vituperative populace in punishment for intimate relations with German soldiers. The “humane and orderly” transfer of Germans from liberated Poland was foreshadowed in the remark made to Jan Karski by a girl member of the Polish underground:

The moment the Germans are defeated, a ruthless mass terror must be organized. The imported Germans must be expelled from the vicinity by the same methods by which they were settled here—by force and ruthless extermination.

_____________

What is there in modem civilization that has set this terror loose among us?

I should like to venture this thesis:

Mankind today has so tremendously improved its technology as to render itself largely superfluous. Modern machinery and methods of organization have made it possible for a relatively small minority of managers, technicians and skilled workers to keep the whole industrial apparatus going. Society has reached the stage of potential mass unemployment; and mass employment is increasingly a manipulated product of the state and state-like powers which channelize surplus mankind into public works, including armies and official or semi-official political organizations, in order to keep it at once alive and under control.

This is to say that large masses of workers have lost all creative relation to the productive process. They live in a social and economic vacuum. Their dilemma is the pre-condition of terror. It provides the totalitarian forces with a road to power and an object for its exercise. For them, terror is the institutionalized administration of large strata of mankind as surplus.

Certain cultural tendencies emerging from the crisis of the liberal era may be cited as contributing to the rise of terror.

Under the impact of mass production, people have learned to live in patterns, not only material but also spiritual. They tend to accept uncritically entire systems of opinions and attitudes, as if ideological tie-in sales were forced upon them. To be a progressive is ipso facto to be for democracy, for the New Deal, for the Negroes, for the Jews, for Soviet Russia, and many other things. To be an isolationist is, or was, to be ipso facto against Great Britain, against Soviet Russia, against the intellectuals, against the Jews, and many other things.

It is not so much that people believe in these configurations of stereotypes as that they themselves become stereotyped appendages of this or that big cultural or political monopoly. Reason, consistency, personal experience no longer matter. One might say, for example, that there are no true anti-Semites any more, because anti-Semitism is not so much a reaction to anything experienced as specifically Jewish as it is a behavior-pattern tied in with adherence to a certain cultural ticket. And this shrinking of genuine experience makes it all the more difficult to counteract distorted and fallacious stereotypes. The cultural monopoly, integrating a whole chain of attitudes, itself exercises a psychologically terroristic impact to which the individual yields.

The fearful discrepancy between the moral traditions of individualism and the mass crimes of modern collectivism has left modem man in a moral no-man’s land. He still holds to the moral concepts of middleclass society—conscience, decency, self-respect, the dignity of man. But the social foundations of these concepts are crumbling. The overwhelming scale of power, size, destruction, extermination in the modern world make individual moral scruples, problems and conflict seem puny and irrelevant.

_____________

To cite a drastic example, the ethical issue involved in Hamlet, which may be considered a classical document of morality after the dissolution of medieval culture, is the question whether or not a time “out of joint” can be righted if Hamlet becomes the judge and executioner of his father’s murderer. In the face of present-day physical and moral catastrophe this issue is almost ridiculous.

The individual today realizes, more or less consciously, that his moral values do not greatly matter, because not much depends any more, either materially or spiritually, upon his decisions. He feels alone, deprived of the material and moral heritage which was the basis of his existence in liberal society. He is exposed to tremendous fury and aggression. He has become a potential paranoiac. In this condition he is ready to accept the most insane ideologies and patterns of domination and persecution.

The fascists were the first to spot the connection between potential material poverty and real spiritual poverty, and to exploit it rationally and systematically on a mass scale. They realized that in order to subjugate and control the surplus population it was necessary to bum into their minds the awareness of physical and spiritual menace, and to extirpate the whole frame of moral and emotional reference within which men had traditionally attempted to survive personal calamity. Hitler himself, in a conversation with Rauschning, once expressed the fascist need of terror and brutality. According to Rauschning:

He had not the slightest liking for concentration camps and secret police and the like but these things were simply necessities from which there was no getting away. ‘Unless you are prepared to be pitiless, you will get nowhere. . . . Domination is never founded on humanity, but, regarded from the narrow civilian angle, on crime. Terrorism is absolutely indispensable in every case of the founding of a new power. . . . Even more important than terrorism is the systematic modification of the ideas and feelings of the masses. We have to control those’ (Hermann Rauschning, op cit.)

Hegel once said, “How fortunate the institution which has no history.” Our age of terror is history, and one of its blackest chapters. But the dreams of freedom and happiness which terror would destroy are also part of history.

It is only by applying the efforts of reason—in its theory and practice—to the phenomena of terror, their roots and their consequences, that mankind can hope to wrest itself from the most sinister threat and ultimately pathetic fate in which it has ever become involved.

The dreams of Western civilization may still become reality if mankind can free itself from its use of human beings as surplus or commodities or means. Otherwise we too may face the terror.

LEO LOWENTHAL (essay published in 1946)

source: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-crisis-of-the-individual-ii-terrors-atomization-of-man/

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In 1989, when the internet was predominantly ASCII-based and HyperCard had yet to give birth (or at least act as a midwife) to the world wide web, R.U. Sirius launched Mondo 2000. “I’d say it was arguably the representative underground magazine of its pre-web day,” William Gibson said in a recent interview. “Posterity, looking at this, should also consider Mondo 2000 as a focus of something that was happening.”

Twenty years ago, it was cypherpunk that was happening.

And it’s happening again today.

EARLY CYPHERPUNK IN FACT AND FICTION
CYPHERPUNK WAS BOTH AN EXCITING NEW VISION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE
AND A FUN SUBCULTURE DEDICATED TO MAKING IT HAPPEN

Flashback: Berkeley, California 1992. I pick up the ringing phone. My writing partner, St. Jude Milhon, is shouting down the line: “I’ve got it! Cypherpunk!”

Jude was an excitable girl and she was particularly excitable when there was a new boyfriend involved. She’d been raving about Eric Hughes for days. I paid no attention.

At the time, Jude and I were contracted to write a novel titled How to Mutate and Take Over the World. I wanted the fiction to contain the truth. I wanted to tell people how creative hackers could do it — mutate and take over the world — by the end of the decade. Not knowing many of those details ourselves, we threw down a challenge on various hacker boards and in the places where extropians gathered to share their superhuman fantasies. “Take on a character,” we said, “and let that character mutate and/or take over.” The results were vague and unsatisfying. These early transhumanists didn’t actually know how to mutate, and the hackers couldn’t actually take over the world. It seemed that we were asking for too much too soon.

And so I wound up there, holding the phone away from my ear as Jude shouted out the solution, at least to the “taking over” part of our problem. Strong encryption, she explained, will sever all the ties binding us to hostile states and other institutions. Encryption will level the playing field, protecting even the least of us from government interference. It will liberate pretty much everything, toute de suite. The cypherpunks would make this happen.

For Jude, cypherpunk was both an exciting new vision for social change and a fun subculture dedicated to making it happen. Sure, I was skeptical. But I was also desperate for something to hang the plot of our book on. A few days later I found myself at the feet of Eric Hughes — who, along with John Gilmore and Tim May, is considered one of the founders of the cypherpunk movement — getting the total download.

This was my first exposure to “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.” Written by Tim May, it opens by mimicking The Communist Manifesto: “A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy.” In a fit of hyperbole that perfectly foreshadowed the mood of tech culture in the 1990s — from my own Mondo 2000 to the “long boom” of digital capitalism — May declared that encrypted communication and anonymity online would “alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret.” The result would be nothing less than “both a social and economic revolution.”

Just as a seemingly minor invention like barbed wire made possible the fencing-off of vast ranches and farms, thus altering forever the concepts of land and property rights in the frontier West, so too will the seemingly minor discovery out of an arcane branch of mathematics come to be the wire clippers which dismantle the barbed wire around intellectual property.

Those words were written way back in 1988. By 1993, a bunch of crypto freaks were gathering fairly regularly in the San Francisco Bay Area. In his lengthy Wired cover story, Steven Levy would describe them as mostly “having beards and long hair — like Smith Brothers [cough drops] gone digital.” Their antics would become legendary.

John Gilmore set off a firestorm by sharing classified documents on cryptography that a friend of his had found in public libraries (they had previously been declassified). The NSA threatened Gilmore with a charge of violating the Espionage Act, but after he responded with publicity and his own legal threats, the NSA — probably recognizing in Gilmore a well-connected dissident who they couldn’t intimidate — backed down and once again declassified the documents.

Phil Zimmermann’s PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) software was being circulated largely thanks to cypherpunk enthusiasts. According to Tim May’s Cyphernomicon, PGP was “the most important crypto tool” available at the time, “having single-handedly spread public key methods around the world.” It was available free of charge for non-commercial users, and complete source code was included with all copies. Most importantly, May wrote, “almost no understanding of how PGP works in detail is needed,” so anyone could use its encryption to securely send data over the net.

In April 1993, the Clinton administration announced its encryption policy initiative. The Clipper Chip was an NSA-developed encryption chipset for “secure” voice communication (the government would have a key for every chip manufactured). “Not to worry,” Phil Zimmermann cuttingly wrote in an essay about PGP. “The government promises that they will use these keys to read your traffic only ‘when duly authorized by law.” Not that anyone believed the promises. “To make Clipper completely effective,” Zimmermann continued, “the next logical step would be to outlaw other forms of cryptography.” This threat brought cypherpunks to the oppositional front lines in one of the early struggles over Internet rights, eventually defeating government plans.

John Gilmore summed up the accomplishments of the cypherpunks in a recent email: “We did reshape the world,” he wrote. “We broke encryption loose from government control in the commercial and free software world, in a big way. We built solid encryption and both circumvented and changed the corrupt US legal regime so that strong encryption could be developed by anyone worldwide and deployed by anyone worldwide,” including WikiLeaks.

As the 1990s rolled forward, many cypherpunks went to work for the man, bringing strong crypto to financial services and banks (on the whole, probably better than the alternative). Still, crypto-activism continued and the cypherpunk mailing list blossomed as an exchange for both practical encryption data and spirited, sometimes-gleeful argumentation, before finally peaking in 1997. This was when cypherpunk’s mindshare seemed to recede, possibly in proportion to the utopian effervescence of the early cyberculture. But the cypherpunk meme may now be finding a sort of rebirth in one of the biggest and most important stories in the fledgeling 21st century.

The post CYPHERPUNK RISING: WIKILEAKS, ENCRYPTION, AND THE COMING SURVEILLANCE DYSTOPIA by R.U.Sirius appeared first on Void Network.

1.

 
Ever since the project of universal emancipation through communist revolution existed there has been a tension between two approaches – a dichotomy of views of people who ostensibly want to reach the same goal. On the one hand we find a view that could be summarized as: Only the revolution will bring about real pleasure and fulfillment, and we have to be ascetic cadres to reach it. The other side seems to declare that: Only by developing pleasures and following our desires will the revolution even become a possibility. If we look back at the two main phases of revolutionary struggles in the last century (ca. 1917-1923 and ca. 1967-77, depending in which country), we can easily see that for many revolutionaries the idea that hedonism and revolution should go together was present and central to the whole project.
Closely related to this is the way the role of work is seen. Marx says in the third volume of Capital: “The empire of freedom begins indeed only there, where work which is defined by misery and external expediency, ceases…” (“Das Reich der Freiheit beginnt in der Tat erst da, wo das Arbeiten, das durch Not und äußere Zweckmässigkeit bestimmt ist, aufhört.”) He leaves no doubt that the empire of freedom is always built on an empire of necessity, but also that it is the human goal to achieve the most freedom possible. And this must include the abolishment of wage labor.

2.
 

Sergey Nechayev set the pace for an ascetic image of the revolutionary that would be picked up by the direct heirs of Bakuninism: the Leninists. First of all, the revolutionary is a man. He as such resembles the hero or anti-hero in the western, which is the epitomy of masculinity. He has no desires as a person, and he only has a mission for which the end justifies the means. The “ideal” man has only one passion – the revolution – yet it is he who is supposed to bring about a society of human fulfillment. But this was something that had to go wrong, and the end came in the misery of the Maoist and Trotzkyist milieus.
A close associate of Nechayev, Mikhail Bakunin, had the phantasy that a small number of strategically placed revolutionaries would be able to start the revolution and run it in the form of an invisible dictatorship. This network has some surprisingly basic authoritarian ideas for an anarchist. One can see how it became the leading idea for an avant-garde party as espoused by the Bolsheviks that has led to the dictatorship of a party and not to the dictatorship of the proletariat as supposedly intended. Bakunin would probably try to deny the connection and his adepts would point out that his formulations were directed against the supposedly authoritarian organisation of Marx and his friends, but if we look at the wordings of Nechayev and Bakunin we can sense the specter of Lenin and Mao. According to Lenin’s understanding, the emotionless revolutionary did not have a human mother, but was given birth to by the party. The rigid structure and clandestine operation of this party, to some degree forced upon the Russian Social Democrats by the conditions of their struggle, became the model for the 3rd International and the various Communist Parties founded after the first World War in most countries around the world. As the party became the ruling organisation in Russia, the hierarchies became solidified, a new bureaucratic stratum developed, and finally the party apparatuses became purged of the revolutionaries.

3.
 

 
After the butchery of the first World War, a situation where capitalism had run its course in a unimaginable blood bath, the way seemed open for world revolution. The victory of the revolution in Russia opened up what seemed like endless possibilities. Despite the harrowing conditions of war communism that followed and the defeat of the revolution in Western Europe by ca. 1923, many attempts were made to extend the political and military victory not just to economics but also to the arts, to sexuality and to communal living.
The revolutionary flood of the first post war years produced many initiatives in the West, combining psychoanalysis with new artistic investigation and revolutionary politics. The surrealists re-discovered the writings of the Marquis de Sade and the utopian socialist Charles Fourier. De Sade of course describes in his writings the unleashing of libertinage in a society of domination. Fourier on the other hand extolls the qualities of free love in large communes he called Phalansteries. But when surrealist leader Andre Breton joined the Communist Party, this was not the revolutionary research the party wanted. They put him in a cell with workers of a gasworks and soon neutralized the input of the surrealists, some of who become ardent Stalinists and went on to write bad poetry in praise of historic materialism. Comparable to this was the tension between the Party officials and people like Wilhelm Reich. The KPD’s book service banned the distribution of Wilhelm Reich’s „The sexual struggle of youth“ (Der sexuelle Kampf der Jugend) in 1932 and expelled him soon after.
The Stalinist counter-revolution which emerged victoriously in the Soviet Union in the late 20’s was not only political, it was also a sexual, moral, literary and artistic counter-revolution. For example, in 1934 a law against homosexuality was re-introduced. The family policies of the Stalinist government became more and more conservative making both divorce and abortion a lot more difficult. The emancipatory project was beaten back.

4.
 
Crushed by the blows of both fascist and stalinist counter-revolution (which was complete after the Spanish Civil War), the idea of universal emancipation survived in small circles. The combination of political with social, cultural and sexual revolutionary ideas slowly re-emerged after the war in fringe circles of the artistic avant-garde. By the mid-60’s the cold war had been going on for nearly two decades and a long-overdue critique of Bolshevism was coming out of the small left-communist circles and received a wider reception. Simultaneously there was a much wider youth culture developing again from small groups of beatniks or ‚gammler’ who had attempted to drop out in the decade before to the mass phenomenon of the Hippie movement. Take, for example, West Berlin: This city was still an island of the West in the middle of what was then the GDR. Many young West-Germans moved there to dodge the draft, and the university became a hotbed of agitation against the Vietnam war, the Nazi-past of the West German establishment, and the state of emergency laws passed at the time. The leading tendency in the West Berlin SDS saw itself as a self-proclaimed „anti-authoritarian“ tendency. There exists an interesting document authored by 4 of the main proponents of this tendency, called „Gespräch über die Zukunft“ where they phantasize about turning West Berlin into a council republic, and expected the proletariat of the third world to be their allies in the world revolution. These somewhat pompous perspectives in a city with a deeply ingrained anti-communist consensus may seem bizarre now, nevertheless, they had a lot of resonance at the time. Needless to say these authors barely had a class perspective in relation to West Berlin itself.
We witness a brief moment where apparently revolution could just be around the corner, and a cultural rupture seems to going hand in hand with a political rupture. A counter culture is developing with dozens of left wing bars, bookshops, communes. People grow their hair, and start dressing differently. They smoke dope expressing their own opposition to the post-Nazi society, where many old nazis are high up in the justice and political system. The idea of the counter culture as forming a nucleus of a future society in the here and now is manifestly tied to the political groups and struggles. It’s no wonder one of the first armed groups call themselves „Zentralrat der umherschweifenden Haschrebellen“ (“Central council of the nomadic hash rebels”).
Similar things are happening the world over. Maybe it’s a matter of quantity turning into quality, and what could merely be a consumer niche could turn into a counter culture. The author Walter Hollstein writes,”This means that the ‘underground’, if it doesn’t want to corrupt itself, has to manage the step from the subculture to the counter culture. Subculture here solely means the accidental dissensus from dominating culture, which in a temporary way expresses itself limited to its own clothing, fashion, group relations and behavior; counter culture means the manifest alternative in the arsenal of contradictions in this capitalist society.” Hollstein revises his judgement of the Underground from a previous sociological essay to a more positive view here, especially in light of the success of the underground press in the US. Going along with the politisation of the Hippies was the politisation of the underground press in the 60’s that boasted 500 titles and 5 million readers. This went hand in hand with a network of crisis centers, communes, free stores and farm collectives. By 1970 Hollstein sees a situation where the underground is not a phenomenon isolated from the general population anymore. He sees a “restructuring of social space” at work that is coming from “liberated terrains” which are defended against state repression. Nevertheless, Hollstein sees the terrain of social contestation not necessarily as something aiming at an immediate system change. It is about a long term process of social transformation with many possible setbacks.

5.
 
However, the political scene and the counter culture are developing a problematic relationship. Both the American and the German SDS are spawning a number of purely political parties, or rather nuclei of parties. An analogue development to the German K-Groups happened in the disintegration of the US- SDS into tendencies such as the Progressive Labor Party, mirroring the elitist cadre concepts of the KPD, KPD/ML, the KBW, KABD, the PL/PI and what not. This phenomenon starts showing somewhat bizarre outgrowths. Each of these party-nuclei proclaim to be the true heirs to the historic Communist Party of Germany, based on the early 30’s phase of this party. Their rigorism goes all the way back to the Nechayev way of thinking on the glorification of the selfless party member. While the counter culture sees itself as a first frame of action where spontaneity, autonomy, self organisation and collective activity can be learned, the dogmatic K-groups, as they become to be known, criticize the counter cultural milieus as „subjectivist, individualist, putschist, utopian“. The counter cultural is accused of an aesthetisation of politics, which is a serious charge that directly references how Walter Benjamin characterized fascism.
The author Diethard Krebs counters this with an argument about the game and the ritual. Both are happenings that are repeated following certain rules, but the game can only be played by people who don’t suffer mortal shortages and in societies with an advanced ability to critique themselves. The game depends on freedom from fear. The ritual on the other hand has standardized regimentations and repetitions of orders causing normative behavior. It’s easy to find examples for these kind of forms in the drug culture as the game and the K-groups as strongly ritualized formations.
The fractions drift apart: cadre parties, rural communes, Maoism, and free love, agitating at the factory gate, and taking loads of drugs just go together less and less. At the same time the mainstream of society and culture is imbibing and recuperating more and more elements of the counter culture. Free love gets commodified as pornography, and supposedly subversive rock n’ roll stars are marketed by huge record companies. In the decades since then, tales from the “good old days” of the late 60’s, and ironically even memoirs about their days in the K-groups are part of a veritable industry of historification, at least in Germany.
As the elements of the revolutionary movement drifted apart, they also diminished. By the end of the 70’s the armed struggle had become the trajectory of social war with small minority groups eventually strengthening the state and the consensus of the citizens. On the other hand, sub-cultural strategies helped the rise of postmodernism and the disarming of revolution.

6.
 
In the 1990’s we at Datacide and others tried to theorize the techno rave scene as a possible proletarian counter culture. For a moment the techno rave had this potential, but not more, and it is now lost. Much more than any „straight“ political direction, we saw in it the possibilities of self-organisation, collectivity and pursuit of pleasure in the counter culture around sound systems, anonymous white label records and illegal parties. This movement was strong enough – at least in the UK – to be directly targeted by laws and by the force of the police. Despite a politisation that did take place especially around the campaigns against the 1994 Criminal Justice Act and the Reclaim the Streets actions, these hopeful developments had run their course by the end of the decade.
In the past decade – despite the worsening crisis of international capitalism – the radical left is in disarray and extremely weak. Worse than that, some of its elements have at points aligned themselves with reactionary and fascist forces under the banner of anti-imperialism. One example amongst many is the British Socialist Workers Party entering an opportunist alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood in the electoral front Respect. Suddenly basic emancipatory aims such as gay rights and women’s rights vanished in an attempt to forge a united front that supported the most reactionary forces such as Hamas or Hezbollah. These groups are financed by the theocracy of Iran where workers and student movements are savagely suppressed and the death penalty is used for „crimes against virtue“.

Conclusion
 
While we’re at an ebb of the revolutionary movement at the moment, things could look a lot different in 10 years. We don’t know yet how the movement will look, and how its international organisation would constitute itself. But we do know that it will not be an authoritarian cadre party, nor a tiny group hallucinating itself as an invisible dictatorship, nor united fronts with reactionary movements. Until then, a relentless critique has to be applied to everything in existence, as Marx put it, which is an exciting task because as Vaneigem says: „We have a world of pleasures to win and nothing to lose but boredom.“

Christoph Fringeli

text: Datacide magazine

The post “Hedonism and Revolution: The Barricade and the Dancefloor” by Christoph Fringeli appeared first on Void Network.