Boy is it ever refreshing to hear an adult spell it out for other adults of sound mind. Completely insane how boneheaded adults can be.
I found this note on Marshal McCluhen on that Ubu website BoingBoing pointed to:
https://www.ubu.com/sound/mcluhan.html
• McLuhan warned that the future global village would be wrought with violence. He figured the electronic process would force people to “re-tribalize,” placing excessive stress on individuals and traditional identities
3 Likes
It is, but is it useful? I mean, we know why they went all in on Trump, it’s because they wanted his naked racism. The sad part is that the attack on the capitol would have probably happened anyway even without the fig leaf of “election shennanigans”. Because the end goal was always fascism.
3 Likes
Which parts of the US do you think would want to leave, and do you suppose that would still be true if the non-white people actually got their say too?
5 Likes
Yes, because that framing tells us in stark terms what we’re up against. It’s not a normal political movement or party, it’s a death cult led by a grifter that’s subsumed one of our duopoly parties.
This is a mainstream Democrat telling us that we have to start regarding the GOP the same way we see $cientology or the Moonies, because their followers/marks act in the same self-destructive ways and because the cult leaders are ruthless and will pull every sleazy trick in the book to game the system and ensure their survival.
Treating fascism as a cult instead of a political ideology or party (as we have in the past, taking them at their word) may offer more productive approaches to dealing with the MAGAts. I personally doubt that most of them can be de-programmed (an extremely difficult task), but if we look at them as self-harming cultists who need to be de-programmed we can better see the entity they’re following for what it truly is.
My sense is that if things continue and the death cult persists, it’s going to be a Syrian-style civil war where no established geographic part of the country just leaves and where a central government remains but acts only indirectly (e.g. funding proxy forces resisting the cult’s sects).
There will be bitterly contested pockets of “Ameristan” scattered throughout the U.S. (including within “blue” states like California and Oregon), with various sects of the cult fighting each-other and local self-defense organisations (including PoC stuck in the conflict zone) for control.
2 Likes
I mean when it comes down to it it’s that we lost a war and Russia didn’t. As they say the first thing towards change is admitting you have a problem. It’s fairly easy for a society to renounce its former values when there are foreign troops on the street and the espousal of former ideas is literally a criminal offence. That drives the true believers underground while the hangers-on don’t see any value in playing their parts anymore.
And even then de-nazification was mostly a surface process for the first 20 years or so. It’s really only the student protests of 68 that brought problems into the national conversation. Before that it was just everyone pretending nothing had happened.
I suppose what I’m saying is that I don’t see a way to have a society-wide change without some outside influence and even then it’s a decades long process.
10 Likes
I understand the intention behind this picture but it’s also a bit insulting to the real founders of antifa who fought fascists in the streets in the 20s while those three probably still palled around with them in private clubs.
8 Likes
I had similar questions after reading the book, and I found that this talk helped me immensly to understand it better
3 Likes
Thanks!
1 Like
Lakoff’s thesis also indicates how difficult de-programming would be in reality. The toxic “strict father” parenting model that’s so compatible with integration into the cult is drilled into the MAGATs literally from infancy.
2 Likes
I really object to that dichotomy. The two are not mutually exclusive. We have emotions for a reason and they are not the enemy of reason.
What’s the ACTUAL enemy of reason are people who twist logic and reason for their own ends, employing enlightenment concepts and language as a means to promote bigotry and racial hatred, among other entirely irrational blights on our world. This is especially true when they pair it with an argument that pins the blame on our own natural feelings that we all have. Witness Ben Shapiro regularly proclaiming facts don’t care about feelings while rejecting reasonable arguments from his fellow human beings.
What do YOU mean by “qualified”? People who agree with you? People who make enough money? People who meet some arbitrary standard such as IQ or who have an advanced degree? This is precisely the language employed by the GOP right now to deny people the right to vote.
I’m sure massacres from those of us who don’t want to be part of the new CSA won’t be a problem at all. Not like we’ll get a choice, because some people blame us, no matter how we vote.
I say that, and I get told I’m wrong. But it’s the correct answer.
Tell that to the Democratic party until the 1950s or so…
Or we could prosecute them when they do things like try to over throw the government and kick their leaders out of power.
Right? Because there became consquences for their actions. Unfortunately, denazification stopped because the US and Soviets decided ti was more important for (both) Germanies and Japan to be rebuilt quickly, so they could rattle their sabers for a few decades across a wall.
That’s how you do it. You demand action from the streets.
4 Likes
That, too, of course. As noted above, whether one calls them party members or cultists or both…
4 Likes
This is my fifth rewrite, but I think I’ve wormed my million quotations and analogies down to what I actually mean to say. When I read the discussion over whether I the framing of “death cult” is a helpful one I feel like the disagreement comes down to:
- Some people feel like framing it as a “death cult” asks us to take a gentle approach
- Some people feel like framing it as a “death cult” reminds us we cannot take a gentle approach
So I don’t think the “death cult” framing is a good one because it doesn’t give a consistent message that people understand. However we communicate the idea of what is going on with the right wing in America (and around the world) it needs to clearly communicate that this is not the time for a gentle approach.
But I do think a complete reframing is necessary. People shouldn’t be going on TV talking about whether Ron Johnson’s approval rating is going up or down as Johnson encourages violent coups. The point of a violent coup is to not have to worry about your approval rating anymore. People need to recognize that when fascists speak they aren’t using words to communicate ideas, they are using words to accumulate power. Sartre wrote about it in the 1940s, it’s not news.
12 Likes
This is fair. If I haven’t been clear, I definitely fall into the second camp. I’m not quite sure how one takes a gentle approach to someone who’s part of a death cult, but I can see how the concept of de-programming might be interpreted as a gentler approach than what’s needed.
1 Like
I guess what I saw in the discussion was that people saw the death cult framing as an attempt to humanize them. Sort of like that cop saying the Atlanta shooter “had a bad day”. And that infuriates people because the same kind of humanization isn’t extended to the victims of the attack or to the victims of Republican “voter suppression” (we should say “vote theft” or “election rigging”) or violent coups.
That is infuriating, and I for all I know Dean completely deserves that fury (it’s hard to say exactly what Dean meant). I tend to see things more your way, I think. If I humanize someone I don’t forget that humans assault and kill each other for petty reasons. I do think the Atlanta shooter had a bad day, because I think some people are one bad day away from committing murder; but I also think those people are exactly the rare sort of people who should spend the rest of their lives in prison.
But I can’t expect that other people understand that’s what I mean when I say humanizing. And so ultimately I think Dean’s message isn’t a good one because it created this misunderstanding (again, which of us is misunderstanding Dean would be known only if Dean were here to tell us).
6 Likes
Absolutely. All too often in America today the fascists are humanised (e.g. the infamous NYT “Nazi next door” piece) while their victims are left as anonymous statistics and cyphers. It’s important to understand what drives the MAGAts, but mainly as a tool to defeat them.
2 Likes
The thing is, I have no interested in dehumanizing them. Their actions are very human, as in they are driven by a specific historical, social, and cultural context.
They see themselves as beleaguered heroes saving the world from the evils of “liberalism”, socialism, anti-white racism, anti-straight, anti-man, anti-God world views. The problem isn’t that they’ve been dehumanized, it’s that they have dehumanized others, to the point of seeing it as not only okay, but even a social GOOD to murder other human beings for their ends. Some won’t act on that, but they sure as hell won’t object if some of “those” people end up beaten, bloodied, or dead, because they’ll see it as a natural outcome of trying to “overturn” the proper order of the world, which is domination by white straight christian cismen.
Right. They think humanizing means emphatizing and letting off the hook for “mistakes” like shooting 8 people because you had a bad day. Humanizing doesn’t mean that, it means understanding the very wide spread of human action, why it happens, and what it means. It also means holding people accountable for their actions.
5 Likes
I think the Qpublicans are scared out of their minds about the changing social landscape of America. They’ve had all the power and now see it slipping away. So their first reaction is to try to deny the problem. 2nd is to subjugate the scary stuff by treating it as second class citizens. 3rd is trying to get rid of it altogether.
Unfortunately, we had the former guy who not only believed this stuff, he encouraged it and gave the scaredy cats permission to act out on their fears, and in an insurrectionist mob, they feel even more powerful.
3 Likes
I didn’t say they were.
Yet it’s framed as if it’s one or the other.
