low quality

I’m going to be so real to you rn but unless there’s apparently been a very, very quiet contingent of USAmericans planning to carry out the overthrow of your government or something to put a stop to imperial slaughter and extraction this whole time, then the vast majority of USAmericans do not care enough for it to count. You are what you do, not what you feel, solidarity is a verb and all that, &c. And the vast majority of you are Not doing enough for it to be worth taking the time to be nuanced and make exemptions.

There’s this thing u all sometimes do where you assume the general USAmerican ignorance of the world is a two-way street, it is not. We know you, too well. We’ve had to. You are literally unavoidable. I am writing in your language on your website, your world is not inaccessible to us. So you’re not really revealing the untold, telling me that many of you “care.”

It’s just that tangibly, the combined psychic energy of every single USAmerican feeling kind of bad about it all(which, if we’re being real, most won’t even commit to that!) is functionally nothing and does absolutely zilch to stop bombs from falling over my region, or any other.

Sewing machines are operated by *people*. Knitting machines are operated by *people*. Yes lots of the process is automated but you cannot tell a machine "make me a t-shirt" or "make me a knit cardigan".

I think part of the issue is that any coherent definition of fascism has to at the very least conclude that anti-communism, colonialism, and imperialism are all fundamental elements of fascism; and so the bourgeois liberal intelligentsia who are in support of all of these things must find ways to not only ignore or deny these elements of fascism (and additionally the fact that many liberal democracies were allies to fascist nations) but to construct fascism as a fundamentally anti-liberal movement so as to place it alongside communism in the rhetorical realm of "radical extremists who hate democracy and freedom".

Fascism is not merely the expression of a particular movement, of a particular party within modern society, but that it is the most complete expression of the whole tendency of modern capitalism in decay, as the final attempt to defeat the working-class revolution and organise society on the basis of decay.

Rajani Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution, 1935

Fascism is not a form of state power "standing above both classes -- the proletariat and the bourgeoisie," as Otto Bauer, for instance, has asserted. It is not "the revolt of the petty bourgeoisie which has captured the machinery of the state," as the British Socialist Brailsford declares. No, fascism is not a power standing above class, nor government of the petty bourgeoisie or the lumpen-proletariat over finance capital. Fascism is the power of finance capital itself. It is the organization of terrorist vengeance against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia.

Georgi Dimitrov, The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism, 1935

What is fascism if not colonialism when rooted in a traditionally colonialist country?

Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 1961

First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and “interrogated,” all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery. And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss. People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind—it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack. Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, in the end, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the “coolies” of India, and the “niggers” of Africa. And that is the great thing I hold against pseudo-humanism: that for too long it has diminished the rights of man, that its concept of those rights has been—and still is—narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist.

And as an adult you don’t really have the time for that yeah but also when I was getting my BA in English lit and my MFA in fiction writing, reading was kind of my job.

I had to do history reading, read stuff relevant to certain movements, certain literary styles, get slightly up to date with what’s new in literary fiction and poetry, read my classmates work to give critique, and I enjoyed doing all of that but it was still work, you know? And even after all that I’ve still been in research mode. I’ve been in research mode for like nine years.

And a few days ago I was sitting there looking at a textbook and thinking like what have I turned into here? Why does everything I read need a purpose behind it? What happened to the guy who used to consume books so fast that the school library ran out of options for him?

I think somewhere in there I might still be that guy. I might be able to coax him out.

also know as the dissection of a robot maid!