podcast friday

[sabotabby]

I have two very short ones for you today, both from It Could Happen Here, and both related to the Current Unpleasantness. Both deal with the fact that we don't have a model for fighting back, and that the lack of people in the streets suggests that most people already know that doing the same thing as in 2017 (marching around with signs) isn't going to stop fascism.

The first is "The Age of Cowards and What Happens Next," with Robert Evans. I know everyone reading already listens to these things or isn't going to, so if you're in the latter group, I have good news, which is that there's a written version of the podcast here. He talks a lot about overconfidence and how the fascists have won largely by trying different things until something stuck; how the left has lost primarily due to a lack of ideas.

The one thing we do have in common with Weimar is that our fascists now find themselves at the head of a state that capitulated to them not out of enthusiastic consent but exhaustion, cowardice and above all a feeling that it didn’t really matter.
 

 

That last one, the feeling that nothing matters, the system is fucked, there’s no point in engaging or organizing- that is the most powerful weapon they have right now. Because that feeling stops you and everyone else from opposing them. From interrupting as they reach out, yet again, to take something you love or need.

It echoes the thing Billy Bragg says so well in "The Sleep Of Reason" (and that he, and many others have been saying for years): "The greatest threat faced by democracy isn't fascism or fanaticism / But our own complacency." It's something that, as a long-time Marcher In Circles, is actually a surprisingly hard pill to swallow, largely because its natural conclusion leads to. Well. The kinds of things that Robert talks about and has personally experienced in places like Rojava and Myanmar and that we all cheered on in New York.

The other one is Mia Wong's episode, "About That Nazi Salute." Which takes Elon's Nazi salute that you all saw with your own eyes and was definitely a Nazi salute and never let anyone tell you otherwise as a jumping-off point to discuss Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle. She attempts to make sense of the firehose of bad shit in the past week and how everything in our culture has converged around interacting with images and symbols rather than material reality.

Neither of them have answers or recommendations (Robert said on the podcast yesterday that you should be very wary of anyone who claims that they do, and he's right) but I think both provide very good framing, and you can't solve a problem until you define the problem.

Comments

[frandroid]

BTW I don't listen to most of ICHH because there are just too many episodes and I don't like shows that retell the news to me, and ICHH is so much of that. So I do appreciate and queue your suggestions.

I'm also heavily filtering out Weird Little Guys because while Molly Conger is an interesting and intelligent researcher, 1) I wish she was bringing a bit of Robert's zaniness to her show, and 2) who are these fucks anyway? Also Sophie should lay off the gloomy score a bit. :P

[sabotabby]

I'm filtering Weird Little Guys too, even though I really like Molly and think she's a brilliant research. A thing I have discovered though, is, in general I don't like to listen to a single person talking. Irony being, of course, that I just linked to two episodes that are a single person talking. But in general I prefer a conversation, and Molly is hilarious when she's on anyone else's show.

[frandroid]

Yeah, you put your finger on it!

[smhwpf]

Really good article by Robert (I did the written version), and yeah, I've thought for a long time that one of the big problems on the left is the lack of ideas.

In the UK, Palestine Action have been doing something new, as in actual sabotage of arms factories (and companies that support them like insurers and logistics firms), and have had some success, though often at great personal cost. And there's been a lot of tutting, obviously by the establishment, who have pondered declaring them a terrorist organisation (though they seem to have stopped short of that for now), but also by many in the pro-Palestine movement, like PSC (one of the founders used to work for PSC but left). Indeed, WE've tutted in my organisation - for valid reasons in some ways, like they were rather cavalier (I don't know if this is still the case) about making sure that activists are properly informed about the legal risks they were taking, and how best to deal with the inevitable consequences.

But they are doing something new and different, and it may well not be the thing that stops the arms trade in its tracks, but it's sure as hell worth trying.

[sabotabby]

The other stuff wasn't working so...you know. Throwing shit to the wall. Terrorism worked quite well for the right.

[frandroid]

What PA has been doing in the UK is outstanding. I don't think that the legal environment in the U.S., even pre-Trump, would have made that as viable, considering how the FBI/DOJ has been dealing with people like the ALF and ELF. It's just such a humongous beast in comparison.

[greylock]

In the UK, Palestine Action have been doing something new, as in actual sabotage of arms factories (and companies that support them like insurers and logistics firms)

I have heard nothing about this and I try to harvest a lot of news sources.

Would this not affect Ukraine?

declaring them a terrorist organisation (though they seem to have stopped short of that for now

I can't believe this is where we are in modern discourse.

[smhwpf]

Would this not affect Ukraine?

I don't think so? Most of what the UK gives to Ukraine is donated from MOD stocks, and much of the rest is purchased on the international market. Some probably produced in the UK, but I doubt that PA's main target, Elbit Systems UK (subsidiary of Israel's largest arms company) is much involved in it. There may be some overlap with other companies.

[greylock]

That seems good.

[sovay]

The other one is Mia Wong's episode, "About That Nazi Salute."

Thanks for the link to this one: I had seen the other in its written form, but not this one and I appreciate immensely its inclusion of a transcript.

[sabotabby]

It's increasingly easy to half-ass a transcript, something I'm grateful for as I don't retain audio information well and I like a search function.

[sal_doesnt_rhyme]

i remember your writing from the queer group that got deleted, thank you for this <3

[sabotabby]

Hello again!

[iolarah]

Mia Wong's piece was so damn good I reached out to her on Bluesky to thank her for it, and to recommend Erich Fromm as an author whose work she might enjoy, especially "The Escape From Freedom". I feel like it complements Debord's work nicely, as an answer to why people are reluctant to engage with the dismantling of the spectacle. I adore Fromm (while recognizing that, as a contemporary of Debord, his work has its own flaws), and would love to read modern work that pulled in as many threads of ideas and scholarship as his does.

[sabotabby]

I read "Escape From Freedom" as a teenager; I wonder how it holds up. Sounds like well.

[iolarah]

Truthfully, I haven't read it since I was in my early to mid 20s, but it made a big impact on me then, and I've enjoyed everything else of his I've read. Just started "The Anatomy Of Human Destructiveness" last week, though I had to set it aside for school stuff.