May the air not load your lungs with plastic May starry sable nights still sing to your clear eyes May fine food from fertile fields still fill you
May the love, quirks, challenges of real people people your days May real songbirds and dogs faithfully dog your steps through the vertigos of the virtual May books and trees still curl your minds inwards, enfold you in the calm aura of their presence
May you remember you are the silent sky within May your Being not be lost in your doing May you remember
[Recent poem about the famous Christmas truce and fraternisation on the western front in !914. 'One World or None', still an obvious lesson we as a species and human family seem to be having great difficulties in learning. Do we really need the immense pain and suffering of all these further local and global catastrophes before we awaken to our next evolutionary step to higher-deeper consciousness so absent from the public sphere but already present in many of us? So unnecessary. Have a great Christmas, festive season, New Year. Peter]
A Brief Moment of Sanity
The trench stank of latrine and terror. Mud caked leggings in thick brown scabs, our boots heavy with the wet weight of doom.
Our days rolled over us in tsunamis of roar, infernal symphonies laced with arpeggios of screams, whimpering, brief silences that sneered at our longing for forest, meadow, stream. Our birdsong metallic, cynical as a sniper’s sudden exclamation mark shattering a careless head.
Our only relief the tedium of waiting that stalked our hours like a boring friend. Until that night, that first Christmas Eve.
It started with the Krauts. Faint crystals of sound floated through the icy space between us like ghostly, dreaming stars.
‘Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht, Alles schläft, einsam wacht ...’
Somethin stirred, some long-buried sense, a slow widening of our cells and souls. This singing rippled with a deep stillness, a sad, soft majesty of innocence.
Our Silent Night, holy Night responded with the blood-rush of an unstoppable antiphon like a lover awakened to a word of love.
Still singing, we downed guns, climbed the walls of bloodied earth, cut through the barbed fangs of fear and hate, walked, amazed, taller now, the snow-slushed no-man’s land of separation and sorrow.
We shook hands that, like ours, once baked bread, fished fish, dug coal, tousled a child’s play-drenched hair.
We swapped cigarettes, peered into the formal sepia faces of wife and child that calmly mocked the old word: ‘enemy’. We showed our own, frozen fingers pointing at names, ages, relationship.
A football appeared, and no-man’s land became the friendly field of everyman. As we stumbled through the ice-mulched mud in our greatcoats like happy bears, we suddenly were alive again, and no one kept the score.
Later, our gentlemen officers raged, as if their world had come to its feared end.
[Recent rhyming villanelle for the season. Wishing all readers a peaceful festive season and 2026]
He
never said he’d return to fulfil some doctrine. His followers never really understood as he pointed to the Kingdom of Heaven within.
Never cared if his mother was a virgin. Just went around doing much good. Never said he’d return to fulfil some doctrine.
Never counted warbling angels on any pin. Just a humble carpenter, appreciated fine wood. Pointed to the Kingdom of Heaven already within.
No Calvin, no self-righteous hater of sin. Raised the low up wherever he could. Never said he’d return to fulfil some doctrine.
Never ever called himself king. Crucified, shed very human blood. Pointed to the Kingdom of Heaven within.
This misunderstood sage so lost in the din of conversions, crusades, wars’ merciless mud never said he’d return to fulfil some doctrine, just pointed to the Kingdom of Heaven within.
The first pandemonia in Italian hospitals, Wuhan-wafted, blue plastic-gowned nurses sleeping slumped in concrete corners curled in fetal exhaustion, in London myriads
emerging from cocooned buildings at dusk to clap NHS heroines, the church-like emptiness of lonely shelves of pasta, toilet rolls, loud demonstrations melding freedom and insanity.
And, suddenly, poverty eliminated, dominance of overpaid, useless work revealed in the essentiality of underpaid cleaners, truckies, teachers, tradies,
the skies unscratched by holiday flights, dolphins returning to now-clear waters in Venice lagoon, the essential ability to sit quietly in a silent room.
[Fairly recent childhood poem. Image: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Children's Games 1560]
Metamorphoses
I was seven when I walked into poverty. Two houses up, or down. Inside, a distraught plastic bucket pinged with cold rain from the ceiling.
But Richard, same age, a head-length shorter, there proudly showed me his pupating pets in a shoe box filled with their acrid stench, spidery silk threads, fretted mulberry leaves.
I can’t remember any transformation, metamorphosis into winged beauty bursting to fly free above childhood’s treeless street.
At home, watching me eat my breakfast, his hunger whispered he wished he was like me.
At Philip’s up the road around a corner drawn curtains defied the blessings of light, shut in the sour depression of dead air. Rat busy-bodies scuttled among junk rusting in the yard. Sometimes snot yo-yoed precariously from the snub-nose supporting his fogged glasses.
We were largely happy together there on Palmer Street in our boyish boisterousness, our unknown changes, the first shy inklings of our invisibly unfolding wings drying in the rising sun of our hidden expectations, each day a fresh possibility of play, an old chant, taunt or ritual, a new sight, sensation, idea, some new occasion for tears of laughter or desolation.
[The usual lucid, common-sense, undogmatic, utopian thoughts one can always expect from situationist Ken Knabb. Taken from Ken’s admirable Bureau of Public Secrets website. Image courtesy of libcom.]
At the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, I noted:
This is the first time in history that such a momentous event has taken place with virtually everyone on earth aware of it at the same time. And it is playing out while much of humanity is obliged to stay at home, where they can hardly avoid reflecting on the situation and sharing their reflections with others. . . . Millions of people are using this pause to investigate and critique the system’s fiascos, and they are doing this at a time when practically everyone else in the world is obsessively focused on the same issues. I think this first ever global discussion about our society is potentially more important than the particular crisis that happened to trigger it. . . . We need to be aware that this is happening, aware that what is going on within us and among us is potentially more promising than all the farcical political dramas we are watching so intently. [Pregnant Pause: Remarks on the Corona Crisis]
Five years later we find ourselves in the middle of another crisis which has impacted us even more dramatically than that earlier one. This new crisis has also provoked widespread debate about our society, but there are two key differences: rather than being a unexpected natural disaster affecting the whole world, it is an intentionally provoked political crisis in a single country (with the rest of the world looking on in puzzlement and horror); and the popular response has been much more active and participatory.
Three weeks after Trump’s second election, I wrote:
The latest result of this pseudo-democratic spectacle is that after more than a year of nonstop campaign blather, costing billions of dollars and monopolizing people’s attention all over the world, 77 million people in a supposedly modern and literate country have chosen to reelect a sick and desperate little man who has already been convicted of multiple felonies and indicted for many more (including for treason); a vicious man who has openly threatened to take vengeance on virtually anyone who isn’t totally in his camp; a vain man who has surrounded himself by fawning toadies even less likely to restrain him than the ones in his previous administration; a man with such delusions of grandeur that he never admits a mistake — with one notable exception: he has said that during his first term he made the mistake of being too nice. [Trump’s Spectacular Comeback]
After some speculations about what might be ahead, I concluded:
There are so many possibilities that I have no idea where this situation will lead, and I doubt if anyone else does. Millions of people have been sharing all sorts of responses to the shock, discussing what went wrong and offering suggestions as to how best to respond, politically or personally. I’ve been impressed and encouraged by how thoughtful and pertinent many of them are. Some may be rather naïve, some may contradict each other, but I’m not too concerned about that. There’s room for all sorts of projects, big or small, and all sorts of tactics, moderate or radical. People will sort out which things work and which don’t.
And so they have been doing.
During the first few weeks I, like just about everyone else, was surprised by how quickly and brazenly the new regime proceeded with illegal, maniacal, and even fascistic actions. Each day we were presented with new outrages and insanities, all happening so fast that it was hard to keep up. But almost immediately there were lots of popular responses, ranging from huge national demonstrations to smaller and more focused actions on all sorts of terrains.
As I followed the events, wondering if I might write something further, I found that virtually every fact I thought about calling attention to had already become common knowledge, and virtually every idea I came up with had already been articulated by others.
But looking at the overall process, I was struck by how these actions were being publicized and discussed in real time by the people taking part in them; and how many of those people were carrying out those actions with little or no outside leadership; and how the multitude of different ideas were being spontaneously sifted and sorted into coherent tactics and projects. As in other social crises, many people’s first impulse was to find public figures who might explain to them what was going on and tell them what needed to be done about it. And they did indeed find and share various sources of ideas and information that they found credible and useful. But as the communications went to and fro, many of them began to take a more active part, coming up with their own ideas and in some cases implementing them. And amid this flux of ideas and actions and interactions, there was a sort of survival of the fittest: certain ideas and tactics emerged that were so clearly appropriate that they were almost immediately recognized and acted on by thousands or even millions of people. Not in lockstep like soldiers, but as flexible groupings of people maintaining their own diverse views and styles while cooperating in joint or parallel projects.
This started me thinking about the notion of “hive mind.” That term was of course originally coined to describe the instinctive collective sense that social insects such as bees and ants seem to have; but by extension it has also come to refer to human networks where people seem to manifest some sort of collective intelligence arising out of shared networks of information and ideas.
Wikipedia (itself a splendid example of shared intelligence) notes that hive mind has several rather different connotations. What I’m talking about here is definitely not “groupmind,” where people are programmed into all thinking alike. It roughly corresponds what Wikipedia calls collaborative intelligence. In contrast to “collective intelligence,” where there is generally a central coordinator, collaborative intelligence is decentralized. Although the process may be rough and seemingly chaotic, the net result of countless individual experiences, interactions, and debates sometimes enables masses of people to arrive at practical conclusions (this works, that doesn’t) without any formal decision-making procedures or top-down directives.
During the last three decades such networks have been enormously extended and speeded up by the development of the Internet and the various forms of social media, where ideas and information can be shared almost instantaneously to millions of people around the world. Among other things, they have facilitated radical social movements such as the Arab Spring and Occupy.
It seems to me that we’ve seen a lot of collaborative intelligence in the various anti-Trump actions during the last twelve months. Below I’ve mentioned just a few examples. Note that in most of these cases the spontaneous self-organization of masses of people has been more important than the coordinating role of national organizations. There are virtually no significant leaders. There may indeed be a few politicians and celebrities who get in the news for speaking out, or a few prominent experts or analysts who people resort to for information or suggestions, but they’re not really leading anyone. People compare and contrast them, choosing those they find the most useful and reliable and ignoring the others. The actual “movers” of most of the actions usually turn out to be loose volunteer groupings of ordinary people serving as little more than contact persons. If you go to their websites, they typically encourage you to seek out other people or groups in your local communities and to take part in those projects that appeal to you. Except for the virtually unanimous agreement to maintain nonviolence, there are no rules and everyone is welcome regardless of their views as long as they’re opposed to the Trump regime (or even merely to some aspects of that regime).
The “No Kings” protests. Drawing 5 million people (June 14) and then 7 million (October 18) in more than 2000 towns and cities around the country, these were the largest mass demonstrations in American history. They were initiated or supported by a coalition of more than two hundred national organizations, but the actual gatherings have mostly been organized locally and autonomously. While many other protests have focused on particular issues, these huge rallies have functioned as big-tent gatherings — terrains where diverse people, groups, issues, and perspectives can all jostle together, debate, and share experiences. They also serve to counteract the feelings of isolation and helplessness the regime tries to foster, and the safety in numbers reassures people that they can take part without too much risk. (Hive mind is virtually impossible to surveil or control or co-opt.)
Immigrant support and anti-ICE actions. This issue has involved tense confrontations on many fronts. At the national level, legal actions have challenged the kidnapping and deportation of immigrants (documented or not), including to the torture prison in El Salvador. Despite the conservative leanings of many federal judges (many of whom were appointed by Bush or Trump), they have almost invariably ruled against the Trump regime’s actions, often adding scathing rebukes of the bad faith of the regime’s legal arguments and of its repeated failures to implement court orders. Meanwhile, Democratic state and local governments and various social justice organizations have responded with legal and logistical support; local communities have reached out with all sorts of improvised actions to help and reassure their immigrant friends and neighbors in whatever modest ways they can; and last but not least, thousands of individuals have courageously monitored ICE actions, organized ways to warn people of ICE presence, and even maneuvered to block or slow down ICE vehicles, risking arrest for their supposedly illegal actions (as if kidnapping wasn’t a far more serious crime). See, for example, these two articles: Immigration crackdown inspires uniquely Chicago pushback that’s now a model for other cities and Another Undaunted City: Charlotte defends democracy and decency.
The Gaza protests. The continuing mass murders in Gaza during the last two years have shocked millions of people and shifted a majority of the US population from its previous automatic support of Israel to widespread outrage against it. But note that although large American majorities (including a majority of Jewish Americans and the great majority of Democratic voters) are now opposed to the Gaza genocide, most Democratic politicians have remained subservient to AIPAC (the powerful pro-Israel lobby) — a glaring example of the disconnect between the masses of people and the political establishments that pretend to represent them.
The “Tesla Takedown” protests. These took advantage of the fact that one particular series of outrages — the accessing of public records and trashing of public services by the unelected and unaccountable “Department of Government Efficiency” — could be personalized, since it happened to be led by the richest person in the world. The boycotts and demonstrations at Tesla dealerships in the US and around the world crashed Tesla sales and stock valuation, leading to Elon Musk’s withdrawal from Washington and to his (temporary) split with Trump. Even though Musk is so rich that none of that mattered much to him financially, it felt like the protesters won that battle: It is very unusual to see one’s actions directly impact a billionaire corporation.
The Jimmy Kimmel boycotts. Most boycotts never get off the ground, and when they do it’s usually the result of months of planning and publicity, trying to convince masses of people that, among so many issues clamoring for attention, the particular issue merits their support. But when the Trump regime pressured Disney+/Hulu to drop Jimmy Kimmel’s popular television program, a lot of people were so infuriated that they independently and immediately canceled their subscriptions and let everyone else know about it — which inspired thousands of others to do the same, and so on. In less than a week more than 3 million customers canceled their subscriptions to Disney+/Hulu, those two companies caved, and Kimmel was back on the air with higher ratings than ever. See the Wikipedia article Suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live!
The Epstein Files. This particular issue has upset even many of the MAGAs, since part of the propaganda they have been fed for years was that Democratic politicians were listed in the Epstein Files and supposedly Trump was going to expose them once he got back into office. When the new Trump administration refused to release those files (because Trump himself was intimately associated with Epstein) the MAGAs had a lot of trouble processing it. Noticing this weak spot, anti-Trump people publicized and satirized the issue on every occasion. In mid-November this issue finally broke through the Republican congressional obstruction, and it seems to be dramatically accelerating the collapse of the MAGA coalition.
Nonviolence. Except for a few isolated incidents of vandalism (if you call that violence), all of these movements have been totally nonviolent. In the present context violent actions are so obviously counterproductive that they are almost universally recognized as the work of provocateurs (or possibly of a few thoughtless radicals who have not considered the actual effects of their actions).
Humor. Protests have always included satirical signs and slogans, but rarely to such a degree as now. The guy in Portland who thought of showing up in a frog costume inspired countless others around the country to do likewise — an amusing and effective way to undermine the regime’s claim that anti-Trump protesters are dangerous and violent criminals and that major cities are being destroyed by chaotic insurrections. It must be admitted, however, that Trump’s rants and self-glorifications are so delirious that it’s hard for any satire to keep up. In fact, it’s often difficult to tell which is satire and which is reality.
Self-care. A simple but valuable counsel was widely shared from the very beginning: Pace yourself. Don’t guilt-trip yourself and overdo it and get so OD’d that you end up dropping out. Pick a few doable projects that particularly appeal to you, while continuing to do what you need to do to take care of yourself and your loved ones and to carry on as human a life as possible under the circumstances.
So many other outrages and absurdities could be mentioned, any one of which in previous eras would have monopolized the headlines for weeks and resulted in shamefaced resignations by those responsible. Here, for example, is just the opening paragraph of one of Heather Cox Richardson’s informative daily newsletters:
House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) continues to try to pin the upcoming catastrophic lapse in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funding on the Democrats. But with the U.S. Department of Agriculture sitting on $6 billion in funds Congress appropriated for just such an event, the Treasury finding $20 billion to prop up Trump ally Javier Milei in Argentina, Johnson refusing to bring the House into regular session to negotiate an end to the government shutdown, and President Donald J. Trump demanding $230 million in damages from the American taxpayer, bulldozing the East Wing of the White House to build a gold-plated ballroom that will dwarf the existing White House, and traveling to Asia, where South Korean leadership courted him by giving him a gold crown and serving him brownies topped with edible gold, blaming any funding shortfall on Democrats is a hard sell. [October 30, 2025]
It’s been hard to keep up. One of the main issues we face is the fact that we’re forced to face so many different issues. What we’re going through is so vast and confusing and rapidly changing that no one can pretend to grasp it all, let alone present a comprehensive account of it. I’m not proposing “hive mind” as some innovative theoretical concept that will explain everything. It’s simply a vivid and humorous image designed to call people’s attention to what they themselves are already doing.
Whatever you want to call it, the current anti-Trump movement has drawn in millions of people and spontaneously come up with all sorts of good projects and tactics. I don’t care whether they’re moderate or radical, so much as that people are getting involved and doing the best they can. Political awareness and political engagement are spreading to millions of people who used to be relatively unpolitical. It may seem pretty trivial to just sign a few petitions or attend a few rallies while others are getting arrested or deported, but that is more than most people used to do. And once they dip their toe in the water, they may decide to wade in further and start swimming.
One indication of this widespread awareness is that in writing this piece I don’t have to describe or explain very much. Most of the matters I’ve mentioned are already widely known, and in many cases pretty well understood. In fact, most of what I’m saying here is just paraphrasing points that countless others have already made, or at most suggesting a few broader contexts that may help them better understand what they are already doing. That’s what the situationists meant when they said: “Our ideas are in everybody’s mind.”
* * *
Although most people taking part in anti-Trump actions are quite aware of many of the flaws of the Democratic Party, I think it’s safe to say that virtually all of them believe that under the present circumstances it is imperative that the Democrats defeat the Republicans in the coming elections.
I happen to share that view. So do many (though not all) of my situationist, anarchist, and ultraleftist friends, who, like me, are normally very dubious about that party and about electoral politics in general.
I encourage everyone to continue to give the Democratic Party all the criticisms it so richly deserves. Nothing will be gained by whitewashing it. I’m not going to go into all its corruptions and complicities here, or all the sordid nuances of political maneuvering in Congress; they are already being observed and debated by far more people than used to pay attention to such matters. I will just note that while many Democratic Party pundits were cluelessly advocating “moving to the center,” Bernie Sanders and AOC’s “Fighting Oligarchy” tour was attended by huge audiences around the country (many of them in red states) and Zohran Mamdani, supported by more than 100,000 volunteers, was decisively elected as mayor of New York City despite tens of millions of dollars of attack ads by his opponents and the hostility of the Democratic establishment. Those kinds of programs and those kinds of campaigns are the future of the Democratic Party, if it has any future.
In any case, during the coming year millions of people will be fervently focused on (1) primarying some of the worst Democrats and then (2) getting the maximum number of Democrats elected in the fall elections. As those elections approach, there will be more widespread awareness of the Republicans’ ongoing vote-suppression efforts, which have up till now been overshadowed by all their other outrages. They may already have swung the 2024 election to Trump (see Greg Palast’s article Trump Lost, Vote Suppression Won). In any case, the Republicans have even more threatening measures in view, including eliminating mail-in voting and, most importantly, requiring voter IDs that would effectively prevent tens of millions of American citizens from voting. Trump has openly bragged that if the Republicans can pass these new measures, “we’ll never lose the midterms and we will never lose a general election again.”
But those elections are still a year away. Meanwhile, there are plenty of issues that need to be dealt with now, without relying on the politicians. If you want the Democrats to do well in the next elections, the best thing you can do is support popular movements that force them to try to keep up with you. If you focus mostly on candidates and your candidates win, they may or may not follow through with their campaign promises; if your candidates lose, most of your efforts are down the drain. If you focus mostly on raising awareness of issues, that increased awareness will tend to help your candidates, but it will still be there whether your candidates win or lose.
Mass movements that focus more actively on issues are sometimes called “social strikes.” Such movements may function somewhat like a labor strike, but without necessarily involving work stoppages. While workers have the powerful leverage of stopping work, other sectors of the population can also exert significant leverage by other means.
Jeremy Brecher has recently written several informative pieces on social strikes. In Social Strikes vs. MAGA Tyranny he outlines the nature of social strikes and how they might relate to our present situation. In Social Strike for Social Self-Defense he presents four cases where social strikes actually brought down dictatorial regimes. Two them (Philippines 1986 and Serbia 2000) were responses to dictators’ attempts to steal elections. A 2024 social strike in South Korea nixed an attempted presidential coup. A 2019 “people’s impeachment” movement in Puerto Rico forced the resignation of a corrupt governor.
Other such movements have raised more general social issues, including two notable ones in France: the anti-CPE movement (2006) and the Gilets Jaunes movement (Yellow Vests or Yellow Jackets) of 2018-2020. For an overview of tactics and strategies in these and other types of “radical situations,” see chapter 3 of The Joy of Revolution.
Boycotts are one of the basic tactics that spontaneously occur to masses of people in these situations. Sometimes they succeed dramatically, as in the Jimmy Kimmel affair, or at least have a significant impact, as in the Tesla boycott. But in most cases it’s very difficult to carry out large-scale boycotts. Most billionaires are more anonymous than Musk, and in any case their ownership is spread into so many mutually interlinked multinational corporations that we can’t even keep track of them all, let alone boycott them all.
In a world where a few billionaires own or control practically everything, it’s difficult to make any significant change without tackling everything at once.
The most direct way to do that is a general strike. During the October 18 “No Kings” day, Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson called for a national general strike against the Trump regime. That may seem like quite a stretch under the present circumstances, but it’s nice that the idea is being bandied about.
General strikes are rare, but they have happened, including in the United States. (See Jeremy Brecher’s book Strike!) The most significant one in modern times was the May 1968 wildcat general strike in France, when more than 11 million workers occupied most of the factories in the country, despite the opposition of all the political parties (left or right) and all the labor unions. If you are curious about how that happened and how it played out, see René Viénet’s profusely illustrated book Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement: France, May ’68. For a brilliant in-depth analysis, see Guy Debord’s article The Beginning of an Era. To get a little taste of what it felt like, see May 1968 Graffiti.
In my previous piece on Trump I briefly cited Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. I’m not going to say any more about that connection here. Instead, I encourage you to read a series of short blog articles by Eric Fattor that explain, in much more detail than I did, how those two books illuminate the whole bizarre Trump experience. You can start here and work back, but you will probably find it clearer if you start here and work forward.
* * *
Almost more sickening than Trump’s actions is the fact that such a large percentage of the American population has gone along with them so gleefully. The question is often posed: Are these people evil or are they just stupid? Some of them seem to be both. But I’m inclined to give most of them the benefit of the doubt and see them as people who, due to circumstances beyond their control or understanding, have let themselves be swayed by a constant diet of media manipulation. Especially those living in regions where they’re rarely exposed to any other perspectives.
Unfortunately, whether they’re to blame or not, this type of manipulation can habituate people into becoming pretty nasty. They may start out as justifiably upset about undeniably real problems; but once they’ve been convinced to blame those problems on scapegoats, they may find it increasingly addictive to experience the thrill of vengeance against the imagined crimes of those scapegoats. And once they’ve gone there, it’s hard to turn them around. As Mark Twain is reputed to have said, “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.’’ If the MAGAs don’t have the courage to admit that they’ve been bamboozled, they may have a hard time repressing it after Trump is gone — like in Germany after World War II, when large segments of the population were going around pretending that they had always been opposed to Hitler.
As for the billionaires and their highly paid mouthpieces who are orchestrating all this: “I don’t know what word in the English language — I can’t find one that applies to people who are willing to sacrifice the literal existence of organized human life so they can put a few more dollars into their highly overstuffed pockets. The word ‘evil’ doesn’t begin to approach it.” (Noam Chomsky)
Fortunately, there’s a lot more resistance to Trump than there was to Hitler. Partly because Hitler moved more gradually — it was years before the Nazis dared to openly do the sorts of things the Trump regime is already doing. The Nazis took care to hide most of their crimes; Trump posts his and brags about them.
The main reason the Trump regime has gotten so extreme so fast is that they’re in a race against time. The longer they’re in power, the more opposition they arouse. Their only hope is to carry out such rapid multifront attacks that they can destroy things and consolidate their power before sufficient opposition arises to prevent them.
All governments lie a lot of the time, and they usually get away with it. But a point may arrive when the sheer quantity of lies becomes not just unbelievable, but unworkable, and the whole edifice of bullshit falls apart. That is already starting to happen and it’s unlikely that Trump or any of his cronies can stop it, though they can meanwhile continue to cause a terrible amount of damage and suffering.
Because Trump has built a personality cult, not a movement. His mental health has been deteriorating for years (very visibly in the last few months) and he also appears to be in very poor physical condition. Before his term is over, he is likely to become so glaringly incapacitated that even his supporters will be obliged to admit that it’s impossible for him to function. When that happens, the MAGA coalition will splinter into its mutually contradictory tendencies. None of those tendencies have much coherence, and many of the key figures and their agents and accomplices will be terrified about their risk of accountability for the crimes against humanity they have so brazenly perpetrated, and rush to throw each other under the bus. Most of Trump’s cronies have no qualifications beyond being skillful ass-kissers, and the few who do have none of his charisma. The only thing uniting them is their fealty to Trump.
There is one respect in which Trump’s delusions of grandeur may turn out to have a kernel of truth. He may go down in history as the person who brought into the open more glaringly than ever before the utter insanity of a social system in which such an ugly and idiotic farce could occur.
Meanwhile, all of you who have been working against him in such a wonderful variety of ways: Please keep doing what you’re doing!
[Part 2 sees the 1930s evolving into the Second World War, Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, our nuclear age, Keynesian warfare-welfare state, the military-industrial-scientific complex, Third Industrial Revolution. Image: Caen, France, July 1945].
The solution to our capitalist falling profit rates, mass unemployment, intensified class struggles and structural crisis/threat (Great Depression) is our ‘social compromise’ of the first Keynesian warfare-welfare state (US New Deal from 1933) in the US and the massive weapons industry (aka military-industrial complex) needed for World War Two. Our GNP per capita nearly doubles in the US between 1938-44, the strongest economic growth in modern US history. This will lead to the final achievement of US global imperial hegemony over its main industrial rival, Germany.
Militarist-fascist Japan invades Manchuria 1931 and its mass bombing of civilians in Shanghai in 1932 is our first terror bombing, five years before the Nazi Condor Legion’s notorious bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War and before it fully invades China in 1937, mainly to secure markets and resources on the Asian mainland. There are millions of civilian casualties, bombings, scorched-earth strategies and mass atrocities like the civilian massacre of Nanjing in 1937 (at least 200,000 murders and 20,000 rapes). A civilisational moral redline (originally drawn at the Hague Conventions of 1898) is also crossed in our mass bombing of civilians by Italian and German fascist bombers in Abyssinia/Ethiopia (1935) and then Spain (Guernica 1937). However, war crimes are not just a fascist thing: in 1935 both democratic US and Great Britain also design and test their first ‘strategic’ (i.e. anti-civilian) bombers.
Then with Hitler-Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 after concluding an imperial non-aggression pact with Stalin (including secret clauses dividing up spheres of interest in eastern Europe; and with Stalin also invading Finland in November 1939), our World War Two erupts, the second total industrialised war in which all our civilians, economic resources and infrastructure are mobilised by our warring states on a much more ex- and intensive scale than in our already fully industrial First World War. While ending the Great Depression (our production, employment, wages and prices surge throughout the world), it also ends in the further social and moral breakdown of our European liberal civilisation and its Enlightenment ideals.
By 1945 in Germany there are 800,000 prisoners in twenty-two camps, as well as almost 4.8 million foreign slave-labourers working in munitions factories, on the land and in SS projects; nearly 2 million of these are our Russian prisoners of war who are brutally treated and systematically worked to death.[i] By the end of our war in 1945, the racist-social-Darwinist ‘eugenics’ of the Hitler regime has also compulsorily sterilised 200-350,000 mentally or physically disabled Germans, murdered 80,000 mentally ill people by gas or injections, and murdered some 5,000 disabled babies. It has worked to death, starved or murdered over 3,000 homosexuals and 219,000 Roma.
In the Holocaust, perhaps the pinnacle of our moral barbarism, the ‘race science’-based, industrialised, bureaucratically organised genocide in which about six million Jews are worked to death, starved or murdered in concentration camps, including over 2.5 million by industrialised gassing and cadaver-processing at Auschwitz-Birkenau.[ii] Members of our anti-Nazi Resistance in western Europe manage to hide and save a few Jews, with our Danish Resistance and citizens evacuating almost all our Danish Jews to safety in neutral Sweden, while in the Netherlands in February 1941 there is our mass strike in protest against the arrest of our young Jews who had organised resistance to German anti-Semitic activities.
Our general European/Western moral breakdown also manifests in our Nazi aerial bombardment of Rotterdam and British cities in 1940-41 (c. 40,000 victims), and then in our firstmass terror (‘strategic’ or ‘carpet’) bombing of civilians by British and US aircraft from 1942-45 (c. 593,000 victims, 3.3 million homes destroyed in Germany, c. 330,000 total victims in Japan), including our first use of atomic bombs by the US on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 (between 129,000-226,000 victims).
Our nuclear age (and postmodern Anthropocene) is ushered in by a murderous economic cost-benefit analysis: having already decided to destroy our cities via ‘strategic bombing’ as a central part of our strategy, at a total cost of $2 billion, our atomic bombs are ‘far cheaper than Bomber Command or the Eighth Air Force, and more reliable to boot.’ [iii]
6 Ausgust 1945: Rev Kiyoshi Tanimoto, Hiroshima Survivor On some undressed bodies, the burns had made patterns – of undershirt straps and suspenders and, on the skin of some women (since white repelled the heat from the bomb and dark clothes absorbed it and conducted it to the skin), the shapes of flowers they had had on their kimonos. Many, although injured themselves, supported relatives who were worse off. Almost all had their heads bowed, looked straight ahead, were silent, and showed no expression whatsoever. [John Hersey, Hiroshima (1946), p. 46] Yuko Kuwabara, 13 years oldSoon the houses on both sides of the river began to burn. After I had swum across the river to the other shore I fell to the gorund, relieved. Then a strong wind arose and a black rain began to fall. The rain drops that pelted down from the storm-grey sky were very strange. When they hit my body they hurt like rocks. At the same time glowing particles flew around my head. When I tried to go down to the water, I was blown over by a gust of wind. ‘You’re finished’, I thought, covered my face with my hands and turned onto my stomach. The hot sparks fell onto my legs, but because the wind threatened to blow me away, I couldn’t wipe them away. I say ‘particles’, but they were large burning pieces that fell like rain. How hot they were, how they hurt! I couldn’t stand it any longer and tried to to reach the water but the wind kept blowing me back. How am I supposed to write down everything that happened to me then? ‘What shall become of you’ I asked myself, as despair and giving-up alternated in me. Hatsumi Sakamoto, 9 years oldAtom bomb falls:day becomes nightpeople ghosts [‘Hiroshima-Nagasaki 1945 bis heute’ exhibition 1981-82, transl. PL-N]
Our European moral breakdown in this period also includes our above-mentioned Stalinist totalitarian terror since the 1930s, induced mass famines and industrial slave-labour camps (Gulag), of brutal, state-directed modernisation and industrialisation under the guise of ‘socialism’.
There are as many as 60-69 million deaths due to our war, with our civilian deaths far outnumbering military deaths for the first time in modern history and with also around 60 million displaced persons and refugees in Europe. The USSR suffers by far the highest casualties with c. 26.6 million or 13.7% of our pre-war population killed (10.6 million soldiers and about sixteen million civilians, and 25% of the population in Belarus), followed by Poland (c. 6 million or 17%), Germany (6.9-7.4 million or 8.3-8.8 %), Japan (2.5-3.1 million or 3.5-4.3%), China (15-20 million or 2.9-3.9 %), France (0.6 million or 1.4%), UK (0.46 million or 0.94%), US (0.42 million or 0.32%), Australia (0.044 million or 0.58%).[iv]
A cultural result of our war in the West is the continuation of our post-Great War collapse of our educated belief in Progress (as also already expressed in Freud’s ‘Das Unbehagen in der Kultur’ 1930).
Voices from the Holocaust 1From TheDiary of Anne Frank (14 years old) 3rd May 1944 Amsterdam (in hiding, three months before her removal to Auschwitz) As you can easily imagine we often ask ourselves here despairingly: “What, oh what is the use of war? Why can’t people live peacefully together? Why all this destruction?” The question is very understandable, but no one has found a satisfactory answer to it so far. […] Yes, why do they make still more gigantic planes, still heavier bombs and at the same time, prefabricated houses for reconstruction? Why should millions be spent daily on the war and yet there’s not a penny available for mediacl services, artists, or for poor people? […] I don’t believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone are guilty of the war. Oh, no, the little man is just as keen, otherwise the people of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! There is an urge and rage in people to destroy, to kill, to murder, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated and grown, will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again. I have often been downcast, but never in despair; I regard our hiding as a dangerous adventure, romantic and interesting at the same time. In my diary I treat all the privations as amusing. I have made up my mind now to lead a different life from other girls and, later on, different from ordinary housewives. […] I have been given a lot, a happy nature, a great deal of cheerfulness and strength. Every day I feel that I am developing inwardly, that the liberation is drawing nearer and how beautiful nature is, how good the people are about me, how interesting this adventure is! Why, then, should I be in despair?
Voices from the Holocaust 2 From Eli Wiesel, The First Night in Auschwitz (from: Night, 1958) Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.Never shall I forget that smoke.Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.Never shall I forget those flmaes that consumed my faith forever.Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself.Never. The Barrack we had been assigned to was very long. On the roof, a few bluish skylights. I thought: This is what the antechamber of hell must look like. So many crazed men, so much shouting, so much brutality. Dozens of inmates were there to receive us, sticks in hand, striking anywhere, anyone, without reason.
Our post-war, postmodern growth era (or Third Industrial Revolution) is technologically prepared in the 1930s and 40s: TV is invented (BBC 1936), as are rockets (German V-2, 1944), jet planes (German Heinkel He 178 1939), the use of IBM punch card-computing to run Nazi census, labour and death camps, the first mainframe digital computer (Zuse, Turing, ‘Colossus’ cracks German Enigma codes in 1943). Alan Turing equates mathematical algorithms with mechanical processes, and finds one to mimic all the others, i.e. the theoretical template for the programmable computer (1936).
However, the major structural change due to the Second World War is that our total war state now, even more than in the First World War, regulates and coordinates the whole productive economy and takes control of science and technological innovation, especially in the US. This war-driven, new systemic approach of the new military-industrial-scientific complex also stimulates ‘an unprecedented culture of cross-fertilisation in strategic disciplines’ and ‘inserts maths and science into the heart of the industrial process [and] economics and data management into political decision-making.’ [v] This culture of daring technological innovation and new capitalist management and systemic organization theory survives the transition to peacetime and the beginning of the Anthropocene, leading to the many great accelerations of the Third Industrial Revolution and a different kind of managed, extended and intensifiedconsumer capitalism. Greater war-induced economic regulation (including price controls) also fosters a greater sense of fairness and social justice, a sense of collective effort in a more united nation.
Technologically, there is the first widespread use of electric air-conditioning in the US in 1938, using the ozone layer-destroying CFC Freon (developed in 1930) and opening up the southern US ‘Sun Belt’ to development and immigration from the north. The Siemens electron microscope (1939) opens up a new visual dimension to the postmodern mind: it overcomes the limitations of optical microscopy and allows advances in medical imaging, engineering and physics by visually revealing the atomic structure of materials for the first time.
There are our further great developments in post-Newtonian physics and cosmology. Hubble and Humason revolutionise our late-modern cosmology by discovering that the universe is not static but expanding: the more distant the galaxies, the faster they are receding with a speed proportional to their distance (Hubble’s Law, 1929). Pauli predicts the existence of the ‘neutrino’ particle (1930). Chadwick discovers ‘neutrons’, and thus with electrons and protons, all three elementary-particle components of atoms have now been discovered (1932), and neutron stars (e.g. pulsars) are predicted (1933). Anderson detects the ‘positron’ (1932). Hydrogen fusion is demonstrated in the lab (1932). Yukawa proposes the ‘strong nuclear force’ (1934). Anderson and Neddermaeyer discover heavier cousins of electrons called ‘muons’ (1936). Bethe describes stellar fusion processes (1939). ‘Quantum electrodynamics’ is developed in the 1940s. In 1943 the physicist Erwin Schrödinger in his seminal Dublin lecture ‘What is Life?’ speculates that life may be based on some sort of ‘aperiodic crystal’ and floats the new idea of a ‘genetic code’, thus inspiring the molecular-biology DNA revolution of Watson and Crick ten years later.
Atomic fission is observed in 1938 and the first chain reaction obtained in a lab in 1942. Sadly, it is our scientists and not political leaders who in every country take the initiative to begin atomic weapons programs. Physicist Freeman Dyson is of the opinion that
If the scientific advisors had refrained from pushing, it is likely that World War II would have ended without any Manhattan Project and without any Soviet equivalent. It would have been possible, as soon as the war was over, to begin negotiations among the victorious allies to establish a nuclear-weapons-free world with some hope of success. We cannot know whether this road not taken would have avoided the nuclear arms race altogether. At least it would have been a saner and wiser road than the one we followed. [vi]
[ii] Ibid., p. 334. At Auschwitz gold tooth fillings are sent to the central bank, hair is used for stuffing chairs, bones are used for fertiliser, body fat is used for soap-making. This unmatched scientific-industrial scale and level of human depravity has reverberated ever since in the words ‘Auschwitz’ and ‘Holocaust’.
[A little bit of history I’ve researched on the 1930s, the age of fascism, Stalinism, New Deal. It’s written in the first person plural. Might be useful for some wider backgrounding and historical framing of some current developments globally, for thinking about similarities and differences…. Part 2 will deal with World War II. Photo of Nazi Nuremberg rally in 1937, with interesting half-naked’manosphere’/chaste female divide…]
Our world population reaches 2.036 billion in 1930, and 2.267 billion in 1940.
After a long and unprecedented speculative stock market boom, we now enter our deep and global capitalist crisis after the Wall Street crash and collapse of our financial system in 1929 leads to mass unemployment (US 24% in 1932, Germany from 0.9 to over 6 million 1929-32) and the global Great Depression. Its political expression is a post-liberal, nationalistic and totalitarian ‘Age of Extremes’ (Eric Hobsbawm) fought out between fascism, Stalinist ‘communism’ and a severely weakened liberalism and social democracy (Roosevelt’s Keynesian New Deal).
Within the Depression, John Maynard Keynes’ ‘The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money’ (1936) renews our mainstream economics with a new anti-laissez-faire, social-democratic emphasis on the problem of unemployment and strong government intervention in a new ‘planned capitalism’ that aims to solve the unemployment problem whilst, unlike fascism and Stalinism, ‘preserving efficiency and freedom.’ [i]
The Depression generally increases national economic autarky and protectionism , which feeds off and further stimulates our political nationalisms and international rivalry, and also increases a general crisis of liberal democracy throughout our western world (France, for example, has forty governments between 1918 and 1939). Perhaps more strongly than elsewhere, the all-pervading atmosphere in Germany around 1930 is one of fear: for the workers of unemployment and penury, for the middle classes of a renewal of inflation and the breakdown of law and order, for the young a fear of unemployment and a the future with nothing to offer but business-as-usual and frustration; Hitler’s Nazi Party (National Socialist German Workers Party, NSDAP) is able to play on these fears and rejections of liberal Wiemar democracy and demagogically exploit the politics of deep anxiety. [ii]
The NSDAP becomes the second-largest party in 1930, increasing its vote from 810,000 in 1929 to nearly 6.5 million votes, and now two out of five Germans have voted for anti-democratic parties. The hard core of Nazi support lies in our ‘white-collar proletariat’ of clerks, small shopkeepers, teachers and many professionals, peasants/farmers and the broad middle classes especially in provincial small towns and especially in the Protestant north and centre, as well as young voters disillusioned with their prospects and the ‘talking shop’ parliamentary Weimar system and attracted to the street violence of the brown-shirt storm troopers (SA).[iii] Most of our industrial working class, Catholics and Catholic peasantry in the south stay mostly immune to Nazi propaganda.[iv]
Hitler and other Nazi demagogues emotionally exploit popular anxieties and resentments, blame Germany’s ills on the ‘Marxist Republic’ of Weimar and designated scapegoats like Marxists/communists/social democrats, ‘November (1918) traitors’ and Jews, and like the right-wing in general, promise strong government and authoritarian leadership ‘for the common good’ of the nation, repudiation of the Versailles Treaty and restoration of ‘national pride’ and of Germany to greatness and rebirth in a ‘national revolution’.[v]
In its populist social program, the NSDAP offers something for nearly everyone, reflecting the fears and prejudices of the petty-bourgeois ‘little man’ and wide swathes of the German public (nevertheless, the NSDAP never achieves an absolute majority of the votes). Right-wing populism, nationalist grandiosity, general vagueness, a militant negativity and blaming/‘othering’ (anti-Bolshevik/-Marxist, anti-foreigners, anti-Semitism, anti-intellectuals, anti-‘cultural decadence’) also characterise Nazi ideology and wider European fascisms.
Between 1930-33 increasingly autocratic Weimar governments with mounting deficits (Brüning, von Papen, von Schleicher) worsen our economic conditions, poverty and thus political polarisation by cutting unemployment benefits and pensions. Hitler’s rise to power in this time bears a striking resemblance to Mussolini’s earlier tactics in its ‘combination of constitutional legality and public violence, and in his use of conservatives who thought they could themselves use him.’ [vi]
Enabled by back-room political intrigues and back-stabbing and by the lone-wolf arson attack on the Reichstag, and supported by the reactionary east-German, aristocratic land barons, some right-wing industrialists (e.g. Thyssen, Kirdorf), younger army officers, nationalist conservatives and right-wing mass-media tycoon Hugenberg, Hitler’s NSDAP comes to power in elections in 1933 (despite a restricted opposition, however, with no more than 43.9% of the votes), via a so-called ‘Enabling Law’ (‘Ermächtigunsgesetz’), quickly erecting a one-party totalitarian state including concentration camps (the first in Dachau).
He gives himself dictatorial rights, brings education, culture, the Churches under total state control while leaving the empty skeleton of parliament and justice system, and proceeds to violently eliminate internal party opponents and the political left and disenfranchise, dispossess and terrorise Jewish citizens (‘Nuremberg Laws for the Protection of German Blood and Honour’1935). Disapproved (Jewish and leftist-progressive) authors’ books are burned in town squares and university campuses where the vast majority of students and professors are conservative, nationalist, monarchist, authoritarian, fascist.
The left collapses, free trade unions are suppressed and there is almost no protest against the dissolution of political parties and the complete destruction of our democratic institutions and working-class movement. Economically, Hitler’s public infrastructural (Autobahns), new automobile industry (VW) and militarist re-armament Keynesianism (defecit financing, also using financial tricks), in concert with global recovery trends, rapidly reduces our mass unemployment within five years from 6 million to 470,000, and thus increases his popularity, as does the expansion of the Nazi social welfare state and its so-called ‘People’s Community’ (‘Volksgemeinschaft’) egalitarianism. By 1939 there are 21,000 political prisoners in six concentration camps in Germany.
Following Hitler’s rise to power, the US’s biggest newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, right-wing nationalist/isolationist (‘America First!’) and anti-Communist, becomes a supporter both of Roosevelt’s New Deal (until 1934) and also, like Henry Ford, of the Nazis, personally interviewing Hitler, ordering his journalists to publish favourable coverage of Hitler’s Germany, and allowing leading fascists like Hitler, Gӧring and Mussolini to publish articles in his newspapers.
Our isolationaist America First Committee, both with pacifist conscientious objectors and anti-Semites Henry Ford and aviator Charles Lindbergh, is formed in 1940 at Yale to lobby for the US staying out of any war against Nazi Germany in Europe. Even after Hitler’s annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1938, Lindberg argues that France and Britain should form an alliance with the Third Reich, stating ‘it is time to turn from our quarrels and to build our White ramparts again. Our future depends on . . . a Western Wall of race and arms which can hold back . . . the infiltration of inferior [‘Asiatic’] blood.’ [vii]
In France, elections in May 1936 bring our progressive Socialist-Radical Popular Front government under Leon Blum into power. For a few weeks our workers wildly celebrate with strikes and widespread occupations of factories and even Paris department stores to force the pace of reform: they gain a rise in wages and the right to collective bargaining with employers, legislation for a forty-hour week, paid holidays, a public works program, nationalisation of the arms industry, bank reform. However our French capital flees abroad and Blum is forced to devalue the franc, tries to ban capital export, is defeated in the Senate and resigns.
Our left-libertarian Spanish Revolution and Civil War 1936-39, including many hundreds of self-organised, emancipatory anarchist social experiments by our peasants and workers, ends in General Franco’s fascist victory over Republican forces (150,000 civilian victims, 50,000 thereafter in Franco’s fascism). In these few months we achieve history’s perhaps greatest modern example of widespread self-management: in our Spanish villages and factories there are about 1000 to 1600 agricultural collectives of anarchist, Socialist and Catholic peasants, all our industry and public services are collectivised in Catalonia and 70% in the Levante, and in total perhaps 5-7 million people are directly or indirectly involved. [viii] Despite being physically attacked by both fascist right and communist-Stalinist left, our agrarian-libertarian collectives are in Gaston Leval’s estimate
[…] to all intents and purposes libertarian communist organizations. They applied the rule ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’ Where money was abolished, a certain quantity of goods was assured to each person; where money was retained, each family received a wage determined by the number of members. […] … solidarity was practised to the greatest degree. Not only was every person assured of the necessities, but the district federations increasingly adopted the principle of mutual aid on an inter-collective scale. For this purpose, they created common reserves to help out villages less favoured by nature. […]
Our Stalinist communists also kill their anarchist and Trotskyist opponents and conflicts between (and within) our anarchists and our Republican government, containing anarchists and supported by communists, erupt in our five-day civil war within the civil war in Catalonia/Barcelona in May 1937 in which the government and thus communist influence are victorious.
Then there is our non-solidarity and collapse of our European working-class movements and probably the final demise of the mass socialist ideal in the double blow not only of our popular fascism but of our Stalinist betrayal in its modernising slave economy of ‘gulag communism’.
From Stalin’s first Five Year Plan (1929-34) onwards, within a very short period of time, our state commissars and armed brigades reinforced by the army and police units violently force millions of our peasants off family farms they had worked for centuries and into state collective farms (kolkhoz). In a new form of ‘socialist’ serfdom, our peasants are tied to these state farms by an internal passport system. This is simply our Soviet state-capitalist version of the usual enclosures, ‘clearances’ and other forms of state violence which our nascent industrial capitalism has used and continues to use in most countries to ‘modernise’ and industrialise by depriving our peasants of their land and commons and forcing them into factories and wage labour. Any peasants resisting are branded ‘kulaks’ (rich peasants) and sent to forced labour camps (c. 100,000) or exile settlements far from their homes (c. 2 million).
The resultant great famine in southern Russia and the Ukraine in 1932-33 occasioned by this Stalinist ‘collectivisation’ policy kills up to 8.5 million people (known in the Ukraine as the Holodomor, ‘killing by starvation’).[ix] As the camps expand from 1929 onwards, the ‘kontslager’(concentration camps),now cosmetically renamed ‘corrective labour camps’ under the Main Camp Administration (Russian acronym: Gulag), are placed under the complete management of our secret police and explicitly harnessed to our Stalinist industrialisation and economic development effort.[x]
Our Gulag system is a vast slave economy in which designated ‘public enemies’ are sent to ‘prison camps where they are worked to death on construction sites, building railways and canals, mining coal and gold by hand, and chopping down forests in the Arctic zone.’[xi] Most Russians and even victims of Stalinism, however, continue to believe in Stalin and his proto-religious cult in which he is the new tsar, the ‘little-father tsar’ (tsar-batiushka) of traditional Russian folklore who protects the people like his children and guides them to a better life.[xii]
As for total death estimates with regard to our Soviet Stalinism, Bullock and Labedz estimate the total of those arrested between 1930-37 who died in forced labour camps at 3.5 million; in addition, they estimate that 11 million peasants died in the countryside of politically occasioned famine.[xiii] Stressing the still very imprecise nature of the estimates, Applebaum quotes a figure of 786,098 official victims of Stalin’s political executions between 1934 to 1953, ‘reluctantly cites’ 2.7 million as the number of prisoners who may have died in the Gulag camps and exile villages between 1929 and 1953, and 10-20 million as the total number of victims combined of the Civil War, the Bolshevik Red Terror, the collectivisation famines, mass deportations, mass executions and the Gulag forced labour camps themselves between 1918 and 1987, the year President Gorbachev finally dismantles the remaining camps. [xiv]
Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899-1980) on the Stalinist Terror RegimeWhen I used to read about the French Revolution as a child, I often wondered whether it was possible to survive during a reign of terror. I now know beyond doubt that it is impossible. Anybody who breathes the air of terror is doomed, even if nominally he manages to save his life. Everybody is a victim – not only those who die, but also all the killers, ideologists, accomplices and sycophants who close their eyes or wash their hands – even if they are secretly consumed with remorse at night. Every section of the population has been through the terrible sickness caused by terror, and none has so far recovered, or become fit again for normal civic life. It is an illness that is passed on to the next generation, so that the sons pay for the sins of the fathers and perhaps only the grandchildren begin to get over it – or at least it takes on a different form with them. [from her memoir Hope Against Hope, in : Cambridge Women’s Peace Collective, My Country is the Whole World (1984), p. 121]
Our Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory (with Korsch, early Lukacs and Gramsci, aka ‘Western Marxism’) is an attempt to expand and deepen our economistically reduced and orthodox Marxism with Freudian psychoanalysis and understand both our European working-class post-war defeat and subjective authoritarian/bureaucratic tendencies as well as the larger historical ‘dialectic of the Enlightenment’ and capitalism’s domination of ex- and internal nature (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Fromm, ‘Autorität und Familie’1936, and later ‘Dialektik der Aufklärung’ 1947, ‘Studies in the Authoritarian Personality’ 1950). Writing in an Italian fascist prison in 1936/37, Antonio Gramsci attempts something similar, stressing the power of bourgeois cultural ‘hegemony’ over mere economic issues in pacifying and integrating our working classes.
In 1933 French novelist André Gide already notes: ‘The sky over Europe and the whole world is so heavy with the storm; hearts are so full of hatred that sometimes I cannot help thinking that only a conflict between classes could put off the mortal conflict between nations’, while in 1935 German existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers writes: ‘Quietly, something enormous has happened in the reality of western man: a destruction of old authority, a radical disillusionment in an overconfident reason, and a dissolution of bonds have made anything, absolutely anything, seem possible.’ [xv]
In terms of bourgeois ‘cultural hegemony’ in the US, our ‘motivational’ ideology of popular psychology is encapsulated in Dale Carnegie’s bestselling ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ (1936), a behavioural manual for the US ‘market character’ (Erich Fromm), i.e. how to manipulate other people and achieve material success within a competitive total market society (the book is a marker of our global modernisation: it has now been translated into 36 languages and sold 30 million copies worldwide).
[viii] Here is more from Gaston Leval (Collectives in the Spanish Revolution, 1975) on the Spanish agrarian collectives:
A conquest of enormous importance was the right of women to livelihood, regardless of occupation or function. In about half of the agrarian collectives, the women received the same wages as men; in the rest the women received less, apparently on the principle that they rarely lived alone. The child’s right to livelihood was also ungrudgingly recognised. […]
In all the agrarian collectives […] the workers formed groups to divide the labour or the land; usually they were assigned to definite areas. Delegates elected by the work groups met with the collective’s delegate for agriculture to plan out the work. […] In addition to these methods – and similar meetings of specialized groups ‒ the collective as a whole met in a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly assembly. This too was a spontaneous innovation. The assembly reviewed the activities of the councillors it named, and discussed special cases and unforseen problems. All inhabitants – men and women, producers and non-producers – took part in the discussion and decisions. In many cases the ‘individualists’ (non-collective members) had equal rights in the assembly. […]
In Aragon, the Federation of Collectives, founded in January 1937, began to coordinate trade among the communes of the region, and to create a system of mutual aid. […]
The collectives were not created single-handedly by the libertarian movement. Although their juridical principles were strictly anarchist, a great many collectives were created spontaneously by people remote from our movement (‘libertarians’ without being aware of it). Most of the Castile and Estramadura collectives were organized by Catholic and Socialist peasants. […]
Small landowners were respected. Their inclusion in the consumer’s card system and in the collective trading, the resolutions taken in respect to them, all attest to this. There were just two restrictions: they could not have more land than they could cultivate, and they could not carry on private trade. Membership in the collective was voluntary: the ‘individualists’ joined only if they were persuaded of the advantages of working in common. […]
The chief obstacles to the collectives were: (a) the existence of conservative strata, and parties and organizations representing them. Republicans of all factions, socialists of left and right […], Stalinist Communists, and often [Trotskyite] POUMists […], (b) the opposition of certain small landowners (peasants from Catalonia and the Pyrenees), (c) the fear, even among some members of the collectives, that the government would destroy the organizations once the war was over […], (d) the open attack on the collectives: by which is not meant the obviously destructive acts of the Franco troops wherever they advanced. In Castile the attack on the collectivists was conducted, arms in hand, by Communist troops. […] In the Huesca province the Karl Marx brigade persecuted the collectives. […]
In the work of creation, transformation and socialization, the peasants demonstrated a social conscience much superior to that of the city worker.” (G. Leval, ‘The Characteristics of the Libertarian Collectives’, in S. Dolgoff (ed.), The Anarchist Collectives (1974, pp. 166-170)
On the present-day significance of the Spanish collectives, Vernon Richards remarks: “What nobody will be able to deny is that the scale on which the collectivist enterprises operated in Spain was such as to silence once for all those critics who argue that self-management along anarchistic lines is possible on a small scale but quite impractical when applied to large enterprises and urban concentrations.” (foreword to Gaston Leval’s Collectives in the Spanish Revolution, Freedom Press London 1975)
[x] Stalinist forced labour or ‘re-education’ camps for the working classes are obviousy not just a ‘communist’ invention. British liberal-conservative politician Winston Churchill also expressed his solution for the perceived problem of working-class ‘tramps and wastrels’ as being ‘proper Labour Colonies where they could be sent for considerable periods and made to realise their duty to the State…’ (quoted in J. Burnside, op.cit., p. 235).
[We all know by now that the equivalent of a classroom of children was killed on average every day for two years in Gaza by the Israeli war machine, its operations largely supported not just by Israeli right-wing extremists but by the great majority of Israelis and Israeli media. What is perhaps less known is, as the following interview with two Israeli experts reveals, that the targets of that war machine and their so-called ‘acceptable collateral damage’, supported by massive US weapon deliveries, were largely selected by AI.
Genocide has now been automated. AI, and its algorithms endlessly spitting out new targets, has enabled, legitimated and prolonged the war. With their usual double standards regarding human rights abuses and ‘(un)worthy’ victims, the governments of Europe, the US, Australia remained silent or prevaricating until the very end. As Ben-Daniel reveals at the end of the interview, this Western complicity of silence in fact enabled the genocide by giving the Israeli government a free ticket to do what it likes. PL-N. Image courtesy of Reuters.]
Automating the Gaza Genocide with AI
An Interview with Yossi Bartal and Sebastian Ben-Daniel, data scientist and weapons researcher at Ben-Gurion University in Negev (translated by Peter Lach-Newinsky from the German from: Medico International Newsletter ‘Vor Aller Augen’ 03/25)
YB: AI is being used to compute targets of Israeli attacks in the Gaza war. How does the deployment of such systems work and since when have they been used?
BD: It started with the Palestinian insurrection of 2016, also known as the Knife or Lone Wolf intifada. At that time it was about identifying potential individual perpetrators in the occupied territories even before they carried out an attack. […] In the context of the occupation, it was about screening social media and other data banks in terms of pre-emptive police work.
YB: How did one become a suspect in this program?
BD: For example by writing religious posts. Or if the tone in the posts was mostly aggressive or sad. Or even if someone got a haircut: it was conjectured that one wanted to present oneself as particularly clean-cut in one’s final photograph.
YB: Using this, a list was then compiled of thousands of youths who were considered suspicious and were arrested as a result.
BD: You couldn’t really charge these youths on this basis. Instead, several of them were put under administrative arrest without charge or due process or else charged with ‘incitement’. It was enough to just write anything against the occupying power and to call for protest. A demonstration in the west Jordan is always illegal. The military believed that someone who was imprisoned for three or four months would ‘cool off’ and no longer be a danger.
YB: Were these policies successful?
BD: Well, that was how it was portrayed in military circles. At the time one officer said they knew that some teenager or another would become a terrorist before he himself knew. In actual fact, there wasn’t a single case of catching anyone with a knife in his pocket.
YB: But the military had a tool that led to thousands of arrests and raids. Basically, it was a mass intimidation campaign against civilians that was supposedly based on the individual case and precise targeting.
BD: Exactly. Suddenly numerous targets were identified. Whether these targets were relevant in policing terms is questionable. And with that we come to Gaza. During its offensive of 2014 ‘Operation Protective Edge’, a great difficulty for the military was that the so-called ‘data bank’ – i.e. a list of military targets compiled by large teams – was very quickly exhausted. It contained 400 to 600 targets and had largely been worked through within a few days. So then they didn’t know what to do in purely military terms. So they needed a system that did this automatically. Because the human in the loop was much too slow. On the basis of this experience, an AI system was developed that was already used in the attack on the Gaza strip in 2021. It was supposed to identify Palestinian fighters on the basis of numerous criteria – from the use of mobile phones that seemed suspicious to a move to a new apartment – and also identify their possible locations for an attack.
YB: The number of civilian victims in 2021 was still relatively low.
BD: At that point they hadn’t used the system as much as they do today. It was more strictly regulated. Every target suggestion by the system was vetted by a human. Also, the number of cases of so-called ‘acceptable collateral damage’ was much lower. It was at that time still an experiment. But they were very satisfied with the result because the system suddenly produced an abundance of targets.
YB: Is that what the then General Commander Aviv Kochavi meant when he declared in 2022 that ‘the industrialisation of precise extermination’ should become the guiding principle of the coming conflicts?
BD: There was a manifest tendency to over-estimate the efficacy of such AI programs. They work much more quantitatively than qualitatively and are, for example, not suited to identifying people in the Hamas leadership. There are still human teams to do that. But they do enable you – under the appearance of military logic − to attack much more, and more quickly. What happened after October 2023 was the almost total automation of these systems. A de facto control by humanswas eliminated. There were no more real safety mechanisms and a much higher number of cases of so-called ‘acceptable collateral damage.’
YB: Official Israeli sources repeatably speak of targeted strikes and the military necessity of their actions in the Gaza strip. How is that to be explained, given the total destruction and enormous number of civilian victims?
BD: If you look at Gaza today, you can retrospectively infer what those responsible for the destruction were thinking. In a recently published recording the then head of the Directorate for Military Intelligence (Aman) Aharon Haliva says: ‘For every person killed on October 7, fifty Palestinians had to die. It doesn’t matter now if they are children. […] There is no alternative.’ If 50,000 deaths was the actual target, the deployment of AI programs was essential.
YB: I don’t quite understand that.
BD: Most of the deaths in Gaza were a result of the aerial bombardment of people that AI systems suspected of being low-ranking Hamas activists. Their military significance is low, but there are a lot of them, and if the ‘collateral damage’ – i.e. these activists’ children, neighbours and families – is scaled up enough, the target of 50,000 Palestinian victims is achieved. Algorithms thus were not the cause but the tool. They generated an exponential number of new targets and enabled a measure of killing that humans alone could not have perpetrated. The IDF argues that every target was vetted. But the rapidity was so great that this vetting could only have been an alibi.
YB: Why do you need this technology if the aim is just to kill? Why not just bomb at random?
BD: That’s the decisive point. AI gave this killing machine the appearance of legality and targetingprecision. Even in October 2023, IDF commanders – as in many historical cases of genocide – could not give orders to randomly kill. That would have been barbaric. Instead, they had to generate political support. It is also essential to create legitimacy for the operations of the soldiers doing the job. You had to be certain that the pilots and the target analysts of Unit 8200 – who came from liberal backgrounds – would carry out this mass murder. For that, you had to convince them of at least two things. Firstly, that there is no alternative, that the massive bombardment is not the expression of a murderous ideology but rather ‘evidence-based’ – with the additional advantage that the AI system is also supposedly faster and better at analysis than any person. Secondly, that everything is legal. Thus, the attacks, signed off by the military lawyers, were regarded as ‘proportionate’ because the collateral damage – apart from several cases of hundreds of deaths around high-ranked targets – was regarded as low when measured against a supposedly almost limitless threat. Because everything that had anything to do withy Hamas had to be liquidated.
YB: However there were the images of Gaza, even if the Israeli media didn’t show them. Didn’t one see and understand the consequences of these actions?
BD: One has to understand the role of military propaganda in this war. There are units and front organisations outside the military whose sole task is to call into question all information coming out of Gaza – similar to how the tobacco industry spread doubts about the dangers of smoking. You don’t have to provide true figures. It’s enough to maintain that there is no reliable information. When the Palestinians say something, it’s immediately said they are lying, manipulating or exaggerating. There is also the active suppression of their own thinking. Many in the security apparatus still speak about the war and combat strategies without perceiving the actual reality – the total destruction of the Gaza strip.
That is quite incredible, especially since the settler movement and its representatives actuallycelebrate the destructions as messianic achievements. Indeed, within Israeli discourse, the military now counts as ‘left-wing’. Generals distance themselves from extreme-right calls for genocide, pilots from the war crimes of several army units comprising many settlers. And yet the vision of precisely these ‘liberals’ is being implemented via judicially endorsed AI programs.
YB: When one speaks of the crime of genocide , it’s often about a question of an ‘intent’. No doubt many of the decisions of the first few months were influenced by desires for revenge – but is that sufficient?
BD: I don’t believe there was a detailed master plan that from the start intended to commit genocide. There were no secret meetings about that. It happened anyway, and in small steps,especiallybecause the world did nothing against it. This free ticket also surprised the Israelis. A year ago, when Rafah was about to be attacked, Europe and the USA expressed great concern. But when the offensive began and the city was in the end completely destroyed, nothing happened. Thegovernment would have thought: if that’s OK, we can keep on doing it. The so-called target bank was also never exhausted because the AI programs kept spitting out new targets every minute. In that sense, AI contributed to eternally prolonging the war.
No distinct beginning nor end, but a wave so confident in my birth and build, so soon unstoppable in my early energy of growth, implacable power of ocean, sun and moon,
an advancing timeline of tensioned surge sizzling with anticipation at the top, cresting, curling in, breaking my climax downwards into crash and thunder, white chaos of churn
shooting shorewards with relentless force, I speed in a wide wash of cappuccino froth triumphantly up the sand’s smooth skin until, suddenly, my power spent, senescent,
a receding hiss and bubbly flurry back to the timeless cycle of my oncoming self.
memengineering 