Alex Marshall

Doctoral student. German-Jewish fin-de-siècle. Zionism, nationalism, duels, utopias, dirigibles, additional Zionism. Stuff like that. I wish people had been nicer to Moses Hess. ORCID 0000-0002-4558-6303

[ralexmarshall]

“After the middle classes had won most of what they wanted, they often voluntarily gave up some of their new privileges so that the lower classes would not have to be given liberties too. They were like the man in the story who was asked what he would like best in the world, provided his worst enemy could have the same thing in double measure – and he answered, one blind eye. There was practically no one to say that the cure for democracy was more democracy.”

—

Priscilla Robertson, Revolutions of 1848: A Social History, p415

The middle-classes, man, the middle-classes. Every damn time.

[ralexmarshall]

Hash Tag Brexit or Hash Tag Trump or Hash Tag Centrism or whatever.

[ralexmarshall]

[ralexmarshall]

I invented a pronunciation exercise to practice getting the distinction between Norwegian vowels.* You say each word or phrase and try to hear the difference, working your way down one side and up the other. Each one loops round.

*the most absurdly difficult part of this sadistically hard to pronounce language

[ralexmarshall]

In Defence of Actually Remembering Stuff

Longreads, it is said, have long lives, and for this reason I listened to the podcast of David Rieff’s ‘The Cult of Memory: When History Does More Harm Than Good’ over a year after it was posted, and sat getting angry at it for being wrong for several weeks after. The article explains, in often emotive terms, the both obstructive and destructive effects of historical grudges, and the political and identitarian distortions they both lead to and depend on. So, fittingly, this post is born of a long-held grudge about something trivial that happened even longer ago.

It opens

As a reporter in the Bosnian war, in 1993 I went to Belgrade to visit Vuk Drašković, the Serb nationalist politician and writer who was then leading the mass opposition against the Slobodan Milošević regime. Drašković had drawn liberal as well as ultra-nationalist support in Serbia for his cause. As I was leaving his office, one of Drašković’s young aides pressed a folded bit of paper into my hand. It turned out to be blank except for a date: 1453 – the year Orthodox Constantinople fell to the Muslim Ottomans.

Friends of mine who had worked in the former Yugoslavia during the Croatian and Bosnian wars had similar experiences in Zagreb and Sarajevo, though the dates in question were different. It seemed as if the “sores of history”, as the Irish writer Hubert Butler once called them, remained unhealed more than half a millennium later – at least in the desperate, degraded atmosphere of that time and place.

Immediately the tone is set. War crimes, ethnic hatred, a grudge stretching back over half a millenium. The implication is clear: maybe if the Serbs had dropped their outdated grievances, the genocides of the Bosnian War might not have taken place. 

Rieff almost discovers the issue at hand early on, writing

This is what happened in the American south after 1865, where after the guns of the civil war fell silent, another form of battle raged over whose version of the conflict – the victorious Union or the defeated Confederacy – would prevail. As the recent debate in the US over the Confederate flag demonstrated, that battle over memory, though diminished, still goes on today.

Memory, he immediately makes clear, is not neutral. It is not factual, or apolitical, or non-violent. And it is part and parcel of nationalism and nation-building, with all the dubious, unpleasant ideologies and practices they entail.

When states, political parties, and social groups appeal to collective historical memory, their motives are far from trivial . Until well into the second half of the 20th century, the goal of such appeals was almost invariably to foster national unity.

Tussles over William Wallace and Joan of Arc illustrate this just as well. Yet, just like Nigel Farage, who was born after the Berlin Wall was built yet laments the generation who have forgotten Dunkirk, Rieff confuses myth with memory. The UK’s curious nostalgia for the Second World War by those born decades after, combined with the strange elevation of a small red flower to sacred national symbol, is perhaps one of the strangest, most politicised and nationalistic uses of second-hand cultural memory out there. Yet it doesn’t get a look-in. Tellingly, Rieff’s examples of the fetishisation of memory, selected for a British audience, are seldom our own, and when they are, they are for an internal succssion movement, not Britain itself. They are all other people’s fetishes, other nations’ hurt and other jingoists’ grudges. But then, every nationalism supposes itself more enlightened and less petty about this sort of collective narcissism.

Calling it “a manipulation of history of the grossest kind” and an “antihistorical exercise of the contemporary political imagination”, he argues that the Islamic world’s narrative of Crusades that continue to this day

offers a textbook case of the deployment of political collective memory in the service of large-scale solidarity. The fact that virtually nothing in the contemporaneous Arab writing about the Crusades supports the Arab world’s collective memory of those griefs is neither here nor there. The myth fills a need, and subsequently can be manufactured convincingly enough to captivate and inspire those to whom it is directed. Think of it as the transformation of the wound into the weapon.

What a stretch then, to call something a “memory” which was never experienced at the time. What Rieff describes is, at best, not historical memory but historical Mandela Effect.

Rieff then takes a balanced view of Spain’s pacto del olvido, essentially an amnesty for the crimes of the Civil War, and, according to Rieff, a pragmatic necessity for persuading Francoists to allow transition to democracy. Yet let’s look at what sides are being balanced. On one hand, the demands of authoritarians to have their crimes forgiven before they allow liberalisation of their society and on the other, well, truth and justice. While there are arguments that once something like that is in place it can be more harmful to remove it, it’s strange to see this kind of ambivalence over what is essentially cut and dried:

The Association [for the Recovery of Historical Memory] was also probably right when it claimed that 21st-century Spain no longer needs the pacto del olvido

Still more concerning is the justification for another act of (admittedly temporary) forgetting:

just as when the documentary The Sorrow and the Pity finally aired on French television it soon became clear that France had changed sufficiently that the truth about what had happened during the Nazi occupation caused no grievous harm to the country’s moral or historical ecology.

Forgetfulness here, quite explicitly means forgetting what The Sorrow and the Pity portrays - crimes perpetrated by France. Rather than, as in the opening story from Belgrade, forgetting your pain at the hands of an enemy being implied as a preventative for genocide, here, we are reminded how important it is for a nation to forget the pain and genocide it has caused, for the sake of its “moral or historical ecology”. Rieff declines to explain what one of those actually is, but it seems unlikely that either morality or history is served particularly well by erasing past sins. 

Speaking of both erasure and French historical crimes, Rieff quotes an unexpected source:

[J]ust as the 19th‑century historian Ernest Renan argued, to the extent these can be strengthened by collective remembrance, it is of no importance whether the memories in question are historically accurate. 

Yet, Renan famously talks about something else as well as memory, and it is particularly strange to omit it.

Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation and it is for this reason that the progress of historical studies often poses a threat to nationality. Historical inquiry, in effect, throws light on the violent acts that have taken place at the origin of every political formation, even those that have been the most benevolent in their consequences. (What is a Nation?, p3)

These violent acts that “every French citizen has forgotten” are, Renan is specific, “St. Bartholomew’s Day and the thirteenth-century massacres in the Midi.” (p4).

And here we see the danger to our historical and moral ecology, not just of Rieff’s analysis, but of both remembering and forgetting: selectivity. Returning to the anecdote at the beginning, even with this powerful opening Rieff doesn’t find the time to explain how a grudge borne by an (assistant of an) opposition politician could affect the actions of his rival in government. Rather, we are dealing here with association. Milošević, the Bosnian war, Sarajevo, ultra-nationalists, a year in the 1990s: all these things are presented but not linked. Rather, they evoke our memories (mine as a schoolboy) of watching the genocide unfold on the news, as spectators a continent away. Rieff, here, is appealing to our historical memories, the fuzzier the better, to say that even a memory as simple as a four-digit year is deadly in the wrong hands, and those wrong hands are not like ours. Throughout the piece, Rieff studiously avoids a phenomenally important moral distinction: between forgetting what has been done to you and forgetting what you have done.

It’s strange to base a utopian vision on the end of Barbarella, where we discover that “an Angel has no memory”, and it’s even stranger that it’s the most memorable line in the film. I suppose it reminds us that we aren’t angels and we do have memories. Without the luxury of forgetfulness, humans may have to make do with forgiveness, a different longread altogether. The “hard work of forgiveness” is mentioned once, the distinctions between it and forgetting not at all. Any question of forgiving without forgetting, reconciling without rewriting, is absent. However valuable reconciliation might be, it’s Truth and Reconciliation that works.

Rieff, understandably, has not forgotten what he saw. He’s not forgotten the lessons he learned about other people’s and other nations’ ancient hatreds. But Joan of Arc and William Wallace are not memories, they are legends. The tussle over the American Civil War is as much about the failure of the South to remember the North’s - or for that matter the slaves' - narrative as it is about its refusal to forget its own. Even his criticism of the Islamic view of crusaders doesn’t hinge on overactive memories, but on forgetfulness of how the events were recorded at the time and willingness, not to remember narratives, but to write them. He neglects to mention how convenient historical forgetfulness can be: how soon disgraced politicians find themselves back in the cabinet, how much Oriel College wished the Rhodes thing would just blow over, how quickly the documents of British imperial crimes found their way into the shredder.

This longread is not an argument against preserving memories but against inventing and shaping them. The solution to every grudge, every one-sided narrative, every hatred Rieff describes is not less memory but more. More accurate memories, more empathic memories, more memories from those you should forgive and/or beg for forgiveness. In the spirit of post-truth politics, Rieff never evaluates whether the accuracy of these memories makes a difference to his pragmatic decision to junk them.  Yet every dangerous historical memory Rieff puts forward (including, though this might surprise him, his own) is at least partly and often entirely a fabrication, as he often makes quite clear. They are fictions and selective memories, and he would be right to argue against the harms, distortions and political instrumentalisation of those. But what destroys false memories is true memories. The cure for sloppy history is better history. The self-serving, selective narratives of old grievances he presents as so harmful are, at their heart, manipulative deceptions, and nothing makes you quite so vulnerable to deception and manipulation as a short memory.

[3tznius5this-deactivated2018010]

Let’s Talk About Zionism

off the back of a discussion that happened on facebook I wanted to compile some examples of different Jewish perspectives I knew on how they relate to ‘zionism’. Mainly to highlight that 1. this is a Jewish word the precludes any aspect of the modern state of Israel. 2. Jews are not monolith, and thus just because you know one accepted way a Jew relates to it, doesn’t mean you have the whole picture. & 3. (probably the most important one) that there is a systematic cross purposes happening when you have groups of activists who have only come across the word ‘zionism’ or ‘zionist’ inside the strict paradigm of acceptable I/P conflict discourse. (By which I mean, where pro-Palestine western discourse has dominated the definition of this word by unilaterally equating it with complicity, support & tolerance of violence against Palestinians). 

“I’m a Zionist..” what it could mean when a Jewish person says this:

1. I’m saying this because I support the state of Israel, including its policy and sanctions against the Palestinians, and believe that the modern state of Israel should expand and control all territories.

2. I’m saying this because even though I do not support the modern state of Israel, and I abhor what is happening to the Palestinians, I believe that the Jews who currently live there should not be forced to leave. 

3. I believe in the Jewish right for self determination, that is my end goal but I truly wish it could be established in a way that brings solace to both the Palestinians and the Jews who currently live there. I am open to a one state or two state solution as long as the end goal is a homeland for the Jewish people and the end of mistreatment against Palestinians.

4. I’m saying this because my family were forced out of Egypt/Yemen/another mena country, and to suggest that we have to go back to the people who mistreated us is violent, and thus the treatment of Palestinians can only get better when mena countries end their own antisemitism.

5. I don’t support the modern state of Israel, or the politics, however I’m a religious Jew who believes in the commandment of not ‘insulting’ Israel, and using the term zionism best encapsulates that for me. 

6. This word represents revolutionary unity between Jews in the face of antisemitism as codified by Herzl (& others), even though I reject most ways in which it is used now by the modern state of Israel, it is an important and historic word to my people in a political manner and I refuse to give it up. 

7. I am very critical of the Israeli government, and I wish (although I don’t always know how) for peace and better living standards for Palestinians, simultaneously however Israel is the epicentre of the Jewish world (even if I’ve never been there) and I don’t think modern politics can detract from that.

8. I never use to use the word zionist but ever since the UN ruled antisemitic and ahistorical statements denying the Jewish history in Israel I realised that anti-zionism is in fact often antisemitic, for me it is only by working with other zionists that we can change the future of Israel to a more peaceful one.

9. I plan to make aliyah one day, this doesn’t mean I agree with everything the government is doing or that it is fair that the Palestinians have had to suffer. I still plan to join the Jewish nation and be able to live religiously near our ancient sites.

10. There are pogroms/riots against Jews/”anti-Israel” demonstrations that chant things like “gas the Jews” where I live right now. I never planned to go to Israel but I am now. It is sad that me & my community are giving up our diaspora community, I am glad Israel exist for us to flee to.

11. Since the diaspora community in [x] (for example, Yemen) has been completely obliterated in the face of violence and forced conversion to Islam, even though I don’t live in Israel I believe it’d be wrong to not support it as that is the only place where my family’s culture still exists through no fault of their own. To me the Jews didn’t create Israel, they were forced there & thus it’s insulting that we are treated as the ‘one true oppressors’ in this discourse.

12. I have family in Israel, to not be a zionist would be saying I want them to be harmed/that if they were murdered that would be just. 

13. Because so many Jews were forced to flee their countries into Israel, to not be a zionist would be saying I think they deserve to be made into refugees/sent back to countries that seek to enact violence on them. That doesn’t mean I support the government of Israel however.

14. I am a convert and part of my conversion meant joining a community that sees Israel as their ancestral homeland. Calling myself a zionist helps me feel close to me (new) identity and is my personal tie to this history. 

15. I am Israeli, no matter what I believe politically this inherently makes me a zionist because I live here & do not wish to be murdered here. 

“I’m Not a Zionist…” this could mean any of the following:

1. I do not support the state of Israel, although I of course don’t want the Jews living there to be ethnically cleansed, the most important thing is to focus on the plight of Palestinians right now.

2. I love Israel, and I fully support the state of Israel including its sanctions against the Palestinians because I believe that’s the only way to keep hamas at bay - who themselves enact violence against Palestinians - I’m not a zionist though as I never plan to make aliyah.

3. I have visited Israel/plan to visit Israel & I see it as a Jewish historical place, I don’t feel like I know enough about politics to have an informed opinion on it though, and I am sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. For this reason I just tend to say I’m not a zionist.

4. I used to call myself an anti-zionist but have since realised that anti-zionism is a movement entrenched in antisemitism and after being systematically abused and belittled for merely being a Jew - even when I openly said I’m anti-zionist - I have given up the title & now say non-zionist.

5. I believe in the Jewish homeland, and that it should be Israel. One part because it is our ancestral home, another part because that’s where Jews live now. I don’t support the actions of the government however, so I choose not to call myself a zionist in light of that. 

6. I am really tired of being dragged into the I/P debate just because I’m a Jew, so I say this to try and get goyim to leave me alone. 

7. I think the time of the usefulness of the word ‘zionism’ is over, and instead we should be looking at the viability of a bi-national state. 

8. I support the right for Jewish self determination, and that Israel is our ancestral homeland, furthermore I think that modern pro-Palestinian activism is often antisemitic and ignores the fact that destabilising Israel will lead to a genocide of the Jewish people who live there. However, many people who use the term zionist are racist/believe things I don’t believe in, so I don’t associate with that word.

9. I’m frum* and to me zionism is a secular word and movement that I don’t associate with, this doesn’t really tell you anything about my politics however. (**note to goyim: frum means ‘religious’ in yiddish, but is better translated as part of a community that strictly observes religious law.)

10. I am Israeli, I don’t need to be zionist as I just have political opinions about my country. Zionism is more for people in diaspora.

“I’m anti-Zionist…” this could mean:

1. I do not support the modern state of Israel, I don’t support people who do, I actively fight the political movement of zionism & would be happy to see “Israel” dismantled and Palestine returned.

2. I believe in the Jewish history and ties to Israel, and I also understand why it was created, but for me Zionism stands for enacting violence on Palestinians and thus I will actively fight against it. 

3. Although I am not wholly comfortable with the term, I use anti-Zionist as goyishe activists would probably throw me out of left wing movements if I don’t constantly prove that I’m not a zionist. 

4. I am Israeli, thus when I say I’m anti-Zionist I obviously am not saying I want Israel to be dismantled, or for Israelis to be harmed, I am instead saying something about the political rights of Palestinians.

5. I think Zionism has come to dominate too much of the Jewish identity, for that sake I distance myself from it. This doesn’t say very much about my political opinions.

6. I don’t want Israel to be destroyed, and I fear for the lives of Jews who live in diaspora and may not be able to flee there if Israel were to change, I am also fearful for the lives of Israelis as Israel’s neighbours have often promised death upon them and hamas’ charter has been one of wishing genocide upon Jews. However, I don’t ever want to go to Israel myself, I don’t agree with the government, and in any way I can I support the pro-Palestinian activism. 

7. Everything about Israel makes me really embarrassed and angry, I wish Israel would stop its violent actions as in the long run it is Jews like me in diaspora that face the brunt of it. 

8. It makes me really angry that right wing politicians and bigots can be antisemitic and even enact/incite violence against Jews, but just because they ‘support Israel’ Jewish safety is ignored by the left, and many Jewish institutions will ignore them in hopes of not rocking the boat. 

9. To me it is a simple binary: do you accept what the modern state of Israel is doing now? If yes: you’re a zionist. If no, you’re an anti-zionist. I fall on the latter, but that doesn’t actually tell you about the other layers of opinion I may have. 

To write this I genuinely just ran through all my Jewish friends and tried to summarise their position and sort it into the three headings. As you can see, from just one British Jew in London, I rub shoulders with a multitude of opinions, feelings & perspectives on Israel. And none of these are even supposed to adequately sum up even one Jew’s feelings on the place Israel or the word zionism. 

Hopefully those reading will see why I get so frustrated when they assume that Jews are either sharing the same opinion on the word zionism, or that they are talking about the same thing Jews are when we use it. 

Finally I will say: zionism is a Jewish word, for my own sake I have a complicated and not particularly happy relationship with it. However, I don’t believe any non-Jew have the right to take away the Jewish control over its definitions. This is especially the case as ‘zionist’ is more easily used as a placeholder for Jew, to the extent that the stormfront created ‘zio’ was in fact common place in ‘anti-zionist’ spaces for a long time & used even by ‘woke’ leftists. Asking goyim to stop using zionism as a catch all term to rile against in regards to Israel doesn’t detract anything from pro-Palestinian activism, the activism itself is still there unless your support for Palestinians was just preformative, to show off your ‘wokeness’ or worse: because you’re explicitly or latently antisemitic and don’t want to give up the ‘acceptable’ means of manifesting that. 

[ralexmarshall]

Nothing to add to this apart from: probably incomplete

[languageoclock]

[charlesoberonn]

“Explain Freud’s structural model of the psyche”

[enmorestation-deactivated201712]

[captainsuckass-deactivated20211]

In Bath, an ancient city built by the Romans in the UK, their museum of the bath house included not only a gravestone that talked about a soldier who was Dutch and came all the way from his homeland but also the almost complete skeleton of a man from modern day Syria who had been buried on site. Further tests of the skeleton and examination of his teeth found that he had wear associated with consumption of sugar, something only people with wealth had access to at the time.

[latining]

This is great, but forgets that Britain had been trading with Carthage (Northern Africa) since at least 250 BC—almost 300 years before the Roman invasion.

[alexicon-art]

Ozymandias

my nam is King of ancient land and haf my face is under sand

and on a stone it can be read “the World is mine” but now I’m ded

(Sorry everyone who reads this. I couldn’t stop myself.)

[coralmarks-deactivated20170821]

these are my predictions for how the right wing will evolve in 2014

[ralexmarshall]

Scarily accurate

[sophiamcdougall]

So suddenly, as you do, I decided to translate an Anglo-Saxon poem.

(It’s my favourite. And it feels relevant.)

DEOR  Wayland knew wretchedness among the worms That brave earl felt bitter pain, Sorrow and longing were his fellows; Wintercold wrack. Grief gripped him Nithad had laid bonds on him, Upon the better man!

That passed by and so may this.

Beadhilde’s heart was not so sore For her dead brothers as for herself. That she was with child she knew. But never what to think, or what to do.

That passed by and so may this.

Matilda’s moans, so many – We remember them. The Lady of Geat, And her sad love, that stole her sleep.

That passed by and so may this.

Thirty winters Theodric ruled. The Maerings will not forget!

That passed by and so may this.

Remember Eormanric’s wolflike mind, How he scourged the land of Goths? That was a grim king! So many sat, wrapped in sorrows, Wretched in thought, wishing always For the kingdom’s freedom.

That passed by and so may this.

When you sit suffering, Your joy all gone, your mind all dark, When it seems endless, may you remember How God goes through the world And always to some brings glory And to some their share of pain.

And of myself, what should  I say? For a while I sang my songs among the Hedenings.   Dear to my lord, and Deor was my name. A good life it was, as winters passed. Another, skilled in songs, has taken What once I had, and all that I was promised.

That passed by, and so may this.

[ralexmarshall]

The Cat Is Simultaneously Dead, and Also Dead

Which is a worse possibility? That Trump’s Muslim ban is fake? Or that it’s real? That it’s a clever “headfake”, designed to test the loyalty and pliability of his institutions and legitimate his authoritarianism, or that it’s just a chaotic and racist regime doing what it always said it would from the start do and wanted to do from the start and said it wanted to do from the start? To quote Twitter quoting Žižek quoting Stalin, they’re both worse. More to the point, they’re both true.

More to the point, the Trump camp is adopting a policy strategy that has already worked like a dream in the world of online and offline discourse. The difference is, now the alt-right have power, they no longer need to phrase it as a joke.

We don’t need to be surprised that a clique of fascists and neoliberal militarists actively wants the policy they’re enacting to keep out a racial/religious group that they’re also bombing from the air. We don’t need to find complex alternative motives, any more than you need to explain why a toddler wants to eat sweeties. As Jake Fuentes points out:

We craft the ban to be about 20% more extreme than we actually want it to be — say, let’s make the explicit decision to block green card holders from defined countries from entering the US, rather than just visa holders. We create some confusion so that we can walk back from that part later, but let’s make sure that it’s enforced to begin with.

This is a strategy anyone who’s ever sold a used car or shopped on a flea market or watched a cartoon set in a fantasy Arabian marketplace knows: you haggle by starting at a better price than you expect. This is not new information. Fuentes is also right that Trump has “just tested the country’s willingness to capitulate to a fascist regime”, that by butting heads with these institutions he can test and increase their willingness to give him what he wants. But let’s not fool ourselves: Toddlers also demand sweeties to see what Mummy will let them have and get away with. What Trump wants is what he’s using for the test. Trump wants to test and advance his ability to pass racist policies, so he can pass racist policies. Yes, he is using the Wall and the Muslim Ban to pave the way for other things, but these other things are going to look an awful lot like the Wall and the Muslim Ban.

But James Butler is also right that 

What is dangerous is to assume is that [Steve Bannon] is doing it from a position of impenetrable strength or as a ‘test’ for some other grand plan lurking in the darkness: it is equally plausible, and perhaps more so, that the administration is a ramshackle mess and gambling that the sheer exercise of power will help smooth its way.

Maybe there is a Grand Plan. Maybe there isn’t. But what we know is that a Grand Plan isn’t necessary. The alt-right - which, let’s be honest, includes Trump - are just repeating what worked for them and got their man into the White House.  A cool cartoon mole explains this really well on Twitter. What distinguishes the alt-right from your common or garden Nazis is the protective layer of irony. The studied use of under- and over-statement, where a speaker (or more likely, a poster) meticulously hides their actual position behind jokes.

Anyone who has ever heard Jeremy Clarkson, or especially Richard Hammond, make a joke knows that you don’t just need to joke about what you believe. You can also joke about how strongly, or how far you believe it. Human punching bag Richard Spencer very deftly managed to signal his approval of the Quebec shooting, without ever signalling his approval of it. When a cartoon frog in an SS uniform approaches you on twitter to tell you that the Holocaust didn’t happen, and should happen again, they aren’t trying to win you round to that position. They aren’t even necessarily serious about believing it. They are trying to undo the situation where the idea that the Holocaust was real, and bad is beyond question. The Holocaust delegitimised racism, fascism, eugenics, nationalism, authoritarian personalities and many other components of their ideology. Their goal is to de-delegitimise it. You don’t need to be serious to do that. Being serious actually doesn’t help at all. To be serious about a political position means being ready to set it out rationally and defend it. To joke about it doesn’t.

Funnily enough, Fuentes’ numerical estimate seems to be the same as mine: before reading the article I told a friend that the alt-right strategy is not to “tone it down”, and argue 80% of your real position for the sake of decency. The alt-right strategy is to say 120% of what you believe and pass the whole thing off as a joke. This isn’t new either, or exclusive to the right, or to people who are always wrong. Žižek does it when he quotes and equivocates about the Soviet Union, half critical, half defensive, and half serious, though you never know which half. Thomas More does it, when he calls his perfect society “Utopia” - a Greek phrase meaning not “a perfect place”, but “no place”. But rather than, like the alt-right, hiding what they truly believe, every Utopia or Erewhon or News from Nowhere openly admits what they believe, and that they don’t think it’s feasible in practice. The big joke is to hide exactly where it becomes completely unworkable. Where the left and our winking, shrugging utopians attack established norms of realism, the right and its irony-Nazis attack established norms of, you know, whether gassing Jews and lynching blacks and electrocuting homosexuals is actually ok.

Who knows if the Wall is feasible, when it will cost $15 billion dollars, and when Mexico has already refused to pay for it? “I will build a wall and make Mexico pay for it” is true utopian trolling. It doesn’t have to be a serious policy. It just has to say “I will be belligerent towards immigrants from Mexico and belligerent towards Mexico about immigrants”. Trump jokes, he does comic nods and expressions, he has the same amusing over-the-top arrogance as Kanye West, and almost certainly with the same self-awareness. I doubt Trump has ever set foot on /pol/ or 8chan or been sexually aroused by My Little Pony. But when it comes to his way of mixing humour and political conviction, and when it comes to the use of overreach as a strategy, Trump is as alt-right as any other Nazi frogboy. It’s just now the alt-right’s overreach is outrageous policies, not outrageous jokes.

Don’t dismiss this as dead-cat politics. If Trump has a secret agenda then he is hiding it in EXTREMELY plain sight. When his regime drops a dead cat on the table, it’s also because he really wants there to be a dead cat on the table. The dead cat on the table is a plan to get a dead cat on the table, and also to kill more cats.

[melo-maniaco]

I’ve been doing it wrong the whole time

[ralexmarshall]

German version of the “No Eye Contact on the Underground” stickers

[norskenerden]

Animal sounds in Norwegian

I saw a post about animal sounds in other countries (can’t remember who posted it), and decided to make a post about it in Norwegian. Hope you’ll enjoy.

Sheep: bæ

Pig: nøff

Cow: mø

Cat: mjau

Chicken: pip

Dog: voff

Horse: vrinsk

Lion: brøl

Owl: uhu

Fish: blob

Feel free to add some more if you want to.

[ralexmarshall]

Vital information in any language.

[ralexmarshall]

[rangordnung]

Hitler told Hermann Rauschning, a Prussian who briefly worked for the Nazis before rejecting them and fleeing the country, that he had admired much of the thinking of the revolutionaries he had known as a young man; but he felt that they had been talkers, not doers. “I have put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun,” he boasted, adding that “the whole of National Socialism” was “based on Marx”. Marx’s error, Hitler believed, had been to foster class war instead of national unity — to set workers against industrialists instead of conscripting both groups into a corporatist order. His aim, he told his economic adviser, Otto Wagener, was to “convert the German Volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists” — by which he meant the bankers and factory owners who could, he thought, serve socialism better by generating revenue for the state. “What Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism failed to accomplish,” he told Wagener, “we shall be in a position to achieve.”

Daniel Hannan, “Leftists become incandescent when reminded of the socialist roots of Nazism” (via rangordnung)

Marx's error, Hitler believed, was the entire content of Marxism. Hitler, however, believed that National Socialism could apply the rest.

Daniel Hannan is a buffoon.

[we-kant-even]

This is a picture of Ludwig Wittgenstein playing the banjo.

Send it to your loved ones.