We are grateful to an esteemed DP correspondent for guiding our attention towards a recent lecture delivered by London Review of Book’s US editor Adam Shatz, author of The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon. A brief excerpt below:
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The entire lecture is worthy of close consideration, and is available here.
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Following the most recent Minnesota murder committed in the name of “law enforcement,” we relay the following few paragraphs from Timothy Snyder, truth-speaker and author of On Tyranny:
The lies begin as clichés, memes that are pounded into our heads by the government and by those in the media who repeat them, mindlessly or with malice.
One of these cliches is “law enforcement,” which is uttered over and over like a incantation. “Law enforcement” is not a noun. It is not a thing in the world. It is an action.
And action is something that we have a right to see and judge for ourselves. People enforcing the law do not wear masks. And people wearing masks who trespass, assault, batter, and kill are not enforcing the law.
They are violating it.
It is indeed the job of some local, state, and federal authorities to enforce the law. It is a disservice to them when federal employees carry out public executions. It is a greater disservice to them when such actions are defined as “law enforcement.”
The lies continue as provocative inversions, as what in On Tyranny I called “dangerous words”: these are, precisely, “terrorist” and “extremist.” These two words are known to us from history as those used by tyrants. And these are the words used by the Trump people to defame those killed by their polices.
This is their “messaging,” their banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt called it.
Or the evil of banality, as Václav Havel said. Words turned into reality with the complicity of those who hear them.
Those who actively lie are directly complicit in the deaths that just happen and in any deaths to come. But those in media who choose to treat propaganda as the story, to begin from lies rather than from events, are also complicit. The border is the crack, the lie is the wedge, and the wedge is made up of people — of us.
Words matter, uttered first or repeated. They create an atmosphere, they normalize — or they do not. We can choose to see, to call things by their proper names, to call out people who lie. We have to.
The moral horror of those killings is enough. But there is a political logic as well. And the two are connected. Those who resist the lawlessness and the lies are doing right. And they are giving a second chance to the endangered American republic.
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OUTING THE LIE: EXHIBIT A
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OUTING THE LIE: EXHIBIT B
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OUTING THE LIE: EXHIBIT C
UNARMED VICTIM ON KNEE SHOT IN BACK BY MASKED “LAW ENFORCEMENT”
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VIGIL FOR ALEX PRETTI
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Now comes Michael J. Thompson, Professor of Political Theory at William Paterson University, with a few excerpts from the introduction to his book, Twilight of the Self: The Decline of the Individual in Late Capitalism. Though published in 2022, the truth and dire implications of his central thesis have become ever more apparent with each passing year.
PORTRAIT OF GLORY, KILLED
The entire book is worthy of close consideration, and is available here.
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On this day of Thanksgiving, we relay a few sage paragraphs from the ever vigilant, luminous & indefatigable Heather Cox Richardson:
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Now comes documentary filmmaker Lutz Stautner and sound artist Ludwig Berger with a film, relayed from Emergence Magazine:
“In the trickling, creaking, and gurgling heard through hydrophones and contact microphones, sound artist and composer Ludwig Berger listens for the voice of Switzerland’s dying Morteratsch Glacier. Directed by Lutz Stautner, this short film follows Ludwig on one of his many visits to the glacier, where he gathers its hidden sounds, the pop of centuries-old air bubbles and the groan of ice, inviting us into the intimacy of listening to more-than-human voices. One hundred years from now, we may only be able to hear the sounds of glaciers through recordings like these.”
Within the film’s narration, Berger says, “The more alive the glacier seems, the more the glacier is actually dying.”
Highly recommended.
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Here at DP, we have been passing around our well-thumbed copy of Hannah Arendt’s remarkably prescient Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1950.
Below follows the entire preface to the First Edition, with emphasis added by DP:
We have been here before.
Reject, refuse, resist.
Connect, create, collaborate.
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Now comes Eileen Crist, whose writings we consider of paramount importance during these times of environmental polycrisis, with “life’s incalculable extravaganza” crushed beneath the iron boot of human supremacism. Excerpts from a recent post on Earth Tongues:
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Now comes Adam Curtis with a few lucid ruminations in the conversational vicinity of his most recent archival TV excavation project, Shifty.
Highly recommended:
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Desperado Philosophy 