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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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 Nicholas Carr, eminent cartographer of the data mine in all its hallucinatory caverns. An excerpt from a recent post on his endlessly illuminating substack:
Let us turn those last two words into a declaration of independence:
DEFY DATAFICATION!
Now comes the voice of the philosophically inclined mycologist Merlin Sheldrake, via a few excerpts from a mini-colloquium organized by the rich mycelial network known as Orion magazine:
SYMBIOTIC WITH-NESS
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Now comes an Open Letter, signed by hundreds of Nobel laureates, philosophers, scientists & artists, including the entire editorial staff here at DP:
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We are grateful to a DP correspondent for alerting us to the below video study in abject ethical & moral vacuity.
Once this wave of lethal madness recedes, the judgement of history will be severe regarding all those who silently grinned and smirked while inflicting senseless cruelty upon the weak, the vulnerable and the poor.
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Desperado Philosophy 