Field Notes: It Is Happening Again
Editor’s note: Field Notes is a weekly roundup of social media writing by Nina Illingworth. Produced and curated by NIDC web-guru Scurvy, these articles feature highlights and links to blogs, journals, and ideas from Nina’s work across the internet.
Field Notes: It Is Happening Again…
Greetings and salutations, trick or treat, and other appropriate introductory phrases!
Given the ongoing dumpster-fire-outside-a-nuke-plant that is current Imperial Core society and how that is currently affecting the same people that are always targeted, the focus this week is going to be entirely unsurprising. There’s a scene from the series “Twin Peaks” that this whole thing keeps bringing to mind: “It is happening….. again!”. And sadly it’s very much like Brown Shirts v2 took inspiration from that episode; the same actress playing a look-alike of the first victim is killed again, by the same killer, in a way reminiscent of the original Laura Palmer killing and certainly disturbing AF.
I am, of course, talking about the further steps towards rounding up anyone who isn’t cis and sending them to…. not Martha’s Vineyard. Communists may be the first people we remember the nazis targeting, but that’s because our society is still very transphobic and don’t actually mind some people being made to go away.
On that happy note, let’s go.
Highlights
Nina-Bytes: Discreet Lies of Immense Proportions
Over the past eight years, I’ve spent a great deal of time writing about what I’ve now come to call the “tri-headed serpent” that threatens the larger labor class in our society. Broadly speaking these threats would be capitalism, its violent handmaiden fascism, and ruling class propaganda that prevents us from uniting to stop these threats to our very survival. Recent social and political developments in the Pig Empire have forced me to focus a lot on the rise of fascism, but since these three heads more or less share the same body, it’s important to stay focused on all three of these calamities simultaneously.
Today then, I’d like to share a couple of stories from left wing independent media that directly touch on murdering the planet for capitalism, but also indirectly expose the propaganda model media’s complicity in “leading us to our own doom.” First up, let’s look at this October 12th, 2022 feature by Sam Knight over on Truthout.
Lobbyists Admit Big Banks Don’t Plan to Honor Climate Pledges
The story here is simple enough; a powerful banking lobby group, The Bank Policy Institute, has publicly admitted that the banks they represent have zero intention of keeping the various “net zero” pledges they’ve made. Of course, we’ve already talked about why even these promises are wholly inadequate to prevent climate crisis and will likely usher us into an ecofascist future; but it really says something when the bankers call even genocidal half measures an “aspirational solution.” That’s not an exaggeration either, as our article notes:
“Specifically, the lobbying group rejected the notion floated by the agencies that regulations should ensure banks’ greenhouse gas commitments to the public “are consistent with their internal strategies and risk appetite statements.”
“The final guidance with respect to public communications should recognize the aspirational nature of external commitments and the fact that these commitments and plans will need to adapt over time as data and methodologies improve and external circumstances change,” the organization said.
The institute urged regulators to “establish realistic expectations with respect to public statements” and said the government “should calibrate its expectations as to the granularity between external statements and internal risk appetite statements accordingly.”
To be clear, I can’t say that as a student of left wing theory and Pig Empire history I’m particularly surprised by this development; the entire history of capitalism is about looting the commons for money, and leaving the labor class to deal with the fallout. Still, when influential capitalist institutions that literally have the power to dictate policy to your government start openly admitting they’re fine with destroying all life on earth while pretending to be part of the solution, you’d think that might merit a little notice in the larger discourse.
We’ll come back to this idea in a moment; in the meantime let’s look at our second article. This October 23rd, 2022 post from Andy Rowell shared on Common Dreams looks at where Big Oil is sitting on the verge of the controversial COP27 climate summit coming this November.
Ahead of COP27, Big Oil Climate Denial More Potent Than Ever
Once again, this isn’t really a complicated story. In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Chevron CEO Mike Worth pretty much went off; and let the cat out of the bag in the process. Promising to drill more oil, not less, and low key pushing climate science denial, Worth and presumably the company he runs, went on the offensive:
“He told the FT that western governments had made a global oil and gas crunch worse by “doubling down” on climate policies that had made energy markets “more volatile, more unpredictable, more chaotic.”
And even though the UN has warned that we cannot afford to drill for more oil and gas if we want a livable future, Worth predicted that fossil fuels are “going to run the world tomorrow and five years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now.”
He also fudged his belief over whether fossil fuels were the primary driver of climate change. “The IPCC concludes that anthropogenic climate change is a real thing and that the use of fossil fuels has contributed, and so we accept that,” he said. But then, according to the Financial Times, Worth “rejected the blame attributed to oil companies” for providing “a legal product that complies with all the laws”, and pledged that Chevron would increase oil and gas supply.”
Please keep in mind that these aren’t random internet cranks or even our esteemed Congresswoman from Q-Anon. These guys are absurdly rich and powerful people in industries, banking and fossil fuels, that drive the entire Pig Empire economy. They can, and do, move governments to forge the rules under which we operate a capitalist society. And they’re more or less admitting they plan to kill us all in the not-so long term, because there are profits to be made right now. Furthermore, these are not isolated incidents; they are part of a consistent pattern of capitalist lies uttered while the ruling class locks us all into climate apocalypse proactively.
Alright then; so how does this involve the propaganda model media? Well just ask yourself if your favorite corporate propaganda outlet disguised as news, even reported on either of these events? If so, did they explicitly put it in the context of an open plan to murder billions like I have? Of course not. But you can be sure that those same corporate media outlets, including the ones who portray themselves as somehow “liberal” in their pervading ideology, have told you about these company’s climate pledges, and will continue to share their lies with you in the future.
In other words, billionaire investors and the companies they control are actively conducting an open genocide against perhaps all of humanity, and the corporate media they also control, are busy covering it up. It’s a closed loop of homicidal capitalist f*ckery; mass murder is on the menu and the capitalist order is happily shuffling us all towards the rotating knives in anticipation of the meal. The simple truth is that it’s not a question of fighting capitalism, or fascism, or climate catastrophe; in a reactionary society where the profit motive rules all, these problems are one and the same beast and must be destroyed together.
Surviving Neofeudalism is About Understanding Class
While the fight against fascism can be organized along ideological lines, across class, the same is not true for the fight against climate crisis; which is a fight against capitalism itself. As in the case of fascism however, here too we encounter the work of capitalist propaganda and the miseducation of the labor class. This is particularly prevalent in the settler colonial outposts of the Pig Empire; in a country like Amerikkka, children are taught that our society has transcended class entirely, and indeed that the very concept is outdated, quaint and extremely British. Of course upon reaching adulthood and entering the labor force, Americans quickly learn that class and class-based exploitation remain all too real; but even then they are actively encouraged to accept politically useless definitions of class that focus on salary tiers, or education levels; things that are often symptoms of class striations in our society, but are not class themselves.
This naturally creates a knowledge vacuum, which keeps the larger labor class divided and unable to effectively oppose capitalist predation; even when it threatens all life on Earth. Furthermore, fascists and their poseur propagandists who grift left have also responded to that vacuum, seeking to fill the discourse around class in the Pig Empire with an aesthetic (and false) understanding of who is working class, known as “producerism.” This corrupted class theory tries to identify billionaire venture capitalists and business owners as “workers,” while purposely excluding jobs overwhelmingly staffed by marginalized people; including teachers, service industry workers, and nurses.
At the end of the day class is about whether or not you must submit to being exploited for profit in order to survive. It’s about the bosses, versus the help; and anyone on the wrong side of that line knows full well who is who. Climate crisis is about capitalism, and capitalism is about class; which means the battle to save the planet, is a battle between the wretched of the earth, and those who extract wealth from their toil. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something; and that something will definitely kill you.
The War on Sharing: Godwin Wept
One of the themes I find myself constantly returning to in my anti-fascist analysis, is the idea that because Pig Empire society has been willfully misinformed about both the history of fascist movements, and the process by which they are installed into power, we are collectively unable to properly recognize fascist political tactics and methodology being deployed in real time. Although the motivations for this deception lie deep in Western colonial history, the particularly Amerikkkan form of this simplified understanding of fascism likely comes from both an enthusiastic embrace of capitalist triumphalism in our society, as well as the reactionary influence of anti-Communist propaganda, and open alliances with fascist regimes during the Cold War.
The effects of this “education” however, are far easier to identify than the origins of this disease. Having been taught a false history of how fascism happened, and an extremely narrow definition of what fascism looks like, folks in the modern Pig Empire are more or less encouraged to adopt the idea that “it’s not fascism until Hugo Boss uniforms and funny little moustache” or more ominously, “it’s not fascism until death camps.” Obviously this is ridiculous; there have after all been fascist movements and dictators who’ve seize power long after the fall of the Third Reich, and the Nazis were certainly still fascists before they began the Holocaust, and indeed, before they obtained political power in Germany. This misinformation about fascism is mostly harmless if all you’re doing is debating World War II history with your drunk uncle; but when false ideas about fascist movements cause a categorization failure that prevents a broader democratic society from even recognizing the fascist movement around them, let alone organizing to stop it, the threat to us all becomes very real, very quickly.
To find a couple of examples the show how this actually works, let’s return again to common misconceptions of how Nazism happened in Germany and briefly relate them to modern American politics.
First up, most Americans genuinely believe Adolf Hitler cast some sort of hypnotic spell over the German people in the interwar period, and the Nazi Party was elected to widespread acclaim. This in turn engenders the idea that as long as a fascist movement remains in the minority, and doesn’tget too popular, they’re not really all that dangerous. The truth however is that the fascists in Germany never won an election, not even the one they heavily rigged while in power; Hitler was appointed Chancellor by the reactionary ruling class, including most notably Paul von Hindenburg. Pondering what that might look like in America? How about a fascist political party refusing to certify election results they don’t agree with and then using six never-elected reactionary judges to sanctify it in the Supreme Court after the fact; or maybe just the actual 2000 U.S. Presidential election? A politically empowered fascist movement, backed by ruling class wealth and influence, is more than capable of seizing control of political power and abolishing democratic rights; this is in fact, more or less the way it has always happened in the history of fascism.
This plays into a second popular misconception about fascist movements that actively clouds our ability to recognize the danger a burgeoning fascist movement presents; the myth that fascists are hyper-competent, disciplined machine men who know how to run a capitalist society. The idea here is that these are very serious, highly successful people and as such if the reactionaries in Pig Empire politics are absolutely shambolic clowns who can’t tell their own arse from their elbow, we have nothing to worry about.
In reality, every fascist movement in history has been full of fundamentalist cranks, losers, bigots, failed revolutionaries and thieves. As detailed in The Kaiser’s Holocaust by David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen, the Nazi party in particular was riddled with cultists, disgraced politicians, conspiracy theorists, failed colonial businessmen, child abusers, fascist street thugs, race scientists, and other deeply unserious people. Despite protestations to the contrary, Hitler himself wasn’t much of a train conductor; he was a lazy babbling weirdo who habitually slept in past noon. As books like Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction prove, the idea that fascists are somehow “good at the economy” is total bunk too. The only economic miracle fascists ever accomplish is looting wealth from their victims, and distributing it to their industrialist backers; it’s no accident “the Thousand Year Reich” only lasted twelve years. Now why does that bit sound so familiar to me?
In other words, just because the fascists in our society happen to be an unpopular minority, populated by an embarrassing series of crass, incompetent, elitist failsons who literally cannot run a message board properly, and organizing around bigoted fantasies that seem batshit crazy to the rest of us, doesn’t mean they can’t, or won’t, win what foolish liberals continue to define as “the culture war.” Fascism itself is not a conspiracy theory, it’s a very real, very terrifying thing that has happened in Pig Empire history, and seems poised to happen again. Laughter has never defeated an ascendant fascist movement; you beat fascists, by organizing against fascism. Neither your comprehension, nor your respect, is required for these people to seize power and unleash Hell on Earth.
I’m sorry kids, your history books lied; and if the folks around you don’t start waking up to that fact real soon, we’re all going to find out how the actual story went in real time.
Journal: For the Birds
Alright folks, I give up. My original plan was to briefly mention Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter in our Morning Meme post, and then forget about it for the rest of the day. This seemed like a pretty good idea at the time, but as it turns out most of my friends are still on Twitter; and all they want to talk about is what happens now that the billionaire fascist Afrikaner is taking over.
The truth is that I don’t know, but I can certainly guess the answer will be “nothing good” and the online fascist community sure does seem excited about all this; which is never a positive sign. Either way, I’ve already touched on why Musk buying Twitter is bad news for anyone in society who isn’t enjoying all this fascism, you can check it out here on Instagram:
Elon Musk Buying Twitter is a Win for Fascism
Alright, so with that out of the way, let’s stop and talk a little bit about why Musk purchasing Twitter might not matter as much in the long run as habitual users of the platform might think; myself included. How is that possible? Because a billionaire fascist can buy Twitter, but he can’t make people actually tweet; and apparently that’s a problem when your company’s business model depends on folks who tweet a lot. The other day I stumbled across a fascinating, if somewhat dry report over on Reuters that strongly suggests Elon just dropped forty-four billion dollars on a dying social media platform:
Twitter is losing its most active users, internal documents show
Oh my; isn’t that spicy? The short story here is that even before Musk offered to buy the whole platform, an internal Twitter study shows the company has been freaking out about a massive decline in activity by what they call “heavy tweeters,” since the pandemic; a group that apparently accounts for 90% of all tweets, and half of the company’s global revenue. What’s most shocking about this however is that when you dig into the story, you discover that Twitter defines a “heavy tweeter” as “someone who logs in to Twitter six or seven days a week and tweets about three to four times a week.”
At first I was astonished to learn that my constant stream of trashposting was driving the global Tweet economy, but once I finished going over the article a little more in my mind, a clearer picture of what exactly is going on here started to emerge. On an obvious surface level, it makes precisely zero sense that English-speaking Twitter users who don’t want to go outside because there’s a plague raging, would somehow have less time to tweet. Furthermore, I think there are significant clues in what the folks still on Twitter are tweeting about; clues that Reuters failed to put into context in this piece. Even if we just assume folks are bored of tweeting, it doesn’t make a lot of sense that tweets about news, sports, and entertainment are going down, but tweets about crypto-currencies and pornography are going up; just reading this report, it seems like Twitter is starting to feel a lot like 4Chan.
And that I think is the handle that mainstream analysts in the media, who are not “extremely online” as we say, really can’t grasp here. If Twitter wants to know “where did the Tweeters go” then they need look no further than the rise of fascism in the Pig Empire, and their own piss poor moderation policies.
Like let’s cut the crap here for a moment alright? We’re talking about a company that was already hemorrhaging even high profile celebrity users because they simply refuse to do anything about fascist propaganda and online harassment on their platform. This isn’t a new issue, it’s the single most defining issue in Twitter’s existence since roughly 2015. As someone who has been on Twitter throughout this entire time, I can tell you that after making the briefest of efforts to ban neo-nazi harassers in response to fascists organizing a literal coup attempt on their platform, the company more or less gave up sometime around last summer. Twitter remains a hive of abuse, eliminationist propaganda, harassment campaigns, bot networks, and some of the most crass scam advertising you’ll find anywhere on the internet.
In other words, Twitter appears to be dying because it’s not friendly to normal people, and the things normal people talk about. Twitter is however friendly to cranks, scammers, fascists, and abusers, who I can tell you from years of experience online, have no lives and are interested primarily in trolling, pornography, and yes, crypto-currencies. As I and many other observers from the left have written in the past, Twitter’s refusal to hire human content moderators because it’s vastly more expensive than using an algorithm, pretty much means this result was inevitable. If you build a platform that loves fascists who tweet garbage, you can’t complain when advertisers lose interest in pitching to frothing reactionary losers who never buy anything and actively drive their target customers away from the platform.
So the question then becomes, can Elon Musk reverse this trend? Given that he engages in reactionary harassment himself, has promised to un-ban several high profile fascists, and plans to cut up to 75% of Twitter’s human staff, I’d say the answer is an emphatic “no.” While posting traffic isn’t the only reason the Twitter platform has dominated social media for the past ten years, it’s certainly a factor. Twitter’s importance comes from the fact that the “official” and “famous” Pig Empire uses the platform; celebrities, news organizations, politicians, and large corporations use Twitter to speak to, and share with the world. Without those folks Twitter is just another online chat program, and whether edgelord fascist billionaires want to admit this or not, none of those people are going to log on every day to be called a pedophile and told to perish themselves by a some rando named PepeRWDSGroomerKilla2022.
In other words, Elon Musk probably can’t turn Twitter into a “popular” version of fascist Truth Social, because Twitter isn’t popular anymore, and it’s precisely because of the people who’re most pleased he’s buying the platform. While the impending loss of Twitter is undoubtedly sad for those poor souls still trying to scrape some value out of a reactionary social media platform that has always loved and catered to nazis, the real judgement day isn’t today. That day comes a year from now when Musk and the fascists who hang on his gonads realize their hero paid forty-four billion dollars for a lemon that’s no more relevant to the discourse than Parlor. And who will Elon and his acolytes have to blame then? Whoever it is, you can be certain you won’t find them on Twitter.
The Roundup
Beating Fascism, Capitalism, and Propaganda
Quickshot Quotations: It Was Never About the Facts
Quick Mix Anti-capitalist Climate Theory for the Whole Family
A Legacy of Right Wing Political Violence
FF&F: A Multi-Purpose Fascist Propaganda Blitz
Journal: Beating Fascism With a United Antifascist Front
Recommended Reading: All The Small Things
Video Recommendation: Courting Fascism
Nina-Bytes: The Impending Rule of Unreality
The Violence is the Point
Recommended Reading: Transmission
Recommended Reading: The Politics of Stochastic Terrorism
Neoliberalism and Fascism Reinforce Each Other
Scurvy’s Selection
This week is less of a specific episode selection and more a general podcast suggestion, and that’s “Native Opinion”, a long running news and current events podcast from “their own Native American perspective”. Michael Kickingbear, an enrolled member of the Mashantucket Pequot tribal nation of Connecticut and David GreyOwl, of the Echoda Eastern Band of Cherokee nation of Alabama, have been co-hosting the show since the beginning and have regularly reached out to other Native / American Indian voices to help get necessary information a wider audience. They also cover issues from both sides of the imposed colonial US/Canada border, pointing out they are frequently the same issue with a different face or manifestation.
Check them out here: nativeopinion.com
And here is their most recent episode:
As always, all writing featured in Highlights and The Roundup comes from Nina Illingworth. Scurvy’s selection is my weekly pick and the content shared there is the product and property of the listed creator, or creators. And with that, I’m out!
- Scurvy
Anarcho-humanist; DIY Cyborg
System-Administrator at NIDC;
“Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike” – Oscar Wilde
