Persistent cycles of historical catastrophe suggest that the foolish gambits of the autocrats do not make history anywhere near so much as history makes them. Small consolation as it may be when witnessing the horrors and brutality currently being unleashed on the Western end of the Great Steppe, I find it helps a little to […]
The autocrat’s gambit is to create a vacuum between fact and fiction and there, in worlds and words of half-truth and twilight misrepresentation, to leverage this difference and there make for themselves a golden palace of power and lies. The amount of information and energy invested in obscuring the facts will eventually be measured in […]
It didn’t work out all that well the last time it happened and notwithstanding that nothing is quite so human as the cyclical cadence of recurring ideological catastrophes, but I honestly wonder how long a government can grind their people into the dust of poverty and oppression before they rise up and find their own […]
On the topic of autocratic ideology, it is no long stretch of the imagination to understand that good ideas sell themselves, bad ideas require a little more persuasion but it is only the truly ugly ideas that kick in your door and point a gun at you.
As an authoritarian regime always and implicitly depends for self-validation upon the presence of external and internal threats, where it does not find them it will manufacture them. This is a narcissistic pathology, writ large. The essential and interior psychological surface as self-definition of an individual (or organisational system as political abstraction of nation) is […]
All civilisation is built upon the toss of a coin.
People want to be led (just as they want to be deceived). It is a herding instinct and we all surrender to it at times. Even leaders are led – not by others, necessarily, but by the constraints and active self-surveillance that an awareness of the fragility of their tenure as leaders entails. To be […]
Context: The First into the dark (link to pdf) Fascism as acute and pathological fear of otherness is perhaps nowhere so clearly illustrated as an interrogation of these facts reveal. I do wonder if the identification of historical horrors at times causes us to distance ourselves from them, even as we warily unveil and as […]
To what extent does the concept or operational implementation of boundaries and nation states quite necessarily both depend on and inadvertently amplify the ongoing and relentless human displacements we currently observe? We might say that the existence and sustainable continuity of boundaries and associated patchwork quilt of international relations (quite beyond the intermittent discontinuities of […]
Context: Jonathan P. Baird: Nazi Germany and the fall of law It is a curious property of the dissociative logic and intractable pathology of any extreme ideological position, not just to sweep along compliant and unwitting collaborators who see in the asserted “strength” of their hollow belief system a reflexive framework upon which to hang […]
As with any other cyclic return – including conflict, revolution and large-scale systemic collapse – a holistic and complex systems analysis suggests a few salient points. Feudal systems of warring tribes return again and again (wearing different uniforms and wielding new vocabularies or other socioeconomic and technological accessories) because they are the optimally-concise self-organisational method […]
The moving frame, having moved, drags itself ever onwards…
Daedelus Kite 