#violent revolution

[formulas-fatal-to-your-mom]

[russia-libertaire]

"...the harsh, materialistic and 'nihilistic' criticism of the 1860s and 1870s is due not merely to the change in economic and social conditions ... but in at least equal measure to the prison walls within which Nicholas I had enclosed the lives of his thinking subjects. This led to a sharp break with the polite civilisation and the non-political interests of the past, to a general toughening of fibre and exacerbation of political and social differences. ... In due course there emerged a vast and growing army of practical revolutionaries, conscious - all too conscious - of the specifically Russian character of their problems, seeking specifically Russian solutions. ... Henceforth the Russian radicals accepted the view that ideas and agitation wholly unsupported by material force were necessarily doomed to impotence ... The experience obtained by both sides in the struggle during these dark years was a decisive factor in shaping the uncompromising character of the later revolutionary movement in Russia."

'Russia and 1848', in Russian Thinkers, by Isaiah Berlin

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

Kreator  -   Mind on Fire

[metalsongoftheday]

Wednesday, October 5: Kreator, “Servant in Heaven - King in Hell”

Mille Petrozza successfully reoriented Kreator in 2001 after nearly a decade of drift, but Violent Revolution didn’t simply revert to the straight thrash of Extreme Aggression.  Instead, tracks like “Servant in Heaven – King in Hell” mixed the aggression of old with traces of power metal, adding the latter’s clarity and focus to the former’s mayhem and fury.  It wasn’t that Petrozza was suddenly wailing like a Halford wannabe, but his gargling was more Chris Boltendahl than Chuck Billy, and he paced both his vocals and riffing such that everyone could follow what was happening.  No doubt Andy Sneap’s crystal production added an extra snap, but this was exactly what Kreator needed to sound like, and for the first time in a long time everyone sounded in sync, from Ventor’s charging drums to Petrozza’s newly anthemic chugging.  And indeed, “Servant in Heaven – King in Hell” and the rest of Violent Revolution offered a path forward for the band, one that surprised everyone by eventually bringing them to their highest levels of popularity.

[transrevolutions]

While overall I felt like the tbosas movie was well done, there's one part that really bothered me. When Sejanus gets involved with the rebels in the book, he's fully on board, stealing them ammo and weapons from the base, and planning to hold guards at gunpoint to free the prisoners. In the movie, however, he just wants to run away and then is surprised and upset by the fact that the rebels were planning an act of violence.

This doesn't seem like a major change, but from a political standpoint (as tbosas is a very political book), it's a big one and one I very much do not like.

In the text, Sejanus plays the role of the moral compass. Whereas both Coriolanus and Lucy Gray having complex and subjective motivations, Sejanus is always driven by wanting to do the right thing, even if it costs him. He acts as a baseline, keeping the readers from getting lost in endless loops of justification for atrocities just because Coriolanus's internal narration is rhetorically persuasive.

So when Sejanus (who up until this point has been relatively pacifist) joins up with the rebels in the book and agrees to participate in an act of revolutionary violence, the text is pointing out that that act of rebellion is morally permissible. That even violence against the oppressor class can be an altruistic action. Sejanus planning to fight the guards with the rebels is not a sign of his corruption, it's a sign of the fact that his society has become so corrupt that not doing it would be morally worse than doing it. After all, someone's going to die either way, so why not have it be the oppressors?

If movie!Sejanus is still occupying the role of the moral compass (which he seems to be), then his dismay at the possibility of the rebels using violence acts as a narrative condemnation of the violence, when the opposite is true in the book. The movie tries to make a distinction between the "good" dissenters (pacifist, nonviolent, morally superior) and the "bad" dissenters (violent radicals/terrorists). In the current political climate, this idea and narrative is extremely unsettling. And I'm disappointed they did this, but not surprised. Like the other Hunger Games movies, it was produced by a large media company, and they can't follow the satire of the book too closely lest people realize the fundamental irony of it. People in positions of power do not want to tell a story where violent activism is portrayed as moral--at least when it's against a society that obviously mirrors our own. (The brutalist architecture style is another complaint that I have, but that can be discussed in another post.)

Changing that seemingly small detail about Sejanus's involvement with the rebels doesn't do much to change the continuity of the storyline, but it does a lot to change the underlying message of his character and the story. This was almost certainly intentional, because the same sort of thing was done in the original trilogy movies as well. Companies are scared of subversive media because it makes them look like the 'bad guys' too, so they wrap rebellion in a lens of fantasy and moderatism.

[bunabi]

I wanna believe things will get better in our lifetime but this shit is a mess with literally no end in sight 🧍🏾‍♀️

[mssr-crumpled-paper]

Gale and revolution

Maybe a hot take and people might throw tomatoes at me but I can't get this out of my head after reading THG.

I found it really hard to relate or even sympathize with Peeta because for me, reading the books, Peeta didn't exist as a character outside of his relationship with Katniss.

But Gale, on the other hand, did.

It was obvious to me from the beginning that Peeta was a character made with the intention for everyone to adore him. And don't get me wrong, Peeta is great. Too great. Perfect and flawless like a sterile version of a human person. And I can only assume that since we're seeing him from Katniss's perspective, along with her very obvious crush on the bread boy, that he's very idealic in her mind.

Gale, on the other hand, immediately gets sorta dogged on in the narrative like 5 pages in. He gets mad at Madge for being more privileged, for being well-fed, well-raised, well-dressed, and all other well-verb'ed that he never got to experience. From the perspective of someone who grew up lower middle class, I related immediately to Gale first. He was flawed, and understandable, and real in the most uncensored way possible.

He was brutal, he was angry, and violent, and that made SENSE to me (not that it's not fucked up). Maybe it's because my country has only VERY RECENTLY suffered from American imperialism, but I understand completely his need for violence, retribution, and revenge. And considering this was written during the War on Terror, the kid to extremist pipeline allegory is not missed. In that way, Gale exists outside of the context of Katniss. Gale exists within the context of his people, systemic oppression, and a revolution.

Peeta however was none of that. He wasn't a revolutionary by any means (but of course he wasn't, he was a child). But he seemed almost lacking in that sense of community with his people. This may be because Peeta grew up fed, still. He ate bread, no matter how stale, and he only had 5 slips of his own name in the games. He's a compassionate person, very much so, but only insofar as his immediate surrounding. Peeta could be kind because being kind and passive doesn't cost him his family. It almost, but ultimately doesn't cost him Katniss.

Gale had to care for his own family, Katniss's family during the Games, and became the only other person providing hunted game for the district's market. He got his district out of the burning rubble. He watched family, and friends, and people he's cared about his whole life die in a fire. For a boy who's only know to hunt with his own two hands, how can one expect gentleness.

So when, inevitably, people view Gale explicitly and exclusively through his relationship with Katniss, it robs Gale of being his own character: a brother, a son, a victim, a revolutionary, a child. And I think that's a shitty way to view him LOL.

[short-wooloo]

The thing that really jumped out to me about Transformers One was how relevant Megatron and his "burn it down" view is in the current day

I see it so often, young (often leftist and/or communist) people who declare that the only solution is the destruction, at best not thinking about the innocents who will disproportionately suffer from it, and at worst deliberately ignoring the suffering, or worse declaring the death and suffering to be "acceptable losses"

(Spoilers under the cut)

And we see this in the film, Megatron has won, Sentinel Prime is beaten, injured, has been exposed as a fraud, and lost any support he had, but it's not enough for the newly christened Megatron, the only thing satisfactory to him is total, unnecessary destruction, he brutally kills Sentinel (there's something there to be said about revolutionaries declaring themselves judge, jury, and executioner), Murders Orion in the proccess, and has the proto-Decepticons start indiscriminately firing in order to "burn it all down", endangering the lives of other bots-including his fellow miners!-in the process

But this is fine to Megatron, because to him the goal makes it ok, "the ends justify the means"

But "the ends justify the means" always leads to a dark place, and that is what "burn it all down" is at the core, the willingness to sacrifice so many innocent people for a hypothetical

But there's another way Megatron feels very similar to the "burn it all down, damn the collateral" crowd

The way both deem those who prefer reform over destruction to be a traitors or just, if not worse, than what came before, real life "burn it down" types tend to hate reformists and realists (ie normie libs) more than the fascists and racists

And lastly, there is the Tyranny

We all know Megatron's story, what he will becone, a Warmonger, genocidal towards non Cybertronian-especially organic life (who wants to bet in the sequel Megatron's solution for dealing with the Quintessons is to Slaughter them to the last?), a mass murderer, destroyer of worlds, and above all, a Tyrant

That is where his revolution leads (oh hello russian/french revolution and civil war/napoleonic wars, I didn't see you there), because Megatron sees violence as the only answer, violence will be his only answer, violence is what keeps his followers in line (Starscream), and if he successfully comes out on top of the coming war with the Autobots, violence will be the only means he'll remain on top, because that's the only reason he's there in the first place

The "revolution, burn it down" types of the real world already have a nasty pro authoritarianism streak, between their dictator worship and belief that they know best and everyone who disagrees needs to shut up/is a traitor and must die (but leftistly), why would that change if they get their wish of violently burning it all down?

[is-the-fire-real]

'Reminder that "punch a nazi uwu" leftists utilize Nazi rhetoric to justify punching Jews.

It was never about punching Nazis; it was about getting social permission to punch.'

It was this very mentality that drove me away from considering myself a liberal anymore (I AM VERY MUCH LEFT LEANING, I DIDN'T DECIDE TO BECOME CONSERVATIVE JUST TO BE CLEAR. I just don't feel like those spaces have any intrinsic safety any longer). It feels like so much of western leftism has become about "punching up". I don't think it's about compassion or concern anymore, it's about finding the "right" targets. And so often that was just used as a way to excuse bigotry. I'm a goy but I noticed this on a personal level plenty with people identifying as feminists, they'd be perfectly okay saying something unquestionably sexist, as long as "white women" was attached onto the front. It's very much the same with shaming people over physical features that others may have, as long as the individual person is "bad enough" it doesn't matter if wide foreheads or big noses or acne are features many people have and would feel hurt by seeing them used as an insult, because they're only "really" directing it at "one of the bad ones"

So, I'm going to link to this piece again because it's been embarrassingly useful, and explains why I say things like "pretending to believe" despite their clunkiness. For new material, I hope you don't mind that you have accidentally triggered a massive unskippable cutscene, but you tapped into a few things I have been pondering and I'd like to take advantage of your observances to add my own.

Part of what you're discussing here, which I agree with, is that toxic slacktivists pretend to believe that they are Good People Doing Good Work. They are Bad People and their work is Bad Work, but if they all get in a group and pretend together that it's Good, then that's almost the same as being Good, right?

Another worthwhile aspect of what you're discussing is something I became aware of in the aftermath of the collapse of Occupy Wall Street. One commenter on a liberal blog I still follow lamented that mass protest never seems to accomplish anything, and how the millions of people who turned out for OWS protests should have affected more political change. Considering most of them could also vote, write to representatives, etc., something other than littering and arrests could've been done.

Another commenter pointed out that he had personally been at most of the anti-Iraq War protests, including the largest worldwide protest on 15 February 2003 (6-10 million estimated participants). But most of those protesters did not agree with each other. There were at least four major coalitions of antiwar protesters showing up then and thereafter. The ones he listed were:

"Just war" advocates who believed the Iraq War was unjust.

Total pacifists who believed all armed conflicts are unjust, and therefore the Iraq War is as well.

Right-wing bigots who believed a war might potentially benefit those they thought of as religiously or ethnically inferior and subhuman.

Xenophobes, both left- and right-wing, who believed "the US can't be the police of the world" and that any action taken outside USian borders was immoral.

Imagine four people with these beliefs in a room talking about the Iraq War... then bring up the war in Ukraine to them and see how fast the coalition falls apart.

"Well, the war for Ukrainian liberation is a just war," says the just-war advocate. The pacifist starts to scream "HOW COULD YOU DEFEND ANY ACTION THAT MIGHT LEAD TO CHILDREN DYING, YOU MONSTER!". The right-wing bigot says they support the war, too--on the side of the ethnically and religiously superior Russians. And then a left-wing xenophobe says we're wasting money that should be supporting American workers and uplifting Americans out of poverty instead of buying new bombs for Ukraine.

And your "antiwar" coalition collapses, with the pacifist wandering off to agree with the xenophobe while the just-war liberal and the right-wing bigot scream at each other pointlessly and without resolution.

This is one of the wisest breakdowns of human behavior I have ever discovered:

Any coalition of people is made up of many sub-coalitions who only temporarily agree on a single aspect of a single issue. Making sure the group does not collapse prematurely is the true, unsung labor of movement maintenance.

To be real, it's much easier to let one's coalition collapse and scream about how The Menz, or The CIA, or Greedy Capitalists, or The Jews artificially forced your group's collapse than it is to admit that one might just suck a big one at coalition building. This is especially true among leftists, who are sometimes anti-hierarchy and frequently fall for populist, anti-expert nonsense. Having a leader means you're suggesting someone should have authority, and a lot of leftists are allergic to that suggestion.

Moreover, though, a lot of "leftists" are "leftists" but only agree with one or two aspects of leftism.

To use your feminism example: I have absolutely seen feminists who think they can be misogynists so long as they say "white" before they say "woman". I mean, who can even argue? I have also seen feminists who think they can be gender bioessentialists so long as they're doing it towards "men" (a category which includes a lot of people who neither look like men, nor live as men, nor benefit from male privilege). I have seen feminists who think they can call themselves "trans allies" while consistently ignoring, degrading, and dismissing the concerns of anyone who isn't a binary trans woman. Etc.

The thing is, they are all feminists. What makes someone a feminist, at bottom, is the acceptance of and opposition to patriarchy. That's it. It's similar to how what makes a person a Protestant Christian is the acceptance of Jesus as their Lord and Savior--you might need to do one or two things to be considered a part of a specific branch of Christianity, but all you need is that one specific belief about that one specific idea. There's a lot of bunk about how "you can't be a REAL Christian unless you do X" just like there's bunk about how "you can't be a REAL feminist unless you do Y", and it's all bunk.

There are people who might be really bad feminists or Christians, but that's not the same as not being feminists or Christians.

So, the coalition of leftism has several sub-coalitions who actually despise each other. Here is my proposal for the sub-coalitions. (Please keep in mind that I am not defining groups by how they define themselves, but by the far more useful metric of their actions.)

Liberals who agree with leftist economic thought, but strongly disagree with leftist conclusions regarding violent revolution. Liberals do not have time for online arguments and superficial action. They are generally participating in protests, running for office, writing postcards to advocate for candidates, informing voters, and working within the system for positive change that alleviates suffering. They are pro-expert but opposed to a vanguard party due to its inherent authoritarianism.

Tankies, whose primary interest in leftism is authoritarian. They oppose capitalism and support violent revolution because they imagine themselves as the vanguard party who gets to control everything when the revolution comes.

Anarchists, whose primary interest is opposing hierarchy. They want to burn down the system because it is a system, and frequently become angry and defensive if you try to ask them any questions about what would be built out of the ashes.

Progressives, whose primary interest is opposing liberals. They also oppose capitalism; they are, like tankies, positioning themselves as the vanguard party because they are already in political power. What makes them Not Tankies is that they care more about sticking it to "the Dems" than they do about actually being the vanguard, opposing capitalism, or achieving anything of worth or meaning politically.

"Red fash", who used to be called "beefsteak Nazis". They say all the right things regarding violent revolution and economics/capitalism, but they only believe what they believe for the sake of their specific ethnic group and nation (frequently, white and USian, but this is extremely popular in Europe too). IOW a red fash wants the vanguard party to only have whites of a specific ethnicity in control of the revolution; they only want universal health care for "their" people, that sort of thing. Some red fash are actual Nazis cosplaying as leftists, but some are just really, really, REALLY bigoted leftists.

Whether we like it or note, the acceptance of armed, violent revolution as a Good Thing means that leftism has always regarded punching up and violence as a necessary component of leftist thought. This is not a perversion of Real Leftism. This is leftism. If you think revolution is good and necessary instead of a terrifying possibility, then you also think punching up is okay; it's just a matter of who is Up and who gets to punch.

Of the five sub-coalitions I described, only one has rejected violent revolution--and it's the one all the other leftists accuse of being right-wing. And interestingly enough, only liberals are habitually accused of secretly colluding with the right... when red fash are natural allies to the right, and when all other forms of leftists openly ally with right-wingers so long as they say the right things about economics. (See under: "After Hitler, us" leftists, left-wing Trumpistas who think they'll rule the ashes after Trump burns down the current system.)

And if you believe in violent revolution, then (let me be facetious for a second) what's the problem with making fun of your political enemies for being ugly? If we believe Steve Bannon is a Nazi, aren't we obligated to stop him by any means necessary, and doesn't that include mocking him for his alcoholism? Isn't mocking someone for their appearance and intrinsic characteristics mild compared to, say, threatening them with exploding cars covered with hammers? Or retweeting pictures of pitchforks and guillotines?

If we believe Ben Shapiro is an opponent to the revolution we accept is necessary and vital to the movement, then what's a little antisemitism in the name of the people? Don't we have to be bigots to oppose bigots? And--

--oh. There's that horseshoe bending round to the right again.

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

Kreator -   Violent Revolution (2001)

[userautumn]

Some of you are so comfortable in the leftist utopia that exists only on the internet in leftist circles and I've got to be honest, that world does not exist. That world will never exist.

[aeligsido]

The fact that no one in the Monkey D. family knows what gender is is amazing to me.

[pleasecallmealsip]

imo the reason we see the guillotine's image being so vastly produced and reproduced despite its usage stretching well beyond 1789-1799 was that the guillotine did away with ideologies and laws as well as the lives of individuals. to kill jourdan de launay was to kill a prison governor. to lead bailly to the scaffold was to declare the national guard of 17 July 1791 illegitimate.

[badastronaut27]

For the betterment of mankind and all that garbage.

[peanut0w0]

Happy International Cat Day? With these two? >:3

[blue-thief]

the thing that's so frustrating about the babel controversy is the fact that babel was already dumbed down so much for white people to understand. YET SOMEHOW SO MANY WHITE PEOPLE MISSED THE FUCKING POINT