“When did the US suddenly become a nation that adored Muslims, and so warmly welcomed them to America? When did the US become so pro-Muslim, that anti-Muslim became un-American? The direct answer is: it never happened. This is a liberal myth, spun for geostrategic purposes, using soft power to exploit potential audiences in the Arab and Muslim nations more generally. It is also a whitewash, intended to cover up the fact that Islamophobia continually reaches popular new heights in North America, to the extreme that even in the recent Canadian federal election the party leading in the polls immediately collapsed after its leader offered a mild defense of the hijab.”

(Zero Anthropology)

Indeed, Hillary Clinton has called for mass surveillance of Muslims not unlike a policy crafted by Ted Cruz, and Obama regularly deported whole communities of Muslims of all stripes. Forte believes that the combination of crucial trade fault lines and rising Americanism make Trump almost destined for the white house.

Beyond the conceptual, Trump also espouses a specifically American brand of far-right politics. I hesitate to call Trump a fascist as he does not fit the mantle of Fascist dictator in the way fascists themselves describe their political system; Trump will likely maintain the current model of US democracy. However, Trump is a fascist in the broad Marxist sense that he is a representative of a desperate capitalist class looking to stabilize their rule in a period of crisis. It is important that I make the distinction that Trump is objectively fascist, while not being one subjectively.

But the ideology Trump most often appeals to can broadly be described as Alternative Right. The Alternative Right as described in The Silicone Ideology (from which this work borrows part of its title) is a rather new phenomenon which distinguishes itself from “liberalism” (which it considers anything not on the far right, including Marxism) and from the “old” Right in its fusion of free markets and traditionalism. The Alt-Right scene is rife with petty infighting and useless pundits, but their talking points have resonated with Trump’s support base.

An example. The Alt-Right often doesn’t directly say they believe in racism; they believe in ethnopluralism. Mixing biological and cultural pseudo-theories of race, they claim that there is nothing inherently wrong with Black, Arab, Hispanic, or East Asian people (in fact they often admire figures like Saddam Hussein and Genghis Khan), but that a particular mix of cultural conditioning and biological traits make non-whites unfit to rule, particularly in white-dominated countries. In fringe cases, some Alt-Rightists believe in computer-managed technocracies with racial undertones.



Now, spelled out as it is above, this most certainly is racism. But the attempted masking with the language of efficiency is important. Take Ivanka Trump’s introduction speech to her father. “He is colorblind and he is gender-neutral. He only hires the best person for the job.” Trump’s presidency is being sold as a sort of business merger between state and corporate power that will usher in a more “efficient” ruling class – better at its job but also just happening to be incredibly (efficiently) chauvinistic. He embodies the Alt-right dream of running the country like a corporation with a “national CEO”.

It is in this light that Trump’s opposition to many policies the left also abhors can also be understood. “Americanism, not Globalism, will be our motto” implies both pulling away from neoliberal institutions like the International Monetary Fund whilst intensifying American imperialism in other ways. He denounces trade deals like NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership but embraces some of their core tenets, such as deregulation and encircling China in a US-controlled trade and military network in the Pacific. This marks a shift to a kind of “decentralism” supported by much of the Alt-right as a way to lessen the diminishment of sovereignty under neoliberalism while maintaining brutal free market measures.

Trump has no direct ties to the Alt-Right and even his ties with the traditional far-right, though apparent, are loose connections. However, Trump’s contradictory populism which seems to echo the likes of Alex Jones at every turn, will normalize more blatant capitalist repression.

Even at the Republican National Convention, this mentality went so far as to overwrite the law itself. While Republican candidates were openly spewing hate speech, police were more concerned with apprehending protesters from the organization REVCOM-USA who dared to set the American flag on fire, despite flag-burning being protected under free expression laws (Interestingly, it was also a case against a Revcom activist which clarified the right to flag-burning in the first place).



Amidst the aforementioned hate speech, Trump centered his presidency, which seems nearly inevitable, as one of “order and security” and I truly believe it will be these maxims which will form the base of “Trumpism”. The aforementioned Alt-Rightism will shape a Trump presidency and has already forced the current post-Sanders election to the right and it will most certainly do the same in 2020.

The gloves are off, America is exposed.

Recommended:

Moufawad-Paul reviews the Silicon Ideology

The Silicon Ideology in full

Edited by swampman (July 26, 2016 19:06:07)

SparksBandung posted:

Even at the Republican National Convention, this mentality went so far as to overwrite the law itself. While Republican candidates were openly spewing hate speech, police were more concerned with apprehending protesters from the organization REVCOM-USA who dared to set the American flag on fire, despite flag-burning being protected under free expression laws (Interestingly, it was also a case against a Revcom activist which clarified the right to flag-burning in the first place).

This is the guy who lit himself on fire while trying to burn the flag, and had to get himself by a cop, right?

SparksBandung posted:

Criticism, feedback, and advice for how to link youtube videos properly is much appreciated. Otherwise, frontpage now catman.

I fixed the video, do you have a banner image for the post you want to use?

babyhueypnewton posted:

Of course Trump sucks, the only leftists who advocate for Trump on the internet do so to piss off smug liberals who are not the audience of the left anyway. No one seriously supports him or believes that 'support' through voting makes any difference. This gets into what the alt-right is which is basically a response to liberalism giving up any pretense of a program or ideology and becoming entirely about being 'cooler' and morally righteous. Liberalism is simply a self-branding exercise in the age of social media.

For many years liberals joked that republicans were not funny because every attempt at a right wing Daily Show failed and also those dumb republicans couldn't even tell Colbert was playing a character. Of course neither of these shows were ever funny but they were about 'coolness' which the alt-right has finally reclaimed from the lameness of internet liberalism. Being a 'social justice warrior' isn't cool. Trump says outrageous things, that's cool to make 'dank memes' about while hillary is uncool and is a 'feminazi.' Pansexual transgender special snowflakes aren't cool, hot blond chicks who want real men like Trump are cool. Censoring video games isn't cool, gamergate is cool. Obviously none of these things is remotely cool, the people who care about them are the biggest nerds on the planet, but nerddom is the ideology of today's media consumption and social media is controlled by the nerds masquerading as cool kids. We should know, SA pioneered all of this, particularly LF.

So I think that essay is quite bad (yours is better because you hint at the importance of discourse in postmodern identity politics) because it misses that both the alt-right and the identity left are the same expression of politics as branding with identity as the commodity and social media as the means of production. The rise of the alt-right is not to me a fascist response to the 'SJW' left but it's continuation once the market became saturated.

This gets into the meaning of fascism. I think the third worldists have it right, when we think about fascism we have to ask "fascism for whom?." From the point of view of the Black Panthers, the native american rights movement, and basically the entire third world there was no difference between fascism and "democracy." In fact, places like Korea, the Phillippines, and Vietnam were actually treated better under fascism. So what we think of fascism is in reality the labor aristocracy in crisis and its turn towards settlerism at all costs.

My post was pretty quickly put together but I think this feedback is timely. I want to do something directly addressing SI's unified theory of fascism with some of your critiques of it in mind.

roseweird posted:

don't frontpage this imo

'Effort posts' are dumb, things that lead to discussion belong on the front page imo.

First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and "interrogated, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.

And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific reverse shock: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers around the racks invent, refine, discuss.

People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: "How strange! But never mind - it's Nazism, it will pass!" And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.

Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.

glomper_stomper posted:

the nazi party was killing polish civilians and communists in the freikorps during its embryonic stage of development.

obviously there should be more concern about people who actually have military training and guns before anyone even starts to worry about 4channers with a taste for julius evola.

if by military training you mean experience brutalising supposed subhumans at the pointy end of imperialism, it is probably worth explicitly noting that this was also true of the freikorps