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by kyrenaios, on 08 January 2021
Filed under: politics
I was not eager to write about what happened, two days ago, at the US Capitol building. No doubt the more chaotic scenes will be remembered, for a time at least; yet, as a whole, I am skeptical of the more breathless predictions of the event being harbinger of the impending fascist takeover.
It should have been clear, to the contrary, that what the mob managed to project is rather complete impotence; which is not to say, however, that I agree with certain members of the liberal establishment that "this too will pass" like nothing happened, once Saint Joseph takes his rightful throne as Redeemer-in-Chief of the United States.
In truth we are both too eager and too late to take lessons from history: the only lesson we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history, dixit Hegel.
For, as a rule, we are always proven wrong when we cite some past happening, note a parallel to present circumstances and proceed to predict the future. This is by no means historical materialism, which concept has been abused more than any other in the history of philosophy, except perhaps Gödel's theorems.
We live through tragedies and we live through farces, and we perhaps do not know in what order these two kinds of things must come in any more. I wonder if this is, one might say, the Danish thinker's revenge: for we still don't understand repetition, and by extension we still don't understand anything about history at all.
Still, there is something intelligible about the chaotic reign of Trump that we may finally feel at ease to begin to articulate, now that the owl of Minerva is just about ready to take flight.
For it should not fail to strike us, even if I know of no one who is talking about the similarity – that, in all of Trump's desperate attempts to stir up a mass movement to save himself, there is more than a hint of Mao Zedong in 1966.
I am showing my hands here: I cannot fault those who are exasperated by the blunt comparison; goodness knows that our pandits are willing to say whatever these days for attention's sake. Yet, for those who are willing to stay and contemplate it, I dare say one won't fail to arrive at the same conclusion.
We know that Mao, as the economic damage of the 1960s rolled on, felt sidelined by his once trusted lieutenants; that he was convinced of the bureaucracy tightening its ranks to thwart him; that he took to calling on the masses to rise up directly to "bombard the headquarters" – of which he was, of course, the commander-in-chief. All of this is, of course, being followed to a T today.
Please note that I do not say this with a view to either approving the one or condemning the other. I will entertain nothing so crudely moralistic as that. I am merely saying this: I do not think there was a conscious attempt to repeat Mao's playbook in the 60s, no. One would not have been a Trumpist in the first place, if one had the foresight necessary to do that. Yet such is the way history repeats itself: without anyone knowing, and without the repetition being understood except much later, après-coup.
Yet I like the comparison between China under the Cultural Revolution and America under Trump: for one thing, it does allow us to access the farcical dimension of the situation. For, where millions of the young under Mao wielded nothing more than the Little Red Book, it is simply ridiculous to imagine Trumpists doing the same with, say, The Art of the Deal. Thus, in its absence, all the military equipment that simultaneously go silent as soon as someone who steps too far out of line is promptly shot to the ground by the Secret Service.
It also gives one the confidence, at least, to say that there is genuinely not much further for Trumpism and its like to go any longer. I greatly approve of Badiou's formulation, that evil can never be original: it is always a mockery of something genuinely new that happened before, something which shows a real promise of emancipation.
Thus the Nazis can make a mockery of Bolshevism with their discipline and fanatic devotion to the Party; but what they can never do is go somewhere that Bolshevism hadn't itself gone, whether it is under Lenin or Stalin. Perhaps, if the same can be said of Trumpism being a mockery of Maoism, we will know that all of its more outlandish fantasies will be blown away by the wind along with the leader's death.
Is this a good thing? Perhaps not so much. It will simply amount to saving us all some psychotic suffering at the cost of "everyday" neurotic misery. But we shouldn't be too eager to try to see further than that; the concepts with which we will have to grasp the future are simply not here yet. We witnessed this early on last year, in Giorgio Agamben's meltdown, during the early days of the apeiropandemic, when he obstinately refused to admit of any consideration in his analysis but what he has always been saying for the past few decades.
If this is a disappointing way to end these musings, it is the way it has to be. Perhaps there will be a way one can wrest out something of an événement out of out this yet; but this is not the place to write about those speculations: after all,
ἀμέραι δ’ ἐπίλοιποι μάρτυρες σοφώτατοι.
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kyrenaios at envs dot net