Just remember this. All agents defect, and all resisters sell out. That’s the sad truth, Bill. And a writer? A writer lives the sad truth like anyone else. The only difference is, he files a report on it. – William Burroughs
@mgkaleem @Souria4Syrians Experts on Syria, pic.twitter.com/tuixaFJzBp
— Darren (@DPL_93) December 8, 2015
Emma Quangel is the woman who bravely contributed to the outing of Nazi murderer/”Last Rhodesian” Dylann Storm Roof’s blog, which probably spoiled Roof’s chances at the inexorably successful—for white supremacists—insanity defense. After Quangel, an insanity verdict for Roof would be an insanity verdict for the U.S. white supremacist system: which is to say, in lieu of Aristotelian-bourgeois justice, Artaudian ritual magic, a self-reparative exorcism.
Molly Crabapple is the woman who doxed Quangel because Quangel relentlessly—“stalkerishly,” according to Crabapple, for whom criticism of the spectacle society that is Murdochian journalism is either outright treason or at the very least a kind of creepy impertinence towards micro-femme fame, towards social media fame—discredited her whimsical pro-NATO feuilletons from Syria. Crabapple’s also the fascoid, VICE-hosted, Congress for Cultural Freedom-style (l’art pour l’art, “fuck the police state,” red-baiting, introjectively mewling) late-stage public intellectual, graphic artist/burlesque capitalist, and possible CIA-operative who happened to lease an apartment near Zuccotti Park right before Occupy Wall Street. Before her stints in Syriza-hustling and Black Lives Matter-bandwagoning, she was also an enthusiastic promoter of weev, hacktivist neo-Nazi cause célèbre, back when neo-Nazism was chic among the pseudo-left avant-garde: in fact it’s still chic, but its mainstreaming is beginning to put a dent in its brand. She’s pretty well remunerated financially and in terms of fame by her paymasters. But she’s also incompetent, like Freedom House’s Sarah Kendzior, which is why she can’t advance to the next echelon of imperial media spooking. For instance, her doxing was clumsy and revealed a wider plot that shouldn’t have existed in the salacious fallback narrative of a lefty cat-fight. In the end, she seemed malicious, authoritarian (which is what she is, in reality): the very opposite of the free-spirited steampunk anarch-ish (self-described “snotty goth moppet…who read the Marquis de Sade”) rebel-girl she needs to be perceived as by consumers of pop-left media: the same unfathomably uncritical consumers who breezily accept her embeds with the U.S. military and the IDF, but whose latent sense of fair play (not for Syria, but for literary yuppies) might make them squeamish about heavy-handed Twitter McCarthyism.
Quangel was celebrated, almost unanimously beyond the orbit of (Daily-)Stormfront-ers, back in June for doxing Roof. I haven’t yet encountered the revisionist claim that Quangel deserved to be doxed because she herself doxed the poor social justice warrior, Dylann Storm Roof, though, considering the moralizing incoherence (THIS PRO-HILLARY SOCIALIST-FEMINIST BELIEVES THAT JUANITA BROADDRICK IS A RAPE-CRYING RACIST) of most liberal commentators in the early days of Trumpism, I’m sure it’s inevitable. The fact is that leftists/decent people are capable of deploring the violence inflicted by the outing of anonymous internet commentators while still not believing in the libertarian, Greenwaldian, TOR-ish fetish of “panoptic/gated-community privacy for all, especially for the far-right and for Nazi killers.”
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Crabapple claimed that her supposedly spontaneous dox was justified because Quangel had denied that citizens were starving in Madaya and had cried tears of joy, or whatever, over the obvious suffering in that town. When in fact, Quangel’s avowed tears of joy were for Crabapple herself, who was forced to suddenly tweet lachrymose on behalf of her mercenary buddies in Ahrar al-Sham: al-Qaeda affiliates and Russian bombing targets. Whatever one thinks of the Syrian Civil War, or Russia’s or even Hezbollah’s role in that war, one can obviously detect a simpering thuggish dishonesty whenever a hipster journalist equates the machinations of an al-Qaeda affiliate with the Syrian people, or whenever interrogating media consensus-manufacturing is equated with atrocity-denial. One can also realize that the UN is being targeted as a last resort, at the very moment that NATO and its clients are losing steam in Syria, by the U.S. military-journalism complex: of which Vice—with its gonzo, glossily disorienting humanitarian-porn-mongering, its sensitive radar for the heart of gold within every narco-contra psychopath, its almost unrivaled access/embeddedness—is a particularly sophisticated, avant-garde example.
Most of all, one can understand how supposedly “private feuds” spill over into U.S. government operations, and vice versa, when those operations are disguised as private affairs, personal (feminine/literary) vendettas. Anyone who remembers McCarthyism or the Cold War understands this instinctively, even if they’ve conveniently forgotten.
Crapabble’s dox proved unpopular even among people who are generally well-disposed towards her moralistic, postmodern, celebrity-left politics. On the one hand, she claimed the dox was justified because of Quangel’s supposed U.N. status (actually, Quangel never worked for the U.N., but it was convenient to say so, precisely because the U.N. was the real target of the campaign). On the other, she claimed that Quangel had stalked her.
Neither is true, hypocrite stalker/lecteur.
It is true that Crabapple was the partial inspiration for a composite villain in Quangel’s novel, Spooks, and rightfully so. Quangel, like Bolaño in By Night in Chile, fearlessly diagnosed the uncanny Möbius Strip of ethical corruption, of aesthetic putrefaction, to which every petty-bourgeois writer-type is vulnerable in a world in which neither art nor politics is pure or uncontested: the uncanny path that the (already) corrupted scribe never chooses and chooses at every moment, the path of inertia and non-movement embarked upon when creative agency becomes defined as absolute adjustment to one’s historical conditions: the path of Bartleby, whose spectacle of anorexic resistance, of narcissistic lacunae, is not only not a threat to the system, but a spectacle of and on behalf of the system, which is why, even when Bartleby acts like a brat, especially when Bartleby acts like a brat, his Wall Street handler caresses him, holds his hand, up to the very moment of his preordained death.
Whoever adopts a superficial, hand-washing agnosticism on international questions—mediated as they are by spectacle society-adepts like Crabapple, who didn’t invent the society of the spectacle out of thin error, just as Debord never invented it—might ask, Well, why should I believe Quangel’s account of Syria over Crabapple’s? Never mind that we’re talking about two pseudonyms here, and about a real country (though certain activists and epicurean liberals have been known to say that the comedy duo Sykes-Picot means that the country doesn’t exist, and a fortiori has no sovereignty). I suppose it’s possible that some people might trust a shameless dilettante brand-creator and publicity hound who repeatedly cribs neocon thinktanks and journalistic outlets, and then glosses those outlets with an adolescent veneer of radicalism, over a woman who candidly put down her ideas, self-published her own novel (as far as I know), and wanted to remain anonymous. In the future, bystanders will find it harder and harder not to believe Crabapple, anyway, if she continues to successfully intimidate dissidents and drive them offline (Quangel’s extremely valuable blog and Twitter account have been closed).
If someone were that honestly hermeticized, that cognitively vacuumed, that they just couldn’t get Syria, but had a beautiful leftist soul, I would say that they should just vote for Bernie Sanders and raise chickens, or whatever, and trust in their anti-war instincts. Anyone else who doesn’t bother to figure out what’s going on in Syria (that impenetrable, ultra-penetrable Orient) deserves their own cognitive dissonance, their own authoritarianism, their own twenty-first century S&M. Later they can always say they were deceived, lost in the fog of (non)-war, the kind of war that they can retrospectively say, mis-interpreting Baudrillard, never happened at all, not even on TV.
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I remember that when Quangel was being celebrated by the likes of The New York Times, a Jezebel journalist tweeted at her, saying something like, HEY YOU BAD RAD BITCH, YOU CRAZY COMMUNIST CUNT, YOU A’WANNA HAVE AN INTERVIEW WITH JEZEBEL, and Quangel, who was most of all demonized by the Crabapples of the world for her refusal to get on board with a Gates Foundation-esque pseudo-libertarian post-feminism that ratified every global iteration of femicidal mass prostitution/involuntary sterilization, simply replied that 1) she objected to the faux-colloquial appropriation of misogynist slurs, 2) that she wouldn’t be easily coopted into Jezebel’s pinkwashing, pro-Zionist, pro-imperialist ideology, and 3), that she would never betray her Red comrades by theatricizing/pigeonholing herself as the COOL COMMUNIST who still has some hipster cred, because what she did she did for communism, and not for some proto-Hillary supporters to feel like they’d scored one against their bourgeois opponents (the GOP, Men’s Righters, whatever). And then the Jezebel journalist tweeted at her audience that, wow, what a rad bitch, she won’t even talk to Jezebel, the vanguard hope of international feminism.
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To be clear about the obscene chiasmus here, we’re talking about: EMMA QUANGEL (verified anti-Nazi militant)—DYLANN STORM ROOF (Nazi murderer)—WEEV/ANDREW AUERNHEIMER (degenerate representative of right-wing Occupy, the parasitic fascist body that still clings to the U.S. left)—MOLLY CRABAPPLE (eulogist of weev, outer of the woman who outed Dylann Storm Roof, the woman who continues to face neo-Nazi death threats, the on-the-ground-refugee-worker now exposed to Crabapple’s preferred MENA death squads).
As I said, Crabapple fucked this one up. After all, even morally obtuse liberals who tend to support McCarthyism and an increasingly pervasive surveillance/snitching culture find it hard to justify exposing a refugee worker to ISIS abroad and NAZIS at home. At long last, have you left no sense of decency, no sense of left-decency?
Or, more simply, Emma Quangel, the woman who stands up for the left and the anti-war movement—and yes, who doesn’t demonize Hezbollah like a neocon parrot or a neocon aphasiac—versus Molly Crabapple, who goes to faraway lands to accuse eleven year-old boys of sexually harassing her, whenever those boys belong to a community that could be interpreted as a threat to U.S. hegemonic interests. We’re talking about Quangel who is reported to have lost her job aiding refugees because the pedophilic contrapreneur (Quangel’s prodigious neologism) Crabapple decided to eliminate the competition, because Crabapple felt that those refugees belonged exclusively to her, to her crass art, her dehistoricized sympathy: those refugees, from whom she’s Drawing Blood (/surplus value) (according to the official Occupy Demimonde radical who “has no beef with capitalism”).
How dare Quangel refuse a dilettante hypersexualized voyeurism, how dare she interpret the frame, practice hermeneutics (hermeneutics are decidedly a non-safe space, a space that makes weaponized Americans feel unsafe)? If she’d just worked hard enough she too could have won free Potemkin tours of Guantanamo and Gaza, she too could have become the chosen Bartleby/wannabe William Burroughs of U.S. imperialism (just as Burroughs had to go to Mexico in order to kill his wife, Crabapple seeks out foreign backdrops as a stage/alibi for her own misogynist violence). She too could have been the sashaying gonzo girl/USO burlesque dancer in the last concentration camp at the end of the world, her lips muttering sultry Human Rights Watch platitudes to the drunken, yawlping, ultra-sadistic guards, but her voice dubbed over, declaring, once and for all, IT DON’T GITMO BETTER THAN THIS!
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Pseudonyms are a bourgeois farce, and I use them—intermittently. Pseudonyms reintroduce, through the sadico-anal backdoor, the brownshirt-aristocratic praxis of snarky, Roman à clef humiliation of the killable Semitic neighbor. As Beckett found out when he testified, ill-fatedly, in a libel case against the real-life Buck Mulligan, Oliver St. John Gogarty: that pathetic poetaster and Dublin socialite who retro-wrote Joyce’s Ulysses as an Irish Protocols, in rhyme, in the same way that the vast majority of contemporary thinkpiece journalism is a crypto or not so crypto-rewrite of Golovinski’s Ur-Text.
But history is full of surprises, détournements. In what has been misnamed the surveillance society, but should be called the dictatorship of the U.S.-imperial bourgeoisie with some Foucauldian frills (Foucault was after all the invented predecessor of Clinton’s No Frills Prison Act), what remains of the true left—which is to say the uncompromising, the non-paid-in-full, the non-neo-Cold-Warrior pseudo-left, the non-Murdoch left—is forced to resort to pseudonyms, not only in their writing but in their social media personae, to protect their economic livelihoods and, increasingly, their lives. On the other hand, a thousand Justin Bieber/Conor Oberst lookalikes—with post-graduate degrees from Georgetown, or wherever, in Security Studies (or for Quangel’s “Weaponized Naked Girls,” in Conflict Resolution) and with a CIA-smattering of Arabic—licentiously publicize kill-lists targeting Syrian refugees, who are accused of having served in, or even of having tweeted in favor of, the Syrian Arab Army, the Shabihah (gringos learn foreign languages solely for the purpose of neoliberal-ethnographic data collection and orientalist murder theodicy), or Hezbollah.
In reality, these kill-lists are nothing more than a random assortment of Alawi and Shia twenty-somethings, kids posing for selfies. These kill-lists are the death-wish of the western pseudo-pro-Palestinian solidarity movement: those liberal snitches who found a way to reconcile their hermetic fetish for Kenneth Roth with their deeply engrained hatred of the Third World.
And acolytes of Glenn Greenwald—that prophet of Pentagon-suborned privacy, who during the Bush years claimed the anti-war and anti-globalization left was a front for Castroite totalitarianism—argue that it’s acceptable to dox anyone who refuses to demonize Hezbollah, anyone who’s judged insufficiently pro-NATO.
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A short note on bullying: Hipster-imperialist scribblers constantly claim that they’re being bullied whenever they’re merely called out for being spectacular or actual agents of U.S. foreign policy.
For instance:
“…that whorephobic Stalinist micro, meso, and macro-aggressed me when she tweeted about how I wore designer shoes on my trip to Iraqi Kurdistan, which could have gotten me killed. Not only by that sectarian cadre of ultra-anti-sex-positive Kurdish feminists (don’t worry, I’ve already brought my bordello-staging of the Zoroastrian sacred texts to the Domiz refugee camp, I like to think of Asha not only as the truth-principle but as the spermatic essence of the bad creator-daddy with a huge Fifty Shades of Grey cock: next year, with anarchist teddy bear David Graeber, in Rojava!). But also by ISIS, that scrappy gang, that sell-out indie band, that so many of my contra friends were forced to join by the desuetude of the U.S. military and by the champagne-sipping decrepitude of the western left.
“I’ve focus grouped ‘Marxist left,’ ‘Stalinist left,’ ‘the Putinophilic left’ ‘the castrated left,’ etc., but ‘western left’ most effectively rebrands these fuckers as privileged rootless cosmopolites, shifty kink-shaming intellectuals, sniffers of their own theoretic assholes.
“Speaking of Fifty Shades, didn’t Sylvia Plath say that every woman loves a fascist?
“That’s at least what weev told me the night before his sentencing, drunk as we were on whiskey and on the symposium of post-Occupy politics, back in the day when I could get away with drawing weev’s jury as hook-nosed Semitic persecutors, when I didn’t even have to bother to pay lip service to the Bolivarian Revolution, when it seemed enough to go from pimp to human rights activist and back to pimp again, when I could be a fucking cold warrior for Beauty. So what if he turned out to be a neo-Nazi. I already fucking denounced that as gross!
“Plath’s a feminist icon, after all. Žižek said that Ted Hughes’ real guilt was the repetition of the murder/suicide of Plath with the murder/suicide of his second poetess lover, who was an actual kike (it’s okay, I’m Jewish, too!). I think he said that both Plath, the German proto-hipster orphan, and Hughes, the Cold War poet, idolized Hitler, and so that Plath’s suicide was actually the re-enactment of a genocidal violence against a future Jewess rival (I always liked to stage interracial cat-fights, for my pimping agency, as a pimp with agency). Well, as I said, I, too, am a Jewess, so there’s no problem.
“And there’s no problem, either, since my dad’s a boricua, when I publish anti-Chavista propaganda in BuzzFeed in the guise of anodyne feminist criticism. Even if my poor mother-fucker-tongue Spanish sometimes confuses me and I accuse the government of a human rights violation that was actually committed by the opposition. Spanish is difficult, subject-verb agreement is all twisted. For instance, when I’m scanning an article, I sometimes see a los chavistas mató el facho, and I translate it as the fucked-up, totalitarian-identitarian Chavistas killed the handsome, blond, innocent, working-class democratic-activist stud, out in the street (where he never placed invisible wires to decapitate motorcyclists, where he never committed false flag assassinations), demanding his rights.
“And don’t get me started on when they killed that BEAUTY QUEEN, and I drew her as a Renaissance art icon, like the coy porn actress Saint Agatha displaying her severed breasts on a silver platter or Saint Lucy, who also had knock-out tits, with her eyes, no less bright, served on a silver platter, too (you don’t even need to go to college to use elementary art history for U.S. intelligence!). Women are always portrayed as enticers to neo-militarist Crusaders, when in fact they can be as sadistic, as mercenary as men (the TRUE ARTIST of the twenty-first century is a sadist and a mercenary: even The Economist called me ‘possibly this generation’s Bukowski!’: possibly, fuck that qualifier!). And speaking of Žižek, I recall, in my rare moments of contemplative quiet, the beautifully irreverent poem of my friend, ‘Slavoj Žižek Gets His Hair Cut,’:
Slavoj Žižek
your beard
like Communism
works better in theory
than in the real world
“And yet when he began to publish about the rapes in Cologne, when he claimed that Norway was a Lacanian fantasy of murderous Islamo-fascist scum (the ones I hadn’t drawn yet), I fell in love again, critically, of course.”
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Even for revolutionaries, certain things come before politics. Certain things are more important than politics (and I’m not talking about the homespun, life-stylish, micro-political virtues of Naomi Klein, or the hypochondriacal, anime-onanist, quietistic practices of Alex Jones, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that there are an unquantifiable number of schizoid stoners who read both in a state of epileptic, passive agape). Roughly speaking, off the top of my head, I can think of a few of these things:
1. A sense of honor: the notion that one shouldn’t engage in a career or a para(philic)-career that is either a subtle stroking of one’s own narcissistic avatar or mediately or immediately patronized by U.S. intelligence agencies, or both. The notion that ratting or snitching is disgusting. The notion that as well-intentioned as one’s intentions are, reality transcends the bio-phenomenal limits of one’s own existence, that history never anointed you, that your environment may very well not be an amniotic bath for you to wade in, but a contested zone (de)-populated by veritable monsters (as well as veritable saints whom you’re too professionally cynical to see) and urban-designed by militarists who have closely read Deleuze.
2 or 1.1. That sex is a labyrinth, but not necessarily Borges’ labyrinth. That sex is dangerous. That when you think you’re having sex, you might actually be masturbating to a non-relation or a manic-genocidal pseudo-relation, though more likely when you’re having sex you’re not doing anything wrong, it’s when you write about sex, when you weaponize sex, that you’re committing a crime. That Foucault had a point when he talked about the criminalization of masturbation (and its corollary, the invention of narcissism) in the European eighteenth century. That your real enemy is not the one you constantly suspect of denying you a commodified orgasm, but the daddy(-state) who groomed your actual orgasm.
As an aside, to so-called Stalinist comrades, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying Mao makes me cum. The problem is that pseudo-left writers and artists, from Andy Warhol to Chris Kraus, and neo-reactionaries like the proto-pick-up-artist Tom Wolfe, tried to convince us that leftist politics were a sordid or superfluous alibi for cumming. The fact is that sexuality is a relation between the inner or micro-world and the outer or macro-world, and any attempt to impose the prototype of one on the other is always dishonest, totalitarian, at heart. But this is not a critique of Stalinists, really (I’m not an anti-Stalinist, but a post-Stalinist, a Stalinist-after(birth)), but of Pussy Riot, Femen, fascist Homeland white girl sexuality, which is to say State Department sexuality, the sexuality of rapist cops and rapist military personnel, only writ-medium-large, which has been imposed on the world and which is the reason that the so-called Cologne attacks are resented, for a supposed repartee in a Clash of Civilizations in which there can be brooked no clash, only uncontested dominance.
3. That in an out-of-joint, unipolar world, people should be able to work for U.N.-affiliated institutions that aid refugees and still be able to keep alive a non-dystopian spirit of political objectivity and even political commitment, which is to say that they should be able to critique the power structure that creates this world of mass misery and death without losing their jobs. And they should be able to do so under their own names, but if they need to do so under pseudonyms, then they shouldn’t be doxed and outted by revolting social-climbing semi-journalists who, at the very least, want to shut down any voice to their left.
4. That, rationally speaking, the PALESTINIAN REVOLUTION shouldn’t be hijacked by an anti-Hezbollah independent contractor, hipster self-marketer, quasi or outright-mercenary, who gets off on how hot young Netanyahu was and pals around in Syria with Saudi-funded death squads.
5. That neo-Régis Debrays/Pierre Menardian William Walkers/imperial-primitivist Lawrence of Arabias (those tireless advocates of counterrevolution within the revolution) like Matthew VanDyke should be, if not executed as a gunrunner and foreign invader, if not entrapped by the Obama Justice Department in the way black and Muslim kids have been, then at the very least subjected to withering ridicule and demystification. That VanDyke’s sloppy quixotic borrowing from the counter-insurgency playbook of world-historical génocidaires like Petraeus and Petraeus’ idol, Marcel Bigeard—his crowd-sourced effort to bring a Christian Assyrian petro-fiefdom to northern Iraq—is the stuff of comedy for those (all of us) who can’t face tragedy: is the stuff of Woody Allen’s Bananas, the cartoon macho-gringo foil to the unlucky-in-love Jewish schlemiel, or one of Annie Hall’s ex-boyfriends, the kind of guy women laugh about later, Sure he turned out to be a loser, but you should have seen him back then, with his keffiyeh and his motorcycle, his takfiri beard and his iron gaze that tried but somehow failed to reproduce the gaze of Che Guevara, I mean sure I would have fucked Chris Kyle, too, but this guy was like Kyle but more cerebral, you know with his Security Studies masters from Georgetown. It should be pointed out that actual mercenaries like VanDyke, the ones who participated in the foreign invasion the entire western political leadership claims never happened, managed to survive their stint in Libya, whereas black migrant workers and black Libyans, defamed as “mercenaries,” were systematically lynched and ethnically cleansed by al-Qaeda, with the encouragement of Hillary Clinton’s State Department, Amnesty International, NATO publicists, the ubiquitous spook Sid Blumenthal (who also “floated,” with his son floating in the inchoate abyss, the Viagra mass-rape yarns), etc.
6. That intellectual honesty matters. That so-called socialists shouldn’t non-contextually cite the fact that certain Arab leaders, like Assad and Gaddafi, at the barrel of a gun, obviously, “flirted with neoliberalism,” as if the anti-war movement can wash its hands of a NATO invasion because of the supposed Bukharanite heresies of those Ay-rab neoliberals. That in Gaddafi’s case, it matters that “his neoliberal period,” (his mainstream period), if one can periodize the menstrually bloody palimpsestic Bush-Obama years, coincided with the rehabilitation of the Libyan regime, whereas when Gaddafi began to reassert his pan-Africanism, threatened to re-nationalize oil, started to establish the African Monetary Fund, etc., the government’s assets were frozen and the country was invaded.
6.1. That Council on Foreign Relations-affiliated Goldman Sachs organic intellectuals like Robert Putnam, who tried and failed to groom the Gaddafi regime in the same way a priest goes after a kid from a troubled household, shouldn’t be exonerated when, scrambling to protect their egg-faced reputations and to shore up the hegemony of the global financial-capitalist class, they write self-apologetic (now-paywalled) articles claiming that Gaddafi was on the Libyan Road to Neoliberalism but that, unfortunately, due to his stubbornly primitive, low-IQ, arch-debased-materialist, Arab-libidinal, Ukrainian nurse-loving, heterodox-Islam-proselytizing to Italian supermodels, Bedouin-fantasist, tent-dwelling, desert-loving of the impossible but medievally bounded horizon, Saif al-Islam-spawning (the exotic tiger-possessing, slightly more genetically advanced LSE student, but nevertheless recidivist son), Green Book-quoting brain, he could never truly grasp our advanced understanding of Civil Society. And besides, we came out well…
6.2 That if one wanted a sophisticated, a joyous, an artistically valid treatment of the Oedipal bathos of the Muammar—Saif al-Islam conflict, one should go back, mutatis mutandis, to Almodóvar’s early film, Labyrinth of Passion, which portrays the Arab/Persian dictator’s gay son living a creative, fulfilled, if inevitably conflicted life in Madrid, loyal to his family (in this case a U.S. client) and loyal to his passions, protean enough to front a local punk band as a cover and to strike up a relationship with a dissident Islamist revolutionary (Antonio Banderas, naturally) from his own country. But, “cured” of his homosexuality (in the same way that Saif al-Islam was “cured” of his neoliberal compradorism when NATO forced his hand), he tries to bring his nymphomaniacal Spanish girlfriend back to his family’s island-paradise exile. Almodóvar portrays this decision as an honorable one, because everyone deserves survival, deserves love, just as the most heroic decision that Saif al-Islam made in his life was to go back to watch his family die. Almodóvar, incidentally, in his movies and literature from the 1980s, was consistently irreverent towards Spanish communists and their ductile adaptations, but he made even his most militantly anti-intellectual, fun-loving whores consistent opponents of Spain’s cleaving to an Atlanticist, “European” identity.
7. That every measure possible should be taken towards the discrediting and smashing of Nazis and neo-Nazis, whether they be terrorists like Dylann Storm Roof or blustering hacktivist trolls like the so-called “weev,” whose real (quasi-Semitic) name is Andrew Auernheimer.
8. That aesthetics/literature matters. That Molly Crabapple’s art is almost as shitty as her politics and that Emma Quangel wrote a very fine first novel, a left-wing appropriation of the normally reactionary dystopia genre, a novel that reveals the machinations of our opportunist lumpen-intelligentsia, the ones who have no choice and have every choice.
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Reading Spooks, I know who will survive: morally, aesthetically, politically (unless I’m wrong, and we’re headed for the final/penultimate Dark Ages, the scientific travesty of the event horizon that would liberate us). I know that Crabapple’s career doesn’t have much time left, no more time than weev, or Roof, her “misunderstood” and now discredited men, the ones who were condemned to join certain fascist ultra-violent movements by the misunderstandings of the race-traitors, the Jews, the RT readers.
And who are these traitors, in this warped, crabby, fantasmatic world? They’re the “moralfags,” the ones who stand in the way of “our lulz,” as the 4chan hacktivists liked to say back in the early Obama days, before they split into an alt-right and a hegemonic bloc. The alt-right represented by the PUA community/Trump: the hegemonic represented by Vice and The Intercept, with a few exceptions.
I know that Quangel can survive anything. She’ll even survive the promised death-threats of the Nazis and the takfiris to whom Crabapple, a passionate if fickle friend to Nazis and takfiris, outed her. There’s a reason Crabapple has, with characteristic hubris, talked up her vast FBI file, but refused to release it: it’s because her FBI file is vast mostly because of the neo-Nazis that the FBI has historically kept a fatherly, watchful eye on.
They even watch you, while you pretend you’re slaying windmills!
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Whatever theocrats like to say when they quote C.S. Lewis about the devil’s supreme genius and his propaganda for his own nonexistence applies absolutely to the diabolical structure of the psyop-lite “Molly Crabapple,” who incessantly does publicity for her own existence and at the same time absolves herself of all responsibility for her existence, claiming that any charges of responsibility amount to “conspiracy theory,” “Russian apologism,” “denial of war crimes,” “I’m too busy,” “I’m too famous,” “I’m on my (shitty) book tour,” “I always thought that Nazism or takfiri-ism had a kernel of truth to it, which is to say that the UN, Assad, and leftists are the true enemies.”
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I remember talking to a high-up PFLP veteran who talked dispassionately about being tortured by the Mukhabarat during the Lebanese Civil War. Someone asked him, Don’t you resent the Syrians for what they did to you? Absolutely not, he said, with his cold human gaze, his Cold-Warrior-for-the-other-side-gaze, as if the question were a joke. He recognized the statist and conservative role that Syria played in the Lebanese Civil War. He personally held no grudges against his torturers, while recognizing them as torturers (there used to be, he seemed to imply, if not a ludic/lucid at least a reciprocal, a provisional quality to torture, as opposed to the absolute metaphysics of torture instantiated by the genetic family of U.S. torturers going back to Alliance for Progress/Operation Condor, who themselves have darker Nazi Ur-fathers). The fact is on the ground the PFLP was working towards a revolution, or towards the roll-back of the counter-revolution, in the geopolitical abyss of the late 1970s, and for them any squeamishness about torture was pathetic, reactionary (which is not to say they would practice torture themselves, only that they never appealed to some panoptic human rights super ego).
Torturer Assad is much more a truth than Comrade Assad. On the other hand, in comparison with Saudi mercenaries, I suppose that that Torturer Assad is a Comrade, if that’s any kind of standard.
Which is the same thing as saying that the vicious Israeli slaughter of children in a U.N. compound in Qana, Lebanon is not the same thing as U.N. forces hunting down Fanmi Lavalas supporters in the slums of Port-au-Prince. Nor is Crabapple’s hatred of the fact that in Madaya her death squads—whom she absolves of responsibility for starving Madaya’s citizens, for their black marketeering with humanitarian aid—were being rebuffed by the U.N. the same thing as acknowledging that the U.N. is cooperating with real-estate developers in the Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon. If this seems like a contradiction, it’s only a contradiction for those who accept some kind of hegemonic world government, whereas leftists want institutions to work for the victims of the international order.
Which is to say, no to John Bolton and Samantha Power. But also no to the IDF, to al-Qaeda and Ahrar al-Sham.
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It’s undeniably true that the sale of rad-chic Hezbollah merchandise (t-shirts, for instance) has dropped off since Hezbollah’s intervention in the Syrian Civil War (etiolated English Defense League fascists, nonetheless, still wear Palestinian keffiyehs while touring Sisi’s Egypt).
It’s also undeniably true that gringo Twitter personalities now feel no shame in demanding the slaughter of Shia not only in Syria but, by Israel, in Lebanon: and these same infiltrators will all along sing the praises of Palestinian human rights.
It’s also almost undeniably true that Hezbollah is protecting Lebanon, particularly the Beqaa Valley region, not only from a reign of takfiri terror, but also from a kind of Christopher Hitchensesque fantasia of autocratic March 14 clientelist rule answering to patrons in Likud and the Republican Party.
Ultimately, though, it would be better if we were cured of these neurotic proxy wars. If Iran recouped its original professed messianic role and destroyed the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, militarily as well as ideologically, in a millenarian war to end all wars.
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All that aside, read Emma Quangel’s novel, Spooks. I think it’s still free or relatively free on Amazon. I don’t want to emulate Crabapple and say that I knew ISIS way back in the day, but I read Quangel before she’d been doxed and would-be humiliated and temporarily spotlighted. Her book gave me a much-needed antidote to a generalized intellectual pessimism, a generalized intellectual anesthesia, and I found myself quoting it when no one knew who she was (maybe they still don’t know who she is, and that’s okay). Nazi terrorists are one thing. Weev the Nazi anti-Semite who dreams nightly about a fourteen-inch Judeo-Bolshevik cock in his asshole (dreams her inherited from his Aryan Nation comrades in prison), is another. Yet another are the enablers of Nazis, the Crabapples, the ersatz artists, artists as labor-of-love spooks (art as remix of dead Arab bodies: the synecdoche of people and societies to their bodies, the synecdoche of post-Westphalian states to sodomizable “Assad” or sodomized “Gaddafi”). But slowly, or suddenly, the spooks are revealed. Lacan called it aphanISIS: the spook vanished not through his symbolic absorption but through his sudden obsolescence, his absolute demystification and impotence.
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#Empathetic_people: Dadaist Postscript for Future Narcisso-Pedophiles/Danish Undercover EmoCops (How to Fund Jabhat Al-Nusra by Confiscating the Assets of Syrian “Fifth Column” Refugees)
An example of the emotional vulturism, robotism, and opportunism of the “Syria expert” who posts the private information of Syrian refugees on his blog:
