Vincent Artman

A Global Necropolis The American Politics of Death

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Image of Senator Alex Padilla being physically dragged away by the DHS secretary's security.

This is what Trump's government thugs are willing to do in broad daylight, to a US Senator, with cameras on.

They are sending the message that anyone who disagrees with Trump isn't safe in America.

This is authoritarianism.

IF THEY WILL BEAT AND HARASS A SITTING UNITED STATES SENATOR IN BROAD DAYLIGHT WITH CAMERAS ROLLING, THEY WILL DO THE SAME TO YOU!

We’ve got to do something about midwit western hamsick dudes in ushankas thinking that belabored and cliched writing full of stale jargon makes them sound like Professor Communist McTheorist.

Please god just make it stop.

To be clear: Trump is dispatching the troops in response to protests *the Los Angeles Police Department* has described as peaceful

YouTube video by Takes™ by Jamelle Bouie The Anti-Life Party

the trump movement has inculcated a genuinely rotten contempt for life in our collective political life and the real challenge will be extirpating it in favor of life-affirming solidarity youtu.be/Em6hb2Mg0XA?...

I guess L.A. hasn't been through enough in 2025. The firestorm was only 5 months ago. They had to stage their little fascist raids here in dramatic fashion so they could call in the troops and put us in our place.

Kharkiv this morning. Sleeping city. Apartment buildings are getting hit. This is terrorism.

3 people have been found dead in Kharkiv following tonight's Russian attack on our city. 6 more remain trapped under the rubble and are unresponsive.

22 are injured, including a 14-year-old girl and a two-week-old baby.

The search and rescue operation continues.

Russia Forced to Deploy Rare Tu-160 Bombers Amid Tu-95 Losses in Operation Spider Web Russia's use of Tu-160 bombers to launch Kh-101 missiles signals a depletion of its Tu-95MSM fleet amid ongoing military operations in Ukraine.

⚡️ After Ukraine’s Operation Spider Web damaged multiple Tu-95 bombers, Russia was forced to use rare, costly Tu-160s for its latest missile strike.

Already saw at least one Dem Congressman making the same point about denaturalization and just begging, begging people not to descend to the level of calling for stripping the citizenship of people you don't like.

I am sad for our country, but at least we are going out with some incredible content

Maybe Lukashenka can help mediate

How it started / how it's going

Portrait of Ambassador Hiroshi Ōshima in military uniform.

Baron Ōshima shaking hands with Hitler.

Amb. Ōshima shaking hands with German officers at the front.

Baron Ōshima inspecting German troops.

On the anniversary of D-Day tomorrow, let us thank Baron Ōshima, Japan’s ambassador to Berlin. The Allies had detailed knowledge of the Normandy’s defenses because the Nazis gave Ōshima a private tour & he cabled every little detail back to Tokyo. Those messages were promptly decrypted by the US!😂

Honestly I think there’s been a big vibe shift from post-Cold War embarrassment about the USSR towards silly kids thinking Stalin was “based” and that the USSR could’ve somehow survived if it’d had just gone back to totalitarianism.

I dunno about “most,” but there’s certainly a large segment of liberal kids LARPING as communists and they think the best way to do that is to slavishly do hasbara for a dead empire they only know through memes and TikTok clips

“DONAAAALD!!!”

Yeah, it a lot of dumb zoomers have retreated to “only Stalin was real communism and everyone after him was a ‘revisionist’”

Western leftists live in an absolute fantasy world in which the Soviet Union actually was the wholesome meme country they venerate on r/communism.

the moribund old communist regimes. People, moreover, are more or less free to voice their dissatisfaction or even call for the total destruction of the whole liberal democratic system in a way they simply weren’t able to under communism./end

(naively, I think) seeking alternatives to a system that increasingly seems as if it’s not working as it should.

The crisis, of course, is nowhere near as acute as in late communism, and ideology, while definitely pervasive, is nowhere near as crude or all-encompassing as in/15

people’s problems (such as the Great Depression).

I think that is also why a lot of people (at least outwardly) are now turning to communism and fascism once again - as capitalism is becoming ever more unequal and liberal democracies seem flabby and indecisive, people are /14

I guess, as an addendum, it’s worth pointing out that the rise of Nazism and communism in the interwar period was at least in part motivated by something similar: a growing skepticism that capitalism and liberal democracy were meaningful ideologies that could meaningfully address/13

something to believe in.

Again, I don’t think I’m saying anything novel here, but I do think it’s helpful to understand that “post-communist nationalism” didn’t simply spring from nowhere, least of all the genetic predispositions of Eastern Europeans.

/12

This embrace, of course, had a lot of different sources — national liberation from communist repression was one major wellspring, of course, but, I also think that because communism made ideology so central while late communism was so barren, nationalism also gave people /11

Kotkin, here), “political entrepreneurs” turned to nationalism to keep themselves in power, regardless of whether or not they were “true believers” and a public that had been inured to ideology’s role in structuring society, embraced it/10

liberatory force.

Nationality and nationalism, however, still meant something: Ceaucescu scapegoated Hungarians; Zhivkov repressed and expelled Turks; Chornobyl was a rallying point for Ukrainians; the Catholic Church for Poles; etc.

And so (and I think I’m borrowing from /9

in the 1980s/90s were dyed-in-the-wool, blood-and-soil nationalists. Most were disillusioned communists who no longer possessed an ideology that could effectively rally the public — 1917 could not be repeated because by the 80s nobody believed that communism was a /8

on the importance of ideology in mobilizing the masses and thus fostered a broad-based “ideological” view of the world, the moral and intellectual paucity of late-communist ideology presented a dilemma.

Nationalism filled that void. Few of the nationalist figures that emerged/7