Ein weiterer Blog-Aufsatz zum Kirk-Attentat, der sich nicht so sehr darauf kapriziert, ob der Täter jetzt links oder rechts war, und ob man die jeweils andere Seite jetzt mit aller Gewalt zerstören und vernichten muss, weil sie so gewaltverherrlichend ist, sondern eher darauf, ob der die Tat nicht vielleicht deshalb ausgeführt hat, um durch den Gewaltakt selbst überhaupt erst das Gefühl zu bekommen, irgendetwas zu sein das nicht nichts ist:
Constituent Parts of a Theory of Spectacular Acts of Public Violence
For some time now, I’ve been trying to work out how to explain what I take to be a new period of spectacular acts of public violence. (This is the clumsy term that I’ve arrived at, “spectacular acts of public violence,” chosen because existing terms like “mass shooting” are insufficiently expansive.)
Alles anzeigen[...] This is, in fact, my overarching argument: that where we are trained to see public violence as the outcome of ideology - those anarchist assassinations, 9/11, Oklahoma City, Anders Breivik, Yukio Mishima - in the 21st century, a certain potent strain of political violence is not the product of ideology but rather an attempt to will ideology into being through violence itself. To create meaning in a culture steeped in digital meaninglessness by the most destructive means available. The 21st century school shooter (for example) does not murder children in an effort to pursue some teleological purpose; the 21st century school shooter exists in a state of deep purposelessness and, at some level and to some degree, seeks to will meaning into being through their actions. This is part of why so many of them engage in acts of abstruse symbolism and wrap their politically-incoherent violence in layers of iconography; they are engaged in cargo cult meaning-making, the pursuit of a pseudo-religion. The tail wags the dog; acts we have grown to see as expressions of meaning are in fact childish attempts to will meaning into being through violence.
Conservatives will of course go on saying that Tyler Robinson was an antifa soldier trained in a George Soros-funded BLM terrorist cell. I’m profoundly uninterested in trying to talk anyone out of that. My point, which you will either accept or won’t, is that someone who scrawls an Italian antifascist slogan onto a bullet casing and also “If you read this, you are gay, LMAO,” as well as obscure video game references… this is exactly who I’m talking about. Clearly he had some sort of ideological urge, some sense that his violence should contain meaning, but his impulses and influences are incoherent; indeed, that urge has been inculcated in online communities that are defined by nothing so much as, well, nothing - the all-consuming lol lol lol of contemporary sad-young-man online culture, forum after forum dominated by an endless race to the bottom of nihilism and self-hatred. I’m going to guess that Robinson has not read deeply in the works of Camillo Berneri. I think, instead, that he saw some quotes pop up randomly in the same frenetic and directionless Discord servers where he lived the rest of his life and thought they would be cool things to write on a bullet. This is the ethos of what I call the Heavenly Aeroplane.1
The kind of spectacular public violence I’m discussing is not the product of ideology; it is the chaotic process by which a system, in the absence of purpose, manufactures the raw materials of cargo-cult ideology, Potemkin ideology, masks of deeper meaning, effigies of religious passion, false gods, unreal heroes.
Of course, conventional analysis will continue to seek meaning in, well, meaning, in ideology, in philosophy, in the assumption of some deeper purpose, and in so doing will obscure the danger ahead:
"Contrary to the assertion of Trump and some Republicans — particularly those seeking to create a committee to “uncover the force” behind the “radical left” by probing a slew of “entities driving this coordinated attack” — Westwood says there’s no evidence the shooting was “coordinated” at all or even that there’s a “national appetite” for coordinated political violence.
The Kirk killing, he says, is part of a trend of “lone wolf” violence that lacks any organizational backing and often plays out with an “isolated individual” struggling with mental-health issues and “without a coherent ideology.”
The New York piece where this quote appears reassures us that more violence will not necessarily come from Kirk’s murder, that we don’t need to worry because this was not an ideologically-motived attack, driven by Robinson’s membership in some coordinated violent campaign. But what if that’s exactly why we will see more violence? Because while organizing a coordinated group of likeminded ideologues who are willing to risk their lives to inflict violence for a cause is actually very hard, we already have a nation stuffed with directionless men soaked in violent pop culture, convinced that they have no future and obsessed with their lack of economic and sexual privilege? [...]
der öffentlich rechtliche Rundfunk mittlerweile geworden ist, wenn diesem, mit Gebührengeld für seine Antifa-Hetzerei bezahlten Kommunisten Zappeloni selbst die gemäßigte Sozialdemokratin Reichinek noch zu "rechts" ist!
