Ancestors

Written by marasawr on 2024-11-08 at 00:03

I finished reading Serj Tankian’s memoir last month. Well worth picking up for a view into what was a profoundly alienating and frightening time in US politics after 9/11 and the illegal invasion of Iraq

https://serjtankian.com/pages/down-with-the-system

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Toot

Written by marasawr on 2024-11-08 at 00:51

When I say ‘profoundly alienating’, I mean I straight-up left as soon as I was able with no intention of returning

The violent hypernationalism, xenophobia, and bigotry were relentless. We became a society obsessed with revenge and bluntly intolerant of dissent. And we stayed like that for a decade

We got a short break for the 2010s up until 2016, whatever we want to call the last four years, and now in a lot of ways it feels like we’re right back where we started

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Descendants

Written by Matt Blaze on 2024-11-08 at 00:58

@marasawr I think it's worse now, in at least one respect. The xenophobia and hyper-nationalism of the early 2000's left a deep stain on us (we adopted actual torture as official government policy), but at least I understood the source of the fear and anger that the right were exploiting.

This latest one is more mysterious and random. Sure, there's always been an undercurrent of hate and fear in this country, but this flareup feels like an evil, stupid spell was quietly cast on us.

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Written by marasawr on 2024-11-08 at 16:47

@mattblaze Tocqueville held this line of absolutely cracked reasoning that France had to have a colonial empire because if it didn’t have a way of violently projecting itself, the nation would fall into ‘decadence’ and eat itself alive

Gallicisation was a parallel and necessary project to the imperial one. France had to be French after all, and that meant the linguistic and cultural erasure of everything that wasn’t…

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Written by marasawr on 2024-11-08 at 16:47

@mattblaze Obvs wack, but deeply influential to the organising principles of imperial powers, including ours. I think France’s fitful attempts to embrace pluralism since the ‘80s and our similarly patchy progress in the same direction say something about just how deeply

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