Terrible weapons and terrible people
My sticky notes from End Times Fascism by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor:
On the three-component mechanism of our enemy:
[Fascism is] an alliance of three very different groups, each racing towards a different but related apocalyptic dream .. the religious end timers, the tech end timers, and the ethno-nationalist end timers.
These three bunkered visions ... [are] bound together by their common abandonment of the very possibility of a stable future.
Fascism is always a warped response to real crises. And end times fascism is a response to real planetary scale crises. The responses it proposes--mass sacrifices of humans and non-humans alike--are monstrous and must be purged from our body politic.
Primo Levi writes:
Every age has its own Fascism, and we see the warning signs wherever the concentration of power denies citizens the possibility and the means of expressing and acting on their own will.
On what fascism looks like today:
contemporary fascism doesn't look like the ordered and industrial past. It looks like the frenetic, always online, never-stop-monetizing, bot-infected present. If we are waiting for soldiers goosestepping in formation, we'll miss the venture capitalists and their autonomous weapons. If we are looking for yellow stars, we will miss the facial-recognition databases and the algorithmic threat ratings. If we expect only white Christians, we'll miss the way historical trauma can jump from host to host, with fascism's past victims mimicking their victimisers and calling it freedom, or justice, or just their turn.
Fascists promote the fantasy of turning the clock back to an idealised past, foreclosing the possibility of building a more inclusive and less disorientating future.
On the fight back:
[The fascists] understand now that they are competing against all the ordinary things we humans used to do on our own and with one another, without requiring their mediation.
Crabapple describes [the Bund] standing up to brutal police, bosses, and fascist gangs -- and also their fellow Jews who told them that paradise was an ethno-state on another continent.
On the nukes:
There are now around 12,200 nuclear warheads in existence today, 4,000 of them ready to be deployed, and nine nations have them. A new arms race has begun, with expired treatise and an AI wildcard.
Kubrick intended to show his audience that to truly comprehend the danger of nuclear bombs, we should not imagine them in the hands of trustworthy leaders -- Oppenheimer and JFK types, tormented by the weight of power. Rather, we have a duty to imagine those weapons of mass destruction in the hands of the vain, stupid, drunk and bigoted characters who populated his comedy. Because, sooner or later, terrible weapons and terrible people will find one another, compounding their respective danger exponentially.
As we confront end times fascism, we can take inspiration from [the Cold War movement to nuclear disarmament]'s example while expanding our definition of what constitutes a weapon of mass destruction and what a modern campaign for disarmament might encompass. Like atomic bombs, accelerating AI and concentrating wealth should also be thought of as WMDs, not least because of the reckless sense of invincibility that possessing such superhuman tools and resources inspires.