Garrison Davis (15:04)
The penguin is not the Ubermensch. The penguin will not achieve individual greatness at the summit of the mountain because it's never going to get there. As friend of the pod, Dan Olson so eloquently put it, the penguin is going to die. Though the penguin does not bash its head on a rock, this separation from society is still an act of suicide. The deranged penguin has literally turned its back on food, water, shelter and the colony to die, wandering towards mountains that it will never reach. The Trump administration's embrace of this suicidal penguin as a that's literally me figure is a shockingly open display of fascism's relation to the death drive. It's just so naked to make your mascot a symbol of suicidal defiance against perceived cultural norms. They're doing a first is tragedy twice as farce for fascist death emblems. The Nazis get the skull, we get a fucking penguin. But the penguin is not the first modern American suicidal folk hero. The killdozer rampage of public destruction which ended in the suicide of the perpetrator, has been a mascot for the libertarian right for over two decades. And in 2018, a 28 year old airport ground service agent named Richard Russell hijacked an empty plane at Sea Tac to fly over Mount Rainier before killing himself by purposefully crashing the plane. Very similar to Herzog's deranged Penguin, Russell left behind a wife of six years, but became a sort of nihilistic folk hero to overly online young men, especially among the online far right on places like 4chan and Telegram, where he was dubbed Sky King. Last August, a congressional Republican from Georgia, Mike Collins, who serves on the Republican Transportation Committee, posted a glowing multi paragraph memorial for Richard Russell on the anniversary of his suicide, signing off the message with Rest in peace, Sky King. But the direct identification of the Trump administration with a suicidal Penguin is a step farther. The fascist appetite for death is well understood, but the death drive represents a usually subconscious desire to not only harm or kill others, but ultimately yourself, an attempt to ease the tensions driving social life by returning to a prior inorganic state. This desire can be channeled through the politics of fascism, which allow for violent paranoid manifestations of repressed internal contradictions which attempt to be resolved through death. But fascism itself is a contradiction between a primitive war machine and a stable state apparatus, and the way that tension is released is also self destruction. In the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, A Thousand Plateaus, by philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari, they discuss the ways in which fascism and totalitarianism differ. They write that totalitarianism is a state affair made up of material components that over manage society. Even in the case of a military dictatorship, the it is a state army, not a war machine, that takes power and elevates the state to the totalitarian stage. Totalitarianism is quintessentially conservative. Fascism, on the other hand, involves a war machine. When fascism builds itself a totalitarian state, it is not in the sense of a state army taking power, but of a war machine taking over the state. This analysis from Deleuze and Guattari is building off of an essay by the French writer Paul Virilio called the Suicidal State, where Virilio argues that in fascism the state is far less totalitarian than it is suicidal, an evolution of the state that no longer pretends to be guided internally by reason and progress, but rather non progress and terror, founded on the repulsion and fear of all development in this civil domain. This repulsion and fear were manifested in the accelerated destruction of state institutions during the first few months of Trump's second term and Doge's scorched earth approach to slashing government agencies, Virilio writes that during the disappearance of public service, quote infrastructures of service are reduced as the wiretaps of the Vermacht are restored. Colonial geometry of decolonialization, unquote. So as the federal government rescinds public services, the everyday presence of the federal government is reduced to masked armed agents in the streets disappearing our neighbors and shooting civilians, while the President fights in court for the ability to deploy the military against American citizens within our own territory. During the tension of total war or total peace versus the system expands and reproduces itself. A material process without an end, but no longer without limits. To quote the Brazilian philosopher Vladimir Svatli, the suicide state, quote, is not just a manager of death. It is rather the ongoing agent of its own catastrophe, the maker of its own explosion. To be more precise, this new state mixes the death management of entire sectors of its own population with an ongoing and risky flirtation with its own self destruction. For the idea of the suicidal state emerges as this new mode of governing to solve the crisis of post war liberalism in Germany after World War I, as well as risked by the United States after each of our many wars. Quote One of the keys to the present situation is on one side, the overly informed status of experts of the system, and on the other, the under informed status of all those who are supposedly thinking outside of it. Unquote. Verlio says that the experts no longer know how to use their hoards of information except to gain money and status by continually adding to their body of work. Meanwhile, the outsiders produce the political and cultural undercurrent of modern folklore and ordinary life. But this limp dichotomy cannot last for very long on its own. So Virilio proposes the new emergence of a third category of people who make use of information for an end, the ultimate end. The directors of the suicidal state, while the outsiders, ideologues and artists simply try to simulate catharsis. Quote by contrast, the third category, the suicidal state itself, produces a feeling for the real better it aims to retain the exclusivity of its production. This feeling is a contempt for and a hatred of the everyday. To paraphrase, the fascist project, exploits man's alienation from his environment through pollution, economic insecurity, emotional insecurity, desocialization, and seeks to replace any legitimate grievance he has with society with a more repulsive and expressive force, the fear of society, which is superimposed on a new military schema of total war and internal invasion, all towards a nihilistic end of dropping the bomb on ourselves. The oscillation of external and internal destruction epitomized by the death drive is mirrored by the imperial boomerang, where the violence of colonial expansion is forced to return to its homeland. Once home, the drive remains, resulting in a war on society directly or through other means. But this is a war on its own people, or as Trump would say, the enemy within. To quote a paragraph from A Thousand Plateaus, so called total war seems less a state undertaking than an undertaking of a war machine that appropriates the state and channels it into a flow of absolute war whose only possible outcome is the suicide of the state itself. There is in fascism a realized nihilism. Unlike the totalitarian state, which does its utmost to seal all possible lines of escape, fascism is constructed on an intense line of escape, which it transforms into a line of pure destruction and abolition. It is curious that from the very beginning the Nazis announced to Germany what they were bringing at once. Wedding bells and death, including their own death and the death of the Germans. They thought they would perish, but that their undertaking would be resumed all across Europe, all over the world, throughout the solar system. And the people cheered, not because they did not understand, but because they wanted that death through the death of others. Like a will to wager everything, you have every hand to stake your own death against the death of others. Unquote. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari quote an excerpt from Klaus Mann's 1936 novel Mephisto, which contains fascist speeches and ordinary conversations from Nazi Germany. The quote they include is eerily similar to the visuals of Trump as the suicidal Penguin quote. Heroism was something that was being ruled out of our lives. In reality, we are not marching forward, we are reeling, staggering. Our beloved Fuhrer is dragging us toward the shades of darkness and everlasting nothingness. How can we poets who have a special affinity for darkness and lower depths not admire him, unquote. Deleuze and Guattari then write, suicide is presented not as a punishment, but as the crowning glory of the death of others. The insufficiency of economic and political definitions of fascism does not simply imply a need to tack on vague so called ideological determinations. We prefer to inquiry into the precise formation of Nazi statements, which are just as much in evidence in politics and economics as in the most absurd of conversations. They always contain the stupid and repugnant cry, long live death. Even at the economic level, where the arms expansion replaces growth in consumption and where investment veers from the means of production toward the means of pure destruction, unquote. Virilio calls this a psychosis which governs its entire politics of production. And he writes that the replacement of the American industries of the automobile and the cinema with the military industrial complex does not involve a rational, functional or useful choice, but rather entirely psychological or rather psychopathological. It stems from contempt for an abandonment of productive rapport with the milieu. Every investment is made to escape from it, unquote. For contemporary reference, go check out the stock price of Palantir. And on the larger economic and international level, Trump's tariffs, his trade wars and the self destruction of the United States geopolitical standing are all expressions of this suicidal state in action. The state of total war, where the economy of war has become the economy of peace, is facilitated by a transformation in the American sense of freedom, where the free as a subject, as in the land of the free, is no longer properly spoken of. As a citizen. He is an anonymous organism without culture, without society and without memory. This figure has no historical precedent. Assistance has become survival, non assistance a condemnation to death. All liberation henceforth has for him invariably the appearance of death, of the end, suicide or murder, unquote. This sort of freedom from social services, freedom from the state, freedom from assistance as a movement of the death drive also provides insight into people's willingness to and even desire to vote against their own material interests, especially when their political struggle has turned against society itself. Only in transformation of ordinary social life into the horrific in the minds of the populace can the fascist find their surest means of governing. The legitimization of his politics and military strategies, and right up to the end, far from weakening the repulsive nature of his powers, the ruins, the horrors, the crimes, the chaos of total war will generally only increase in scope. In Hitler's 1945 telegram 71 he writes, if the war is lost, may the nation perish. Here Hitler decides to join forces with his enemies in order to complete the destruction of his own people by obliterating the last remaining sources of its life support system, civil reserves of every kind, potable water, fuel, provisions. This is the normal outcome of the politics of dialectical retreat from the man who had written, the idea of protection haunts and fulfills life, unquote. Fascism hijacks the mechanism of evolutionary and revolutionary escape and reverts it into a mechanism of destruction. Instead of resolving crises, it produces constant crisis for it to feed off of, forming as Deleuze and Guattari say, a war machine instead of resonating in a state apparatus, a war machine that no longer had anything but war as its object and would rather annihilate its own servants than stop the destruction. To quote a thousand plateaus. This is war not for conquest or revolution, but war as its own end. The hollowing out of public institutions and social services, the divestment from the milieu of life leads people to turn towards the suicidal state as the only force of movement resting on, as Ferio says, the advanced exploitation of our instincts for death. A new totalitarian state defined by the constant ascent of statistics toward planetary death. Crime and madness will no longer be the defects. The madman and the assassin are the legitimate children engendered and recognized by the suicidal state. And what phenomenon has risen in the United States the past few years? The conspiracy theorist and the assassin. The embrace of total war and the campaign of civil fear necessitates a break from sanity and the bizarre strangeness of means that inevitably result in in a self destructive end. Virilio claims there is an insanity at the heart of the fascist project. The imaginary potential of the fascist state arises. Quote from a finished world where insanity has become the goal of order, the very product of organization, unquote. There's a quote from Goebbels to one of his aides, Prince Frederick Christian. The world in which Hitler moves is a world of absolute fate. A world in which even success makes no sense. It's not a mistake that the White House has cast itself as a lost penguin marching to its own death. They know the absurdity of their replies. They know the world looks upon them as insane. They know that they'll never reach the make America great again mountain. The self destruction ice, the tariffs, the broken treaties are not for any greater purpose. The means are the end. This is total war. The psychological purpose of which is terror, which for the fascist is synonymous with peace. But let's not forget how Hitler and Goebbels finally resolved their contradictions.
