Musings on the inhumanity of Nature or matter

I had recently looked at an interview with the esoteric collective Gruppo di Nun on Diffractions Collective, conducted by Dustin Breitling, and there was an idea from that interview that had me thinking. At some point in the interview, a person called the High Priestess of Nun talks about how Gruppo di Nun wants to eschew “traditional” 20th century occultism in pursuit of a new magic that reaches “beyond the human” through all available means, and as part of this accepts the inspiration of scientific thought as a tool that could allow the access of “the inhuman depths of matter”. It’s that particular theme, the inhumanity of matter, that I would like to really over-extend and fixate on here.

To understand this inhumanity, perhaps we must first stay with the interview for a little longer. A key focus of Gruppo di Nun’s demonological worldview is that they see themselves as “vessels for a swarm of voices from the great outside”, and the attendant politics of this demonology involves the unleashing of the inhuman or anti-human forces against the “Man-God machine”. Such forces include, per their examples, Tiamat as the “Original Mother” slain by the masculine sun god in Mesopotamian mythology and then comes to represent a rebellious anti-cosmic matter, and The Beast as depicted in the Book of Revelation. The archetype of the barbarian also figures into this framework as an Insurrectionary rejection of “the Human” (among other things), and so does the concept of the demonic invasion as a path of resistance as conceptualised through the Witches Sabbath. It is also reflected in Gruppo di Nun’s namesake: Nun refers to the Egyptian goddess of the primordial abyss and represents the ocean of infinite recombination, while the name Gruppo di Nun inverts the premise of Julius Evola’s Gruppo di Ur, in which Ur represented the triumph of (male) human will over the abyss of matter.

I can only hope that their upcoming book Revolutionary Demonology delves more into the content of that inhumanity, but at the same time I’m inclined to delve into other ideas about that from other places.

One of the things that springs to mind instantly is Georges Bataille’s essay, Base Materialism and Gnosticism, where he discusses his particular take on Gnosticism and its supposed leitmotif of esoteric materialism. Bataille argued that the Gnostics were fixated on “monstrous archontes” and “outlawed and evil forces”, such as the “ass-headed god” (no doubt the god referred to as Seth-Typhon), which to him represented “the most virulent manifestation of materialism”. This ostensibly was, to Bataille, more of a psychological obsession than an ontological statement, but it also denoted matter as something extant and foreign to the aspirations of human ideation, idealisation, or idolization, and thus could not be subordinated by “the great ontological machines”. In a way it does track with the way Gruppo di Nun talks about the demonic in terms of a great outsideness in relation to the order of things, or the barbarian as alien par excellence.

Insofar as Bataille’s Gnostic venerated these monstrous archontes, these inhuman forces, it is possible to interpret this Averse Gnosticism (per the terminology of Nicholas Lacetti) as a religious communion with the inhumanity of matter and nature as represented by the archontes. Per Lacetti the emblems of this dark principle of Averse Gnosticism are not only monstrous archontes or divinities featured but also tripartite devil’s signature of attested by Eliphas Levi, consisting of the inverted pentagram and sign of the goat, the “typhonian fork” and the diverging serpents, and the inverted name of God, all symbols of rebellion, negation, conflict, creative destruction, and a sort of Satanic subversion which all present a chaotic, inhuman, “blind” totality at the centre of reality. Of course, it’s probably not worth overlooking that this doesn’t necessarily have much to do with what was the makeup of esoteric Christian sects referred to as “Gnosticism”, and pertains much more to the shadow of “Gnosticism”. Yet, there is something about the historical movement of “Gnosticism” that perhaps we can discuss in relation to this idea.

In The Cult of The Black Cube, Arthur Moros’ treatise about his proposed cult of Saturn, Moros discusses the figure of Saturn in relation to Ialdabaoth, one of the many Demiurge figures presented within “Gnosticism”. In the course of this he argues that there was Gnostic current which did not reject the Demiurge or Archons and renounce the world but instead venerated and petitioned these beings as the rulers of the world in order to attain secret rites, which would allow them to cultivate magical power, fulfill worldly goals and desires, or perhaps even achieve some kind of liberation. He bases this idea largely on Origen’s account of an Ophite ritual within Contra Celsum in which the “Gnostic” invokes the rulers of the seven gates of wickedness in order to receive secret teachings from them. We can refer to a passage from Origen given by Moros, per his own translation, as follows:

Further, if anyone wants to better understand the practices of those magicians, through which arcane secrets they endeavor to mislead people, with mixed success, then listen to the secret teaching which the Gnostics receive after passing through the spiritual gates, which are governed by the archons. At the First Gate, say: Hail, Solitary King! You are the first power, the darkening of sight, utter destruction, upheld by wisdom and foresight, by which I am purified. […] Hail, lord, let it be so!’ At the Second Gate, they shall find Ialdabaoth. Say, ‘Hail, Ialdabaoth, first and seventh, fearless, and born to rule. Your mind is clear and pure. You are a perfect son [to Chaos], holding the sigil of life, and opening the sealed gate to your realm. Again I pass through your realm. Peace be upon me, lord, let it be so!

Of course, Contra Celsum is likely the sole source for this ritual, and Origen in turn regarded it as a profane sorcery that had nothing to do with Christianity. But Arthur Moros believes that it was a real and reflected a historical, albeit probably heretical, tendency within “Gnosticism”, and thus that Origen somehow had access to this tradition. There’s no real way to have any historical certainty about this idea, but perhaps it should not be discounted. If the principle holds that to write against heresy is ultimately to preserve it, then there is reason to assume that Origen may have ended up preserving something. But moreover, if you look at the Greek Magical Papyri, you will find spells invoking archons such as Sabaoth and Abraxas for various worldly ends. Beings such as Ialdabaoth and Abraxas appear in various amulets attributed to Gnostic magic, which Moros takes as a sign that magicians were using the image of Ialdabaoth as a talisman for the purposes of invocation. Why exactly any Gnostics would want to invoke such a being is a mystery, but I suppose it’s into this mystery that you can explore any number of rationales. A creative interpretation of Valentinian Gnosticism, for instance, would position the Demiurge as a being who could be invoked by initiates to save them from the cycle of rebirth. An interpretation of the ritual described by Origen could lead to a similar conclusion, but the idea being to liberate yourself from the cycle by gaining the power to acheive apotheosis. One can think of passing through the gates of wickedness as an application of the credo of “no way out but through”, paging the approach to nihilism presented by Keiji Nishitani or Maurice Blanchot, but it’s also inseparable from the recognition of a monstrous and chaotic principle at the source of reality

And further reinforcing this on esoteric terms we can revisist the subject of hongaku thought and its applications in certain strands of Japanese esoteric Buddhism. Hongaku, or “innate enlightenment”, is the idea that all beings and even things in general already possess some kernel of enlightenment, or even a latent mode of enlightenment in toto. You can also sometimes find possibly similar ideas well outside Buddhism, including in modern neopagan groups: towards the end of Nevill Drury’s The Occult Experience, we see a member of The Temple of the Mother, an Australian neopagan group focused on worshipping the goddess Isis, explain his belief that humanity is already enlightened and just has to become aware of it, whcih to him means that the religious process consists of an “unfolding” of inner spiritual truths rather than creating them while spiritual freedom consists in Man realizing its own latent divinity and perfection. In an esoteric Buddhist context, the Hongaku philosophy establishes the possibility of enlightenment being present or potential even in the most ignorant, unenlightened, or wicked beings. Tendai Buddhism established not only that all things were in some way Buddha but also that all thoughts and deeds, even ignorant ones, could be seen as expressions of innate enlightenment without cultivation. In theological terms, it also meant that even demons were themselves manifestations of innate enlightenment. In Bernard Faure’s study Protectors and Predators, we see a triad of chthonian demon gods, Bishamonten (Vaisravana), Daikokuten (Mahakala), and Enmaten (Yama) emerge as emblems of an “unthinkable reality” of violence and evil that is nonetheless. Daikokuten in particular, as “The Great Black One” came to be regarded as the representation of fundamental ignorance, from “great darkness”, and thus, in Tendai doctrine, an embodiment of ultimate reality and innate enlightenment. A similar context developed for a number of Japanese Buddhist and Shinto deities that came to be regarded in demonic terms. Thus fear, anger, passion, violence, defilement, all the “poisons” – which were seen as attributes of beings such as Kojin, Daikokuten, Ugajin, Matarajin, and Mara – were all understood as the fundamental identity between ignorance and awakening, the inhuman ultimate reality that the practitioner must realise.

The inhumanity of Nature or matter as a larger subject should also be considered on its own terms. To play with Gnostic parlance, matter is not inherently “good”, but neither is it inherently “evil” as the “traditional” “Gnostic” perspective. What it is, though, is inhuman. It’s simply absurd to moralize it. Thus it is for Nature. The idea that Nature can be conceived in the terms of human morality is nothing but an illusion. The idea that Nature is inherently “Good” comes as a projection of our place within it, the fact that we necessarily derive existence from it, our perception of it as the organising principle of existence, and the further bias or prejudice that the organising principle must by dint of its status be “Good”. But destruction, as in the destruction of everything, is one of the immovable “laws” of nature, and the destructive aspect of Nature is bound up with its creative aspect. It’s worth noting the way that Spinoza recognises this in his assertion of his God-concept, which in some ways can and has been identified with Nature. Spinoza does posit definitions for “good” and “evil”, but these are defined in terms of what is beneficial to us versus what hinders that beneficence, while nothing is “good” or “evil” from the point of view of Spinoza’s “God”. “Good” and “evil” are either equally serviceable to this “God” or Nature or they do not exist as “good” or “evil” at all. They’re the products of we who spring up from the earth and which, with our seemingly distinctly developed sentience, we do not understand, struggle to understand, fail to understand and almost cannot understand.

The fundamental inhumanity is not hard to understand. There is a profound chasm that sits between Nature and thought; that is, between reality as it exists and the systems by which we strive to understand it. We try to cross or bridge that chasm, but neither reason nor moralization permit us to do so. We very often try to see Nature in human terms, and we might even occasionally regard the opposite perspective as merely a reflection of a cruel life. But there is nothing “human” about Nature, except perhaps for humans. Nature does not care what comes of humans, or any other creature or things, when we perish. It is not the concern of Nature what we become in life or in death. If within a system of metempsychosis we may reincarnate as one of the vast menagerie of animals whose existence we sometimes mock from the relative comfort of civilization, would Mother Nature really shed a tear, or even smirk upon as the vindication of some karmic law? And if it did, for what reason would it permit that living things often must devour other living things in order to continue their existence, or for that matter the very fact of their inexorable decay and death? But of course, even this is merely speaking with a degree of senselessness: after all, to talk of the “permission” of Nature is also absurd. Nature doesn’t “permit” or “forbid” anything in the fashion that the familiar lawmaking God might, just that nothing can exist beyond, apart from, or outside of Nature.

So long as we understand this about Nature, it is simple enough to locate the realities of destruction, struggle, and violence. Ah, but perhaps it is here that inhumanity becomes a somewhat tenuous category, for you see violence is perfectly human. In political life, the one and only taboo is that violence exists at the centre of all political arrangements, as well the alteration of and emancipation from said arrangements. Bourgeois democracies have their subjects pretend that they exist without any structural violence and do not depend on violence to exist, and even sometimes among some anarchists there is a tendency to pretend that violence exists only as something that other people do against you. Meanwhile, reactionaries and fascists opportunistically exploit the contradiction of violence by claiming some recognition of violence as the sole law of nature, and in some cases proudly proclaiming that their ideology is based on violence, and yet when anti-fascists exercise violence against fascists and militant reactionaries, they denounce the recognition of violence as a necessary part of defending the oppressed from fascism. The truth about fascists is not that they believe violence in itself a law of nature, rather they typically ultimately only accept that the violence of domination is natural; the violence of the master is just and natural but the violence of the slave is somehow to be accepted as an attack on “the natural order”, even when the very order they worship was quite literally established by the violence of rebellion or insurrection against a previously dominating order! In that sense their morality actually differs little from the tacit acceptance of the violence of liberal-democracy as somehow inherently legitimated, sans the matter of recognition as violence, while the violence arrayed against that system must only be some malefic aberration of history.

Whether we recognise it or not, though, violence is rather inseparable from political struggle, even if only in limited forms such as defense or the ability to threaten violence against adversaries. In fact, there is absolutely no way to guarantee that we will somehow abolish it once all the major structures of domination have been dismantled. There are many reasons for this, of course, but among the most relevant would be that you have no guarantee that no one will try to re-establish authority and domination, after cultivating some desire to dominate others. To establish that authority will invariably depend on violence, just as it has before when statehood itself emerged, and to oppose that authority, to prevent its re-emergence, will require violent resistance. Thus, since struggle is never absent, even in the world after the world, so too violence is never absent. Yet here it may seem that the inhumanity of nature is at once abject humanity, underpinning the universality of struggle.

There are other prospective considerations that emerge from the theme of the inhumanity of Nature. Gruppo di Nun seem to their understanding of the inhumane powers of outsideness to themes of disintegration, destruction, and ultimately towards becoming, even referring to Mihkail Bakunin’s axiom that the passion for destruction is also creative. Of course, the beginning and rest of that passage is “Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternally creative source of all life”, and with Gruppo di Nun it’s safe to assume they interpret Bakunin’s quote as a reference to an actual esoteric power. The demonic outsidness is thus also a perennial source of becoming, but the link between this outsideness and becoming is also already established in Nun as the chaotic abyss that is also the zone of endless transformation. In Pagan terms, it’s not so hard to link this same theme to that of the deifying power of the underworld as discussed by Jake Stratton-Kent in relation to ancient Greek polytheism, and from there to the whole world of chthonic mystery. I also see in the conception of the inhumanity of nature the possibility of certain ways of conceiving chaos from years ago returning to life in different ways. I imagine any idea of Chaos that would emerge in such considerations would differ from how, when I was much younger, I inclined myself towards the idea of Chaos as a kind of energetic life force, but insofar as it pertains to a kind of abyssic power of becoming, Chaos as a power in itself would not be an invalid idea. On the other hand it all would smack of the way I’ve already written about Darkness as an ontological concept or urgrund, the nature of nature as it were, and I lean towards the idea of Chaos as a meta-condition of sorts; the inhumanity of nature and its rammifications not necessarily being a bad description of that condition, though perhaps incomplete when describing the condition of Chaos.

In any case I am rather looking forward to the clarifications that perhaps Revolutionary Demonology might bring forward in regards to the overall demonological philosophy of Gruppo di Nun, which I am actually eager to see more of and hope will prove to be both personally inspirational and an expression of new ways of thinking within the broader Left Hand Path.

Against the Milites Christi

As I write this short piece, I am supposed to still be busy working on my commentary on Stanislaw Przybyszewski’s essay, The Synagogue of Satan, which I believe to the earliest written treatise on Satanism written by a self-declared Satanist. But recent events compel to interrupt such work for just a moment, because, thinking about it, I feel that it would be wrong for me to not say anything about it here on this blog when I have readily done so in the past. My work on Przybyszewski’s book is still in progress, but what I write now, I must write now, however briefly.

On June 10th, the headquarters of The Satanic Temple in Salem was attacked by a man who tried to set the place on fire. He placed some accelerants onto the premise and set it on fire. It seems that this individual was spotted in a T-shirt with the word “GOD” on it, likely indicating his commitment to Christianity. It also seems that the man was later identified as Daniel Damien Lucey, who, after his arrest, confessed to driving up to the building to light it on fire and that it was meant as a hate crime.

Although my opposition to The Satanic Temple are pretty well-known, and although I have questioned the very extent to which they could even be regarded as “Satanists”, the simple truth is that the attack isn’t really about any of that. It is reasonable to assume that Daniel Damien Lucey attacked The Satanic Temple quite simply because as far as he was concerned they were Satanists, and I further suspect that he may have been motivated by Christian nationalist ideology and the attendant moral panics centering Satanists and The Satanic Temple more particularly. This week, the American right condemned The Satanic Temple for their involvement in a Pride event in Idaho in which they were to offer “unbaptism” ceremonies and sell merchandise. The Satanic Temple pulled out of the Idaho event, probably not wanting to deal with reactionary backlash, but either way right-wingers already had their narrative that Satanists and LGBTQ people were “degenerates” looking to corrupt the community and, how do they put it, “sexualize your children”. In this sense I don’t think it’s a stretch of the imagination to count this attack as a broader expression of right-wing Christian nationalist violence meant to target marginalized groups, and anti-Satanic moral panic is a huge part of that ideology.

The recent attack on The Satanic Temple in Salem is not the first time Christian reactionaries have attacked Satanists or places associated with Satanism. I still remember when the Greater Church of Lucifer (now called the Assembly of Light Bearers) opened their first physical church in Texas back in 2015, and faced vandalism from local Christians before eventually shutting their doors in 2017. I am also informed that, in November 2019, a place called The Wilde Collection, which featured a depiction of Baphomet among other things, was the target of an arson attack by a man who said “God told me to do it”. And how often do we forget that Satanists have been victims of hate crimes for years now. Christian reactionaries have been trying to attack Satanists and be rid of Satanism for a long time now, and they’re not going to stop, especially not now that the war being waged by Christian nationalism is in full swing. In other words, it’s not just about The Satanic Temple particularly, because we are all under attack in exactly the same way, and the difference certainly doesn’t matter to our attackers.

You may notice the title of this article, “Against the Milites Christi”. That is no flowery hyperbole, and it is not simply a fancy name for fundamentalism. The term means “Solider of Christ”, and was the name used by the early Roman Christians to refer to themselves and the community of Christians in military terms. It is often also rendered as “Miles Christi” or “Miles Christianus”. The Christians saw themselves as soldiers on the side of God and his son, waging struggle on their behalf in order to spread the word of God and convert non-believers. Those who were not “Milites Christi” were called “pagans”, or “paganus”, in this case meaning “citizen” or “civilian”. The language of “Milites Christi” continued and evolved over the history of Christianity. The Christian Crusaders called themselves “Milites Christi”, and Christian leaders who advocated for the Crusades were also dubbed “Milites Christi”, while the basic concept took on more generic forms in the form of knighthood, chivalry, and the generic term “Christian Soldiers” referred to in Christian hymns. Modern Chrstian nationalists who attack Satanists, non-believers, and marginalized people tend to carry in themselves a similar zeal and fundamentally the same ideological mission: waging struggle in order to uphold God’s order, at least as they see it, under the desire to realize a theocratic nation-state. I will grant that many modern Christians do not view their faith in terms any great struggle, except perhaps for a more abstract sense of inner struggle with their own sins. But the Christians who are attacking Satanists with arson and violence absolutely see themselves as “soliders of Christ”, fighting evil in order to spread and uphold the order of God.

These people must be fought. There can be equivocation on this reality. Let them be cursed, let them be smashed, indeed let them burn in exactly the way they are trying to burn us. You should accept no counsel against the struggle that is to come – no, the struggle which has already been foisted upon you. In the American context, all talk of disarmament should be swiftly rejected, because it only means taking guns out of the hands of those waging anti-fascist struggle while the would-be “soldiers of Christ” get their hands on them anyway. And don’t doubt for a minute that they will. We’re talking about people who are convinced that their country is ruled by people who want to “sexualize” your children and get rid of Christianity and cis straight white males. Do you really think they’ll give a shit about how hard it is to get a gun if they think it means putting a stop to that? Make no illusions of the fight that is to be had. They want war. They want holy war on the streets. That’s how they see their actions against Satanists and anyone who they think is a Satanist, and if they’re allowed to run rampant they might indeed get their wish. Let’s not pretend everything is OK, and let’s not pretend that the powers that be will solve our problems. The politicians don’t care because they don’t regard us at all, the media doesn’t care and will happily tell us that those who kill in the name of God are not who they say they are, and it should ultimately be remembered that even now Douglas Misicko (sorry, “Lucien Greaves”) could still clutch his pearls about anti-fascist direct action taken against the people who just now tried to burn down The Satanic Temple’s Salem headquarters!

What action is to be taken against these Milites Christi, is to be taken into our own hands. Satanists are under attack, and other non-Christians will be too. The boots of the cross must not be allowed trample upon Satanic liberty; instead the cloven hooves must press upon them before they dare snuff it out!

Democracy versus autocracy, or oppression versus oppression?

As the possibility of war in Ukraine gradually unfolded yesterday (as of the time of this writing, Russia has now invaded and declared war with Ukraine), with Russian and Ukrainian troops gathering in the eastern Ukraine after the sham “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk were declared sovereign states by Vladimir Putin, I caught a Twitter thread from a Finnish liberal (well, I suppose he much prefers the term “leftist”) named Janne M. Korhonen, who argued that Putin’s actions in Ukraine were part of a broader plan to undermine and ultimately bring down the European Union. Korhonen’s idea of “the left”, or what “the left” should be, of course boils down to support for Nordic social democracy, which is essentially just capitalism with a human face as guided by the ideals of an ideology of progressive welfarism, and to preserve this order he feels that Finland should join with NATO in the hopes of protecting Finland from the possibility of being drawn into a war with Russia. Suffice it say, as far as “leftism” goes this certainly is fairly weak.

I will say that there are a number of valid points that Korhonen raises when he’s talking about Russian actions within Ukraine and the reasons why Finland and the Baltic states would fear any hint of Russian aggression or even expansion in Europe. However, the part of Korhonen’s thread that I wish to bring into focus is his overall narrative that what’s happening represents a struggle between “democracy” (referring to the West, of course) and autocracy (referring to competing imperialist dictatorships such as Russia and China). I find this to merely be liberal version of a phenomenon found in some corners of the left that is referred to as campism. Campism is a vulgar form of anti-imperialist analysis that frames the world as divided between, as the name suggests, two geopolitical camps; one “imperialist”, the other one “anti-imperialist”. In contemporary Marxist or even some non-Marxist socialist movements (and honestly even some nationalist and fascist circles), this means seeing the “imperialist” camp as consisting of the West, particularly the USA and NATO, and the “anti-imperialist” camp as any nation that can be seen to actively oppose the US-NATO sphere of influence, such as Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and Syria. The campist approach to anti-imperialist politics typically entails uncompromising support for the latter “anti-imperialist” camp of nations, often regardless of whether said nations could even be called socialist countries or even regardless of their actual imperialist actions (such as Russia’s actions in Ukraine, Georgia, and Chechnya). But of course, the liberal has their own version of campism in practice. From the liberal standpoint, if Russia is doing imperialism, then surely NATO is the anti-imperialist party in all this, regardless of the nature of Western imperialism and the atrocities involved in its continuance, and if Russia represents autocracy and authoritarianism then the West must be the party of democratic freedom, regardless of the oppressions that plague the Western world.

It is on this note that I would highlight an important and disturbing development from the so-called “leader of the free world” that is the United States of America, or more specifically the state of Texas. On February 22nd, Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced that, according to the Office of the Attorney General, gender affirmation surgery constitutes “child abuse” under Texas law, and further announced that the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services would be directed to investigate any reported instances of children receiving gender affirmation surgery in Texas, and investigate the parents of the children who receive them. All licensed professionals and even members of the general public are now required to report to the authorities on such surgeries, and those who refuse to report to the state will be subject to criminal penalties.

What this means is that it is illegal for trans children to undergo gender affirmation surgery in order to embody their real gender identity, since Texas law deems this to be “child abuse”, and that the parents of trans children can be arrested and investigated by the state for supporting the individuality of their children, along with any medical professionals who facilitate gender affirmation surgery. This is oppression. This is oppressing people for being trans. And it’s not like this is too big a surprise considering that the same state also implemented a law that allowed basically anyone to sue anyone for providing an abortion, thus oppressing reproductive rights through the incentives of the legal system.

Some may think “at least the US isn’t Russia!”. Maybe. Technically they’re right that the entirety of the US doesn’t work the way Russia does, and even in Texas there aren’t brutal crackdowns of LGBT protests, or at least none that I know of. But even then, such an objection misses the point. Oppression is oppression, and it does not matter what form your oppression takes. And besides, Texas is not the only US state that is oppressing trans children. In Florida, schools are permitted to carry out invasive “physical examinations” of children to make sure they aren’t trans, so as to enforce a ban on trans athletes competing in sporting events. Something similar has been proposed by Republican lawmakers in Utah, who want to ban trans students from competing in sports events and enforce that ban through a commission that would examine the bodies of children to make sure they’re eligible to compete (read: to make sure they’re not trans). And even outside the issue of LGBT rights itself, are we really going to ignore the fact that certain states are trying to ban books and make it practically illegal to protest against police brutality?

The United States of America is at this point an increasingly oppressive country. Its media can’t even acknowledge the issue of trans rights, without first pointing to how Russia banned trans people from adopting children, as though you’re supposed to be grateful that you don’t live in Russia, as if you’re not supposed to see that there is more than one oppressive country in the world. In this sense, just as pro-Russian campism obscures the real dynamics of imperialism as a global system by ignoring the way Russia engages in flat out imperialist aggression, and putting you squarely on the side of authoritarianism for as long as it means opposing the USA and NATO, so too does liberal pro-Western campism obscure or even sometimes excuse the nature of oppression as it takes place in the US and similar countries, such as the oppression of trans people that can be seen at present. Besides, the American liberal may whine that Russia is worse, but this is only because they cannot conceive the American conservative constructing a more systematic and equally brutal hierarchy of oppression than what exists in Russia. Oh, and for any British liberals who might be reading this, don’t fall asleep; Britain is much nicer to trans people than America is at the moments. You won’t see too many British conservatives gas on about the way God supposedly made you, but you will see even the Labour Party support the oppression of trans people – they’ve even tried to cover it up.

To return to Korhonen’s thread, which I used as a springboard for this much broader discussion, I will say straightforwardly that one of my disagreements with Korhonen is his belief that “violence cannot build a sustainable world”. To be frank, I think that Korhonen is simply wrong here. The entire geopolitical order of liberal-democratic that Korhonen so lauds was built and maintained through violence; whether that’s the revolutionary violence that inaugurated the age of bourgeois republics in the dawn of the Enlightenment, the war and revolutionary violence that was waged against chattel slavery in order to abolish it, the violence of the police force and system of incarceration that was created ultimately to defend the privilege of private property, the war that was waged to stop Nazism or fascism from taking over the whole world, and the conflict between the West and the so-called “communist states” that led up to the so-called “end of history”, culminating in the geopolitical order we see today. And not only is the world we live in built on some form of violence or another, so were all worlds before it, and so perhaps will whatever world succeeds this one – that may well be true for communists and anarchists, since how else is the capitalist state and the global system of imperialism to be defeated? Korhonen, thus, is wrong.

And the whole reason I raise this point is that in addition to creating new worlds, it is often necessary in order to preserve life and freedom. I have said before, not long ago, that the US left should consider being prepared for all-out war with the reactionaries that are increasingly threatening their lives. In the wake of the new Texas legislation, it is not unreasonable to see similar calls for militarization in order to resist the abject oppression being put forward. Only active resistance to oppression will lead to the triumph of liberation and the defeat of oppression. “Reform”, insofar as it still maintains the mechanisms of oppression, will still support oppression. Oppression and imperialism are global systems, and should be fought on those terms. Campism, thus, means consignment to an illusory perspective of the world, which serves only to hinder the struggle against oppression on behalf of one of the oppressors.

Janne Korhonen is thus only faintly correct in framing our situation in terms of democracy versus autocracy, if we refer specifically to Ukraine versus Russia, insofar as at least in Ukraine you could vote for Zelensky or someone else and vote out whoever’s in charge. That’s not much, but the same can’t be said for Russia. But if we’re talking about some bigger narrative of the democratic West, led by America, versus Russia, as a contestation between the principles of democratic freedom versus authoritarian autocracy, that’s just detached from reality when you look at the oppression being carried out right now. Whereas Janne Korhonen would say that the world is democracy versus autocracy, I prefer to see that the world is oppression versus oppression, and the real war worth fighting is the war against the global system of oppression.

It may seem strange to discuss both the thread, the war in Ukraine, and the mounting US oppression of trans people in the same post, but in a weird way it all kind of comes together, once we try to consider the claim that we’re dealing in the world that Korhonen would hope we do. Plus, all of this is going on at the same time, and neither can be readily ignored in favour of the other. Suffice it to say this has been an eventful timeline in more ways than we might prefer.

In closing: this should go without saying, but my solidarity goes to the oppressed trans people in the United States of America, to anyone in America who plans to fight this oppression, to the people of Ukraine escaping and fighting Russian invasion, to the Russian anti-war protesters who risk being brutally curtailed by Putin’s fascist thugs, and to the working class and anarchists in Ukraine, Russia, and Russian-controlled territories who are actively fighting imperialist war and oppresion in their lands!

Violence and self-reliance

Friday was host to the court outcome that both shocked everyone, and yet surprised no one. Kyle Rittenhouse, the young man who travelled from Illinois to Wisconsin to shoot and kill a couple of anti-police brutality protesters, was found not guilty on all charges, after a particularly farcical two-week long trial. Where even to begin with that one? There was video evidence of Kyle talking about killing people with an AR-15, which, if it made it court, would have shot down any suggestion of Kyle acting in self-defence. That’s probably why the judge barred the prosecution from presenting or even mentioning it. That decision itself seems almost predictable, at least when you learn that the judge was a MAGA ideologue himself, and this among other things made it seem really obvious that he was going to acquit Kyle Rittenhouse. By the end it seemed like the jury, largely handpicked by the defendant, were really doing the 12 Angry Men business judging by the delay, like they were trying to fight what we knew they were going to do anyway.

But, to be perfectly honest, the real point for me is the rammifications of all this. Everybody is talking about how Kyle’s acquittal is going to lead to a grim state of constant violence in which anyone with a gun can show up almost at anywhere at random can kill whoever they please under the pretext of vigilantism, at least so long as they’re sufficiently “patriotic” and shoot the right targets. If that’s going to be the case, that just means that violence against protesters, leftists, really anyone that opposes the system or some aspect thereof, will be attacked at whim and could be killed by terroristic reactionaries, and the legal system and along with polite society will help them evade justice. It’s easy to get blindsided by the fact that Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murdering George Floyd, but Derek Chauvin was one of only eight cops to be convicted of murder. The rest are not punished for their crime, and are instead protected by the system.

Think about what that means. What should be the response to this situation? People seeking long-term change for the system are going to face violence from either the police or from adventurist vigilantes for their stance. If that’s the case, at a certain point, they should learn to fight back, because it’s the only thing to do. If it’s going to be the case that in America you can just be killed by right-wing fanatics only for those same murderers defended in court, then those who seek justice should be prepared for a war of all against all, in which those who side with the camp of liberation and justice fight brutally against their oppressors. I say this because, quite frankly, that might be coming.

Some might argue that this is a problem for reasons of optics, that leftists shouldn’t arm themselves because any discipline problems would end up attracting media attention. Well, Kyle Rittenhouse certainly got a lot of media attention and condemnation for his “discipline problem”, and he ended up getting acquitted of all charges. Basically every cop who killed unarmed black people could be seen as trigger-happy, “lacking discipline”, and most of those cops are protected for it anyway. It does not matter that you care what the media thinks. They will see what you stand for, and more importantly, that you stand up for it, and they will have made up their minds from the start, as will have the authorities who never intended to yield anything to you, and who have only given you any concessions because you forced them to, through collective action.

I said last month that struggle is the most basic reality that matters in politics, and much of life. That’s why I’m not going to complain if people see the Rittenhouse verdict and decide to take matters into their own hands in defence of themselves, their freedom, and their communities. That is, if it is indeed true that the threat of violence against protesters is set to increase as reactionaries become emboldened by Rittenhouse’s declared innocence. I would hope that it’s all bluster at the end of it. And yet, if it were all spin, I suppose the downside of that would be that it means that people go back to sleep. Don’t forget that the life of politics is that of a system that is at war against life, both human and non-human, and will not hesitate to suppress whoever is on the opposite side of that war, or whoever expresses conscience against that war.

The death of a politician

Recently, two conservative politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, though one in particular, on my side of the Atlantic, has engendered a mainstream media conversation about violence against politicians, and this conversation has a lot of rammifications for how our society understands the realities of politics, and conveys what it wants you to understand politics as.

On Friday last week, the Conservative MP David Amess was murdered seemingly at random during a constitutency surgery (basically a one-to-one meeting between an MP and their constituents) in Leigh-On-Sea. We still don’t exactly know who killed him, but it is already being assumed by the authorities that the attack was a terrorist incident, since the investigation is being handled by counter-terrorism officers, and the apparent main suspect is an unnamed 25-year old man who happens to be of Somali heritage and who is suspected of being motivated by Islamic extremism. Exactly why that motivation would lead him to target some random MP is not yet clear. British media coverage is of course consumed by this story, and the entire British establishment and media is describing him as basically a kind-hearted patriot who just wanted to serve his constituency. What’s more, the fact of Amess’ murder has opened up discussion of the security of MPs, to the point that Priti Patel, our Home Secretary, is calling for the abolition of online anonymity in order to “protect” MPs.

It’s only natural for people to avoid speaking ill of the recently deceased, especially for family. But I believe that the way the politicians and the media are going about this makes me think, “give me a break!”, and compels me to say some things that I imagine a lot of people might not like to hear.

When it comes to politics, actions speak louder than words, and for democratic politics that tends to mean the kind of policies you work to put in place. It’s easy to forget this when our politicians tell us about the democracy “we have developed as the means of no longer attacking each other and using violence to achieve our aims”, but in reality the policies made by elected officials can represent violence in its own right. It may not be the violence of somebody getting shot or stabbed or what have you, but it is the violence of a government denying you dignity and making sure you probably die in austerity or live in tyranny – the power to do which, incidentally, is maintained ultimately by conventional violence. Structural violence is what I mean. For our purposes, let’s forego the predicted discussion about Amess’ Conservative Party and the effect they’ve had on the national level and go straight to his individual voting record, because that by itself doesn’t tell a pretty picture of the kind of politician he was.

For starters, Amess consistently voted to expand the mass surveilance of citizens by the state, such as the mass retention of internet usage by the government and the interception of communications by the government. In a few words, he voted for tyranny. He also voted against granting autonomy to the regional governments of Scotland and Wales as well as local councils, and against reforming the House of Lords to make it wholly elected. He voted against banning immigration detention for those who are pregnant and against implementing guidelines for the detention of vulnerable people, thus he voted to increase the hardship and suffering of vulnerable people under a hostile immigration system. He voted to bar people from work based on their immigration status, thus anyone just coming here looking to survive, if they didn’t come here “the right way”, are fucked. He always voted to reduce government spending on welfare benefits, including cutting Universal Credit benefits for people in paid work and cutting housing benefit. He also voted against investigating the impact of government austerity measures on the incidence of poverty and inequality, and voted against spending money to create jobs for young people who have been unemployed for a long time. In a few words, he voted to make people poor and keep them poor. He voted in favour of repealing the Human Rights Act of 1998, which, among other things, protects citizens from torture and forced labour and preserves numerous rights and freedoms in accordance with the European Convention on Human Rights. In fact, he voted to only allow human rights grounds to be invoked to prevent the deportation of foreign criminals. He voted against plans to save the steel industry involving fast-tracking infrastructure projects, meaning he voted against anything that might have protected working class jobs and thereby their livelihoods. He voted against same-sex marriage, against making the age of consent equal for homosexuals and heterosexuals, against making it illegal to discriminate based on caste, against allowing same-sex couples to form civil partnerships in Northen Ireland, and against the legalisation of abortion in Northern Ireland. He voted for the Iraq War, in which hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed based on lies, only to later criticize the Labour Party for not being able to find weapons of mass destruction. Finally, he voted against several measures aimed at curtailing man-made climate change.

All told, when it comes to his votes, what he did in government, he actually seems to have contributed to the long-term suffering of his constituents, as well as other people in Britain, as well as the long-term survival of human life and life on earth more generally. This is especially poignant when it comes to his voting record on welfare benefits, since his defence on austerity literallly constituted class warfare against the poor and the working class, many of whom depend on those welfare benefits to survive, and that goes double for the disabled, which would mean that Amess pursued policies that can be counted as structural violence against vulnerable people and the poor. On top of that he also advocated for the reinstatement of capital punishment, meaning he would have granted the state the right to execute people if he ever got the chance. But hey, I suppose he at least had the decency to oppose foxhunting and hare coursing. One must wonder if he loved animals more than his own constituents. But if you point all of that out, you’re told that all of this does not reflect Amess as a person, because “everyone who knew him” thought of him as a kind and decent person. I assume that means the politicians and his family, not everyone else. It’s all just the kind of political correctness reserved only for dead politicians, and it serves the same purpose as regular political correctness (and I mean in the old, pre-1990s sense).

The only violence that MPs want to talk about is acts of seemingly random violence towards them, violence that will easily be contained because it’s not a long-term threat to the system. They don’t want to talk about the violence that the system they uphold visits upon people every day, possibly because it’s long-term structural violence and not visceral short-term violence. The short-term threat to them is what all this talk about taking away online anonymity is all about it: curtailing your freedom to uphold their meager sense of security. And you know what? I’m gonna bet it won’t even work. Even if you take away online anonymity, I’ve seen people on Facebook advocate for violence against immigrants and non-white people with their real names and photos attached to their accounts. You don’t think some people are gonna say some shit about politicians too? Will you be able to arrest all of them? And all the while, all you’ve gone and done is ensure that people, say, trying to hide from abusive parents won’t be safe because they can’t operate anonymously on the internet. Did we forget what a lack of online anonymity means for LGBT people in repressive regimes or reactionary cultures? You could say that all the MPs are doing is furthering violence upon people who don’t deserve it in order to protect themselves from a leftfield attack.

Colin Powell is another example where honour towards the deceased is in some ways misplaced, more customary than really deserved. This is a man who sold the idea of the War in Iraq to America, on false claims of Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction. He got tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis killed and sent thousands of American suckers to kill and die for more oil extraction and a murderous occupation overseen by the Blackwater corporation. But now that he’s dead, he’s called a warrior, a patriot, the first black Secretary of State, and a man who paved the way for Barack Obama to become the first black President, as though Barack Obama was somehow such a good president anyway. And as long as we’re talking about American war criminals who got fawning praises after dying in recent memory, Colin Powell isn’t the only one. John McCain was almost solely remembered for enduring capture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and after his death he got venerated like he was a North Korean dictator. If that was all you saw about John McCain, you might not known that he was essentially responsible for the growth of what would become the Donald Trump movement, and beyond that he was another Iraq War goon busy leading thousands to their deaths, and threw himself behind the bombing of Libya and Saudi Arabia’s genocidal war in Yemen, which lead to scores of deaths and even the return of chattel slavery. When George H. W. Bush died, he received showers of sympathy and praise as a noble public servant, completely glossing over his legacy of racism and war crimes. I’m sure that when Joe Biden kicks the bucket in my lifetime he’ll be given the exact same treatment.

I think that of all people Max Stirner actually got it right when he said this: “The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.” It’s obvious if you really think about it. You’re not supposed to think of what politicians do as violence. Only criminal elements who don’t have political office get to be thought of as violent thugs, while statemen and stateswomen get to be thought of as making “hard choices” and defenders of some greater good. I’m not going to say that what happened to David Amess was right, that would be pretty callous of me. What I will say is that I won’t be crying for him, and you can’t make me, and you will not have me participate in your politically correct worship of the state and its vessels.

The New Delhi riots and fascism

In New Delhi this week, as US President Donald Trump visits India, violent unrest has been erupting for a few days now as Hindus clash with Muslims over a policy implemented by Narendra Modi, the current prime minister, known as the Citizenship Amendment Act. As of now 21 people have been killed and up to 200 people have been injured. What is noteworthy about these riots is that Muslim settlements in particular have been scorched while apparently Hindu settlements have not been scorched, suggesting that a significant portion of the violence and destruction would have been instigated by Hindutva extremists. The riots also see Hindutva mobs chanting “Jai Shri Ram”, meaning “Hail Lord Ram” (or Rama, an avatar of Vishnu), which is a major rallying cry for Hindutvas, and it is here that we can establish the major context as relates to Hindutva of these riots, and from there why we should not be surprised about these riots (other than in relation to the scale of the violence, of course).

We can begin with the Citizenship Amendment Act. Many commentators highlight that it is a law designed to make it easier for non-Muslims to gain Indian citizenship. It’s true purpose, however, is to directly exclude Muslims from Indian citizenship so that they could be deported. As part of this legislative program the Indian government introduced a National Register of Citizens, which requires all Indians to provide documentation proving that they are Indian citizens, while the Citizenship Amendment Act would grant citizenship documents to any illegal immigrants who are not Muslims. Furthermore the government is also building detention camps for the purpose of holding people who fail to attain citizenship, using the labour of the very Muslims that the government will later detain there upon its completion. While some would deny that this is intended to unjustly discriminate against Muslims, Amit Shah, Modi’s Minister of Home Affairs and close ally, has openly stated that the party intends to implement the CAA for the purpose of granting non-Muslims citizenship and then implementing the NRC in order to deny citizenship to Muslims (or “the infiltrators” as he calls them). This suggests that the Bharatiya Janata Party knows exactly what they’re doing by implementing this legislation – they want to create a country where Muslims are denied the basic rights of citizenship on the grounds of their faith. What’s more, what is happening in India has striking parallels to what happened in Nazi Germany. The Nazis similarly drafted legislation designed to exclude Jews from German citizenship through what was known as the Nuremberg Laws. And of course, we all know what happened to the Jews after that. Not to mention, Amit Shah has very publicly referred to Muslims not only as “infiltrators”, but also refers to them as “sucking the blood of this country like parasites”, which is in many ways an echo of kind of blood libel that was once reserved for Jews in anti-semitic tirades, such as the kind that were promulgated by the Nazis. We can safely conclude, then, that this legislation is the means by which India will transform into a fascist state, and so what Modi and his government are doing is fascism, plain and simple.

So it should come as no surprise then thhere have been multiple protests over this law for months. It is worth noting that said protests had not initially descended into mob violence, it was only relatively recently (as of Sunday) that clashes began to break out. Given that the Hindutvas have a habit of instigating and causing violence towards political opponents without provocation, we are left to assume that it is the Hindutvas, perhaps seeking to browbeat popular dissent, that are the primary cause of the violence.

Then there’s the “Jai Shri Ram” rallying cry. Last year, a Muslim man named Tabrez Ansari was murdered by a mob of Hindutva men in Jharkhand. They tied him to a pole, beat him, and forced him to chant “Jai Shri Ram” while he pleaded for his force, before ultimately handing him over to the police, who imprisoned him and left him to die from his injuries. The month before had seen a steep rise in violent attacks carried out against innocent Muslims by Hindutva thugs, who just like in this instance forced their victims to chant “Jai Shri Ram”, along with other nationalist slogans such as “Bharat Mata ki Jai” (“Long Live Mother India”) and “Pakistan Murdabad” (“Death to Pakistan”). The slogan “Jai Shri Ram” likely originated as a simple religious greeting, comparable to “Namaste” and the like. However, since the 1980s, the Bharatiya Janata Party and various Hindutva movements used it as a political slogan as part of their campaign to build a temple to Rama in a part of Ayodhya that they believe was controlled by Hindus and wrongfully usurped by Muslims. In 1992, the Babri Masjid mosque that once sat there was destroyed by BJP-aligned mobs, who chanted “Jai Shri Ram” in the midst of their destruction. Ever since, that chant has frequently accompanied various acts of Hindutva violence and rape, such as the Gargi College molestations that occurred earlier this month, and the BJP has adopted that slogan for their own purposes. As such, the chanting of “Jai Shri Ram” can be seen as the Hindutva equivalent of an Islamist terrorist shouting “Allahu Akbar” while carrying out his crimes.

Finally, as I learned about the riots one question struck me: what was Modi doing about these riots? After all, the last time I recall Modi presiding over a major religious riot was when he was Chief Minister of Gujarat in 2002, when riots Hindus began attacking and killing Muslims. Despite a Supreme Court ruling exonerating him, clearing him of complicity, there is still a sense that he did nothing to disperse the riots, or indeed may have instigated them himself, and it’s rather telling that, every time the subject comes up, he has a habit of dodging the subject and once even walked out of an interview wherein he was asked if he regretted that the killings happened. No one would assume that this was the action of a man of clear conscience, free of culpability or complicity, capable of defending his actions, other than a complete and total rube. Now that he is again residing over a major riot, this time as Prime Minister, it becomes pertinent to ask what his actions over the riots have been so far. Not much, I imagine, considering he’s rather busy doing trade talks with Trump, other than a tepid appeal to peace and brotherhood – tepid, I say, because his entire political project has been built atop anything but. And so far, I have been hearing reports about how police in New Dehli have done very little to intervene in the situation, with some police forces claiming they are helpless to act, and telling journalists that they cannot protect them. Needless to say this doesn’t sound like a situation that has been put under control.

In my opinion, the bloodshed in New Dehli is the culmination of a growing and strengthening fascist movement in India, and what we are seeing can be treated as a repeat of the atrocities that happened in Gujarat about 18 years ago. We’re seeing signs of a grim future for India, as the stage is set for what amounts to the rebirth of the Third Reich.

The burning of a settlement in New Delhi

 

The common trend among mass shooters

The way I see it, there is a distinct trend connecting so many of the people in America who decide to go out and murder scores of people with a firearm. In order to solve the issue, I believe it is more important and of greater necessity to examine this trend rather than to try and pinpoint the thing Americans are supposed to be banning, thinking it will solve the problem.

To that end, I’m going to go through 10 examples of American mass shooters, some perhaps more infamous than others, in order to examine what drove them to commit the atrocities that they committed, in order to try and establish a common trend between them.

 

Kip Kinkel

I think people far too often forget that Kip even existed, let alone murdered his own parents and some of his fellow students. But he did, and in a rampage that pre-dated the Columbine massacre by only a year. Unlike the Columbine shooters, however, Kip didn’t kill himself afterwards, which not only means that he was arrested and punished for his crime but also that the police were able to extract a motivation from him through interrogation, which is sadly never the case in the majority of these incidents.

Kip was interviewed by detective Al Warthen in May 21st 1998, he told the detective that he was aware that his mind “wasn’t right” and he knew that it was considered wrong to bring a gun to school but did it anyway. He told the detective that he was ashamed of having done something wrong, and that he killed his father because he loved him but was also “fucked up in the head”. After Kip’s arrest, some writings were found detailing his state of mind around the time of the Thurston High shooting. He seems to have wallowed in a desire to end his own life, he saw himself as profoundly disturbed or abnormal and as a consistently destructive influence to the world around him. He claimed to hear voices in his head telling him to kill and was full of rage and hatred towards mankind. He also mentions a woman who he was seeing, but apparently broke up with him, which caused him to feel like his heart has broken, which he doesn’t even think is possible because he didn’t think he even had a heart. During Kip’s trial, Dr. Orin Bolstad testified that he had been hearing voices since he was 12 years old, and had experienced hallucinations, and that he told him that the voices in his head might have come from either “the devil” or a chip put into his head by the government. He stated that these were the signs of psychotic thinking, a manic phase of bipolar disorder, extreme depression and schizophrenia, as well as a consistent state of delusion. He was also said to have an obsession with violence, and to have exacted “revenge” on people who he perceives as having crossed him, whether his perceptions were accurate or not. Kip was on anti-depressant medications for a period time before eventually being taken off of it when it appeared he was showing positive results. After he was taken off the medication, however, his mental health began deteriorating again. It’s very clear that Kip was profoundly, extremely disturbed, and guided by delusions.

 

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold

Perhaps the most infamous school shooters in American history, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were responsible for the Columbine massacre, which is now etched into the memory of the collective American consciousness. Many people attempted to find scapegoats in guns, heavy metal and gothic music and the first-person shooter genre of video games (which back then was a rising star of PC gaming, home to such titles as DOOM, Quake, Duke Nukem and Wolfenstein). However, the diaries of the shooters were uncovered not long after the massacre, and they offer insight into their motivations.

Eric Harris wrote in his journal about how he believed that everyone around him was irredeemably stupid and robotic, incapable of thinking for themselves, that only he and his friend possessed what he called “self-awareness”, and that he wants nothing to do with society except to kill those he deems unfit to exist. He believes that human society is best run by a principle of “NATURAL SELECTION”, which for him entails the murder of the disabled, the “rich snotty toadies”, fat people, people of low intelligence and people with “brain fuck ups” (presumably with the exception of himself and Dylan, if you get me). He believes that the human race is not worth saving, only destroying. Dylan’s journal suggests that he may have been extremely depressed and self-loathing, but like Dylan he also viewed himself as a literal God compared to most people, who he viewed as just zombies. Apparently they both felt pushed to the edge by, of all things, getting busted for breaking into a van and stealing things from it. They agreed to participate in a diversionary program in exchange for the juvenile officers expunging their criminal records, and they performed so well that they were let off early, but they still treated this is as the moment they became the “bad guys” with no going back. If you read it, you’ll find it to be a textbook case of extreme pathological narcissism and aggressiveness. Strangely enough, they say their parents raised them fine.

 

Randy Stair

This man’s story was widely covered on the Internet, with many details emerging outside of the mainstream media’s analysis. Stair happened to be a transsexual individual, in this case a young man who believed himself to be a woman (or a “female soul”) trapped in a man’s body, and it is because of this fact that he felt separated from the rest of society. He was a self-confessed racist and misanthropist, who simultaneously hated the human race as a whole and everyone who isn’t white, and he especially hated men, both straight and gay people (though he did go on record as a homophobe). He seemed to be a deeply confused, highly irrational and extremely depressed individual, carrying around a combination of self-loathing, gender confusion, personal identity crisis, solipsistic tendencies, depression and intense irrational hatred for various groups of people and humanity in general.

He was also the creator of a cartoon series on YouTube called Ember’s Ghost Squad, which seems to be based off of a character named Ember from the children’s cartoon series Danny Phantom, who Stair claimed “brought out the girl in him”. The show centers around an all-female cast of ghosts who recruit lost souls into their army by having them killed in some way. That all the souls in the squadron are female, with no males, can be related to his own belief that he is a female soul, and a female spiritual presence that, in his own words, “puts [you] where you need to be”. The final episode of this show before Stair’s crime and death was a high school shooting, in the vein of the Columbine massacre, taking place at a high school committed by a character named Andrew Blaze, who seems to Stair’s alter ego, along with members of the ghost squad with the aim of killing innocent students and ultimately himself. The episode in question was released around the same time as the Weis Market massacre wherein Stair killed 3 people and himself.

Cursory research into Ember’s Ghost Squad can offer significant into the profound mental instability that Stair was suffering. While some have assumed that Stair had been radicalized by intersectional feminist (or social justice) ideology, the reality is much less simplisitic. For one thing, I haven’t seen evidence of him having operated on any radical feminist, Marxist or generally leftist websites – if anything, he was a brony.  I think he happened to embrace basic bitch social justice ideology as something to latch onto whilst he rationalized his disturbed psyche to the wider world and justified his future actions.

 

Adam Lanza

On the face of it, there is no conclusive motivation that would explain why Adam Lanza carried out the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012. However, I think there are clues that might help to explain what he was thinking before he did it. He was often described as a profoundly autistic individual, and according to his father he was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome at the age of thirteen. However, autism campaigners have objected to this description by pointing out that most autistic people do not have the kind of aggressive and strongly isolationist tendencies that Lanza exhibited. According to a team of Yale researchers, Lanza was prescribed a behavior-based treatment program and an anti-depressant called Celexa, but his parents discontinued the treatment after they noticed that Lanza “was unable to raise his own arm” and attributed this as a side-effect of the treatment. The parents could not be convinced otherwise. As he grew older, he became much more isolationist and socially rigid with his youth, and increasingly obsessed with mass shooters. He was also active on a now (presumably) defunct online forum called Shocked Beyond Belief, under the username “Smiggles”, which was a forum in which people talked about the Columbine killers and a video game based on them entitled “Super Columbine RPG”. Dr. Peter Langman has written a report about Lanza’s mental tendencies and has concluded that Lanza suffered from deeply psychotic personality tendencies, and suggests that his mentality was very similar to many other mass shooters in not just psychotic personality but also in the sense that he went through similar failures in life.

Apparently, in 2014, a radio clip has emerged of what is supposedly Adam Lanza speaking to an anarchist/primitivist anti-civilization radio show called Anarchy Radio. He talked about a chimpanzee named Travis, a pet chimpanzee and animal actor who in 2009 attacked a woman and was shot to death by police, trying to articulate that Travis’ violent behavior was ultimately a reaction to civilization, which he thinks conditions people away from their instinctive nature. Some of his postings on Shocked Beyond Belief indicate that he had great sympathy for the dead chimpanzee, and he felt that after his death Travis was now free of the “rape” of civilization.

 

 

Elliot Rodger

Elliot killed six people in Isla Vista, California, and injured 14 others before ultimately killing himself. Before the shooting, Elliot Rodger released a 141-page journal on the Internet, in which he recounts his life in excessive detail as well as his belief that he is akin to a god in human flesh, entitled to whatever he thinks is deserving of him especially the company of women, and sent to rid the world of those he deems impure. For all his godly pretenses, however, he also complains that he was jealous of other men for attaining pleasures that he did not and feels his life to be pathetic in comparison. His YouTube channel consists of videos where he talks about how he views the world as fundamentally unjust and unfair because he is incapable of finding a romantic or sexual partner.

His father, Peter Rodger, was an unsuccessful filmmaker most recognized as a second unit director for The Hunger Games. His own film, a documentary called Oh My God?, was a failure, scoring terrible reviews among film critics. If Elliot’s manifesto is to be believed, Peter invested all of his money in the film, kept talking about how it make him loads of money, and in the end it lost him money to be the point that he claims the film bankrupted him.

Many progressives and feminists used Rodger as a symbol of their conception of “toxic masculinity”, basically grandstanding for their ideology on the corpses of the people he killed. They propped him up as a political point about how they view all men in general as fundamentally suffering the same sickness as Elliott Rodger, when in truth most men aren’t actually like him. Elliott viewed himself as the greatest man in the universe, a god among men, and not the sad, narcissistic and possibly somewhat spoiled individual that really was. That’s all he was. He was a textbook narcissist, who was constantly disappointed with the world for supposedly denying him that which he believed, and the primary motivation seems to be that of “punishing” women for not having sex with him, as well as other men for having sex with women instead of him, coupled with his developed hatred for mankind as a whole, whom he blames for his internal anguish. His father believes that he was just the sweetest boy who was kind to everyone and wouldn’t hurt a flea, but the truth is that he was a profoundly egocentric individual who was obsessed with sex because he never had the company of a woman and who was consumed with loathing, desperation and hatred of mankind, which might have enabled him to separate himself from Man and negate any sense of value of the life of his fellow Man, not least because he felt himself to be above human life. It is possible that he may not have learned how to cope with failure and disappointment, and never accrued the characteristics associated with maturity and what it means to become a man before he died.

 

James Eagan Holmes

James killed 12 people at the Century 16 theater in Aurora, Colorado. In his notebook he diagnoses himself with dysphoric mania, social anxiety disorder, OCD, PTSD, Asperger’s syndrome, ADHD, schizophrenia, body dysmorhpic disorder, psychosis and several other mental disorders. He justifies this self-diagnosis by describing numerous symptoms such as catatonia, excessive fatigue and isolationism. He believed that the reason for life is fundamentally arbitrary and thus life should not exist. According to Dr. Raquel Gur, an expert on schizophrenia, Holmes’ writings suggest that he was intelligent, capable of tackling deep subjects that most people don’t typically think about, but also incredibly delusional, noting that very intelligent people are also capable of generating more bizarre delusions. She compares his level of delusion-crafting to that of the “Unabomber” serial killer Ted Kaczynski, who also happened to be a professor of mathematics at Harvard University. She also says that Holmes did not feel wronged by anyone and was not motivated by a desire for revenge, and the last straw is instead cited to be him believing himself to have failed his neuroscience program. According to his defense attorney, Holmes was a schizophrenic and suffered mental illness for years before eventually succumbing to a violent delusion. Prosecutors note that he was aware of what he was doing and planned every aspect of his attack in advance and in detail within his notebook.

 

Jared Lee Loughner

Jared was responsible for a 2011 shooting in Tuscon, Arizona, in which he intended to kill Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and ended up killing six other people before being arrested. Before the shooting in question, he released a video claiming that Pima Community College was a “genocide school” that tortured its students. Incidentally, he was suspended from Pima Community College following the release of the video. According to TIME, he showed multiple signs of mental illness, including disorganized speech and writing, paranoia and an inability to function in social situations. According to a friend he also frequently used drugs, including marijuana, magic mushrooms, LSD, salvia divinorum, and even cocaine. Loughnor had been diagnosed with schizophrenia by experts who interviewed him. However, in an article for Psychology Today, Dr. Langman offers a different diagnosis. He instead suggests that Loughnor’s illness is closer to paranoid personality disorder, on the grounds that he read the idea of secret meetings into his encounter with Gabrielle Giffords which may have led to the development of grudge between him and Giffords, and that he did not seem to think that everyone was specifically against him.

There was a lot of controversy surrounding Loughnor’s alleged political motivations, possibly due to the fact that he targeted an elected representative; namely Gabrielle Giffords. Although many in the media have taken to painting him as an expressly far-right Tea Party partisan, Loughnor himself was an Independent voter and according to a friend of his he was neither left-wing nor right-wing. Another classmate describes him as very left-wing. He was apparently interested in conspiracy theories, and was active on a web forum called AboveTopSecret which specialized in conspiracy theories and similar subjects, and he was particularly interested in the idea that the world would end in 2012. He also happened to be interested in the 2007 film Zeitgeist, which was a left-wing conspiracy theory film. He talked about refusing to pay in any currency not backed by gold and silver, and yet far from being a gold standard advocate he advocated theories of “an infinite source of currency“. Much of the idea that he is strictly a right-winger comes from the Southern Poverty Law Centre, who it must be noted are so thoroughly couched in leftist ideological bias that they have more recently declared people like Maajid Nawaz (a liberal Muslim) to be “anti-Muslim extremists”. In general, Loughnor can accurately described as an enthusiast of fringe politics in general, without necessarily aligning with the left or the right. Some people even blamed Sarah Palin for inspiring the shooting simply because of her use of a target symbol in an electoral map. Needless to say, this was a stretch.

 

Dylann Roof

At face value, it would seem fairly obvious that Dylann Roof’s massacre at Charleston’s Emanuel AE Church was an act of pure radical white nationalist ideology and nothing else. I am, of course, not going to contest the idea that he was motivated by extreme racist ideology – after all, the evidence for his ideological persuasion is clear as day – but I propose that there is another motive at work, one that may be decidedly less obvious compared to his ideological persuasion.

If you read his manifesto you find will find, perched alongside the ideological material,  an obvious signifier of profound narcissism. As expected from a militant white supremacist, he believed that black people presented a threat to American society and needed to gotten rid of, but towards the end of the last page of the manifesto he proclaims that no one is doing anything about it other than talking on the Internet, and so he states that “Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”. This to me is Dylann positioning himself as the lone savior of the white race. For him, only he can save America from racial impurity. Not to mention, the idea that he had some kind of “racial awakening” to me harks back to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s concept of “self-awareness” – a profound “knowledge” of the world around them that no one else had. He claims he attained this “awakening” after Googling black on white crime following the George Zimmerman verdict, and he claimed to have become “completely racially aware” after checking out the website for a group called the Council of Conservative Citizens and looking up black on white murders in America and Europe. I can’t help but think, based on that, that he was the kind of person who either saw things in the world that have been spun by radical ideology and not necessarily reflective of the truth, or simply did not look at the larger picture of things and focused on very small details.

Other than that, recently released documents introduce the element of Dylann’s possible mental abnormality. They suggest that Dylann had suffered a combination of social anxiety disorder, schizoid personality disorder, mixed substance abuse disorder, possible autism and a history of depression. It is suggested that Dylann suffered from various symptoms associated with autism that may have cast doubt on his mental competency to stand trial, and that he had a high IQ that was compromised by an inability to process information and a poor working memory. They also entail that it was revealed in an investigation that Dylann was extremely socially isolationistic, pre-occupied with fallacious health concerns, used narcotics, possessed firearms and believed his life was falling apart. However, Dylann was deemed by the court to be mentally competent enough to stand trial and he chose to represent himself, apparently to block his legal team from presenting evidence of his mental health issues. His reasoning for this may have something to do with the fact that he viewed his reputation, rather than his actions themselves, as the most important thing, which one would argue is a fruitless endeavor considering that almost no one holds him in high esteem for his actions.

 

Seung-Hui Cho

One of a number of individuals who is claimed to be part of an alleged current of right-wing terrorism in the United States of America, Cho was born in South Korea before emigrating to the United States. He was responsible for the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007, in which he killed 33 people (including himself) at the campus of the Virginia Tech university. He sent a “manifesto” of sorts to MSNBC before the shooting, in which he outlines his motivations for what would become the Viriginia Tech shooting. In the “manifesto”, he lambastes the people he sees as “the rich kids”, accusing them of being sadistic, debaucherous, hedonistic, and fraudulent and of being rapists and lovers of terrorism, and he views himself as being abused by the world around him whilst positioning himself as the savior of the “Weak and Defenceless”. There are also multiple religious references in the manifesto in question, particularly towards Christianity. He also viewed Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine killers, as martyrs who laid down their lives in order to claim vengeance from what he calls the “Apostles of Sin”. Some even thought Cho was a Muslim because he identified himself as Ax Ismail, Ismail being the Arabic name for the Biblical figure known as Ishmael. Despite the religious tone of manifesto, however, Cho himself apparently hated his parents’ sense of religiosity, and when asked if he had religious beliefs his answer seemed to be no.

Cho had undergone psychiatric evaluation by court order after he was deemed to be a danger to himself and others. A report that was produced on Cho’s mental health concluded that he suffered from extreme social anxiety, depression, suicidal and homicidal thoughts, aggressive personality tendencies, and the loss of positive influences (including coordination between his school, therapist and psychiatrist) that had in his school years. Apparently the campus authorities at Virginia Tech were warned about his mental instability, but it seemed the warnings had gone unheeded. It is also possible that he was motivated by a sense of jealousy and rage sparked by his romantic advances towards a woman named Emily Hilscher having been turned down. To me, he also comes off as somewhat narcissistic; after all, how exaggerated must your sense of self-importance be for you to position yourself as the savior of the weak, helpless and downtrodden when in reality you’re a terminally depressed loner or something? Still, in his manifesto he makes it sound like he was raped by his friends in some kind of orgy, and I have to wonder what the hell inspired his writings, if not for a kind of pre-existing insanity or mental instability.

 

Charles Andrew Williams

Dr. Langman notes that the case of Charles is replete with contradictory information, particularly as some of Charles’ own statements are contradicted by other statements he made. It doesn’t help that it has recently come to light that Charles views himself as an “awesome liar”. It has been widely reported in the media that Charles was a good and wholesome kid who was pushed into becoming a serial killer by bullies. However, it had also emerged that Charles was actually a troublesome kid who was cocky, disregarded authority and delighted in breaking social norms through mischief. He apparently abused drugs, started fires (though Charles himself has no recollection of this), solicited the theft of alcohol, stole drugs and hung around with other delinquents who would later grow up to be criminals. Despite this, however, he managed to make it seem to others like he was a good kid. Whenever he was questioned about trying to “pull a Columbine”, he laughed. When he was taken into custody after the attack, he appeared to be calm, cold and nonchalant, demonstrating a lack of remorse for his actions. It is likely, therefore, that Charles was pretty much a psychopath, one with a history of delinquent behavior rather than simply having been bullied into becoming a monster. Furthermore, Charles has claimed to have been egged on into committing the attack by friends, but it appears to be more likely that he just shifted the blame for the massacre onto other people.

 

Conclusion

There are many more mass shooters besides the ten presented in this post, but what is clear is that all ten of these seemed to have suffered from various mental issues. Many were extremely depressed, some were clearly psychopathic, a number of them have expressed a deep seated hatred of humankind, some were schizophrenic, some were narcissistic enough to view themselves as gods or saviors who would bring salvation or judgement down upon us in a hail of bullets, and there was a tendency among them to feel isolated, hopeless and desperate. In the case of some of them their mental health problems were known to parents and experts and it was given treatment for a while, until the parents took them off the treatment, either because it they thought they no longer needed it or because they thought it produced unwelcome side-effects. In the case of some others, their mental health problems were never known to their parents or some of their peers. But all of the shooters had profound problems with their psyche, and had severe psychological problems before they resorted to mass violence. And it is likely that they weren’t driven by one single problem either. The shooters had multiple profound issues and problems that guided their respective personalities. Personally, in doing the research for this post, I have also come to the opinion that these people generally don’t just snap out of the blue, but rather that their problems develop for years before they finally kill scores of people.

Of course it should be noted that not all mentally ill are violent, and many mentally ill people may nonetheless not be driven to commit atrocities. However, there are enough murderers who are profoundly mentally disturbed to suggest that there is problem with mental health in the United States. In fact, it is no secret that there is a problem with mental health in the United States. There is a researcher at Yale that, I think, makes a very salient point in one of the articles I linked here:  he says “When mental illness is well-treated in society, patients are not necessarily more violent. But when they go untreated and they are allowed to become severely ill, then we’re seeing a larger share of violence being committed by mentally-ill individuals. That violence is different in nature, because it’s often unpredictable — it’s often based on delusions.”. I wonder, just how well are the mentally ill being treated in America?

 

Jesus was fucking crazy!

I will never understand how Jesus’ reputation as a peaceful hippie type leader has stayed so influential in the West. I feel the same way about the idea that the Old Testament was the evil book of the Bible and the New Testament the good book of the Bible.

Why do I say this? Because in the New Testament there is plenty that can be used to point to the idea that Jesus was not the ancient equivalent of the leader of a hippie commune as some have painted him as, but rather a crazed revolutionary.

I mentioned this first point on the last post I wrote, “The Divine Individual“, but Jesus is not here to overturn the cruel laws of YHVH. In fact, he’s very much in favor of it. So much so that one of his criticisms of the Pharisees was that they didn’t execute their sons for being rebellious.

 ^“For God said, ‘Honor your father and mother’ and ‘Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death’. But you say that if anyone declares that what might have been used to help their father or mother is ‘devoted to God,’ they are not to ‘honor their father or mother’ with it. Thus you nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition.” – Matthew 15:4-6

For the record, here’s what the Old Testament has to say about that.

“If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of his town. They shall say to the elders, “This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.” Then all the men of his town are to stone him to death. You must purge the evil from among you. All Israel will hear of it and be afraid.” – Deutoronomy 21:18-21

That is the word of YHVH telling his believers that if you have a disobedient child then you have to punish that child with death! And Jesus is all in favor of that.

Now for some stuff I didn’t mention in a previous post. At one point, he actually advises his followers to cut off their own hands and feet in order to avoid being damned to hell for some reason.

“If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out. And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than to have two feet and be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell, where the worms that eat them do not die, and the fire is not quenched.” – Mark 9:43-48

He was very much a fire and brimstone preacher as well. Contrary to what the liberals would have you believe, I think he would have gotten along with the Christian right, even the fundamentalists to a certain extent, just fine. This next verse is an example of why I feel this way.

“But when you enter a town and are not welcomed, go into its streets and say, ‘Even the dust of your town we wipe from our feet as a warning to you. Yet be sure of this: The kingdom of God has come near.’ I tell you, it will be more bearable on that day for Sodom than for that town. “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes. But it will be more bearable for Tyre and Sidon at the judgment than for you. And you, Capernaum, will you be lifted to the heavens? No, you will go down to Hades.” – Luke 10:10-15

Essentially he’s saying that cities that refused to hear his teachings would get a worse fate than that of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgement. And make no mistake, he believed the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.

“But on the day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all. Even so will it be in the day when the Son of Man is revealed. In that day, he who is on the housetop, and his goods are in the house, let him not come down to take them away. And likewise the one who is in the field, let him not turn back. Remember Lot’s wife.” – Luke 17:29-32

What I find most troubling about the character of Jesus is how he says he has come to pit families against each other. Literally.

^“ Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division: For from henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three. The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother; the mother in law against her daughter in law, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.” – Luke 12:51-53

Gee, a guy preaching about the end of the world, about a heavenly being saving their souls if they fear him and obey his every command, and having people turn on their own families for him? Why, oh why, does that sound like he might just be the leader of a cult?

But it doesn’t stop with just the living Jesus. Later on in the New Testament it’s said that, when Jesus returns, he will destroy non-believers.

“And to you who are troubled rest with us, when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ: Who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power.” – 2 Thessalonians 1:7-9

His second coming is also set to be very destructive.

“But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar, the elements will be dissolved in the fire, and the earth and its works will not be found.” – 2 Peter 3:10

Once you get to Revelations you find that Jesus is pretty much a cosmic mass-murderer on behalf of his father YHVH, and he has some angelic buddies in on the action as well.

“I looked, and there before me was a white cloud, and seated on the cloud was one like a son of man with a crown of gold on his head and a sharp sickle in his hand. Then another angel came out of the temple and called in a loud voice to him who was sitting on the cloud, “Take your sickle and reap, because the time to reap has come, for the harvest of the earth is ripe.” So he who was seated on the cloud swung his sickle over the earth, and the earth was harvested. Another angel came out of the temple in heaven, and he too had a sharp sickle. Still another angel, who had charge of the fire, came from the altar and called in a loud voice to him who had the sharp sickle, “Take your sharp sickle and gather the clusters of grapes from the earth’s vine, because its grapes are ripe.” The angel swung his sickle on the earth, gathered its grapes and threw them into the great wine press of God’s wrath. They were trampled in the wine press southside the city, and blood flowed out of the press, rising as high as the horses’ bridles for a distance of 1,600 stadia.” – Revelations 14:14-20

The last verse I want to show, just to hammer home how, in another instance where it seems the people talking about how Jesus was a peacenik don’t know shit about Jesus, Jesus turns to be something of a warmonger.

“And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war.” – Revelations 19:11

Also, if you read the New Testament, there are many more verses that show that not only was Jesus a mad and violent prophet, but that the God of the New Testament is clearly no less evil than the God of the Old Testament. I really don’t know where people are getting the idea that the opposite is the case.

 

Let violent video games be violent

Just today I was at my regular lecture about games design and history, it was about what players want out of video games when they play them, and among the reasons we talked about was that people want to fantasize. They are also attracted to some kind of escapism, to do things they will most likely not get to do in real life and all free of negative repercussions, and this includes behavior that would normally be unacceptable. And then I thought about violence.

Video games that allow for violent actions within the game allow people to indulge in fantasies of violent activity, and not always violent activity that can theoretically be justified if it happened for real, without repercussions towards the player and without actually killing anyone in real life. There is a violent part of our nature, as there has always been, and modern video games make it easier for us to keep actual violence in check because they allow us to indulge some of our more violent and aggressive tendencies without actually harming anyone. It’s the same for any games that, while not having gore, do let you use weapons.

The guardians of false morality do not realize what curtailing the violence of video games would do to us as human beings. Without any enemies to fight, all we have is our own kind to be violent towards, and unless people have a way of indulging violent fantasies within the realm of fantasy, humans will get violent in the real world and it would be terrible for all concerned (except perhaps the guardians of false morality, who would exploit like the opportunistic bastards they are). So let violent video games be violent, for the sake of the people who like to play them as a means of venting their aggressive side, lest they start channeling their violence into full blown immoral or unlawful conduct.

A world made by moral guardians is a world of emptiness and suicide

Pictured: Bullshit. Particularly espoused by a lame person.

Ever noticed that moral guardians always go after the things that make us happy? They’re always out to get rid of anything that is not “morally clean”. You know, the kind of people who make loud and false claims that video games are evil, that Harry Potter is satanic, and that a woman’s naked body permanently damages anyone who sees it, and believe that children should be protected from fucking everything (the German, and possibly also the Australian, government is full of those types). They have flat out ridiculous moral standards, almost always motivated by religion, or their fundamentalist religious beliefs.

But this isn’t about them, strictly. This is about what kind of world they’d end up creating. Lots of the things they go after make us happy. We enjoy heavy metal music, it makes happy, helps us deal with life, confronts issues we would deny, and empowers us. We like playing video games because they empower us, they take us to a world where we can take out our desires, and they let us enjoy ourselves (most of the time, and in the case of good games). Some of us read books because we get the pleasure of being taken to another realm, kinda like in video games. Same is true of movies. Violent movies put us in the action (and the sexy action) without us having to experience the potential consequences, or because some of us want to see it happen, or want to see someone kill bad guys. Even monster and horror movies fulfil some people’s need to see the content their looking for. Some of us drink and smoke stuff to keep ourselves happy. It might work, it might not, but you can only find out one way.

Now imagine if everything that wasn’t “clean” but made us happy had been removed just to “protect” children. We’d be in a pretty bland and unhappy place. No sexual liberty, no musical freedom, no free media. And would you believe there’d be more suicides and death? See, music makes you feel better about life after a hard day, heavy metal especially makes you feel better, inspires you not to give up. The music never judges you, it’s always there for if you’re willing to listen. It keeps you alive. Take that away, and chances are there’ll be more young suicides. Take away violent video games, and chances are you’re more likely to be killing real people rather than taking your homicidal anger out on virtual people. Take away sexual excitement, and I’m sure relationships will end much faster. Take away things that are part of being human, and things go wrong with human beings. The sad thing is that in such a world, the moral guardians will never acknowledge that that things are be going wrong, or that it’s their fault for creating a puritanical world where people live in fear of going outside imposed dogmatic standards and actually kill themselves or other people more often than without violent media and heavy metal. They’ll just say that a group of devil worshippers or supposed Satanists are inspiring people to kill themselves and each other, like any suburban murder.

Pictured: Someone who really doesn’t give two fucks about youth suicide.

And the sad thing is, plenty of them are just political opportunists seeking to get attention based on something popular, which only helps the sales of the media they’re trying to ban. Who knows, they’re probably serectly more perverted and depraved than they appear. These people are useless and contribute nothing to society, except maybe to remind us who the real enemy is.