The A(braham) Bomb (2023)

Max Azzarello, Self immolator:

This is obviously very bad news, but the biggest lie we’ve been told is that we are powerless. We’ve got one way out of hellworld, and that’s for the public to realize that we’ve been conned completely so we can build a united movement that shatters every lie they’ve told us, mocks this rotten farce as loudly as it deserves, and aims at nothing short of abolishing our criminal government so we can build one that serves the public.

Liberals mock the hypocrisy of conservatives; conservatives mock the hypocrisy of liberals, and our collective circumstances erode. The left shouts “All Cops Are Bastards,” which ensures they’ll be hated by the police and the public (and flies in the face of leftist theory). The public’s distrust of the government is at an all-time high, but so is the belief that we are helpless to do anything about it.

And with all this, a sharp rise in apocalyptic messaging: Climate change will kill us all; COVID will kill us all; vaccines will kill us all; AI will kill us all – no matter the bubbles we ascribe to, we’re bombarded with existential crises with no solutions. We’ve seen a surge in apocalyptic film, literature, and video games that tell us there is no way out of our poor circumstances but total societal breakdown. Zombies tell us that the public is our enemy. If you go to your nearest convenience store, you can buy a can of water called “Liquid Death.”

This is our rotten farce: For our entire lives, we have been flooded with media designed to slowly steer us into a world where the American Dream was dead, where the public was fully divided against itself, where everybody believed we were powerless to do anything about our worsening circumstances. It is all so they can organize an unprecedented, apocalyptic rug pull on the entire populace as they pivot to fascism, which is perhaps best understood as kleptocracy at the barrel of a gun.

When we piece it all together, we understand the truth: We are in a totalitarian doomsday cult.

Peter Thiel, American billionaire and political activist:

There’s always a question why the Antichrist hasn’t taken over yet, and it’s this mysterious force that holds it back, this restraining force that holds back the totalitarian one-world state. I don’t necessarily put too much stock in it because, on its own terms, it’s somewhat unstable. It’s provisional. It has these archaic sacred elements. It can work for a while, but you can’t identify it with an institution.

Again, the Schmittian view is, there were all these different things that played the role of the katechon at various points in time. If you’re not supposed to immanentize the eschaton, you’re also not supposed to immanentize the katechon. If you identify too much as one thing, that can go very wrong, if you think of the katechon as the thing that restrains the one-world state or that restrains the Antichrist. Anything that’s the opposite — this is a Girardian cut — is always going to be mimetically entangled. It’s going to have this parallelism. There’s always a risk that the katechon becomes the Antichrist.

The proto-Antichrist was Nero. Claudius, the good emperor, was the katechon. He was restraining Nero, but then at some point, yes, Nero’s the opposite of Claudius, but they’re both Roman emperors.

Or you could say that in the middle of the 20th century, from let’s say, 1949 to 1989, I would identify the katechon as anti-communism. I would identify communism as the ideology of the Antichrist in the 20th century. What stopped communism was not . . . The United States couldn’t have done it. It was not just one country. It was not some libertarian debating society. Something was pretty violent, pretty hard to morally justify, not really that Christian, but it had this unifying effect.

The way it morphed — 1989 — something like anti-communism morphs into neoliberalism. Well, if you’re anti-communist, you’re not aspiring for world control. You’re just trying to stop the communists from getting world control. Once you’ve defeated the communists, what are you supposed to do? Maybe you can just go home and forget about all of what you did.

But in practice, these things have a tendency to perpetuate themselves. Bush 41 — anti-communism became the new world order, and we’re now going to just govern the world in the name of anti-communism. There’s something about it that’s always misleading. Or even what I said about the Antichrist in this apocalyptic thing. Doesn’t the Antichrist just come to power by acting as a katechon? This is what Greta says she’s doing. She is the katechon stopping climate change. It’s a somewhat useful concept, but I wouldn’t put too much weight on it.