Feb 4 2021
If you have kids, you love them. But it's not because they give you more money, more energy, more free time, more time with your friends. Quite the opposite. You have to make a sacrifice for your children. It's their neediness. It's the fact that they need something from you that elicits that love. And that's how social eros develops as well. When we start to open up to the need that other people have of us. So when people go out marching, for example, for free Palestine to stop the genocide in Gaza. They're not doing that because they're going to improve their wage packet. This old political consensus that people act on the basis of enlightened self-interest is nonsense. They're not doing it for an easier or more convenient life. They're risking arrest. The people in this country are being locked up. Even grannies for supporting called Palestine Action. So people take risks when they feel moved by that social eros that bond with other people who need something from them and they put themselves at risk. And that to me is a far more promising avenue for socialism and radicalization than ‘let's offer people some housing’, ‘let's offer people wage increases’. You know, that's a good start but there's nowhere near enough.
Richard Seymour returns to This Is Hell! to talk about his new book "Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization”, published by Verso Books. Seymour discusses the ideologies amplifying the contemporary right that is distorting modern politics into a nihilistic disaster nationalism.
We will have new installments of Rotten History and Hangover Cure. We will also be sharing your answers to this week's Question from Hell! from Patreon.
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Posted by Matthew Boedy
Welcome the Moment of Truth, the thirst that is the drink.
In the summer of 2005, a team of 4 US Navy SEALs dropped into Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush, on a mission to capture a supposedly high-level Taliban leader. Only one SEAL survived. He was later played by Mark Wahlberg, a former white rapper and underwear model, in the movie, Lone Survivor .
In the book on which the movie was based, Marky and his fellow pinnipeds were ambushed by between 35 and 50 Taliban. Reconnaissance experts and those with access to intelligence on Taliban activity in the area that day say it couldn’t have been more than 8 or 10, and probably fewer. The man they were hunting, contrary to the contention of Marky Mark’s real-life counterpart, was no big-shot pal of Osama Bin Laden. He was the leader of a small Taliban- adjacent militia who had no link to US casualties.
And so, this very expensive mission that cost the lives of 3 of Marky’s comrades, along with a Special Operations Chinook helicopter and the lives of sixteen elite soldiers inside it who’d come to aid the original SEAL team, was a mission based on lies. Nineteen super-soldiers were killed while performing an operation amounting to a totally bullshit job, and the helicopter was shot down. The little militia that could have but didn’t, recovered three M4 Carbines with grenade launchers, a field laptop whose undamaged hard drive contained locations of possible targets, gear for night vision, and a sniper scope, which gave the US military a chance to order replacements, including a new tandem rotor heavy-lift military vehicle from Boeing Defense, Space & Security.
A side note: April 20 of last year, in the quarter following the start of the pandemic lockdown, the defense side of Boeing did better financially than its civilian side. The last time this happened was in 2008, after the world economy collapsed, proving that if you’re looking for a recession- proof investment, the mass murder industry is where it’s at.
But back to the summer of 2005: Marky was crawling, injured, to an uncertain survival down a cliff-face, when he was found by a Pashtun villager named Muhammad Gulab Khan. Gulab Khan then acted according to the code of hospitality called the Pashtunwali. The entire population of Afghanistan, whether Pashtun or not, follows the Pashtunwali code. When the US government demanded the Taliban turn over Osama Bin Laden to... read more