@e_flux wrote:
At the Verso blog, Franco "Bifo" Berardi uses the epidemic of gun violence in the US as a springboard for examining a global civil war in which, as he writes, "the aging, white mind becomes increasingly obsessed with the myth of potency and the humiliating experience of impotence." Read an excerpt from the piece below, or the full text here.
What Joyce Carol Oates describes in A Book of American Martyrs is not an ideological or a political conflict that may eventually be resolved democratically. It is a clash of incompatible cultures that do not, and cannot, belong in the same political universe. Civil war is the name we give to this incompatibility. Civil war is not only the name of what is going on right now in the United States of America, but also, in changed forms, what is happening in the EU and the United Kingdom. Brexiteers and remainers are not two political parties that may eventually find a common ground of democratic government, they are two cultural armies that for the next generation will diverge more and more. Across the world, as political government is replaced by automatic governance, the very sphere of social intercourse is collapsing.
If what was formerly called “the West” (“the West” having collapse as a geopolitical entity in the post-Trump world) has already entered a period of civil war, the backdrop of this is a larger and more cataclysmic war: that being, the clash between the victims of colonialism (both past and present) and the white populations of Europe, America, and Russia. The background of the present internal decaying political order in the Northern hemisphere, and the return of racism on a massive scale, is the inability to deal with the end of modernity, and to confront the great migration, and the legacy of centuries of colonialism, exploitation and devastation. Civil war in the white countries is the other side of the same coin.
Image: Student walkout against gun violence, March 14, Maryland, USA. Via pbs.org.
Posts: 1
Participants: 1