The emergency addiction
The constant reference to emergencies shows that elites cannot justify authoritarianism outright.
The emergency is now ubiquitous in political life, whether it is the covid emergency, the climate emergency, the health emergency, or governments sending ‘fill in the blank’ emergency alerts to mobile phones. Increasingly, the majority of policy is justified as a response to one emergency or another.
The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben observes that the state of emergency (or state of seige) was originally an invention of modern democracies, from the French revolution on (1). The moment that states instilled universal suffrage, they also created mechanisms by which this might be suspended. Historically, the state of emergency was declared in response to some temporary crisis such as war with another nation, or internal class conflict. The state of emergency allowed for the installing of direct elite rule, until the crisis had been resolved and democracy could be restored.
The role of the emergency now is somewhat different. First, it is not a temporary measure to resolve a crisis, but a way of life. The current political system is constituted on an emergency basis. Most Italian laws are passed as emergency decrees, and France has been in a near constant state of emergency since 2015. The emergency becomes the primary basis for policymaking and the state’s relationship with citizens.
Second, the elite is concerned less with political emergencies - the conflict with a foreign state or the breakdown of civil order - than with natural emergencies. It is concerned with the flood, the virus, illness, or rising temperatures. A society more protected than ever from the vicissitudes of nature has become singularly preoccupied with the natural threat.
It is clear that emergency politics allows the elite a freedom of manoeuvre and an impregnable form of self-justification. The London mayor justified his low emission charging zone on the basis of the ‘public health emergency’ which was a ‘matter of life and death’, and therefore he did not need to gain democratic assent or listen to popular protests.
And yet it also must be recognised that emergency politics reveals a fundamental weakness in our political system. It appears that there is a move towards a form of direct elite rule, and yet there is no political basis on which this elite rule can be overtly justified. There is no new totalitarianism or absolutism, which declares the word of the leader to be the word of god or the nation; there is no ideology of elite power or authority. Instead, we are always in a ‘state of exception’ from democracy.
Policies cannot be justified on their own terms, because they will improve people’s lives or because they represent a certain social interest. Instead, they can only be justified as a response to an external natural threat. Politics is no longer the realm of choice, representation, or freedom; politics is the gun to the head, and without the gun to the head - without the threatening force from without - it has no means to justify itself.
The German sociologist Ulrich Beck perceptively noted that the climate emergency provided ideological orientation for a political life that had lost its way. He said that the global climate risk could provide a ‘sort of navigation system’, ‘a historical new fixed star by which to mobilise solidarities and actions’ (2). This means that societies do not have their own fixed stars, their own internal drivers of action or direction. The external natural threat offers a mechanism ‘by which to mobilise’ solidarities and actions.
So while the politics of emergency gives elites a great power to override accountability and criticism, it also attests to a great vacuity and weakness, whereby politicians can only justify action as a blind and forced response to some natural event.
(1) Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, Uni of Chicago Press 2005
(2) Ulrich Beck, The Metamorphasis of the World, Polity 2016
In what the late Saddam Hussein once dubbed “the great Satan,” roughly two-thirds of the United States enlisted military corps is white . . . The fat, bulbous U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin once confirmed in a 93-2 vote of the U.S. Senate, immediately embarked on a whirlwind media tour of duty, telling the pseudo-secular sycophants in the state-controlled tabloid press and state-controlled television talk show circuit about how the U.S. Army is full of bad racist white men.
Senior Defense Department leaders celebrating yet another Pride Month at the Pentagon sounding the alarm about the rising number of state laws they say target the LGBTQ+ community, warned the trend is hurting the feelings of the armed forces . . . “LGBTQ plus and other diverse communities are under attack, just because they are different. Hate for hate’s sake,” said Gil Cisneros, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for personnel and readiness, who also serves as DoD’s chief diversity and inclusion officer.
And now the U.S. Army is doing ads begging for more young white males? What happened?
Even with a full-on declaration of war from Congress, and even if Gavin Newsome could be cheated into the Oval Office by ZOG somehow, with Globohomo diversity brigades going door-to-door looking to impress American children into military service, they will be met with armed, well-trained opposition, the invasion at the Southern border is going full tilt, and the drugs are flowing in like never before.
Get ready for it . . . the fat old devil worshipping fags on Capitol Hill, on Wall Street, in Whitehall, and in Brussels are in no shape to fight a war themselves, and most Americans are armed to the teeth with their own guns . . . NATO hates heterosexual white men . . . they said so themselves . . .
https://cwspangle.substack.com/i/138320669/nato-an-anti-white-and-anti-family-institution