the end of nonviolence
or, the crippled calculus of righteous violence
what did you say about Osama bin Laden?
You’ve probably seen people talking about how the youths are obsessed with bin Laden and think he’s a pretty swell fella, but I hate to be the bearer of bad news and let you know that this probably isn’t real and never was.
goes through the available timeline of events here and makes a pretty good case that this was never a trend on tiktok but only became a viral sensation when repackaged by Yashar Ali.
This seems to be the case of how social media actually interacts with major news over the last decade. Some very unwell people will say some very wild shit and then the tweet or post or, in this case, tiktok video, gets picked up by legacy media and made into NEWS.
I think Broderick may be underselling how popular bin Laden was on tiktok, but even if it was twice as popular or five times as popular, it still was probably not that big. This is especially true because of how weird and multitudinous tiktok is.
Where twitter seems to daily coalesce around the same conversation, tiktok seems to be having a million different conversations daily and they may never intersect or interact. Something with millions of views may be something you never even encounter after spending hours on the app.
And so virality on tiktok is just different, but when something escapes tiktok to become DISCOURSE it’s usually because a twitter account associated with legacy media and with a big enough following begins talking about it. And once a journalist begins talking about something—even if it really is a microtrend already dead by the time it’s discovered—it becomes NEWS and DISCOURSE and now your grandma is calling you on the phone and asking you about why elementary schools are all buying litterboxes for children who self-identify as cats.
And, honestly, I may as well be your grandma, at least with regard to the time it takes for me to learn about something trending on tiktok.
However, despite all that’s said above…Osama bin Laden is viral now. And people do seem to, well, think he’s a pretty swell fella. And many of them seem to be young. Possibly younger than 9/11 and definitely young enough to not have been fully conscious when 9/11 happened.
Some seem to think we should absolve people for that but I don’t.
I do think young people should be given a bit of grace and understanding. Who knows what kind of dumb shit I said when I was seventeen? I’m just glad I never posted it online or made it into a video that would persist forever beside my name.
Really, all of our online activity should be automatically scrubbed from the internet at the start of each new year. Like a giant, worldwide digital absolution for all the idiocy of the previous year.
Make it a holiday.
Anyway, why do I think the youth are so into Osama bin Laden? Well, babies, it’s not just the youth.
This person has a fairly big following and a major publisher putting her books out. She also seems just completely deranged. And while this is probably the dumbest thing I’ve seen her say, she’s known—by some—for saying just wild shit like this.
She presents herself as a leftist and maybe she is, but she sure does love fantasizing publicly about violence. Which doesn’t necessarily keep her from being part of the left, but I find this to be a depressing shift. I’ll talk more about this below.
Worse than this, though, is she then made Israel/Palestine about herself.
Oh, yes, boohoo, this genocide is REALLY about you. Thank you for posting incessantly to your audience of weirdos; the conflict will now be resolved.
How brave.
How beautiful.
You’ve done it, Gretchen! Your tweets have saved us all!
I have no sympathy or interest in these types of people. And I’ve said about all that I can about this type of behavior here:
the internet is a diseased brain
the lies of Eden The Ones Who Walk from Omelas by Ursula K Le Guin is one of the most taught short stories of the last 50 years. It’s often taught in moral philosophy classes because of its very clear moral statement. For those who are unaware or who don’t want to click that link to read the story (it’s short), I’ll summarize it here, briefly.
context collapse and the rise of the incurious
I could go on and on about what I think is happening and why people are suddenly into Osama bin Laden—and I do think the answer is interesting—but I don’t think it’s particularly complicated.
We have a lot of people on the world wide web who just know nothing about history and aren’t particularly interested in learning anything. Media literacy has also been decimated by the internet with most people learning film criticism from other tumblr tweens who don’t understand the difference between subtext and text or the beliefs of a character v the beliefs of an author.
Along with that, most people no longer get their news from any established place. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and I think much of institutional US news is quite bad and largely propaganda, but they at least have to wear a veneer of factuality.
And there are facts out there. You can check upon them.
One problem with social media is that no one ever clicks the link anymore. No one digs deeper than what the meme says.
But because so many people get their news and understanding about the world from anonymous accounts with no need or desire to fact check or tell the truth and because those are sometimes fronted by normal people who look just like you but with basic graphic design and public speaking skills, it feels more authentic and therefore more trustworthy.
Like that social media influencer is just your pal, bro.
There’s a reason why AOC and Andrew Tate do so well on instagram, for example.
But it should go without saying that Osama bin Laden was not some groovy anti-imperialist. He was a religious zealot and a butcher of his own people, an enslaver of women, and, you know, a terrorist who murdered indiscriminately.
Also, if you read that letter, you may think to yourself that he correctly described how capital has conquered the Western world. However, you may also notice who he says is in charge of that capital.
And while antisemitism has become very popular in the last month, maybe you don’t want to tell the world that you think a small shadowy group of Jews is controlling the world.
Or maybe you do mean that.
I’m not your mom. You can say whatever you want.
But it is probably worth thinking about it for one fucking second.
Now, I’ve been on the left for a long time and there has always been a subset of people—sometimes large, sometimes small—whose anti-imperialism basically amounts to I’m against anything the US does. Which, honestly, is kind of fair.
But it also, often, causes these people to say things like 9/11 was good and so on. I don’t think I should have to explain exactly how this was very much not good. And not just because of those murdered in the World Trade Towers, but the million+ Iraqis and Afghanis who were killed in the subsequent War on Terror. Most of them not terrorists.
And so in their rush to criticize the US, they absolve the enemies of the US of any crime or wrongdoing. In fact, they’ll celebrate when some fucked up thing happens to US soldiers or US allies.
What kind of freak celebrated the October 7th terrorist attack against Israeli women and children?
A lot of people! The DSA, for example, which is such an astounding embarrassment.
And then, of course, you have the people arguing that Israel needs to flatten Palestine because that’s the only way to stop Hamas. That those savages deserve annihilation for occupying the ancestral Holy Land of an itinerant people.
Which leads me to my real point here.
burial of the American anti-war movement
Many things about 2020 bothered me a great deal, but what troubled me most was the rise and popularity of violence across the political spectrum.
A growing number of people believed that political violence was justifiable, given the proper conditions.
Here are two discussions of these numbers: one and two.
The numbers are interesting for a lot of reasons, but you can read about that for yourself and take your own meaning from them. Possibly even one different than mine.
But I think this trend has been going on since 2016 and I think it will spike again during the 2024 election, regardless of who wins.
The Ukrainian War really destroyed the antiwar movement, in my view. And part of it is because of which people were against this specific war.
While the antiwar movement has traditionally been from the left, it’s often called for people from across the political spectrum. And this has been a strength. A mass movement needs all kinds of people. Even people you may disagree with on every other possible topic.
But because Tucker Carlson, for example, was against the Ukraine War, the left didn’t know how to respond, apparently. Did they want war, or did they want to associate themselves with Carlson, who they have widely cited as a Neo-Nazi?
Well, I guess bombs abroad are better than saying you agree with Tucker Carlson!
Because all politics have been drowned in the Culture War and the lines have been drawn clearly across every possible sector of life, there’s no room for the idiosyncratic mesh of beliefs most people actually have.
Can you be a pro-life feminist who wants an increased welfare state but no discussion of homosexuality in schools?
I mean, yeah. You can be.
People are.
Can you be a conservative who wants increased immigration, a firm second amendment, and religion kept out of public life?
Sure!
Or at least, you can be offline.
On the internet, you need to be 100% this or you’re 100% that. And so when Tucker Carlson says he’s against the war in Ukraine, people on the left broke in half and some made the tortured logic that a proxy war with Russia on Ukrainian land was the progressive choice.
Effectively, we have no antiwar politicians in Congress. We don’t even have a major political movement that is broadly against violence and against the war. We have no one agitating for an end to all war, to a reduction of armaments, to the reduction of US military bases across the globe.
Instead, we have the constant drum of war and violence beating everyone into a frenzy. Because if the right people are involved, if you’ve done the calculus of oppression, you can justify that this time the violence is good and just and righteous.
Better bombs abroad, yes?
After all, this is all abstraction to us here in the US.
Who cares if Ukraine or Palestine are demolished?
Who cares if Israeli children are raped and murdered?
I mean, I’m tweeting about it.
What more do you want from me?
Man… I like sarcastic Ed.
Yep. The most fucked up tweet I've ever seen - I wish I had saved this but I'll just have to paraphrase it - went something like this: "Honestly, it's great to discover that you're kind of an asshole, because then you can aim your cruelty towards the people who deserve it."
The woman who posted this was ostensibly a leftist, which made it quite strange that she had 1) posted maybe the clearest distillation of fascist sentiment ever written, and 2) positioned it as a moral good, as though the only problem with jackboot thugs is the direction in which they're marching.