Fourth Reich Archaeology - Fourth Reich Geopolitik 5

Episode Date: May 16, 2025

This week marks the fifth installment of our ongoing Geopolitik series. More so than any of our other excavations, we’ve been proceeding with Geopolitik as if it were an actual archeological dig. Recall that we began with a surface level survey on the field of geopolitics itself, tracing the pseudoscience back to its roots in the British Empire, its passage through the Third Reich, and its handoff from the Nazis to the American empire. We went on to examine the geopolitical goals of the Trump administration in Europe, in Latin America, and here at home, always paying attention to the inadequate and ultimately collaborationist alternative on offer from the Democratic party. We then explored the lifeblood that powers the expansion and progression of the Fourth Reich–the successive series of genocides that the United States has been responsible for since before this place was even a country. Last week, we discussed the use of genocidal ideology to get away with this genocidal project, drawing on white supremacist myths of racial superiority and the dehumanization of any group of people that got in the way. In this episode we dig through yet another level of substrate, and unearth the foundation on which ideology rests–culture and identity. In modern society, culture and identity are developed, cultivated, and largely manipulated by media (movies, tv, music, books). And in the 21st century, media can be best understood as spectacle. We turn to the work of the legendary Marxist theorist, Guy Debord, and his foundational work “Society of the Spectacle.” We’ve referenced Debord’s work in prior episodes and we often talk about spectacle during our excavations, but never have we dug into Debord like we do in this one. As if it were written yesterday, Debord’s Society of the Spectacle so accurately describes the current state of affairs where spectacle serves as both the result and the justification of the existing mode of production. It exists to keep working class folks alienated, numb, and incapable of doing anything other than consume. In a late stage free market democracy like ours, converting citizens into passive consumers would not be possible were it not for spectacle. Buckle up because this one has another cover by Don. As always, we are so thankful for our listening audience. If you’re able, please consider throwing us some dollars on Patreon to help keep our engines running: www.patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology You can read Society of the Spectacle here: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htmAnd Comments on the Society of the Spectacle here: https://monoskop.org/images/3/3b/Debord_Guy_Comments_on_the_Society_of_the_Spectacle_1990.pdf

Colonialism or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. So it's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources. We found no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission of science. I'll never apologize for the United States of America.

America. Ever, I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to require information, which showed that there were two wars going. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders the more easy victims of a big lie than a small one. For example, we're the CIA. He has a mom. He knows so long this is a guy, afraid of we'd never be secure.

It usually takes a national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers. We've got a lot of killers. Why you think our country's so innocent? This is the United. I'm not going to see. This is Fourth Reich Archaeology.

I'm Dick. on welcome back we are so glad to be here with you and we are so glad to have you here with us to any of you out there who are tuning in for the first time welcome we think you pick the right episode to start with and we hope you enjoy our program very much this week we are doing another one of our geopolitic episodes. Recall that these episodes address the current sad state of affairs in our late capitalist imperialist hellscape provided to you with the Fourth Reich archaeology lens that we've been developing over the course of the last nine months. Before we get into all of that, I just want to say one more time, as I always say, right at the outset.

Thank you very much. Thank you to all our supporters. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for liking the pod. Thank you for subscribing to the pod. A very sincere, warm, deep. Thank you very much to our Patreon subscribers. We could not be doing this if,

it were not for you. We strive to be completely listener funded, free of any special interests or advertisement. Basically, we want it to just be us and you, our beloved listenership. So if you can, and if you have the means, please consider giving us a donation on Patreon. I just will chime in here with respect to our Patreon, first to reiterate my thanks as well to our subscribers and to encourage folks who are willing and able to support the project to do so, but to do so at patreon.com as opposed to through the Patreon app on the iPhone, because it has come to our attention that Tim Apple is sipping off of your contribution every time that you subscribe through the App Store version of Patreon.

So let's cut him out of the deal. Patreon's already taken a cut, so let's just keep the fingers to a minimum in that pie if you are so kind as to give us a little support. Damn, great call out, Don. I had no idea. Motherfuckers be sipping our milkshake. I drink your milkshake. I drink it up.

Fuck you, Tim Apple. I want to once again just remind everyone that our mailbox is open and we check our mail. daily, constantly, multiple times a day. We've tried to adopt the 38th president's motto of responding to correspondence within a day, but we're very busy here at Fourth Archaeology. We endeavor to respond to every single one of you, and we do. We like to think that we are pretty successful. Just maybe we'll take a few days. You can reach us at Fourth Reichpod at gmail.com, and we're on Twitter and Instagram at Fourth Reichpod. And I'll kick it over to you, Don. Like I said at the top of the hour, we're going to be doing another one of our geopolitics series. This one is picking up where

we left off last time on ideology. That's right. The Geopolitic series, as the returning listeners will know, but just to level set for everyone here, we began with first an exegesis on the field of geopolitics itself. So we traced this pseudo-scientific project, this pseudoscience, back to its roots, its roots in the British Empire with Sir Helford McKinder, its passage through the Third Reich and famous Third Reich geopolitician Karl Hauscholfa. And we also let the listener know about its handoff from the Nazis to the American Empire, hand it off like so many Waffen SS officers brought on to the CIA payroll after 1945.

And we went on to explore the geopolitical goals of the Trump administration in Europe, in Latin America, and of course here at home in the United States. And we have endeavored to always pay close attention not only to one or the other side of the aisle, but as we've described it, the two. two-party duopoly acts like a right and a left hand, strangling the life of the people. And so we've not spared from our critique the inadequate and ultimately collaborationist alternative politics on offer from the democratic side of the aisle. And really, I think more than any of our other series,

that have, to a greater or lesser extent, proceeded in sort of a chronological order, this geopolitic series has proceeded as an archaeological dig might. So we began at sort of the surface level, and then once we got beneath the sort of goings-on within the realm of geopolitics, we took it one layer deeper,

down and found that genocide is the burning furnace on the ship of the Reich, this continuous layer that underlies both the Nazi project, the imperialist projects of various national stripes of the 18th and 19th centuries, and of course the post-war. American century up to and including the modern day and currently ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, which we, to be 1,000% clear, call for its immediate end, and not only for its immediate end, but for accountability for the perpetrators. Of course, beneath that layer of substrate in our dig, in the last installment of this series, we went one layer deeper into the ideological foundation for these successive genocides that have marked the expansion and development of the capitalist mode of production. And Dick, why don't you tell the listeners where we're going to take it today as we dig yet one layer deeper underground?

So as you said, last time we discussed the use of genocidal ideology in this genocidal project called the Fourth Reich. And we did that by drawing on these long-standing white supremacist myths of racial superiority that have pervaded American society since before this place was even a country. The dehumanization of whomever has been cast in the poor, sad role of impediment to progress, whether it's the Native Americans, whether it's the Mexicans, whether it's the Blacks, whether it's the blacks. Throughout history, these people have been cast aside because of this myth of the superiority of the white man,

the white Anglo-European man. Yeah, to quote ICE lawyer James Rodden, aka Glomar Responder, what we're referring to is the dehumanization of those who would be, quote, tossed into, a tree shredder.

Jesus. And we sort of explored how ideology is weaponized, how the powers that be are able to tap into individual prejudices, individual hate, and use that to leverage, for example, a police force,

an army, a border patrol. When you embed people that are so filled with hatred of the other into the government, especially into the enforcement arms of the government, it becomes very easy to see how that leads to a situation where those same people willingly do violence onto the heads of innocent people for no other reason than their immutable characteristics. And so, yes, this week we will continue the dig.

We'll do so by exploring the basis of ideology, the foundation, which we posit is a mixture of individual identity and more broadly culture. These two components fuse together to create this modern spectacle that we are in. and in the 21st century spectacle is propagated by what we generally know as media now just to define it right at the outset to us media includes not just the news but films TV music internet advertising and it seems like less and less so these days print books newspapers magazines and the like. Yeah, I think before we kick off the dig into this identity formation process that takes place through the spectacle, it bears reading the words of a man whom we've referred to a few times on the pod who is a big influence. and who really stands at, I think, one of the key inflection points in Marxist thinking

for the post-war modern era, talking, of course, about the French Marxist theorist and one of the leaders of the Situationist International, Guy Debile. Of all the other It's crevue, I sole, conu, the desonor to not be dead to chandone.

I'm of course of love, brave people, brave jean, it's not me that rumine and it's not me that we're in gerbe, the more foch to the other. Giedebor, of course, the author,

of the society of the spectacle. And a couple of the early appearing aphorisms in that work which is available for free online, wherever you access the internet and is certainly worth a read. It's both interesting as a historical document representing a peak of anti-system social organizing in 1960s, was published in 67, preceding, of course, the massive uprisings in Paris in 1968, which were echoed in many other European countries as well as the United States at that time. but it's also a very accurate, descriptive piece of theoretical writing. And in it, Debord writes, The spectacle grasped in its totality is both the result

and the project of an existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealistic of the real society. In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially a dominant life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already. made in production and its corollary consumption. The spectacle's form and content are identically the total justification of the existing

system's conditions and goals. The spectacle is also the permanent presence of this justification, since it occupies the main part of the time lived outside of modern production. One cannot abstractly contrast the spectacle to actual social activity. Such a division is itself divided. The spectacle, which inverts the real, is in fact produced. Lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle while simultaneously absorbing the spectacular order, giving it positive cohesiveness. Objective reality is present on both sides.

Every notion fixed this way has no other basis than its passage into the opposite. Reality rises up within the spectacle and the spectacle is real. This reciprocal alienation is the essence and the support of the existing society. Damn, it's like he wrote that yesterday. Yeah, I'm saying. He, one of the most vindicated men. And this is how democracy can work on a mass scale in the modern time. where you look to the market, you look to businesses to provide people with culture, with basically identity, things that the government can't really give people.

Yeah, I mean, I think the whole point is that it takes on a life of its own. It's the self-justification of the mode of production. It's the self-image of capitalism that is imparted unto all of the participants in the mode of production as something that one tells everybody this is the only way that it can ever be and two gives a massive two thumbs up and says, This is the only way it can ever be. Why? Because this is the culmination of progress. It sort of takes as it's given a worldview premised on the advancement of civilization. And in that sort of linear view of history, it posits that here we are.

in the apogee of all that's come before. Kind of the Kamala Harris quote. What could be unburdened by what has been. Absolutely. And it's crazy how quickly it works, right? Let's take maybe just a second to talk about a very real example, a very basic one too, right? The police force in the United States,

local police law enforcement. Growing up, I don't know about you, but certainly for me, cops and robbers, big part of my childhood, right? Toy badges, toy guns. So much of our dramas on TV, they're procedural dramas about cops, about the justice system. And in all of this, the cops are the good guys, right? It's sort of normalized that we're just not even a way. aware that it's happening over the course of years and years and years.

On the same token, you switch the channel or maybe the cop show ends and the local news comes on and it's almost a continuation of the same artifice, of the same spectacle. The lead story on the news at 9 is going to be some crime that took place, right? They'll interview the crying victims family and they'll show the mugshot of the perp and they'll give the press conference clip of the chief of police or whatever the case may be. But it's all part of this totalizing spectacle that like the board said, it lived reality is materially invaded. by the contemplation of the spectacle. So when you're watching the TV news, you're thinking about the show that you just watched

and you're fitting these real-world events into the paradigm erected within the fictional world of the show and vice versa. You're never not connecting the dots and connecting the points of reference in between what is real, lived reality, and what is fictional, what is spectacular.

And it's this feedback loop that's self-reinforcing, and it creates this wheel. And I also wanted to give a shout out to the recently published book, Copaganda, by Alec Karakatsanis. which is a tremendous exploration, very accessible, not a super long book. You can order it. It's out now. Love to get him on the show one day. But it goes into depth on how this process is at work in today's media and policing environment as well. So you just gave too good of an example, Dick.

I had to run my mouth about it. Well, it's an easy example. I'm glad, and I'm glad you did. And maybe I'll do another example. What all of this leads to is a society where our consumer choices are basically acts of expression. No more do I need to think about actually taking a step towards change. I could just buy something. Case in point is, let's say I'm a 30-something well-to-do professional, and I'm feeling guilty

that I'm not contributing enough to undo all of the damage we've done in the 20th century. So what do I do? I go out and I buy an electric car. And in doing so, I basically made my statement, right? I'm saying, I parked my car outside my house and I say, hey, I'm doing my part. You voted with your wallet. Hey there, Richard. Oh, hey, Gerald.

Yeah, it's a hybrid. I just couldn't sit back and be a part of destroying the earth anymore. Well, good for you. Oh, thanks. Well, there goes the new high and mighty Gerald Roflowski. Yeah, ever since he got that new hybrid, he thinks he's better than everyone else. This idea of sort of your consumer choices as your form of expression in society. As you say, voting with your wallet, it's not just with electronic vehicles, it's with any number of things.

I wonder maybe we could talk a little bit about how it got to be this way. So I think we talked a little bit about this in the episode that I did a while back with Matt Farwell on propaganda. And we talked about Edward Bernays, of course, Sigmund Freud's. nephew and the real godfather of the public relations industry in America and how in the industrializing era of the early 20th century he really captured the psychological connections that consumers were beginning to make with consumer products. You know, before mass marketing, commerce was really conducted locally, right? You'd go to the general store, you would get the stuff that you need.

You would maybe develop these local specialities in your hometown. or city, and that was about the extent of it, but with the mass publication of newspapers of nationwide circulation, with radio syndication, with the advent of the television, of course later on the branding exercise becomes central to consumption and you're no longer buying just for the purpose of fulfilling a practical need but you are buying for the purpose of the purpose of associating yourself with a product with a company with a brand. Of course, the most popular brands had some nationalistic panache a lot of the time. Think about the Ford automobile that revolutionized mass production and became a real symbol

not only of, you know, motor transport, not only of the convenience of being able to travel longer distances in shorter periods of time more easily, but really of innovation as an abstract concept, of industriousness as an abstract concept, of mass production as a concept and all of those concepts in turn are stamped with the stars and stripes and become their own aspect of national identity and so that is something that is deeply rooted in the experience of mass production once again it's kind of your class

classic reflection of the Marxist idea that the superstructure, right, what we observe in our day-to-day life, what we witness, experience, and participate in as commercial activity is informed by the base structure, namely the relations of production between the owners of capital. Here, you could think Henry Ford, the Ford Motor Company, etc. And the means of production, the factory system, the assembly line, and mass production, and marketing. And so you see the superstructure reflecting that base structure and in turn taking on a significance beyond the practical use value of the vehicle itself. The vehicle example is a great one, but it applies to pretty much any consumer good.

You are no longer buying a can of soup to nourish your family. You're buying a can of soup because you're a considerate, thoughtful mother who likes to take care of her children when they're sick. You're buying a can of soup because when you were a child, that can of soup was in your home and it reminds you of home. You are proceeding in the market largely through emotions, through memory, through trigger points that bring you back to a moment in time or a relationship or an ideal that you are trying to achieve. Right. The classic Adam Curtis example, too, with the cigarettes and women smoking. He gives this example in which Curtis documentary was it again? I think it's the century of the self. Yes. And I think you're

talking about the switch actually, right? He did a psychoanalytical study and discovered that women didn't like smoking cigarettes because it reminded them of the penis. A.A. Brill was one of the first psychoanalysts in America. And for a large fee, he told Bernays that cigarettes were a symbol of the penis and of male sexual power. He told Bernays that if he could find a way to connect cigarettes with the idea of challenging male power, then women would smoke because then they would have their own penises. And then he went on this campaign to switch that up, right? And this was the success. He was able to do that. Right. It became a liberatory gesture to smoke the cigarette. And he

mounted a whole manifestation in Manhattan of women smoking as a sign that they were free. free to do what they want. And so for them and for the ad campaign, smoking becomes not a way to get a nicotine fix, but a way to express yourself as a free person. Every year, New York held an Easter Day parade to which thousands came. And Bernays decided to stage an event there. He persuaded a group of rich debutants to hide cigarettes. under their clothes.

Then they should join the parade and at a given signal from him they were to light up the cigarettes dramatically. Bernays then informed the press that he had heard that a group of suffragettes were preparing to protest by lighting up what they called tortures of freedom. He knew this would be an outcry

and he knew that all of the photographers would be there to capture this moment and so he was ready with a phrase which was torture of freedom. The same way that for men, the Marlboro Man advertisements give a identityitarian connection to your everyday smoker, no matter their life circumstances, to the cowboy out there on the Western Plains. An American ideal from the very beginning, right? This, the pioneer mentality. We talked about it

in our last episode. No longer do you have to pick up and move west to stake your claim and to be a real rugged individual. All you got to do is buy a pack of Marlboros at your corner store. And you can achieve all that with one smoke. But it's just like you said, right?

It's like you are receiving this flood of entertainment about a certain subject. and then that episode or that show ends and then the news comes on and it's basically just playing off of the same sort of value set and belief systems and just inundating you with what is now ostensibly your reality right it's no longer law and order special victims unit you're now watching a story about a young girl who was raped and imprisoned in the basement for six months and it's this way that the general population is able to be kept under control. Yeah, and I think here it bears marking a distinction between the Third Reich approach to propaganda and the Fourth Reich approach. Because as everybody knows, the totalitarian society under Nazi rule in Germany under the leadership of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels was heavy-handed to the max, right? I mean, calling it heavy-handed, it's almost a joke. It's almost an understatement. because there was complete censorship, complete control,

and any non-compliance with the party line in media representation was punished swiftly and decisively. You could not just put out news reporting or event. cultural media that ran contrary to the goals of the regime, famously in high art, which had in fact thrived under Weimar Germany in the interwar period. You know, the German expressionist reaction to the horrors of World War I is some of the most heart-wrenchinged. and impactful artistic representation that the Western world has produced in the modern era, right? Thinking about, you know, your painters like Georg Gros or Ludwig Meidne or your film industry. You know, the German expressionist films of the likes of Fritiers.

Lange and others the collage work of Katty Kolwitz or Kurt Schwitters, you know, all of these plastic arts, all of this artistic representation of the horrors of war that gives rise to a whole array of expressionist representation is stomped down with the jack boot of Nazism.

It's displayed in the degenerate art exhibitions throughout Germany and then is burned en masse. Well, in fact, some samples were burned.

Others were secretly squirled away by high-ranking Nazi officers. In fact, and may even be on the walls of your favorite museum today for all we know. But the point is that, and then by contrast, on the other side of the coin, you have your Lenny Riefenstahl, you have your official propagandist art and informational media, which are directly controlled by and completely enlocked,

step with the messaging of the regime. But that's not how it works in a democracy, right? No, in fact, nowadays, that's sort of the number one criticism for an authoritarian regime, right? That crude approach. How many times have you heard an American news outlet or pundit or whatever talk about how awful it must be in one of these authoritarian government? North Korea, Iran, where essentially their criticism is that they restricts speech much like the Nazis did.

Right. Again, oftentimes, although that's not the purpose of this episode, oftentimes in a very trumped-up and cartoonish way as well, right? As far as the finger pointing goes. Definitely. But nowadays, in the Fourth Reich, it's much more refined, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, that's what Chomsky was on about. Well, I shouldn't say Chomsky because, of course, his co-author, Edward Herman in the seminal manufacturing consent was really the media studies guy of the pair, whereas Chomsky was the linguist, but Chomsky gets all. all the credit, let's say Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model set forth in their classic

manufacturing consent. Societies differ, but in ours, the major decisions over what happens in the society, decisions over investment and production and distribution and so on, are in the hands of a relatively concentrated network of major corporations and conglomerates and investment firms and so on. They are also the ones who staff the major executive positions in the government, and they're the ones who own the media, and they're the ones who have to be in a position to make the decisions. They have an overwhelmingly dominant role in the way life happens, you know, what's done in the society. Within the economic system, by law and, in principle,

they dominate. The control of our resources and the need to satisfy their interests imposes very sharp constraints on the political system and the ideological system. And that consent, it's obviously essential in a system where, at least in theory, the basis for the government's authority is the consent of the governed, right? This is where the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, took their cues from the British liberal philosopher John Locke, the social contract theory of government, whereby the governed are either explicitly or, if not, at least implicitly, authorizing the government to make decisions on behalf of the

entirety of the society and in such a system to the degree that the government diverges from what would organically be the will of the people it needs to manufacture that consent yeah and i think part of it is also something that uh herman chomsky talk about is this idea that under the modern structure the dissenters are given a seat at the table maybe a kitty a kitty seat at the table dissent is allowed to is permitted right but it's permitted only in the margins only on the fringe it is put in place so that it can show of course we have a free Western liberal democracy where people can say what they want to say and criticize the government, but it's not given enough of a space, enough airtime, so it's not

to interfere with what the sort of official agenda is. just like Marx theorized in capital that alternatives or critiques of the capitalist mode of production would inevitably be absorbed into the capitalist mode of production would be accounted for and would be addressed with some table scraps from the capitalist mode of production, the ever-enriching rulers of the world down to the toiling masses under the table. The same goes for dissent and critique, that the critiques are allowed to persist to the extent that they either end up reifying the system like you were kind of getting at, because we have dissent, therefore we are free, therefore no fundamental change is needed here, no revolutionary restructuring of society is needed here, because we already have a system

whereby those who oppose the activities, the conduct of the rulers, are able to voice their dissent. And the rulers respond in some sense to those critiques. And, you know, in this way, all of us together, whether a hundred billionaire, like Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, all of whom are not only 100 billionaires, but also massive media titans, they are on the same team. as the homeless who is being trampled under the treads of a bulldozer that is depopulating their encampment in any American city right as we record. So it's a way in which the, again, the spectacle, and I think that the spectacle framework is so useful here

and if you'll forgive me, I'm going to get Guy Debord back on the line. Oh, yeah. Because... Long-time friend of the pod. Oh, yeah. And while most people are aware of the Society of the Spectacle, the 1967 book, fewer people, I think, have...

interacted with his update that was written 21 years later in 1988 comments on the Society of the Spectacle. And there, Debord has spent two decades observing the confusion over, oh, well, what's the difference between the spectacle and the media? And, oh, you know, maybe we do have a democratic society after all, because, hey, didn't we end the war in Vietnam? And to that, Debord says, the empty debate on the spectacle, that is on the activities of the world's owners is thus organized by the spectacle.

itself. Everything is said about the extensive means at its disposal to ensure that nothing is said about their extensive deployment. Rather than talk of the spectacle, people often prefer to use the term media. And by this, they mean to describe a mere instrument, A kind of public service which, with impartial professionalism, would facilitate the new wealth of mass communication through mass media. A form of communication which has at last attained a unilateral purity, whereby decisions already taken are presented for passive admiration. For what is communicated are odors, and with perfect harmony, those who give them are also those who tell us what they think of them. Spectacular power, which is so fundamentally unitary, so concentrated by the very weight of things, and entirely despotic, In spirit, frequently rails at the appearance in its realm of a spectacular politics,

a spectacular justice, a spectacular medicine, and all the other similarly surprising examples of media excess. Thus, this spectacle would be merely the excesses of the media, whose nature unquestionably good since it facilitates communication is sometimes driven to extremes. Often enough, society's bosses declare themselves ill-served by their media employees. More often, they blame the spectators for the common, almost a bestial manner in which they indulge in the media's delights. I believe I'm talking to the people after I am dead. I am dead.

I am talking to the people of your young generation. I believe they call these the gooners, the people that are doing the gooning. The Volta la text. A virtually infinite number. An infinite number of supposed differences within the media thus serve to screen what is in fact a result of a spectacular convergence pursued with remarkable tenacity. Just as the logic of the commodity reigns over capitalist's competing ambitions and the logic of war always dominates the frequent modifications in weaponry. So, the harsh logic of the spectacle controls the abundant diversity of media extravagance. In all that has happened in the last 20 years, the most important change lies in the very continuity

of the spectacle. This has nothing to do with the perfecting of its media instruments, which had already reached a highly advanced stage of development, it means quite simply that the spectacle's domination has succeeded in raising a whole generation molded to its laws. The extraordinary new conditions in which this entire generation has effectively lived constitute a precise and comprehensive summary of the all that henceforth the spectacle will

forbid, and also all that it will permit. Hell yeah. And to bring it back to Adam Curtis, to just sort of layered it on top, but this is what he would call. And what we have discussed at

length is this idea of a citizen as nothing more than a passive consumer. in modern democracy, what we refer to as disgusted spectators who really only have one purpose and that is to consume. This is the concept of a free market democracy. Your needs can be met by the market and they can be met simply by purchasing things and because of where we are in the world and time, as Americans, this abundance of media, of products, it's pretty easy to go numb because you feel like you have everything you've ever wanted right at your fingertips.

Yeah. Yeah, and it especially stood out to me this discussion of the vast, array that is put out there because today it's reached absurd proportions whereas de bo was writing this after one generation had been entirely brought up within the spectacle that was in 1988 so we're now at least two or three more generations deep and the spectacle through the advancement of technology has only become all the more totalizing since that time and you know i think this rendered deborr extremely pessimistic i mean the guy committed suicide six years after he wrote that book in 1994 and that to me always sits as a stark warning of the potential dead end of this entire line of analysis but at the same time you know the young debauch certainly saw

openings at various times and those openings into which he thrust his efforts in collaboration of course with many other comrades i mean this is not a lone intellectual this is a communist who was operating alongside shoulder to shoulder with like-minded comrades to put their bodies on the line for that revolutionary interruption of the dominance of the spectacle. And that's something that ultimately, I think we ourselves are reaching towards through this project to link up with, and it's not just a ideologically narrow, community limited to quote unquote communists. I mean, what does that even mean in 2025? Not much. But at a minimum, what we mean is once you see things as they really are,

once you strip away all of this veneer of propaganda, once you're able to disentangle your identity from the capital O official capital N narrative of capital P progress in the Western civilizational tome. Then you see the possibilities for revolutionary change and, you know, we see it today with the likes of the students who, despite threats of experience, despite having their graduations canceled and their diplomas taken away are nevertheless standing firm against their universities complicity and financial support for genocide to give just one example so it's all connected and you know this is again this kind of

vertically deepening analysis that we are digging out here through this series is to strip away the ossified and hardened layers of identitarian reflex that are built into each and every one of us to defend the status quo as a knee-jerk reaction against any radical critique thereof. Just because you mentioned Dibor died in the mid-90s, I think now is a good point to read in the famous Carl Sagan quote that is in his book, The Demon Haunted World, Science is a Candle in the Dark,

which came out in the mid-90s, And it's a foreboding I have, maybe ill-placed, of an America in my children's generation, or my grandchildren's generation, when all the manufacturing industries have slipped the way to other countries, when we're a service and information processing economy, when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues. When the people, the people, I mean the broad population in a democracy,

when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or even to knowledgeably question those who do set the agendas, when there is no practice in questioning those in authority, When clutching our crystals and religiously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in steep decline, unable to distinguish between what's true and what feels good, we slide almost without noticing into superstition. So there we have in the mid-90s, Sagan already putting his finger up. on this backslide into what he calls superstition and darkness. Yeah, and I guess on that path from the past towards the present, it also bears taking a stop at another inflection point of history

after the spectacular destruction of the Twin Towers, at the World Trade Center, and of course, Building 7, not to be forgotten, and the Pentagon and the downing of the plane there in Pennsylvania as well. But after that spectacular intrusion into the mind's eye of the entire world population was effectuated in 2001 after the Bush administration was able to parlay that event into a genocidal invasion of the Middle East, most notably into Afghanistan and Iraq, which, as we know, was not limited to Iraq, but spilled over into many other Middle Eastern countries, the consequences of which are absolutely still not only being felt today, but are still spinning off today. Well, in 2004,

the author Ron Susskind was writing a book about the Bush administration. And he, in this passage discusses a conversation he had with Carl Rove, the famous political sphingali of George W. Bush, and he calls him in this passage the aide. So what Susskind wrote was, the aide said that guys like me were, quote, in what we call the reality-based community, end quote, which he, defined as people who, quote, believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That's not the way the world really works anymore, end quote, he continued, quote, we're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality, and while you're studying that reality,

judiciously as you will will act again creating other new realities which you can study too and that's how things will sort out were history's actors and you

all of you will be left to just study what we do and quote and there you have it and I'm glad you picked up where I was going with it and that brings us

into the new millennium and I mean it's spot on if you ask me sad and so maybe now we'll take a couple minutes and just sort of talk about how this plays out in our modern times by now we have all heard about it it's been about a week and the waves are still cresting that's right I'm talking about Yays-Ile-Hitler song. It's crazy how quickly. We're not going to sing it and we're not going to play it. No, and we're honestly not going to talk about it that much.

But it's a great case study of how quickly culture can backslide, right? In one night, in one 24-hour period after the release of the song, you start seeing it on the internet and God have mercy. on colleges and high schools around the country. But all of a sudden, it becomes, you would think, totally acceptable to utter these disgusting phrases. Yeah, we were saying before we hit record, I mean, imagine what rush week is going to be like around the fraternity houses at the University of Alabama, at Ole Miss,

the ghost of General Edwin Walker, will rise bodily from the grave to dance above the refrain of Heil Hitler as polo shirt, popped collar, trod, frat boys, scream at the top. of their lungs, no doubt doing the Elon Musk stiff arm Roman salute as they sing. It's a sickening sight to behold, and I'm sure there will be no shortage of side-by-sides between what we thought might have been the death pangs of American apartheid in,

the age of integration in the 1960s, well, I wouldn't be surprised if before too long there are going to be calls under the banner of anti-woke, anti-DEI for de-integration, for resegregation, all to that catchy old tune. And meanwhile, while certainly a massive portion of the society will look upon that spectacle with disgust, you know, we could sit here and talk about it till we're blue in the face, just how awful it is. But the fracturing of the American identity, the fracturing of the media landscape, and the fracturing of the media landscape,

and the fracturing of the spectacle itself into a million little silos, a million identity categories that one can consume as though off the shelves of their local supermarket, there may not be eggs, but there's no shortage of identitarian options. plenty of Islamophobia on sale yeah half price exactly exactly and so that siloing off what it means in practice is that anything that anyone who despises nazism who is disgusted by white supremacy and segregationist ideology, nothing that anybody of such a stripe could or will say will have the slightest impact on the world view of those who are sucking from a different teat From the teat of Shiloh Hendricks, perhaps.

Oh, man. Okay, I think, you know, we wanted to do a shorter one, and I think this is probably a good place to stop. Maybe I'll turn to you, Don, if you have any other last-minute thoughts to leave the listener. There's a great deal more that we could say on this topic, and there's a great deal more that we doubtly. will say on this topic. This is fertile ground. The question is, was Guy Debord right at the end of his life

when he concluded that the spectacle had come full circle and had imprisoned the spectators in to watching the show helpless to change the channel. For now, we hope the answer is no, but that's yet to be determined. In any event, I'm Don saying farewell. as soon as you're born, it make you feel small. By giving you no time instead of it, oh.

To the pain is so big you feel nothing at all. The working class hero is something to be. Working class hero is something to be. They hate you at home. It hits you at school. If you're clever and they despise a fool To you're so fucking crazy, you can't follow their rules Working class hero is something to be

class hero is something to be when they've tortured and scared you for 20 odd years. Then they expect you to pick a career body function, so full of fear. Working class hero is something to be. Working class hero is something to be. Keep you dope with something to be.

Doped with religion, sex and TV. And you think you're so clever in classless free. But you're just too fucking peasants as far as I can see. Working class hero is something to be. Working class hero is something to be. There's room at the top, they're telling you still. You must learn how to smile as you call if you want to be lightly focused on the hill.

A working class hero is something to be. Because hero is something to be If you want to be a hero, then just follow me. If you want to be a hero, Thank you.