It Could Happen Here - About That Nazi Salute

Episode Date: January 24, 2025

Mia discusses Elon Musk's Nazi salute, why everything feels like this, and how to get out. Sources: https://apnews.com/article/jair-bolsonaro-politics-brasilia-united-states-government-florida-state-29fad1e6c79a5737641932c939021e62 https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-invisible-committe-to-our-friendsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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The Happiness Lab's how-To Season starts January 1st. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The richest man in the world does a Nazi salute while giving a speech at the inauguration of the new president. He does a second one. In another age, it is the most significant event in world history. It's maybe the third most fascist event of the day. NBC re-uploads the address and cuts away from the sig-hail it broadcasted live. You refresh your timeline.

Everyone is arguing about whether it was even a Nazi salute. You watch the video, it's a Nazi salute. The second one is a Nazi salute. None of the headlines will say that Elon Musk did a Nazi salute. The articles won't say it either. You can't tell whether they've been cowed to submission by the threat of a defamation lawsuit or if they're already running cover for the new regime. You scroll through your timeline. They made my gender illegal. They tried to repeal the 14th Amendment through executive order to end birthright citizenship. You can't follow it.

It's too much. The world has become a spectacle. And that spectacle is trying to kill you. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm your host, Neil Wong. In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. So wrote the French social theorist Guy de Borde in his seminal 1967 work, The Society of the Spectacle. De Borde is typically written off as just another theorist

of early mass media, and today his work is generally confined to the art world. Which is, to be fair, largely a demonstration of the fact that nobody who talks about him has ever gotten past the opening paragraphs of the book and made it to the part where he demands the formation of armed workers councils. But this is the age of the spectacle, in ways more nightmarish than de Boer could ever have predicted. His elaborate metaphors rendered thuddingly literal. Quote, everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation.

And indeed, living has been replaced by the image of living. This phenomena is called Instagram. The spectacle society of the spectacle opens is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people mediated by images. Today, we literally call the collection of images we use to relate to each other social media. Quote, lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle, while

simultaneously absorbing the spectacular order, giving it positive cohesiveness. A reality TV star, the old human symbol of the spectacle, in which everything that was directly lived has been transformed into a representation, is now a president the second time, driven by streamers and influencers and podcasters who stand as the new human symbols of the spectacle. They have invaded real society and now rule it directly. In the 1960s, the debate was whether you could ignore the spectacle because it wasn't real. The board's elegant solution was that contemplating the spectacle makes it real.

None of that matters anymore. You can't ignore the spectacle because it's here. It has physically invaded the world. Donald Trump is the president. The richest man on earth is Nazi saluting Elon Musk. The autonomous force de Boer described as a spectacle no longer operates at the abstract level. It is the president of the United States.

Everything is rendered thuddingly, transcendently literal. In De Boerde's usage, the spectacle is the management of society by mediating people's social relations through images. This sounds complicated, but on an intuitive level, you already understand this. You and I relate to each other through the one-way mirror of a podcast app.

You relate to others by reacting to their TikTok videos. You watch the bombs fall on Palestine on Twitter. You relate to each other and the world through images. And that relation is a system of control. As de Boerde describes it, that mediation takes you out of the real world, a world that you can actually change with your actions, and thrusts you into the world of the spectacle, a world where reality is, quote, an object of mere contemplation. Today we call this the discourse, the work that inspired the 1968

revolutions, called it the spectacle. Why does it feel like this? The rot, the decay, the unreality of the moment that consumes you until one day Donald Trump is president and the next he's president again. The board has a simple answer. It's because the entire political, economic, and technological system is designed to make you isolated, afraid, and alone. Technology is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn.

From the automobile to television, all of the goods selected by the spectacular system are also weapons for a constant reinforcement of the condition of isolated, lonely crowds. Later, he writes, what binds the spectators together is no more than an irreversible relation at the very center which maintains their isolation. The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate. This is why the world feels like an endless doom scroll. Instagram, TikTok, live streaming, this podcast, they're all based on isolation. Look at what happened to social media during the isolation of the pandemic, how it came to consume even more of our lives with the promise of connection that simply rendered

us more and more and more isolated. The spectacle, given technological form in the social media app, turns us into a mass in which we are all, somehow, terrifyingly alone. We're not people who form a crowd that could do anything from celebrate a holiday to burn the third precinct. We're spectators. We're listeners. We're viewers.

We're chat. Not living, but commenting on the image of living. The spectacle, the app, the image mediates our social relations with each other and ensures that together in a lonely crowd we rot in isolation and do only the two things the capitalist system needs us to do, work and consume. Atomized individuals are the ideal subject of capitalism, the basis on which everything is built. You entered into a free contract to live under a state, says a social theorist.

You the individual gave up your labor to your boss voluntarily in another free contract between individuals," says the economist. Do not organize with anyone else to get paid more for that labor, or God help you try to create a system where you aren't forced to sell your labor every day. That's cheating, says the politician. Your job is to sell your labor, buy these products, and comment on a world in which someone else is acting.

The isolation of the spectacle ensures that we're incapable of collective action. Not only because we're incapable of forming a collective, we're not even engaging in the world in which action can take place. The extent of the advance of the spectacle today is such that the unfolding of the economic system is designed to turn every part of you into a commodity. Not just your labor, but your identity, your beliefs. Everything that you are is sold to everyone else's spectacle. And in turn, everything that defines you becomes the spectacle itself. In a world where there is no action, just the image of someone else's action

somewhere else, a commercialized political identity is much easier to adopt than actually doing politics. You don't have to do politics. You can just put on a red hat and watch the man on TV make the liberals angry. You don't have to do politics. You can just put on a red hat and watch the man on TV make the liberals angry. You don't need relations with your family. You have Facebook groups. Relations to the world are relations to images. David Graber wrote that the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently.

But the second slightly less ultimate hidden truth is that almost everything we think of as objects, money, capital, commodities, are really just relations between people abstracted out onto something physical. We interact with each other by using objects as forms of command. What do you think money is?

Instead of having real, equal social relations. And that makes it all the more dire that the social relations that compose this world are no longer even relations with each other at all, but relations with images. Experiencing the news each day can feel like a journey. With Up First from NPR though, it doesn't have to be. Welcome to 15 easy minutes of breaking news, clarity on international and national affairs, and a casual tone that you can take in with breakfast. Begin your day informed, ready, and refreshed.

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We make it this big pie-in-the-sky thing, and then of course we're all frustrated because no one knows how to get there. Struggling with tough emotions? We have a how-to guide. Worried that you're not enough? We got you. Self-obsessed and want to get over yourself? There's a guide for that too. The ability to approach somebody and make them experience desire for you

in minutes or even hours is a rare and rather unnecessary skill, historically speaking. The Happiest Labs how- To Season starts January 1st. Listen on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We want to speak out, we want to raise awareness, and we want this to stop. Wow, very powerful. I'm Ellie Flynn, and I'm an investigative journalist.

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You know who he is because of his pattern of behavior? He's just spinning the web for you to get trapped in it. He's everywhere and has been everywhere. It's so much worse and so much more widespread than I had anticipated. Together, we're going to expose him and the rotten industry he works in. It's not just me. We're an army in comparison to him. Listen to The Bunny Trap on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

["The Real World Changes into Simple Images"] The spectacle is a strategy of control. As DeBoard writes, quote, "'Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior. The spectacle is a tendency to make one see the world by various means of specialized mediations. It can no longer be grasped directly.

As a spectacle advances, even rebellion is reduced to meaningless attacks on the symbols of power, never touching power itself. Quote, but when the insurgents manage to penetrate parliaments, presidential palaces, and other headquarters of institutions, as in Ukraine, in Libya, or in Wisconsin, It's only to discover empty places, that is, empty of power and furnished without any taste. So wrote the Invisible Committee in the distant Halcyon days of 2014. It could have been written yesterday. Nine years later, the insurgents, now on the right, produced their masterpiece. Brazil's even more ineffectual cousin of January 6th, known forever as January 8th. On that day in 2023, for reasons that are almost totally

incomprehensible to anyone whose mind has not been utterly melted by prolonged and terrible exposure to the spectacle, supporters of defeated President Jair Bolsonaro stormed Brazil's capital. Bolsonaro, of course, had already fled to Florida. The presidential palace, congress, and the supreme court were literally empty when the protesters took them. There was nothing to be won, nothing to be gained. The protesters' vain hopes that simply seizing the symbols of power would trigger a military coup to remove Lula and restore the Bolsonaro regime evaporated like a morning dew, leaving

nothing in their wake. January 6th, at least, attacked the site of the Ritual of Power, while the Ritual was technically in progress. at least, attacked the site of the ritual of power while the ritual was technically in progress. The attack was, of course, designed to stop the certification of the election. Congress was at least in session, even if that attack too was the culmination of a series of ineffectual reruns of the Brook Brothers riots in which right-wing political operatives did manage to steal an election by stopping the vote count in Florida in 2000.

On January 8th, no one was even there. So how do we get out? Lashing out at the symbols of power is pointless. You can't ignore them either. Elon's Nazi salute really does represent something the opening of any solution is to go to the source Trump and Elon are symptoms Not the disease The spectacle is born of capitalism

It's a management strategy designed to suppress any attempt to end or even rearrange the terms of the class system. Trump and Elon were likewise produced by two settler colonies. They are, in their own ways, the manifestation of the evil of colonialism and racism. The board's solution to these problems, of course, well, the solutions that people bother to read, there is a staggeringly racist section of this work about how time passes in China that I simply cannot recommend. But the board solution was workers councils, and he got his wish the next year during the factory occupations of 1968. It nearly worked, but the last workers council fell a quarter of a century ago in Argentina, and there's no sign that the Workers' Council, the definitive fighting form of the working class for over a century, is coming back.

In some ways, this is liberating. 170 years ago, Marx wrote this in the 18th Vermeer of Louis Bonaparte, Marx wrote this in the 18th premiere of Louis Bonaparte, his own response to a nation's nationalist attempt to restore its former glory by invoking the name of a previous leader. The social revolution of the 19th century cannot take its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstitions about the past. In the days and weeks and months, and God help us all years to come, we're going to have to assemble a new fighting form. And no one knows what it looks like yet. We could, perhaps, look at the airport protests from the first months of the original Trump administration, where masses of people, including a very young Mia who had not quite realized

what gender she was, occupied airports all across the country to stop the implementation of Trump's Muslim ban by physically forcing the government to release the people who had detained in the airports. The power of those protests was that they directly located the site where power was operating, the airport, and took them. The weakness of those protests was that people went home, and they went home because they had been told time and time and time again by the ACLU and by other legal organizations that the fight was over, that they could leave, and that

the Muslim bans would be defeated by the courts. Most of you lived through it. Some of you remember the Muslim ban was never defeated by the courts. It could possibly have been defeated in those moments. It wasn't. The contest was taken away from the real side of power and into a domain largely ruled by the ruling class. But we can learn from both January 8th and the airport protests.

Marching to a building doesn't guarantee you're actually targeting power. You must understand how a system is operating before you attempt to go up its works. A thousand miniature January 8ths is no solution at all. You must do the hard work of sifting through the tangle of rumors and lies and attempting to work out the actual structure of repression. It starts with community self-defense. It starts with actually engaging with each other, instead of the mediated images generated by an algorithm.

You want to break out of the spectacle? Talk to the people around you. Talk to the trans people and the immigrants in your life, and find out what they actually need. Figure out the concrete steps you can take to organize the people around you, and the steps you can take to lift them out of their despair. We're not going to develop a new fighting form glued to our phones, alone in a digital crowd.

We're going to figure it out by talking to each other, by acting in the real world, not by being rendered passive observers of the spectacle. We're going to do it by finding the real places where power operates and taking them. And above all, we're going to do it together. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonedmedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Experiencing the news each day can feel like a journey. Thanks for listening. Begin your day with Up First. Subscribe to Up First from NPR on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Catch Jon Stewart back in action on The Daily Show and in your ears with The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. From his hilarious satirical takes on today's politics and entertainment to the unique voices of correspondents and contributors, it's your perfect companion to stay on top of what's happening now. Plus, you'll get special content just for podcast listeners like in-depth interviews and a roundup of the week's top headlines. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The OGs of uncensored motherhood are back and batter than ever. you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Lari Santos, and to welcome the new year, my podcast, The Happiness Lab, is releasing a series of happiness how-to guides to help you in 2025.

I'll distill the wisdom of world-class experts into easy-to-digest, actionable tips. Struggling with tough emotions, we have a How-To Guide. Worried that you're not enough? We got you. Self-obsessed and want to get over yourself? There's a guide for that too. The Happiness Lab's How-To Season starts January 1st. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.