It Could Happen Here - Eight-Pointed Stars & Why We Shouldn't Let Fascists Steal Things

Episode Date: April 4, 2022

The Black Ram (@A_Skoteinos) joins us for a brief history of the Chaos Star and we talk usage of symbols. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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fascists falling apart garrison, take us away. Yes. So today we're going to talk about kind of why maybe it's great not to cede any aesthetic ground to fascists anytime it's uncomfortable. And to do so, we've brought on someone who I found on Twitter who wrote a very, very great article about some kind of ongoing debate and drama around anarchist symbols and fascists trying to use symbols. But we are talking to Black Ram. Hello! Hey, how's things? I'm actually doing okay. I've been looking forward to this chat for a while. I'm actually doing okay.

I've been looking forward to this chat for a while. So, yes, if people are unfamiliar, it looks like the past few weeks, people have really freaked out about an eight-pointed star. People really seem concerned about it. Yeah, this has a lot tied in with what's been happening in Ukraine, because as always happens when there's a new story that has anything to do with the far right, people got acquainted with some symbols that they had not been aware of before, particularly

the SON and RAD, which is a common symbol that you'll see on members of the Azov Battalion, kind of some other far right organizations in Ukraine, as well as elsewhere. The Christchurch shooter wore a SON and RAD. And then they started identifying all sorts of things that they felt looked like Sanin rads everywhere on the internet. And things kind of spiraled from there. Well, and I think there's actually a little bit more to it than that. Well, we're going to get into Black Ram's article here shortly. But yeah, I kind of first want to just briefly go through, I think, why this debate happened

now. Because the debates happened before, but it's never gotten this intense. A big part of this is tied to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And everyone wanting to play like Where's Waldo with symbols being like, can you spot the sun in red on the pictures of the Azov battalion? And I think the other, so everyone's already kind of looking for symbols as like a fun game. But the other thing that's kind of happening is because of the Russia-Dugin connection,

Dugin's like a political fascist writer who's very influential inside Russia. But because of the Russia-Dugin connection, some people are now seeing Dugin's symbol, the Eurasian square, for the first time, right? And now that they've seen the square, they're seeing anarchists using the Chaos Star, which looks a little similar. They're not the same. But because they just learned about the Eurasian square, now they're seeing the Chaos Star. And they've never really noticed the Chaos

Star before. Maybe they just don't really care about what symbols random people use but now that they see the eurasian symbol and they see the chaos star they're making this connection here and they think this is a new development right they think this is like like they're asking themselves like why are anarchists suddenly using this fascist symbol um which they either think to themselves or they think out loud on twitter.com, which is really rich because anarchists have been using the Chaos Star longer than Dugan's been using his Eurasian Square. And if you have been watching anarchists for any amount of time on the internet, I know you would have seen them using the Chaos Star. It's not a new development by any means, but because everyone's trying to like, where's Waldo and Ocent their way through the war,

they're kind of drawing these false connections, which is kind of unfortunate because there is actually some interesting things to talk about in terms of how Dugan did kind of base his design off of Michael Moorcock's Chaos Star and a whole bunch of stuff around like why anarchists use the Chaos Star. And there's a nice debate to be had there

around fascists always inserting themselves in these subcultures and trying to gain ground, whether it be the punk scene, the industrial music scene, online gaming, right? Fascists always try to do this. Just often we try to push back on that, right? Like, Nazi punks fuck off

but it seems specifically with the chaos star a whole bunch of people just want to cave and let them kind of take this symbol which is i don't i think not not a not a great instinct um but to to kind of talk about this and other kind of background stuff uh like i said we brought on a black ram hello uh to help to help talk about this so yeah what kind of background stuff uh like i said we brought on a black ram hello uh to help to help talk about this so yeah what kind of prompted you to write your article i guess on you know watching this debate kind of go down what what kind of actually just like what was what was the straw that broke the camel's back and being like okay now i need to write like a decently long article on this topic i I think I've said this on like,

uh, on the, on Twitter a little while before writing the actual article. But, um, I think the, the, the spark was a friend from a guy you may or may not have seen him around. He's like somebody who's like,

well, Dem sock, but, but he has like anarchist leading on his bio, which I guess communicates the idea that he would probably like anarchism if he did not consider it to be

impractical. Sure, yeah. But anyways, I kind of wavered on the idea of covering it at all. I thought it would only go for a few days. It was sort of a Johnny-come-lately by maybe a day or so, admittedly. But I figured it would be sort of ephemeral.

But there are things I sort of kept seeing. But in the midst of writing it, there was like some tank geek who went even further and made the link to the Chaos Star. And I think it was the logo of the sith empire from certain star wars media yeah we'll talk we'll talk about that yeah it's it's like well it's like well one has six lines and they're not even arrows they're just like uh blocks in like a sort of hexagonal shape but it's like the same guys really like the idea that the logo of the ukrainian armed forces is actually the iron cross yeah a big chunk of this i i think kind of the prehistory of why this became such

a specific problem started with kind of unite the right in the period after that where you had all these new fascist groups on the ground in the united states and they all had their symbols and you know i was a part of this to To the degree that there's some culpability here, a number of researchers, including myself, were warning people like, hey, there's some like symbols that people are taking to right-wing gatherings, and they're claiming to be normal conservatives. And these are symbols of groups like the Phineas Priesthood or groups like different kind of fascist organizations. And you might not be aware of them. And so you should know what kind of these, you know, the Kekistan flag or whatever means, because people were trying to kind of stealthily hide

their very radical right-wing sympathies behind some like obscure images. But the problem is that it got a lot of people looking, not just looking for fascist symbols and everything, but also looking for the clout that comes from like pointing something like that out. And I think that's kind of the root of a lot of these problems. And it's not surprising that it happened with Dugan's symbol. No, absolutely not. Because it does, like, again, if you're just like kind of a casual observer, it does look a lot like the chaos star. It's an eight-pointed star with arrows. Yeah. And it makes sense. If you know anything about Dan's philosophy do alexander dugan is a um essentially a russian political theorist and author um there's a lot that's kind of said about how close he is to putin he certainly

was at one point closer to putin there's a lot of debate as to whether or not putin kind of saw him as more of like a useful uh uh person to kind of a useful propaganda organ or or whether or not Putin kind of saw him as more of like a useful person to kind of, a useful propaganda organ, or whether or not he really bought into what Dugin was saying. But Dugin is and was a really big advocate of like what he called like multipolar international politics. Yeah, multipolarity, which is this idea that like the United States should not be a the hegemonic power in the world. Right. Which it kind of was after the fall of the Soviet Union. It's this idea that there should be a bunch of equivalent powers, which is number one. You can see how a lot of folks on the left would be drawn in by that, even if they weren't particularly fans of Putin.

Just the idea that like, oh, well, yeah, it's been a problem that the United States is this massive hegemonic power. Perhaps it would be better if there were a bunch of equivalent powers. And it's one of those things where there's a logic to that, but it does kind of require ignoring all of the times in the past when we had a multipolar world and there was tremendous violence. There's a root error in this sort of pathway, which sort of refuses to deal with imperialism as a global system. The reason that's a hang-up is because

once you think of imperialism as a global system, you then have to move on to the idea that it's a global system that then has to be dismantled globally. You can't quite do that with capitalism because it implicates nations that are supposed to serve as like moments of world historic progress against like hegemonic capitalism and it is one of those spooks of the mind that people kind of have to do away with which the anarchist movement sort of does pretty successfully because that mostly comes from the fact that it starts off from the position of like the state as an actual sort of structural presence.

It's sort of funny that like the Marxist argument is usually down to like hyper focus on the state and hierarchy is idealist, which is odd when you consider that hierarchy and the state are very much material in the same way that capitalism itself is. So it's like it's it feels more like a sort of argument that's like, well, my materialism is the materialism. Your materialism is, in fact, a form of idealism. a form of idealism i think with with that we're gonna go on a a quick a quick uh quick ad break and then we're gonna come back and i think we should probably now talk about like the origins of the chaos star and and michael morecock and discordianism um and then we'll kind of get into the kind of current current debate on it uh some more so yeah anyway here's here's here is some uh here's some some ads for your ears coming in through the earwaves.

Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iheart and sonoro an anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of latin america from ghastly encounters with shape-shifters to boneilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

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On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami.

Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story,

as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts

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Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, yeah, it's time. It's time to talk about more. It's time for more. Okay, well, you beat me to it. So, I guess,

Blackrab, you actually did a pretty good, succinct kind of thing on how the Chaos Star came into being initially via Michael Moorcock. Do you want to just briefly talk about kind of how he came up with the symbol for his books and stuff okay so full disclosure i haven't really read the books themselves i have i've read some michael

moorcock a lot of what a lot of my familiarity from him is pretty secondhand one of the main things of that is siri fungal being like this this sort of 80s band that i sort of think back to yeah their whole vibe is more cox works but but anyways the reason why the chaos star is the shape that it is is because what it's supposed to represent is meant to extend outward endlessly yeah the counter symbol for order is a single a single upward pointing arrow. Funny enough, when I thought about that, I thought about the Tiwaz rune or like tear. It doesn't really have the same meaning, but it's like upward pointing arrow in a symbolic context. That's the other example I have. But that upward pointing arrow signifies a straight and narrow expression of where possibility goes, where potential sort of goes, which creates structure.

The Chaos Star, by contrast, has like the eight directions are meant to represent all directions in a circular sort of space, like a compass of sorts. And the energy and the potential and possibility goes out in all of them. We have no set path, no definite limit, no boundaries. It just goes, it just sort of goes out there.

It's little wonder why the chaos magic movement embraced it for a very similar set of reasons. Yes. It's even because even though it is kind of a myth that there's absolutely no rules in chaos magic what is true is that you can explore very uh a very very broad and like almost limitless range of like practical possibilities within that movement in that sort of within that sort of frame yeah it's a it's a very like post-structuralist post-modern view of it.

Post-modern is how I've heard it described. And kind of getting back to what Moorcock was in brief, because I do think we need to kind of give an overview of who he is. Yes. He's still alive, last I checked at least. He is alive. I heard him talking at an anarchist sci-fi conference a few weeks ago. If you didn't immediately know who he was, he is the most influential fantasy author you have not heard

of he he is like a george rr martin level of influence uh if not significantly more so like he he's he some people will say he's the most influential fantasy author since tolkien um and among his you you've noted the band sirith Ungol. If you've been a fan of any of the Warhammer games, he's a huge influence on that because the thing that he created was kind of the concept of chaos as a sort of religious entity. And I'm not going to get into like the depths of the lore in his books, but a lot of it is about kind of the struggle between order and chaos. lore in his books, but a lot of it is about kind of the struggle between order and chaos. And so the Chaos Star, he created that specifically like for this kind of theological like conflict that occurs throughout his books. And it became the symbol of like one of the sides

in Warhammer in this very, like there's tens of thousands of people who have the Chaos Star tattooed on them, not because of Warhammer, but not because of any political reason or because of Chaos Mansion, because they were fans of like Warhammer 40,000 or whatever. Yeah. And it's interesting because in the same time,

when I first got into anarchist political theory before, long before I considered calling myself one, it was because I came across a book published by AK Press. I think I bought it in 2007 called No Gods, No Masters. And it was, it's a collection, a lot of people have a copy of this book in their house if they're into anarchist theory. It's like a collection of early anarchists, like people like Prudhon, essays on like kind of the first wave of anarchist political theory.

And it has a chaos star on the cover. Because number one, Michael Moorcock is an anarchist, is both an author and someone who identifies as an anarchist. Politically, yeah. Yeah, politically. And so his books were particularly popular among anarchists who don't always get a lot of chunks of pop culture to themselves. Absolutely. And so he's – it was kind of from the beginning both this nerdy fantasy symbol that you could see – you could put alongside a bunch of different shit from The Lord of the Rings.

Not to – I love The Lord of the Rings. You could put alongside a bunch of different shit from The Lord of the Rings. I love The Lord of the Rings. But you could see it as like somebody having a tattoo in Elvish. But it also took on almost immediately this dual meaning where it was actually representing aspects of anarchist political theory. And so it was put and printed on books that were about political theory and had nothing to do with fantasy. So I cannot actually think of another symbol with a similar pedigree. It's, it's a really pretty unique case.

It is, it is because it's, it's less of like an anarchist symbol, but more a symbol created and used by anarchists. Like it was, it was, it was, it was invented by an anarchist.

It was, it was a symbol invented by an anarchist to represent something in fiction that had such resonance that people adopted it as an actual political symbol. not total freedom. There's still the most range that you could get that results in that negation. It doesn't take a lot of elaboration to see why the symbol expressly meant for the symbol of chaos would gain traction. Absolutely. I was talking

with Margaret Killjoy about this a while ago and she was like, yeah, if you were in the 2000s and you were a traveling cross punk, at least 25% of people would have chaos star tattoos because that's, cause that like, it's about expanding out in all directions. You know,

you're the, the, the single arrow is law and order. Instead we're expanding out every in, in every possible way. Yeah. I mean, I have a chaos star tattooed on me and I,

I, it's a, it's, it's for primarily ideological reasons, as opposed to the fact that I spent my entire childhood playing Warhammer. So yeah, I think now, so it is worth mentioning. So the Chaos Star was invented in the 60s by Michael Moorcock. Of course, there's been other eight-pointed stars over the course of thousands of years

of history. Yes, Jesus, of course. It is like a broad, like, geometrical shape. Every kind of star has meant something. Yes, but the specific design was made by Michael Moorcock. And then because of Moorcock's, like, anarchist tendencies in fiction, his work was used, or at least appreciated, by a lot of the Discordians, which is also popular around the 60s, a lot of the Situationists.

And then as the Discordian and which is also popular around the 60s, a lot of the Situationists. And then as the Discordian and Situationist movement kind of morphed and started to kind of intermingle with parts of occultism, we have the Chaos Magic movement starting in the late 70s, which started also using the Chaos Star, which makes sense

because, like, Robert, you were talking about how it's almost like personifying chaos as a thing to worship, which is actually a big part of early chaos magic text is like reveling in the idea of chaos as a primordial god, which there's of the original primordial gods. So there is a big part of that in early chaos magic books about looking at chaos as this very ancient force that should be respected. using uh the the star i mean obviously there's a lot of crossover between like sci-fi writers like robert anton wilson um and michael moorcock who then robert anton wilson was very influential in the chaos magic movement so you you can see how this gets carried over from like anarchist sci-fi to chaos magic and then because it's in chaos magic it gets way more visibility so then it starts then you start seeing it inside more it's more like underground anarchist scenes um and then so around around this time dugan was starting his political career and he was he was seeing it inside more underground anarchist scenes.

And then, around this time, Dugan was starting his political career, and he was dabbling in a lot of various occult circles himself. Now he's more of a traditionalist, more like a Christian traditionalist. That is his primary

occult interest. As long as it can be called occult. Yeah, it's not worth getting too much into the weeds on Dugan at this point. I think people... But I think it's worth mentioning, because he obviously did rip the... He did take inspiration from the Chaos Star to make his own version of it. Yeah, he's certainly a guy who had some occultic leanings and a degree of knowledge. I think, again, like with a lot of things, a lot of things about Dugan are overstated,

including his like closeness to Putin, because he's this really easy, in part because he's like so prolific and there's a lot available on him in English. It's really easy to kind of tie everything happening in Russia to Dugan. To him, yeah. Yeah, and I think that to kind of tie everything happening in in russia to do to him um yeah and i think that's kind of a degree of what's happening here there's a website i've forgotten the name of but i think it had like a bunch of like online reproduction of dugan's various writings from the 90s all sorts of weird shit about occultism and yeah and yet i do think that there's a very obvious gulf between the dugan of that weird eccentric like esoteric nazi sort of phase of like his relative youth versus today where he frames his entire rationale for multi-plurality as a kind of christian a

christian crusade against a hegemony that he legitimately believes to be a satanic empire. He has basically said that and it's not the only thing he considers satanic. We should point out that one of the main forces that were going

against Pussy Riot were Eurasianists at that time. He called them devils and witches and taught his followers to show up with pitchforks. were going like against pussy riot were eurasianists at that case of that time and he called them like devils and witches and taught his followers to show up with pitchforks people in the west don't really understand them so you get guys like well you get both alexander reed ross describing him as an adherent of chaos magic and some guy from the National Review referring to him as the leader of a satanic cult somehow. Yeah. And boy, I mean, there's a long history of people liking to flatten fascist movements with an occultic tradition to just Satanism. We're not going to talk about that

at length, but whenever you hear people talking about a problem and like they reduce it to it's satanists you should be a little on edge because usually they're wrong or at least incomplete um and they just have have kind of over anyway we don't need to get terribly into that the only only reason i wanted to bring that up is because like this is around the same time that people that are fascists were trying to enter in a lot of different political like subcultures whether it be like the punk scene and industrial music um including like the the occult fascists do because that that is like their primary means right like they they try to like they are an aesthetic driven movement they try to co-opt

any aesthetic and use it for their own gains and to to kind of overlook the anarchist origins of this thing just because fascists tried to co-opt it at some point i think it's very silly because then like what are you gonna throw away all punk music like come on or even like or even like crosses like a lot of fascists still use variations of christian crosses that still have essentially political Christian meanings. I'd probably still assume that the majority of religious fascists do lean on some kind

of Christianity, and to the extent that there's neo-pagans involved, they're sort of a minority. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast,

and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian.

Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom.

At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature.

I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Thank you. Explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's a couple of things that this is like.

One of them would be kind of in the United States, fascist co-option of the flag of the United States, which we can talk a lot about, like the fact that the United States is an imperialist power and the genocides done under that flag while still acknowledging that attempts by fascist movements to co-opt it as a purely fascist symbol

are problematic in part because that symbol, the United States flag, has a lot of power to a lot of people. And so if the fascists kind of co-opt it totally, that's a harmful thing. That's a thing that can allow them to get their brain worms into more people which doesn't mean like you should take and wave the u.s flag but it does mean that like it's just a matter of don't you don't have to let them take the ground you know um and

i i think on a kind of a different angle one one of the things I think about a lot is the first time I went to India, seeing, especially in large parts of India, you'll see swastikas hanging over the doors of many, many houses all over the place. You'll see them hanging from cars. They're constant things. And it's only unsettling if you have allowed yourself to forget that the swastika is a symbol that the Nazis stole from another culture, co-opted and invested with a new meaning. You should see Japan. Yeah. Yeah. And why should people in other parts of the world who have been using it for a totally different purpose for thousands of years?

Why should they be like, well, I guess we don't get this now. Also, it's like India has had to deal with their own fascists as well. Yes, well, yes. And there's, I mean, again, we're delving into a lot of very deep topics because there's a lot to be said about how the fact that the Nazis took the swastika led to degrees of sympathy within areas of Indian culture that allowed some fascist ideology to creep in. And like, that's also tied to the fact that both the Nazis and a lot of Indian nationalists were fighting against the British empire. It's all very complicated, right? We don't need the guys,

guys like VD Savarkar did, who were founders of the Hindu movement. Yeah. Did openly praise Hitler. Oh yeah. Yeah. It's kind of easy for some people to think of it as entirely motivated by religion,

but his whole concept of nationhood is entirely racial. He outright says himself that it has nothing to do with religion. Yeah, and it's one of those things, if you actually want to understand things and engage with them in a useful area, you have to understand that history and grapple with it without like looking at a 2500 year old hindu temple and going well i guess they were nazis hashtag problematic yeah the last thing i actually want to talk about is how how how the

kind of debate around symbols use of symbols has just kind of morphed into just fast-jacketing anarchists in general and worrying about like, oh, the fascists are secretly infiltrating the anarchists and they're going to turn anarchists into fascists, which is pretty silly because, I mean, if you're going to turn anyone into fascists, I think anarchists are one of the hardest people to do that to. There's a lot of other people.

It's way easier to convince to become fascists although when anarchists go fascist they tend to go fascist pretty hard well yeah but the type of like fear-mongering around it is still it's really frustrating because like i'm looking at all these i'm looking at all these tankies like fast jacketing anarchists for using us for using a symbol created by anarchists which has been used by anarchists for decades, right? But then you also have, like, tanky superstar Caleb Malpin regularly hanging out with, like, Malpin regularly hangs out with Dugan. And then you have someone who's another, like, pretty, like, popular, like, tanky influencer, like, Ben Norton, who openly uses Dugan's multipolar theory, right? And so

if you're looking for the most visible example of fascist and nationalist rhetoric trying to enter into leftism, you should look at, like, the growing, like, patriotic communists, you know, people like Peter Coffin. I believe it's referred to as, like, patriotic socialists, but the idea is

basically the same but yes it's like people like peter coffin and this like growing like patriot communist socialist kind of live streamer grift um which is like because like the easiest entry on the left for fascism is in forms of nationalist authoritarian communism right it's like you know that that's that is how you get like national socialism right uh it's like they just had this like super cringy uh nozble convention just a few weeks ago with some of the best moments on twitter up until will smith slapped that guy yeah but like you know you have you have like coffin and malpin hanging out and like malpin regularly regularly hangs out with do good like

so like if you're gonna live if you want to be watching out for a fascist creep, maybe you should direct it towards the people just doing it out in the open and not fast-jacketing queer anarchists who have been doing the thing that they've been doing for decades. I guess one of the last things I will mention is the hilarious incidents with the Sith Empire

thing of people just fully getting consumed by their own brain worms and trying to insist that a star wars symbol uh is secretly a fascist chaos star um and then doing the same thing to the warhammer symbol um it is yeah it is in in i mean it's funny because like in star wars it is a fascist symbol right that is that's not a fascist symbol in the real world but it is within the world of of star wars that is absolutely a fascist but it's also it's also not a chaos star it's not a chaos star uh and in warhammer it is a chaos star

but it's not a fascist symbol it's actually an anti-fascist symbol within the world of warhammer you can basically argue that yeah yeah because it is it is just frustrating looking at all these people being like trying to play trying to play the where's waldo game just to all like dunk on anarchists and it's it just kind of shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the history of anarchist culture um and the history of like anti-fascist anarchists you know most of the anti-fascists that i know use the chaos starks it's a because it's a red symbol it looks rad it looks cool um and yeah trying to like in insisting that we must cede this ground and let fascists use anything that they think is aesthetically cool i think is uh

is a first of all like a losing battle to actually just like to just just to to start that now i think is uh would have some pretty bad implications for fascism and its use of aesthetics you don't have to give them things just because they want to take those things it makes sense that you would see like tankies do it because then if you're a tankie you could basically get into a position where you can basically discard all sorts of symbolisms and just replace everything with old Soviet symbology or something. Which is

obviously not tied to any atrocities that have happened. Right. Oh, incidentally, don't ever tell them about Georgia. Yeah, don't tell them about Georgia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine. Ukraine!

That giant lake that was like the largest lake in Europe that they turned into a pile of poison. Don't mention a few things. And Trotsky would be proud considering he wanted to turn mountains into like city structure. I mean, that actually is

one of the things I think Trotsky was on the right ball about. More Minas Tiriths. More Minas Tiriths. Let's Tirith up some mountains. So any final thoughts on our lovely circular Chaos Star? I'm thinking of a quote from like, what was his name?

Pablo Friardi. I hope I've gotten that name right. A quote I've seen going around that I think goes around something to the effect of when the point of education isn't liberation, the goal is to become the oppressor. You could sort of, usually

that quote is relevant to the material processes of being inculcated into a capitalist system. So you can kind of make the most sense of it as basically you are educated to become a boss instead of wanting to abolish all bosses. micro level, you can sort of apply it to the ways in which people, even in radical spaces, sort of become self-styled

cops, as it were. That, I think, is a phenomenon that a lot of the anarcho-nihilist tendency sort of responds to. Anyway, this is coming from a perspective that is sort of flirtatious towards anarcho-nihilism, but not necessarily.

But it's like, you could, a lot of the interactions with like, like certain people demonstrate that. There are some instances of it where I think, I can't quite tell if it's Poe or not. Somebody, I saw somebody posted like a photo of themselves with like a, like a jacket, and they had like the upside down cross and the inverted pentagram on board and somebody someone somebody with like

basically no followers who somehow blew somehow blew up when they posted that photo next to like a nazi uniform to try and compare the inverted cross to a swastika or no, if not a swastika, then maybe some other part of the jacket. And the pentagram to the armband or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm still not sure if that was entirely serious.

See, that's the thing. We have to be careful. I don't like anarchist infighting. It's rarely useful. And we have to make sure to be watchful for how much don't like anarchist infighting. It's rarely useful. And we have to make sure to be watchful for, like, how much of it is just people trolling or people trying to prompt infighting just for the sake of infighting, right? So if, like, I tried for a long time to not engage in this debate because I don't like talking about this. Like, I don't like infighting with anarchists. I don't like having these types of debates.

So hopefully the next time this debate starts, we don't need to, because we can just point to how this last one went and say, no, look, we clearly demonstrated that this has a long history of use by anarchists, invented by anarchists, and not start the debate again, because we don't need to do it. And there's no telling if people are doing it sincerely or people doing it ironically or people just doing it just to get, you know, people upset. at like boogs right look at and caps right these people who try to claim to be anarchists are very bad at actually blending in because they can't help themselves when they start talking about like the validity of anarcho-capitalism or the validity of like small nation states like it's it is it is it is hard it's hard to actually infiltrate anarchists this is the thing that the fbi has said multiple multiple times it's hard to actually do. So whenever fascists try to blend in, whether they're Boogaloo boys, they can't help but use their old Boogaloo symbols.

They can't help but just give hints. It is astonishing how bad they are at this thing. They're also bad at the protection that they claim to offer. There was an article from last year going over. Part of it mentioned that they were basically at this purported protest that they were supposed to offer protection from, and most of what they did was get drunk and piss on the

sidewalks. The Boogaloo Boys I've seen at actual protests, with cops attacking protesters, the Boogaloo Boys are the first ones to run, because they're cowards. Yeah. Alright, well. I guess, where can people

find you online and where can people read your article, Chaos, Nihilism, and the Way of No Surrender? WordPress, basically. I call the site LF's heretical domain, but the link goes like mythoughtsbornfromfire.wordpress.com

I actually tried changing the URL once I changed it to LF's Heretical Domain I think in 2013-14 but I figured that doing so would fuck up all of the stats and whatever, so I just didn't bother.

Thank you so much for kind of writing what I would say is probably the most definitive stance on this debate at the moment, which we can always point back to whenever this inevitably comes up again in like a year or two. It's going to come up again. I've seen it come up like every few years you see it.

So thank you for that and thank you for coming on yeah if you want to follow us you can do it at the thing you know the thing Twitter and Instagram at HappenHerePod and CoolZoneMedia you can look at my unhinged chaos tweets at HungryBowTie

yeah nothing is true and everything is permitted also at acekatinus is where I go to like sort of ramble about politics and occasionally the occult and other things

we do love a good ramble alright that does it for us today fuck fascists nazi punks fuck off etc etc Fuck fascists. Nazi punks fuck off, etc. Etc. Etc. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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