Our Weekly Discontents 9/28/20: More Newsletters About War and Autocracy
If good news existed we would print it
A man attempted to run over Black Lives Matter protestors in Albuquerque on Friday night. Someone at the protest, a follow-on action from a vigil for Breonna Taylor, claimed that before the vehicular attack, the driver walked through the crowd, screaming "All Lives Matter" up until he decided to leave the scene and attempt manslaughter.
I'm Kelsey D. Atherton, writer of Wars of Future Past, and I bring up the Albuquerque attack not because it is unique, but because it is so close to home. It took place in front of The Frontier, a restaurant so embedded in the firmament of the city that in the mid-aughts the mayor offered to permanently deploy additional police across the street if it would preserve the diner's midnight hours.
If you live in an American city, perhaps some crucial site of your own teen years witnessed overt political violence from a driver this week. Since our last Discontents, there have been vehicle ramming attacks in Hollywood, Yorba Linda, Denver, Buffalo, even one by a cop Laramie, and possibly elsewhere.
In my normal beat, I write about the weapons and technologies of war. Most of these are deliberately built for killing; a sword-missile fired from a drone has no other function. Increasingly, my beat covers dual-use technologies, machines designed with a civilian or commercial use, suddenly adapted for violence.
The 1990s gave us one of the better terms for this dual-use: the Technical. Often but not always a Toyota Hilux truck, a Technical is any non-military vehicle, modified to carry a weapon and used for war. For people who write and work in the broader ~national security space~, the car-turned-weapon that rings most true is the VBIED, or Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosive Device, a car filled with explosives and driven as a one-way bomb.
Unlike a Technical or a VBIED, a car used for ramming gets no special name, or at least not one that I know. Instead, it is the way the car transforms from vehicle to weapon based entirely on intent and effect that makes modern car ramming attacks so menacing.
These attacks have a domestic history in the US that dates back to at least the 1960s in Louisiana. It speaks to the bifurcation of war reporting that many voices in national security will reference examples of car rammings in terror attacks abroad before considering if violence internally has domestic precedent.
The lack of overt premeditation that goes into vehicle attacks offers drivers with murderous intent (and especially their ideological colleagues), a kind of plausible deniability. When a video of attempted murder by car goes online, the replies fill with folk screaming that the video was edited, that the protestors themselves instigated violence, that the person who drove at a crowd of human beings was in fact under threat and acting in self defense.
In Florida this week, Governor Ron DeSantis took a break from exacerbating the pandemic to promote legislation that essentially makes murder by car as protected as murder by cop, while outlawing protest itself. It’s only not a national security issue if the people writing about weapons, and about war, accept the same fundamental premise as DeSantis, that the targets of this violence are not political, but merely deserve to be summarily executed for jaywalking.
This is what counts as governance in 2020. Welcome to your weekly Discontents.
(Caltrop from the Battle of Vittorio Veneto in 1918 / Lorenzo Spadetto via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0))
Wars of Future Past
This fortnight at Wars of Future Past, I took a deep dive into the popularization of “Forever War” for the conflicts authored by the US since 2001. If we are very lucky, historians centuries hence will treat it as kindly as they treat the 30 Years War.
Beyond that, I also wrote a little about Amazon Ring’s new home drone, which is a great gadget if you like having a robot that can film the inside of your house controlled by companies with as stellar track records as Amazon, and Ring.
Welcome to Hell World
“Derlin Newey who lives alone in a mobile home has been working about thirty hours a week delivering pizzas because his social security benefits aren’t enough to keep up with his bills.”
This week I looked into the story of the 89 year old pizza delivery man who was gifted $12,000 by one of his regular customers and how we all continue to do this “feel good story” horse shit long after everyone should know better. Then I reflected on how much I knew about what my own grandparents actually did for work.
Elsewhere I discussed the conditions that have to be met before we can officially declare the Trump administration fascist.
“None of this is fascism by the way it doesn’t actually count as fascism until the official declaration of a fascist state papers have been filed and approved and our leaders announce fascism season is underway. Everything that leads up to that point is basically fine and you’re hysterical if you complain about it.”
Meanwhile, as “I feel sorry for Americans” was trending on Twitter, here’s a post from earlier in the summer in which I asked people from other countries to explain their epiphany when they realized everything that is said about this country being great is actually bullshit.
Air Gordon pt. 2
No newsletter this week, sorry; have been on deadline for an assignment and doing away with more of the boxes from last month’s move, condensing four comically oversized binders containing tax documents and lease agreements and 2013 receipts and birthday cards and museum flyers into one. Dreary stuff, though it was nice to revisit the not-so-recent history when Donald Trump was not the president. Last week I wrote about Ghost of Tsushima, among other things, and the game is still wonderful though my character just got ahold of some poison darts that can kill someone in about 3 seconds, which just feels a little unrealistic for 13th century Japan. You know, I can believe my guy can murder 1,000 Mongols without an ounce of regret, but the quick-acting poison darts? Unforgivable.
A Lonely Impulse of Delight
As your resident Shirley Jackson, I—Connor Wroe Southard of A Lonely Impulse of Delight—did yet another piece on one of her novels. I don’t know that it’s my best work. I believe in transparency in the newsletter game. Last week was a sleep-deprived mess for your boy. I think I’m belated paying off some of the psychological debt I accrued by having a much more pleasant Covid Summer than most people. But hey, if that summer hadn’t been relatively easy, I don’t know that this newsletter would be what it is now. And I’d say generally it’s good. So yeah, please sign up, so you’ll be ready next time I do a Jeremy Saulnier movie or when I revisit Hamilton (I will not revisit Hamilton).
Foreign Exchanges
It’s almost October in a presidential election year, which means we get to spend the next few weeks wondering what will be this year’s “October Surprise.” To be honest it feels like we’ve already had about 20 of them, from the revelations in Bob Woodward’s Rage to the race to get Arab governments to recognize Israel, from the start of peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban to the recent passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the sprint to replace her. Just this weekend a new contender emerged in the possibility of a full-blown war in the Caucasus.
In addition to these, there’s some reason to be concerned that Donald Trump is keeping one potential “October Surprise” in his back pocket to be pulled out as a Hail Mary before Election Day: a military conflict with Iran. As I’ve been covering over the past couple of weeks at Foreign Exchanges, the Trump administration has been, even by its own standards, unusually provocative when it comes to Iran lately. It’s been inventing and leaking scary stories about Iran and its proxies, including a claim that Tehran was plotting to assassinate the US ambassador to South Africa (debunked by South African officials), a claim that Hezbollah has been stashing ammonium nitrate all over Europe for use in potential terrorist attacks (debunked by French officials), and a claim that Iran will have amassed enough fissile material for a nuclear warhead by the end of the year (debunked by math and physics). Almost like they’re trying, however clumsily, to build a case for war.
Now the administration has given itself another justification for picking a fight, in its unilateral assertion that United Nations sanctions against Iran that were suspended as part of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal have been reimposed. Nearly every other nation on Earth has rejected this assertion, but the United States can impose sanctions powerful enough to compel individuals, companies, and even entire countries to obey, in the hopes of provoking an Iranian response. It can also assert the right to seize Iranian cargo at sea, a right it does not possess but which no international body and no other country would likely risk challenging. Again the intention would be to provoke an Iranian reaction that could justify a conflict. It wouldn’t need to be a lengthy or intense conflict, just enough to create a “rally around the flag” effect that Trump could then exploit politically. Maybe this won’t happen, but after almost four years under this president can we really rule anything out?
Perspectives: Past, Present, and Future
Books: pretty cool, right? The only thing I like more than reading books is talking about books that I’d like to read, which like most people I’ll purchase and then may or may not eventually get around to reading.
With that in mind, I reviewed a few of my favorite recent works of history: The Deluge: The Great War, America, and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931, Adam Tooze’s history of the emergence of the 20th century’s distinctive global political economy ; Richard White, The Republic For Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896, a magisterial and haunting portrait of an oft-overlooked but instructive period in American history; and James C. Scott’s provocative anarchist history of the beginnings of agriculture and the first states, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. These books are all accessible to a reader with a bit of background, and they all have a ton to offer. I’d like to hear about your reading recommendations, too. Let me know in the comments of that post and let’s see if we can get a good discussion going.
My last essay was on America’s local gentry, the smaller-scale elites who dominate the localities and regions of the non-metro US. They don’t get as much attention as the global oligarchs, but in the aggregate, they do a lot to shape our political culture and economic system.
BORDER/LINES
Usually when people think of immigration policy in the Trump era (or, really, at all), they think of mass raids and squalid detention centers. That’s obviously a big part of it, but there are a lot of bureaucratic, administrative changes that can wreak havoc on people’s lives as well.
This week, we took a look at new proposed regulation that would make it harder for international students and journalists to maintain their status in the US. As usual, administration’s underlying logic is that immigrants—and foreigners in general—are prone to fraud and will abuse the system without rigorous controls in place. Of course, there are already rigorous controls in place, but here we are.
We also dig into a new rule that would basically gut asylum more than it already has been, and discussed the latest coronavirus death in ICE detention, as well as the rampant medical neglect that has made such deaths common.
Discourse Blog
Our big news for the week is that we’re leaving Substack. Discourse Blog has had a great run as a newsletter, but we’ve got the really exciting opportunity to take our small newsroom over to a fully-fledged, online publication, built by the same tech team that helped create Defector. You can read more about that here. We’ll still be contributing to Discontents, but sometime next month our content will be migrating over to a standalone site.
Throughout all this, we still found some time to publish a few blogs, including one of the best essays we’ve put up so far, in my opinion: Caitlin Schneider’s comprehensive reckoning of how RBG’s death also felt like the end of a series of myths about American politics.
Next up this week: we’re livestreaming the debate! We’re going to put on our first Twitch livestream, over at twitch.tv/discourseblog, where you’ll get to see me (Jack Crosbie), Jack Mirkinson, Kath Kreuger and others from the team try not to say anything that will get us in legal trouble while we watch something monumentally stupid happen on our computer screens. It’s going to be a blast. Subscribers will have access to a private Discord channel, where the rest of the team will be chatting, hanging out, and doing short micro-blogs about the debate for the entirety of the night. Fun starts at 8:30-9, we’ll see you there.
The Insurgents
Our new episode will be coming out tomorrow, so if you haven’t already please make sure you’re subscribed over on Substack or through whatever podcast app you happen to enjoy.
In the meantime, if you didn’t get a chance to listen last week, please go back and check out our episode with The Law Boy, who expertly broke down the coming Supreme Court fight and why the just-announced Amy Coney Barrett would be such a disastrous and dangerous pick (because she is Catholic, obviously).