After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the disintegration of the USA has accelerated. Of course, ever since the victory of Trump and the GOP at the last elections, it was immediately clear that this would be the end of the USA as we know it. Project 2025 had already provided the blueprint for the dismantling of not only democracy but of the entire constitution and its legal anchoring. The nation state with the largest and most advanced military apparatus in the world has now joined the ranks of other rogue states. The legal, political, economic and cultural collapse has been faster than most had predicted beforehand and it is now on warp speed.
In Europe, we will witness a similar decline with political parties openly embracing corporatist (= fascist) aspirations all on the ascendance. Those who proclaimed that talking about an apocalypse is premature, should now all be eating humble pie. For the sustainability of ecological harmony it is already too late, with the exposure of international law as an emperor without any clothes by the genocidal, Zionist entity and its kakistocratic allies, we can also dismiss universal human rights as a beacon of hope. Resistance will be crushed, incarcerated and tortured to death by these kakistocrats and their paramilitary henchmen. Those who assumed that modernity always favours progress forgot to take out their enemies when these were still small factions.
This truly is the post-apocalyptic condition as there is no rescuing of the past. We have lost what we once had: the good and the bad. Do we have a right to defend ourselves? And if so, who grants us that right? What exactly are we defending when we refer to “ourselves”? An identity? An estate? An establishment?
I am personally torn between pragmatism and kenosis. Pragmatism is oriented towards survival. It often requires adaptation, diplomacy, negotiation. Pragmatism prevents me from speaking publicly and saying stupid things that could land me in trouble, lose my job, lose my freedom, even of the latter has become rather meaningless. Pragmatism keeps me silent about Charlie Kirk, about the genocide, about the return of fascism, about the corruption inherent in the judicial and political systems.
An interesting phenomenon is unfolding, as the political spectrum shifts to the right, ordinary, moderate “left wing” political positions become renamed as ”extremist” whereas as on the other side, formerly extremist position (for example regarding dismissing universal human rights) become normalized. Of course, this so called political spectrum is itself a debilitating abstraction as it assumes that all political positions are inherently framed around a single bipolar axis. This would amount to the same as the starting point of Bob Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower where one is either a Joker or a Thief.
It is quite clear that what has now unfolded as Kakistocracy started as Kleptocracy – the rule of thieves. In many so-called democracies, politics has always been a career with additional benefits that can only be described as legalized theft. In the USA, for example, politicians use their positions as a means to secure donations in exchange for promises that only need to be kept of the donors are powerful, i.e. when they supply dark money in exchange for silence about the funding. In Europe, such blatant corruption is not legal, so one needs to resort to more subtle constructions, such as complex financial set ups involving friends, relatives and shell companies, additional functions on advisory boards and boards of directors, and/or cleverly hidden investment portfolios managed by BlackRock and Vanguard.
However, over the last 20 years or so, Kleptocracy has slowly evolved into Kakistocracy. The events surrounding the world-wide collapse of finance markets in 2007 is a very good example of the ascendance of Kakistocracy. With the help of politicians from the broad “spectrum” of ideologies, finance markets had flourished under the neoliberal onslaught, both in terms of a massive reduction if legal limitations and constraints on the one hand, and an equally massive increase in the ability to use the state as a means to funnel public wealth into private property. The latter is a hallmark of corporatism as it enabled particular corporate entities to plunder the common good whilst expanding the state’s repressive apparatuses. This had no specific political colour. In the USA, the so-called liberal Bill Clinton had expanded the state’s repressive apparatus whilst rapidly increasing the prison population that in turn provided very cheap labour managed by privatized prisons. In the UK, the so called socialist, Tony Blair spearheaded successive governments that enabled the sell- out of public health services and amenities, whilst expanding anti-terrorism laws that would be used by his later successor, Keir Starmer, on behalf of the Zionist entity as well as wealthy arms dealers and shareholders of weapons manufacturers.
The fact that there seems to be widespread exhaustion with the political system that is lazily referred to as democracy, especially by those who tirelessly work behind its façade to not be curtailed by the due process that democracy demands, is a direct consequence of the hegemonization of corporatism. The widespread sentiments, that people express when voting for parties that promise an end to universal human rights and due process, hover between complete disappointment and a (sadistic) thirst for revenge. The latter flares up in relation to a range of expressions of self-victimization regarding women, people of colour, people with non hetero-normative sexual orientations, intellectuals, muslims, jews, immigrants etc. Popular support for anti-democratic political figures is not really an embrace of corporatism, because these political figures work very hard to hide their corporatist-extremist views, presenting instead, multinational corporations as national assets. The topic of corporatism is receiving too little attention in academic analyses. This is partly because the concept itself is poorly understood and considered a relic from the past, when it was used as a precursor to fascism. However, it is also misused in popular culture in terms of its identification with (often malevolent) multinational corporations. Whereas the latter clearly are not only beneficiaries of corporatism but also play a significant role in its architecture, corporatism is an ideological practice that is deeply entrenched in the operations of the state. It is this role of the state that has been blurred out in the focus on “Neoliberalism”. The fact that it is the state that serves as the main vehicle for the accumulation of private wealth that defines corporatism. The state does not necessarily require the cultivation of authoritarian populism, although that certainly helps diverting attention away from the growing amalgamation of politics and organized crime.

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