“You think men like Thomas Wayne ever think what it's like to be someone like me?” said Joaquin Phoenix’ Joker. “To be somebody but themselves? They don't. They think that we'll just sit there and take it, like good little boys! That we won't werewolf and go wild!” Ledger’s Joker essentially concludes the same, saying about the people living under the system: “They're only as good as the world allows them to be. I'll show you. When the chips are down, these... these civilized people, they'll eat each other. See, I'm not a monster. I'm just ahead of the curve.” Paul Dano’s Riddler expands upon their sentiments by articulating the vision for destruction that these villains collectively see as the solution to society’s contradictions, saying to Batman: “All it takes is fear and a little focused violence. You taught me that.”
Their thesis is that because the system is designed to create violence, their adding to the violence is justified. That whatever harm they cause is a proportionate response to what’s been done to them. Increasingly, there are individuals who think exactly like this. And for revolutionaries, success depends on identifying and rejecting the ideas which lead these individuals to ultraviolence.
“Is it just me, or is it getting crazier out there?”-Arthur Fleck
The most incoherent, base examples of these ideas are all of the violent outbursts that have been appearing around the United States amid the pandemic. The mask temper tantrums, mistreatment of service workers, and assaults that we constantly see these days seem like unavoidable animal madness, but they’re informed by political ideas. Caught up in their American obsession with individualism and interpersonal dominance, these belligerents carry out ridiculous and damaging actions, taking out their rage at their conditions against often the most vulnerable people. From this attitude of pride and ego, instilled by a cultural hegemony that encourages ruthless competition, these and all the more severe manifestations of violence are being proliferated.
“Americans have been drinking 14 percent more days a month during the pandemic, and drug overdoses have also increased since 2019,” writes The Atlantic’s Olga Khazan. “Substance-abuse treatment, never especially easy to come by, was further interrupted by COVID. Americans have also been buying more guns, which may help explain the uptick in the murder rate. Gun sales spiked in 2020 and 2021, and more people are being killed with guns than before. In 2020, police recovered nearly twice as many firearms within a year of purchase as they did in 2019—a short ‘time to crime’ window that suggests criminal intent. ‘Put more plainly, thousands of guns purchased in 2020 were almost immediately used in crimes,’ Champe Barton writes at The Trace. Though owning a gun doesn’t make it more likely that you’ll kill someone, it makes it more likely that you’ll be successful if you try.”
Such vices—substance abuse and reactionary gun culture—are also symptoms of the system the ruling class has engineered. Robbed of the life they deserve, the masses are turning to the poisonous coping mechanisms that are being marketed to them. What’s essential to the marketing is to convince its targets that by contributing to society’s deterioration, by embracing the violent, narcissistic, and hedonistic hyper-individualism that’s pushed by our cultural hegemony, one is rebelling against the system. American gun culture is partly a product of the ultraviolent mentality that the masses are saturated with due to the covert influence of the military-industrial complex, which inserts glorifications of war into video games, TV, and film. Along with this fetishism for violence naturally comes a paranoia, an ingrained sense that humanity can’t be trusted to act collectively when faced with a crisis—and therefore the only rational thing is to look out for oneself and the others in the in-group.
“Everybody just yells and screams at each other,” observes Arthur Fleck in 2019’s Joker. “Nobody's civil anymore! Nobody thinks what it's like to be the other guy.” The tragic irony to Fleck’s character is that when he’s driven to insanity by this casual cruelty from others—born out of the system that’s driven Gotham into poverty and cut him off from mental health treatment—he responds by making the cruelty worse. He goes on a murder spree, picking off various individuals who he feels spite towards and inciting angry mobs to committing random violence. The latter of which he lacks real culpability for, since the conditions are what sparked the riots, but that feeds into his conclusions that human life doesn’t matter and that destruction is the only option. “When on the Murray Franklin show, Joker recites some dark humor about a drunk driver killing a child, and Murray protests that he has gone too far,” observes Left Voice. “In response, Joker says he is sick of not being able to laugh at ‘inappropriate’ things; that society should not be the arbiter of what is right or wrong anymore. This echoes the alt-right cultural war against political correctness and ‘cultural Marxism,’ starting with Milo Yiannopoulos’ attacks against minorities, masked as comedy, and ending with Andrew Anglin’s ‘ironic Nazism.’”
The unsettling thing is that in the context of the film’s world, where no alternative to the present social order is within immediate reach, resorting to such destructive measures feels to the audience like the best course of action for Fleck and the others who society has pushed aside. Being trapped in an increasingly claustrophobic world, where everything is bearing down to try to crush you, instills an animal rage. It feels like you have no choice but to werewolf, even though you always have the option to choose revolutionary theory over impulsive action for action’s sake. This risk of falling for one’s worst urges is greater the more inhospitable of an environment one is in.
The stresses that many middle class white people are newly experiencing right now are absolutely nothing compared to what the disproportionately colonized people in impoverished neighborhoods have had to try to survive for generations; studies show that growing up in a violent community is as likely to give someone PTSD as going to war is. Is it any wonder why, according to voices I’ve encountered from the black community, the experience of living as a colonized person in this country tends to make one desensitized to tragedy? Reactionary attitudes go hand in hand with this kind of trauma-ingrained hardness, as indicated by how the black YouTuber F.D Signifier names “patriarchy” as one of the great problems the impoverished people among his community face: “wherever there is poverty, wherever there is patriarchy, you’ll see it.” “It” being a dynamic where men react to their conditions by internalizing “apathy and callousness…a greater sense of becoming a monster themselves.”
When one embraces the reactionary beliefs that can come from this dynamic, whatever survival plans one develops in response to our society’s unraveling become based around a mentality of insiders and outsiders, anti-social and alienated from one’s community. And the less coherent responses that a follower of this toxic individualism carries out in their everyday lives—resorting to violence on a whim, embracing close-minded anti-intellectualism, adopting a rigid with-me-or-against-me mentality—reflect this. Naturally, it’s easy for such attitudes to be directed towards bigotry and the reinforcement of oppressive power structures. Sexual predation, domestic abuse, hate crimes, toxically masculine aggression, and racial or gender chauvinism get almost necessarily nurtured by individualism in a society where these things are systemically enabled. The individualism adds fuel to the tendencies towards abuse, exemplified by the pandemic’s instances of belligerent anti-mask outbursts and even intentional weaponizations of the virus during interpersonal disputes. The collective good is disregarded in favor of personal spite, the world dragged further down into hell just so that one person can feel emotionally satisfied in a single moment.
But for the reactionary psychological state, which is what takes that individualism and animates it into destructive action, mere apathy or lack of compassion aren’t enough. The cold attitude towards those deemed undeserving needs to go along with a mentality of perpetual war. Reflecting the literal endless war that our government carries out, the follower of what Umberto Eco called “Ur-Fascism” (or “eternal fascism”) must apply the war mode to how they relate to the world: “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such a ‘final solution’ implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.”
This practical absurdity of Ur-Fascism’s mission matters not to those who’ve been assimilated into the ideology. It tells them that life itself is one big reaction, a struggle which can never be abandoned lest the enemy win. The seeds of this mentality exist within every act of petty abuse or senseless descent into brutality that these pandemic-era belligerents commit. To turn these seeds into more coherently destructive forces, the kinds of forces that the state seeks to harness for counterrevolutionary purposes, a rejection of clear-headed thinking needs to be ingrained. The concept of introspection needs to be viewed with contempt, with war for war’s sake being the only acceptable mindset.
“You know the thing about chaos? It's fair!”-Joker, The Dark Knight
To radicalize someone with this reactionary individualist mindset towards fascism, you need to convince them to see their darkest impulses as correct. These are the inner voices which say that inflicting harm on others is justified by the pain they themselves have experienced, that those they target in their perpetual war are deserving of brutal punishment or are necessary collateral damage. Essential to this is rejecting material analysis, which can put the contradictions that the reactionaries see in their proper context; according to materialism, embracing ideologies like racial supremacy is a self-evidently absurd response to capitalism’s contradictions. But when this analysis is made to be viewed with suspicion, the Ur-Fascist war mentality becomes even more entrenched. Whenever you see something wrong with the world, it’s further proof that hatred and ultraviolence are the answers.
“The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity,” writes Eco about one instance of Ur-Fascism’s crude traditionalism and anti-intellectualism. “In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action's sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering's alleged statement (‘When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun’) to the frequent use of such expressions as ‘degenerate intellectuals,’ ‘eggheads,’ ‘effete snobs,’ ‘universities are a nest of reds.’ The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.”
It’s easy to see overlap between these arguments, and the arguments driving a villain like Heath Ledger’s Joker, who takes this reactive mindset and applies it inversely towards fascism’s love for the state—instead concluding that anarchy is the answer. The real-life terrorists he’s based on also intend to fight tyrannical power structures, and do so from this same type of undialectical thinking. The Islamists behind 9/11 were motivated Ur-Fascism, if a strain of it that’s different from the ones we commonly think of. By intentionally killing massive amounts of civilians, the 9/11 hijackers didn’t fulfill their goal of ending imperialism’s oppression of Islam; they made it worse by bringing upon numerous new imperialist wars that have killed millions of more Muslims.
Which parallels how the Joker, by terrorizing Gotham’s people with the intent of breaking the system, gave law enforcement the narrative precedent for a fortified capitalist police state. Like George W. Bush, Batman and the cops were able to declare mission accomplished, proud that they had defeated their momentary enemies while not addressing the contradictions driving this cycle of violence. These similarities between Christopher Nolan’s character and the terrorists who inspired him are fitting with the backstory that’s implied for Ledger’s Joker; as evidenced by his strangely advanced knowledge of tactical military maneuvers, his injuries, and his oddly specific analogy about how a “truckload of soldiers will be blowing up,” it’s possible that he’s a traumatized war veteran. One who’s coping with his PTSD through the avoidant strategy of adopting an unnaturally fearless and bold new personality, capable of making him unflinching as he risks his life for his anarchic cause. Given the film’s timing, he was likely a veteran of the Afghanistan or Iraq wars (if you choose to interpret the story as being that similar to our own), and was therefore another part of the destructive domino effect caused by 9/11.
In a broad sense, you can argue the Islamists have achieved their goal of weakening U.S. imperialism, since their provocations have driven the empire to carry out reactive wars that have accelerated the decline of Washington’s hegemony. But there’s a reason why communists don’t glorify 9/11, or wish for similar destructive scenarios: both the initial act of deliberately killing many innocents, and the consequences of provoking incomprehensible destruction for Islamic civilization, were not consistent with the Marxist revolutionary warfare doctrine described by Che Guevara. Che wrote: “It is necessary to distinguish clearly between sabotage, a revolutionary and highly effective method of warfare, and terrorism, a measure that is generally ineffective and in-discriminate in its results, since it often makes victims of innocent people and destroys a large number of lives that would be valuable to the revolution. Terrorism should be considered a valuable tactic when it is used to put to death some noted leader of the oppressing forces well known for his cruelty, his efficiency in repression, or other quality that makes his elimination useful. But the killing of persons of small importance is never advisable, since it brings on an increase of reprisals, including deaths.”
It’s these kinds of distinctions between dialectics and reaction, with one route following the path of scientific analysis and the other following the path of pure emotion, that make the difference between a revolutionary and a reactionary. It’s because the Islamic terrorists have the Ur-Fascist mindset that the U.S. is the one which has cultivated recent history’s biggest Islamic extremist groups, from the Taliban to Al-Qaeda to ISIS to the Uyghur terror cells. The oppressors know they can use those who hate them the most to their own advantage. All they have to do is feed the ideologically incoherent, theoretically deficient passions that the victims of their violence initially have upon being radicalized towards anti-Americanism. The imperialists are able to exploit anti-imperialism, diverting those most desperate for justice towards unintentionally reinforcing the established order.
This dynamic of reaction weaponized by the oppressors applies to domestic counterrevolution as much as to foreign policy. Some of the biggest enemies of proletarian revolution within the imperial center are those who are most passionate about fighting the system. The key to making them this way is combining that Ur-Fascist intellectual arrogance with ideological poison, with a pseudo-revolutionary ideology that leads one towards becoming the thing they think they’re fighting against.
“My mask allowed me to be myself completely, no shame”-Edward Nashton
This ideology can be spawned from the reactionary potential of the lumpenproletariat, promoting patriarchal, racial chauvinist, and gang-fetishizing ideas that lead those raised in the hood to embrace the ultraviolent mindset. It can weaponize internet culture, propagating racist, misogynistic, and ultraviolent ideas on forums like 4Chan. It can come in the form of religious extremism, like the online ISIS recruitment network or the violent Christian extremist groups. Or it can manifest in pure nihilism, leading angry, depressed, or insecure men to become mass shooters.
What they all have in common is the decision to take the nihilism which systemic injustice instills, and turn it into an excuse for causing further destruction. It’s the thought process of Edward Nashton, the man who puts on a Zodiac Killer-inspired mask and becomes a serial murderer in The Batman. It’s also the thought process of the hundreds who follow “The Riddler,” and assist him in committing a terrorist attack that primarily kills their fellow members of the underclass. His rage comes from his childhood as an orphan who had been trapped in a facility that suffered from lack of heating, overcrowding, and rat infestations. He reacts by making online content that radicalizes those from similar backgrounds towards inflicting violence partly against corrupt officials and primarily against innocents, one of the terrorists declaring during the attack that “I’m vengeance.”
This is too charitable of a depiction of reactionary terrorist groups, because in real life they don’t direct their anger at the system. Their targets are those with even less power than they have, like marginalized racial groups. The equivalents of Nashton are figures like Andrew Anglin, the neo-Nazi internet personality who’s coordinated harassment campaigns against Jewish people and helped organize 2017’s deadly Charlottsville white supremacist rally. Then there are the 8Chan shootings, and the QAnon terrorist attacks, and the incel killings, and all the other acts of violence we’ve seen in the last decade that have come out of this lethal combination—the one where a sense of being wronged crosses with toxic ideas.
When it comes to these white supremacist and misogynist killers, it’s negligible whether actual systemic injustice has contributed to their being radicalized. Economic inequality is just one of the many factors that may be impacting their mental states, and ultimately, their perception of being wronged comes not from being an oppressed class but from having a skewed sense of entitlement. An entitlement rooted in individualism. “Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration,” writes Eco. “That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old ‘proletarians’ are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.”
And this isn’t even the full extent of the potential that Ur-Fascism has to grip people’s consciousness during late-stage capitalism, because the lumpen are capable of being brought towards it as well, if in a different sense. Whereas middle class fascism uses fear of crime to animate hatred towards people of color, for instance, lumpen fascism fetishizes crime, with gangs often being portrayed in reactionary lumpen circles as sources of hope for revolution. (Keep in mind that these crime entities are essentially fronts for the CIA, with the spooks using gangs to push their drugs—making support for this position astroturfed.) And whereas middle class fascism invariably represents white supremacy, lumpen fascism can be utilized in the equivalent ways by other racial groups, representing black supremacy or Chicano supremacy in alternative to the neo-Nazi gangs. These types of ideological strains are fringe, but they’re dangerous in that they have the potential to lead well-intentioned radicals towards supporting undialectical and ultraviolent ideas, believing these ideas to be actual decolonial theory.
Whatever forms that these reactive, Ur-Fascist ideas take, they’re getting a lot easier to be proliferated. Our conditions ensure this. Investigations of the real-world Gothams reveal poverty, homelessness, crime, mental illness, and consequential capitalist efforts to exploit the misery. In Los Angeles, companies have popped up that supposedly save the homeless population, but really put them in for-profit prisons of a different brand, cramming them into humiliating little spaces policed by private laws. All hints of increases in crime are being seized upon by the media to justify vilifying the poor and building up the police state. The symptoms of this fortification of bourgeois rule are even more violence, both random and racial. It’s no surprise that the last two years have seen an explosion in mass shootings, some of them anti-Asian hate crimes.
Amid the growing madness, there are those who seek to do what Batman and the “good” Gotham cops do, and try to fight the injustice by combating its symptoms. But as is revealed even within the text of The Batman, what they’re doing is simply the other side of the Riddler terrorist group’s “I am vengeance” sentiment. It’s not dialectical, it’s reactive and ultimately narcissistic. It seeks to bring oneself a sense of heroism and victory, when actually all that one has done is make injustice more severe. The means to fight injustice lie in stepping away from this immature mindset, and truly assessing what our conditions call for us to do.
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