'the banality... of evol... she knew about that... oh yes she did...'

horsemouth notes the strange inclusion of hannah arendt in donald trump's proposed sculpture park. you can just imagine the re-elected president trump's speech at the opening of it (not that it was ever intended to happen)  'the banality... of evol... she knew about that... oh yes she did... stolen elections... yes. bad bad people... we won't dwell on that... but we defeated them... oh yes'

horsemouth is up (just). rarely for him he has slept badly. but (no fear) he has his coffee. a grey day. a grey morning. 

horsemouth has been a very poor reader of late - he has read a little of the origins of totalitarianism. he knows that it is popular at the moment with spiked/ libertarian anti-lockdown types. he knows that is is popular with people trying to navigate an anti-zionism that is not anti-semitism. he knows it is popular with people trying to understand MAGA.

there is of course a tendency to read any book to hand as if it were the key current events. 

now horsemouth should be clear, he does not think we are heading into totalitarianism caused by the coronavirus outbreak, the guidance may be repressive but it's hardly a police state, nor does he think the US is rolling in the direction of totalitarianism (though if trump had won or succeeded in having the election set aside horsemouth would think so). nor does he think populism or brexit or the return of the democrats to office are signs of it. 

ok no he does think they are signs of it.

MAGA, brexit are signs of a political attempt to forge a direct relationship with the people (in arendt's terms the mob) that is actually politically mobilising (rather than the dead fossilised majorities of the democratic process). hence the sudden upsurge in maoist rhetoric ('let a thousand flowers bloom') from the brexiteer tories. 

horsemouth loves the rhetorical fury of hannah arendt's text - strangely the dictators are quickly forgotten - it only takes them to be succeeded for them to be seemingly lost to memory.  and yet he has made a very poor fist of reading it.  

it is holocaust remembrance day it is important to make sure the lessons of history are actually learned.  

100,000 dead (and the hill being symmetric) possibly 30,000 more still to come as we go back down from the current peak. horsemouth (armchair general) pushes forward the troops 'and the lines on the map moved from side to side'. 

horsemouth (standing in the office of armchair general and ultimate arbiter of right and wrong), thinks you can't blame boris for missing five COBRA meetings and not following the scientific advice and locking down early right at the start (the first 20,000 deaths or so). 

well ok you can. 

and yet on the whole (while late) the government response to the first wave was surprisingly proportionate and  correct. on the other hand you really can blame him for every fuck up since that. in particular boris should have stayed locked down longer, got levels down to much lower and set up a working track and trace and (horsemouth pauses to notice that strange moment of being in agreement with pritti patel) closed borders. 

to horsemouth repressive measures carried out against the virus, whilst marking a capitulation of biopolitical logic, are not truly repressive because they aim to lead us up and out of the pandemic. what would be repressive (and totalitarian) would be to leave those measures undone, or half-done. 

there is a tendency to say of totalitarians 'well at least they made the trains run on time' but in fact totalitarian governance does not work that way, in fact it does not work well at all. the various bureaucratic institutions of the state and the party are encouraged to compete with each other, to be seen to be doing something (whether it works or not is beside the point). in this way what we are living through may actually be totalitarian.