'to look for precedents and analogies' (in the hands of the austeritarians)

'to look for precedents and analogies (where there are none)' - hannah arendt, on violence. (repunctuated in a horsemouth style).

'so horsemouth has nearly survived the year  (and what a fucking year it has been - war, pestilence, famine, death, tories and other locusts, and brexit yet to come)...' - horsemouth on this date 2 years ago.

ladies and gentlemen. if only he knew what the next two years had in store for him! 

indeed 3 years ago horsemouth was (in a conventional way)  'not that pessimistic'. 

'what is good about current times is that the post-thatcher political settlement (the rich get richer and er... the rich get richer) could in theory change - people at least see it now (which when the crumbs were trickling down from the table they never could).'

of course instead what happened was not the people coming to (class) consciousness but more carnage. the people can maybe see it (but can they do anything about it that is the question). 

now we are in the hands of the austeritarians - the people who hold that austerity is good for us.  a strange retour a normal (back to work) is being conducted as if the past few years was just a fever dream culminating in moral panic and hysteria  over over COVID (and guilty of this and of taking the furlough shilling we now all must pay).

of course this is not a fair reflection of  the situation at all - it is literally ideology, it is literally upside down in this it is the key workers (that is the people who had to keep going through the pandemic) who must now take the beating and accept pay rises of less than inflation (real terms pay cuts) so that the rich should not have to take a pay cut.

horsemouth is at his folks in the countryside. they are comfortably off and are not skimping on the heating or food. he just had a discussion with his dad about the limited effectiveness (and long payback times) of double glazing. decarbonise the countryside? (horsemouth thinks not). he watches the smoke rise from the chimneys and from out of the boilers.

horsemouth failed to bring arendt's the origins of totalitarianism  (a breeze-block of a book) and for many recent years touted as the guide to our strange times (and in particular the trump years - though it applies just as well to brexit and to boris). instead he brought the slimmer on violence - arendt is on the wrong side (we would take it) of then contemporary debates (the student movement, black power for example), she is still haunted by nuclear war fear (in a way that we are not). she notes the way that marxism has slipped its moorings (in the critique of political economy) and become infested  with a georges sorel inspired insurrectionism. 

she has read fanon, she has read sartre, she has little time for an imagined third world to counter the super-power hegemony. 

of course our current times are just as beset by strange bugbears of radical thought. and strangely the right are now insurrectionists, dabbling in assassination, bombings, conspiracy theories. indeed the benefit of arendt's totalitarianism  was the way it described the cross-class alliances of the mob and the ruling class, the conspiracy theories and the scandals. we could see that there were indeed precedents and analogies. 

here the dawns are always beautiful but then (almost immediately) it clouds over. in a bit horsemouth will go for his usual walk on the common (this stands in for his usual walk on the marshes). he will listen to the news but he is drifting out of contact with it.