nikhil.io

Like many others, I saw the movie first. Good stuff, Natalie Portman is great and Hugo Weaving is fantastic even behind a mask. This novel is not like the movie. Length and character depth aside, it’s very British in its setting, sensibilities, and its response to its time (in the movie, I do remember wondering what Bush-era excesses had to with a fascist state in the UK). It is also is much darker than its film adaptation.

I think the claim is that anarchy, which Moore defines as a state of being without leaders but not without order, is the only effective resistance to runaway fascism.

He explores a lot of the latter’s properties: It happens slowly, then suddenly. It metastasizes slowly with both the apathy and consent of a majority. And when it’s here, it’s too late; all resistance (other than anarchy of course) is merely symbolic.

There were riots, and people with guns. Nobody knew what was going on. Everyone was waiting for the government to do something. But there wasn’t any government anymore. Just lots of little gangs, all trying to take over. And then in 1992, somebody finally did. It was all the fascist groups, the right-wingers. They’d all got together with some of the big corporations that had survived. ‘Norsefire’ they called themselves. I remember when they marched into London. They had a flag with their symbol on. Everyone was cheering. I thought they were scary.

They soon got things under control. But then they started taking people away. All the black people and the Pakistanis… White people, too. All the radicals and the men who, you know, liked other men. The homosexuals. I don’t know what they did with them all.

Now because there is no firm philosophical center to fascism other than outgroup hate and appeals to some glorious, prosperous, and fictitious age of yore¹, it will collapse and destroy everyone involved, including the usual prey of minorities and immigrants and other People Not Like Us.

Moore gives space to almost every character to illustrate this. Like the average person, whether or not they’re True Believers:

Dad had been in a socialist group when he was younger. They came for him one September morning in 1993. It was my birthday. I was twelve. I never saw him again.

They made me go and work in a factory with a lot of other kids. We were putting matches into boxes². I lived in a hostel. It was cold and dirty and I just used to cry all the time. I wanted my dad.

Or the bourgeois Top 9.99%³, including a few token minorities who consider themselves the ‘Right People’, who surrender any prior conviction, morality, and common decency to self-aggrandizement (or preservation).

Derek, when we married, you remember, I was working at the bank and you were in insurance. We were going to buy a house in Surrey, perhaps have children that was in '87 just before the war. And then, in '92, you joined the Party.

Mrs. Rana next door loaned us food all through the war years. When they dragged her and her children off in separate vans we didn’t intervene.

And now you’re dead and I walk home alone each night through riot zones, past lootings, shootings, burning buildings… Now you’re dead and I crouch like an animal and offer my hind-quarters in submission to the world. Now you’re dead and I can’t sleep for being scared; for crying, hating; thinking ‘Who has done this to me?’ I can’t sleep for wanting justice, wanting all the world to know of its unfairness.

But all this cannot happen at this point in (the end of) history. Alarmist hogwash. Zero contemporary parallels. There is no oligarchic capture of democratic institutions. Wealth inequality is at an all-time low. Unchecked globalization was a raring success. Billionaires need more tax breaks and we are obliged to feel proud when unfettered Capitalism creates the first Trillionaire. The ongoing privatization or outright elimination of public institutions and goods and services will cure the most unfortunate amongst us of their moral and spiritual failings. All xenophobic and economic nationalist movements like Brexit were triumphs of sovereignty and self-determination.

Social Media companies must exercise their Free Speech rights by absolving themselves of all ethical responsibility to moderate their platforms (“Corporations are People, my Friend”). Think of the shareholders and the executives and their famished households. Climate Change is natural, hence does not require interventions (what would God think?), and will not result in mass humanitarian and allied migration crises. Survival of the Fittest bro, where’s your bunker (or Mars Colony) invite? Taxation and regulation are for communists. Empathy is weakness. Up is down. East is West. Wrong is Right.

So yeah. No way any of this is building up to anything. Stop listening to hysterical candyasses. It’s not as bad as it seems⁴. This book is a work of fiction written by a crazy disheveled anarchist and augurs nothing. Relax. Like and subscribe, sign up for my newsletter, buy my coin, and pay for my course on disruptive innovation, bro.

V is Annoying #

V is portrayed to be very intelligent, well-read and cultured, and an expert planner and strategist. No disagreement here. But Lord is he annoying when he opens his damn mouth. Here’s his reply when Evie asks a perfectly simple “You’re almost finished aren’t you?”

See for yourself. The pieces are set out before me, perfectly aligned. Complete, one may at last grasp their design, their grand significance. But ‘almost finished’? Yes. Yes, I suppose I am.

Though recognition’s been delayed by its circuitous construction, now the pattern, long concealed emerges into view. Is it not fine? Is it not simple and elegant and severe? How strange, after the long exacting toil of preparation that it takes only the slightest effort and less thought to start this brief, elaborate amusement on its breathless, hurtling race: The merest touch, no more… and everything falls into place. The pieces can’t perceive as we the mischief their arrangement tempts: those stolid, law-abiding queues, so pregnant with catastrophe, insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least…

And understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late. Indeed they’ll not know anything’s amiss until they’re caught up in that terrible momentum, possibly mistaking it at first for bold decisive action, some last minute rally to avert disaster, charging to the rescue…

But they are not charging. They are falling. There… Poor little things. You see them? Standing with their numbers on their blank, indifferent faces. Nuremberg in miniature. The ranks of painted wooden men… Poor dominoes. Down it goes. Your pretty empire took so long to build. Now, with a snap of history’s fingers… down it goes.

Took me two and a half passes to get through that thicket. More of a yes or no question, Vincenzo. And pray how is the poor girl supposed to react to that edgelord logorrhea? “Uh… word.”

And that’s just a sample. It’s not enough that he literally tortures her: almost every simple thing she enquires of him leads her to a linguistic hostage situation. There’s no direct answer to anything asked of him, presumably to show that he’s some posthuman “4D Chess” level above the rest. He kept reminding me of a few good-hearted assholes I knew in college, over the age of twenty mind you, who texted and sometimes spoke like this for no fucking reason.

ME: “Hey you want a beer?”

ELLIOT: “Unequivocally. Chilled ferments shall slake my thirst and refresh my frayed cognitive apparatus. You have both my company and gratitude this evening, sir.”

ME: “Word.”

Great book though. I’m sure I’ll read it again. Looking forward to reading something happier.