Killing Our Way To Paradise

I'm getting tired. Are you getting tired?

There's so much happening every week, and so much of it has to do with killing and the threat of more killing. All the proposed killing sure sounds like murder to me, but I'm informed that most of it is actually a very practical and necessary and obvious solution. This makes it good killing—we can tell because we are doing it—or at least killing I oughtn't to worry about so much, or else it is killing that is important to ignore for now to avoid even more future killing. Good killing has been necessitated by other bad killing, I'm told, or at least the threat of some future potential bad killing. We can tell it is bad killing because they have done it—and the bad killing is the only killing that I'm told ought to alarm me, while the good killing should make me feel safe. We are the heroes, I'm told. No, it's more than that—heroism is our exclusive property. What I mean is, I'm told that what we do is heroic because we do it.

And yet all the killing and proposed killing alarms me. And there's so much of it. Which killing do I write about? There's a danger when you write about everything that you wind up not writing about anything at all. But if there is killing I fail to mention, does that mean I don't care enough? Will it be so telling that I failed to include it? Will my silence on one matter or another within this piece speak volumes? Will I no longer be seen as a hero? Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

I'm going to start with Star Wars movies. Didn't see that one coming, I bet. Oh right, I put a lightsaber in the lady's hand in the photo. Shit. What a giveaway. Superfans are going to be livid about the unexpected spoiler.

Now a "superfan" is somebody who has attached their whole personality to hating an intellectual property they loved in their youth: hating it for the crimes of not making them young again; hating it for the crime of not representing them and only them. These toxic hate nerds subject the creators of these intellectual properties to threats and other harassment in targeted online brigades, with special vitriol saved for actors who commit the unforgivable crime of depicting a hero while being not white and/or not male and/or not straight. There was a story that went around this week about movie studios' woes around "superfans" and it made us all mad, as intended. The story informs us that studios, faced with the very real threat of persistent targeted harassment, have taken many steps to address the matter, some of which involve simply capitulating and focus-grouping the superfans to see what they want and giving it to them, which is how you get The Rise of Skywalker.

Superfans will tell you they engage in such antisocial behavior because their love of the work is such that they cannot abide any impurities to its perfect formula. My observation is that they seek purity for a different reason, namely that they have stored their beliefs, unexamined, deep in the dank basements of their minds and souls, and down there in the dark, those beliefs have gone to rot. In their minds, heroes are people just like them, that is to say people who are white and straight and male, and these people are heroes because they kill all the people not like them, which creates a paradise in the world of the movie, at least until it's time for more movies. In the mind of superfans, it's not just that white straight males are the only appropriate heroes; it's that white straight males exclusively own heroism itself.

I suspect the superfan problem with heroes who are not white and not male isn't actually that there are no white male heroes for them to enjoy, because there are still plenty. There's always going to be a white dude in the mix; he's the peanut in the mixed nut assortment of popular fiction. I suspect the problem for the superfans is that the white male heroes in these modern movies do something the superfan cannot, which is demonstrate a belief that not white not male not straight people are heroes, too—which makes them a part of us, which means that they are not a part of the people who need to be killed and killed until paradise happens. And, because these white straight male heroes honor the humanity of people who are not male or white or straight, these supremacist superfans find themselves unable to identify anymore—not only with the characters they despise, but with the white straight male heroes. Deep in the basements of their minds and souls, they now identify themselves with the villains, who despite their obvious villainy still believe that power is best effected and protected by killing until none remain to kill, and still believe that power belongs only to the pure. So superfans need their children's-movies-for-adults to be pure again in a way that allows them to identify as heroes again. That's what I think.

Star Wars superfans are probably the worst of the bunch. Nobody hates Star Wars like a Star Wars superfan. There was a really cool and interesting installment in the series a few years ago, and it ended with the conclusion that heroism had nothing to do with bloodlines and was accessible to all. It featured a female protagonist and a Black hero and a female Asian hero. It also had a hero in the classic white dude mold who failed to listen to leadership and created a big problem by thinking he knew best and going it alone, and it featured another classic hero—a returning one, the protagonist of previous films—who had rejected star wars altogether, and no longer wanted to wield his weapon, and no longer trusted the old narratives he'd been given, and eventually he saves the day by sacrificing his life without killing anybody (spoilers on a 7-year-old movie). This was exactly in keeping with his training from the original films, by the way; you could even say that it was the ultimate fulfillment of the character's moral arc. No matter: The superfans lost their few remaining marbles and have never gotten them back. And now studios are asking them for advice, in a futile attempt to avoid being harassed forever by these few, these angry few, this band of boogers, who will be rewarded for antisocial behavior by being allowed to set boundaries of permission when it comes to how much not-white not-male not-straight should appear on screen.

To not really change the subject, Nazism is back. In increasingly open and alarming ways, it's the sole animating spirit of one of our two national parties, the one that calls itself "conservative," the Republican Party. They have a coinflip chance of taking the presidency.

Somehow Palpatine returned.

Nobody who wrote the movie bothered to say how Palpatine returned. People in the real world are similarly confused. I think his return came from doing what the studios are increasingly doing: listening to the superfans, bringing them more of the exact same they demand (which, once they have it, they hate) trying not to upset them by suggesting that heroism—which they see as their exclusive property—is under attack, a fake threat that justifies any real threat they might bring in retaliation.

Maybe the way Palpatine returned was that he was never gone.

It occurs to me we've always had supremacist superfans in this country. There are statues and societies and cosplayers and flags and everything. They insist that they and only they are heroes—that heroism is their property.

To not really change the subject again, we killed an innocent man in Missouri last week. His name was Marcellus Williams, and he was a human being, and we killed him.

Somehow lynching returned. Everyone's confused as to how. Maybe the way it returned is it was never gone.

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Marcellus Williams had been convicted of a murder, so he was guilty in the eyes of the state, and for that crime the state insisted that it was justified in murdering him. In the eyes of almost everyone else, including the prosecutor and the victim's family, he was innocent of the crime, for the very good reason that he appears to have not done it. We killed him anyway. It was done to somebody whose life very clearly was deemed to not matter, and demonstrating that Marcellus Williams' life didn't matter appeared to very much be the point of the execution. Demonstrating that people whose lives do matter have the power and the authority to kill the innocent while still being thought of as being just appears to have been very much the point, too.

I am guessing some of you don't like my use of "we" very much. I sympathize. I don't like it much, either, even if I it find it necessary, but also I want to define the term, because it's important to be careful when we talk about collective responsibility and collective blame. Punishment-oriented people are always eager to dole out collective punishment, a punishment which you may have noticed always falls most on those least responsible and least on those most responsible, so we must be cautious when we talk about collective responsibility, and you may with very good reason bridle that I say "we" killed an innocent man.

Nevertheless, if you live in the United States, the lynching of Marcellus Williams was done on our behalf, you and me, if we are people whose lives are deemed to matter by the supremacist institutions that carried out the process. So maybe, if you are reading this, it truly wasn't done on your behalf. Maybe you're one whose life is also deemed not to matter by this supremacist society. If so, please feel free to read along, but today I'm talking to the us on whose behalf it was done. There are a lot of us, and many of us may have opposed killing Marcellus Williams specifically, but still feel that the systems and institutions that murdered him on our behalf make us all safer.

Speaking of those systems and institutions, Missouri governor Mike Parson, who resembles a demonic bunny rabbit, refused to grant a stay of execution, even though he could easily have done so, even though he's not opposed to pardoning people even when they're actually guilty of their crimes. He pardoned Patricia and Mark McCloskey, those two boomers in golf clothes who went out to illegally point their weapons (or maybe it's to point their illegal weapons?) at peaceful protesters against racist police brutality back in 2020. The governor appears to have been making two points with the McCloskey pardon. The first point was to reinforce the popular belief among white people that if white people with property feel that they or their property is threatened, then they are threatened, in a way that overrides questions of whether or not they are actually threatened, and any real violence or real threat white people want to offer as a response to this imaginary threat should override both the facts and the law, and should be deemed to have created safety and life even if it created danger and death. The second point seems to have been to safeguard the belief that killing people who don't matter is just in and of itself. I wonder: Do the McCloskeys feel they are heroes? Do they feel that their heroism is a portion of their exclusive property that was threatened?

On the matter of Marcellus Williams, the Supreme Court broke, as it usually does, along the lines of judges who have and judges who have not been bribed by theocratic billionaires, with the bribed majority siding with state murder, as they very reliably do. We must admit, though, that the bribed judges probably would have sided with the killing even without the bribes. You don't get to the point where theocratic billionaires are bribing you unless you're already on board with the overall killing project.

And we killed another five people over the course of the same week, people who perhaps did not have as much of a claim to innocence as Williams, but who were also human beings. And we do this all the time.

Why do we do this?

I think it's because for many of us, some of our core beliefs have gone to rot down in the basement of our minds and souls. Killing people seems to make us feel safe from the dangers that we face, and feeling safe through killing means that we are safe, even if the killing doesn't actually make us safer. And we do this because we, like superfans, believe heroism is our property. Our killing is good because we do it. Some of us admit that sometimes we do some oopsie killing, but we're working out the kinks in our mostly perfect system.

I saw a comment the other day from a popular online supremacist superfan named "Landshark Rides." Mr. Rides has 55,000 followers approximately, and he went into Elon Musk's twitter machine to give us this, the purest expression of fascism imaginable:

there is basically zero downsides to executing violent criminals and if you just keep doing it again and again society eventually effectively turns into paradise but we can't actually do it because leftists still control all the governments and legal systems

Perhaps you think I am making a bit much of Mr. Rides. After all, he is just another semi-anonymous online whomever who has managed to amass a following (I know, I know, it takes one to know one). "Landshark" might not even be his real name for all I know. Maybe it's Ray.

But still, I have noticed that Mr. Rides isn't in any way alone in his sentiment. The idea that we can create paradise by increasing the killing is a very popular notion here in the rather backward and underdeveloped country of the United States. I mean "backward and underdeveloped" in a moral sense. In an economic sense, the country holds vast wealth, but we still fail to feed the hungry and provide shelter to the unhoused, and so on, and we still think that being allowed to live is a matter of deserving it, and deserving it is a matter of being profitable, and that the answer to most of the problems that arise from following these beliefs is killing, and that violence carries redemptive properties, and so we still think that people who struggle deserve death because they haven't earned life, and we still believe the fact that we still have problems must be that we aren't killing enough yet.

We? Not me!

I hear you, I hear you. Not you. But enough of us anyway that I don't really see any end to the killing anytime soon.

Donald Trump just suggested that all that is needed to solve the violent problem of immigrants (a group of people who are not, collectively speaking, violent) is to have "one very violent day" to brutalize and kill the problem of unwanted human beings. And last week in my hometown, Trump made sure to specify that immigrants are not human beings, but animals. And of course his slippery shit of a running mate JD Vance said that even legal immigrants were illegal, and Trump has promised to revoke legal status and even citizenship status. The thought, again, is that all that's needed for paradise to arrive is killing on a scale that isn't being permitted, and that the answer is to kill anyone preventing the expansion of killing, and then redraw the boundaries of who needs to be killed until the concept of "violent" and "illegal" is expansive enough to get all the killing done that is needed to create a paradisial regime that will last for a thousand years.

This is the sort of thing that's been tried many times before. German Nazis tried it, for example, against people who they insisted were not human beings, but animals. They killed nothing by violent criminals, simply by enforcing their ever-expanding definitions of what constituted "violent" and "criminal." It didn't create a paradise (spoilers for an 80-year-old war). One violent day instead led to more violent days, one after another after another. This is what violent days always do. Killing has weight, I'd observe. If you give it to gravity, it will generate momentum that is impossible to control.

Still, Trump, who has been directly mirroring German Nazis in his rhetoric and tactics, may very well win a national election by running on nothing but a promise of retributive bigoted mass killing, and I must conclude that this can only mean that, here in our morally underdeveloped nation, the idea of mass killing is very popular, mostly because it makes so many of us feel safe. This, despite the fact that killing will inevitably endanger us all, because that's what killing—which has weight and momentum once it gets going—always does.

So I just can't escape the idea that Raymond "Landshark" Rides is not alone, and that deep in the unexamined basement of our assumptions, it's not only the proud and open Nazis who believe we can kill our way to paradise. The other candidate with a real chance of winning our election's name is Kamala Harris, and she doesn't mirror Nazis in her rhetoric and tactics, and she actually does believe in protecting a lot of people that Trump intends to kill, and she actually has pursued real solutions to real problems, and so I do want Trump to lose and Harris to win. I mention that I want Trump to lose because I'm about to note that, despite her very clear and important differences from her opponent, Harris in many ways does still very much espouse the belief that our institutions of killing—policing, empire, military, capitalism—are institutions that are necessary to protect us and keep us safe, and whenever I say something like that, I know it will be taken not for the plain observation that it is, but as the open expression of desire for a Trump presidency that it is not.

It'll happen anyway. Oh well.

But also another thing will happen.

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What will happen is the revocation of my inherited and assumed heroism.

People will suggest that, because my observation of Harris is critical, and because it is important that Trump should lose, and any criticism of Harris helps Trump win, I am therefore no hero. It is indubitably true, by the way, to say I'm not a hero. I'm skeptical that any criticism of Harris automatically makes a Trump win more likely, but I am a part of a violent empire that kills on my behalf, so I am not a hero as far as I can see. I can do what I can to align against that empire, but I'm still a part of it. The best way I know of to align against it is to stop insisting on my heroism, and then acknowledge my inextricable complicity, and then wrestle with it. For this reason, I make my critical observations about Harris, who I nevertheless very much hope will win next month.

And I also know that by hoping Harris will win, I will be told that I love all the killing and support all the crimes and terror and genocide of our violent empire, and I will be told that for this reason I am no hero, but am an inextricably complicit part of a violent empire that kills on my behalf. And again, though I do not love the killing, it is true to say I am complicit, and am no hero.

And yet I still put all these caveats in, perhaps because I want to protect myself from true charges. This suggests to me that somewhere deep in the unexamined basement of my mind and soul, I still cling to my sense that heroism is my inheritance and my property, even as the killing done on my behalf goes on and on. It seems I still have work to do on myself.

It occurs to me, too, that those who respond to my critical observations or my clear hopes regarding Harris by telling me that I am no hero often do so with the (usually unspoken) assumption that, because they are not making such criticisms or because they do not share such hopes, they are heroes in ways I am not, even though many of them are also people who live in a violent empire that kills on their behalf. This suggests to me that perhaps somewhere deep in the unexamined basement of their mind and soul, rather than acknowledging their inextricable complicity, they too still cling to a sense that heroism is their property to claim, even as the killing, often done on their behalf, too, goes on and on.

In any case, now that I've said these things about Kamala Harris I will be told a lot of things that I have already considered, and a lot of things that I may even agree with. I will be told that I am complicit in my country's many crimes against humanity—and I have already agreed that I am. I will be told that Trump and his party represent unique and historic threats, for example—and I have already agreed that they do. I'll be told that it is very important to vote to prevent his presidency, for example—and I have already agreed it is. I will be told that our nation is founded in genocide and slavery and this inheritance continues to this very day—and I have already agreed that it is and it does.

I will also be told that it is important to win the election, and in order to win, we must be practical, and the practical fact is that to win votes, a candidate must support and uphold our violent institutions of policing and enforcement and empire, the ones that kill on our behalf.

The funny thing about that last one is, if it is true (and though I am far less certain about electoral strategy than most people seem to be, there seems to be real evidence it might be true), it supports the point I am making. I suspect Harris espouses these defenses of our institutions of killing because it's the only politically viable belief to espouse. It's very popular in our culture.

We're sending bombs to Israel all the time, by the way. Nothing it seems will ever stop us from sending more bombs to Israel. We're circumventing U.S. law for us to do so, because Israel is using the weapons for war crimes, and yet we keep sending them. Israel keeps needing new ones because they keep using the old ones. Almost exactly a year ago Israel absorbed a horrific attack on their citizenry, and over a thousand Israeli Jews were murdered, most of them civilians, and hundreds were taken hostage. The Israeli government, which had already for years been dealing with the threat of Palestinian reactionaries who had sprung up in the wake of decades of Israeli abuse of and killing of Palestinians, and had been for years solving that problem by killing and abusing Palestinian citizens more and more, has reacted to this horror by accelerating its killing of Palestinian citizens, and telling anyone who is horrified by the sight of a year of daily escalating civilian massacre that any opposition to this killing is indistinguishable from, and should be taken as a desire for, genocide and a wish for death to come to Jewish people everywhere.

The idea I suppose is that as long as the Israeli government keeps killing then the killing will eventually stop, even though there are plenty of signs from Israeli government and military officials that the plan is to keep killing until there's nobody left to kill. Almost 2% of the Palestinian population has been killed so far, most of them civilians. And last week Israel knocked down six residential buildings in Lebanon, which is a totally different country, so the killing, which is being done with our support and our munitions, appears to be spreading, and yet our politicians refuse to even entertain the notion that we might stop sending bombs. And now Iran has gotten into the mix. Israel does not seem to be killing its way to safety for anybody, is my observation.

One violent day has led to more violent days, one after another after another. This is what violent days always do. Killing has weight, I'd observe. If you give it over to gravity, it will generate momentum that is impossible to control. I remember when my own country suffered a horrific attack, and thousands of our citizens died, and how we tried to kill our way to safety, and how catastrophically that attempt failed, and how much blood we now have on our hands. And I remember how, no matter how much killing we did, the story we told was still that we were the heroes, not because we were being heroic, but because we were us.

All this feeds into my skepticism regarding the very popular mainstream notion that we can even kill our way to something like safety, much less paradise, especially since the most present dangers we face are things that can't be killed, but must be solved through cooperation.

For example: Also last week, portions of southern states flooded catastrophically, with states like North Carolina and Florida and Tennessee severely affected. The police did what the police all too often do in situations like this: they came together, joined forces, and made sure that nobody who desperately needed food and water would be able to get any. The point there seems to be that people who can't get food and water during a disaster taking some food and water that is available creates far more danger than feeding hungry people with food that, without power, is doomed to spoil anyway. The violence of the catastrophe isn't enough, it seems. We need further violence to safeguard against a danger far greater than a flood, which is the danger that somebody might get what they need to live without paying.

And we could think of the deaths in the wake of Helene as premeditated murders. Hurricanes like this were known outcomes of our fossil fuel consumption decades and decades ago; known and suppressed by executives and politicians who decided that harming profits would be far more dangerous than not having mass weather catastrophes all over the planet, and billions of people killed in the coming decades, and so on. They knew full well what would happen, and they used their wealth and power and influence to make sure that it happened anyway, and none of them will be executed, though they are guilty. None of them will ever even be arrested, because these people are deemed by our institutions of authority to matter the very most, and so the act of authority arresting powerful killers is seen by many of us as dangerous in a way that authority killing Marcellus Williams, or killing any number of our growing population of prisoners or homeless people, never will.

Where am I going with this? Am I saying we ought to execute oil executives? No. I see why some might feel the urge, but I'm very skeptical that we are ever going to kill our way to paradise.

I'm going to recommend that we stop being heroes and start being wrestlers.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about the need to oppress conservatives—not with punishment, but with the sort of society that they tell us terrifies them so: open and free and equitable, focused on human thriving, caring for everyone's needs, centering humanity even when issuing appropriate consequence, rejecting the idea that violence redeems. And I suggested that the first step would be to oppress the little conservative that lives within so many of us.

I think this is one part of how we oppress that little conservative inside: we need to reject our own heroism, and our supremacist assumption that heroism is our heritage and our exclusive inherited property.

I think we need to put down our heroism, and accept whatever accountability we've inherited, and do whatever work that calls for, and pay the natural costs of that work.

And to do that, we need to go into the basements of our minds and souls, where we keep our unexamined beliefs—the ones that drive our most popular stories—and flip on the lights. What's down there might be ugly and powerful, but I think it needs to be wrestled with, and only we can do the wrestling.

Violence seems to have led to violence. That's all violence ever seems to do.

Yet we keep thinking it's going to do something else. We keep thinking it will bring safety and security and get us to paradise. We superfans of killing.

We.

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A.R. Moxon is the author of The Revisionaries, which is available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places, and the essay collection Very Fine People, which you can learn about how to support right here. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. His guitar wants to kill your mama.