and maybe the real problem here is that it’s not my sensitivity that makes me personally dysfunctional but your insensitivity that enables putin, society-wide, over and over again, to leave babies in their cots, bleeding red and dead as they slept.
mil williams, 14th august 2023, stockholm sweden
• neo-terrorism on the individual: how to undermine society without society ever realising it’s been happening | #darkfigure #neocrime | slide-deck version here
our problem
your problem is as follows.
if i am right re #noi, it’s been undermining all our societies for decades:
our = western, as well as locally here
and where i am right, the owners of #neoterrorismontheindividual and its processes and tools collect data on everyone, without exception. however, their owners and users choose when to use this data: they pick their moments and actual targets really judiciously.
mostly, it only gets visibly used against those who notice: what happened to me in 2003 in the uk.
but imagine if everyone began to notice: what then?
then, all the data these bad actors have collected on you over the years — keeping their powder utterly dry, if you like, in expectation of inevitable future need — would allow them to rapidly up their game overnight: because then, for them, the threat level would actually begin to exist. to date, it’s been all one-sided: theirs.
so what then?
#noi would become a visible act of repression, not an invisible one. it wouldn’t be #neocrime any more. what before sociology and criminology called #darkfigure:
and maybe #ukraine is not a sign of putin’s strengths in longitudinal gaslighting, though it might be easy to come to this conclusion.
maybe it’s a sign of his ultimate desperation. for his version of #noi, even factoring in pandemic, banking scandals, and three wars of his making in the last fifteen years, haven’t led quite enough to the total dislocation of western economies he sorely — and i’m sure dearly — expected would be delivered after all these years of having being a kgb acolyte of the worst, turned thug in fancy suits of the most horrible and politically immobilising kind.
because #ukraine has never just been about territory. that is, not physical. equally, and maybe much more, it’s been about distracting and dismantling western unity and sense of time & place: all good people’s mental territories and landscapes.
in the end, putin and his ilk are not even spymasters: they’re chessmasters in the most terrifying traditions. it’s chess they’re playing, not politics. total surrender, but sometimes — right to the end — with you not even thinking it’s going to be your fate. like the jews in the ghettos: worse than this, it surely can’t get.
in conclusion?
i can live with being ignored. i can live with being gaslit daily, in the trivial and incompetent ways they do. i can live with the #ukraines we have awaiting us. i suffered the #balkan one. i survived that, even at the cost of being improperly incarcerated as a result of the another democratic dismantling in 2003: the terrifying lead-up to #iraq which led to my own provoked mental dysfunctionality.
and we can’t forget 9/11: we never must.
and we can’t forget #pandemic either, though we already are: how the mercilessly rich knew it was coming and prepared their supply lines to benefit.
but let’s just imagine that for every hyper-sensitive person you assume people like me are, what you’re really witnessing are canaries in the mine: and meantime, as you laugh at us, and those who cause pandemic graft, invasions like #ukraine, disasters like #iraq, tragedies like 9/11 … and #brexit, and #trump, and all that stuff … well, maybe we’re not sensitive to irrelevance; maybe, instead, you’re insensitive to the embedded criminality that starts with the smallest of communities, the tiniest of acts, the symbolic gaslighting of the idiot on the metro … and maybe the real problem here is that it’s not my sensitivity that makes me personally dysfunctional but your insensitivity that enables putin, society-wide, over and over again, to leave babies in their cots, bleeding red and dead as they slept.
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