Daily Bard Digest 2024-08-30

At 08/30/24 18:51:02 in ContraPoints with a score of yall:

Henry Kissinger's academic thesis - and his lifelong career thesis - is that in international* politics, "legitimacy" is afforded to policies and actions which the major powers go along with, and "illegitimacy" or "dangerousness" or "revolutionary" is applied to any policy or action which one or more major powers push back against. (It is and was an observation he made during WWII, living under the Nazis, who imposed the Führerprinzip. Nazism being, of course, the most famous and "successful" example of resentment politics)

He made a career out of putting this thesis to work for anyone who paid him to do so. Usually with an associated body count.

• The GOP has increasingly made resentment politics a legitimised part of domestic US politics, and various people & institutions have failed to meaningfully push back on it. This failure legitimises their increasingly violent and accelerationist rhetoric & politics such that there is now a reasonable concern that meaningful pushback options are dwindling. That's bad.

I've often said that violent extremist movements ought not be considered legitimate political movements / ideologies / affiliations, but I also have to note that history shows, under the Kissingerian thesis, that modern humans keep fricking doing it anyway