Dmitry Utkin (who was also on the plane) is definitely a nazi, and Wagner has a lot of links to far-right elements in Russia. Wagner itself is supposed to reference Richard Wagner, Hitler’s favorite composer
so Prigozhin is definitely in bed with nazis but idk anything about his actual beliefs
Also the guy Nietzsche ghosted because he couldn’t stand his antisemitism.
…sorry random association the first existentialist gets maligned all too often. “Talks about nihilism and how it needs to be overcome == nihilist”, yeah sure.
I spam redsails but it’s such a convenient site. I read The Gay Science as one of my first philosophy books, but I completely turned around because of Losurdo
The antimodernism thing is like the least charitable take one can have on Nietzsche but at least it’s not one that’s based on his sister’s stuff.
Some quick thoughts:
His stance on democracy has to be understood in the context of its days, much less developed than now, and in the Kaiserreich also very much class-based, ruled more by mass psychology than consideration of what actually good politics would be – on both sides, though I won’t deny that the nobles and bourgeois of course needed their wings clipped. At the same time he’s very much an elitist in the sense of, erm, personal improvement, sees the need for the individual to transcend the forces acting around them and develop their own path as sublation of everything, contrast that with the political forces in parliament being not even close to that but simple thesis-antithesis with no sign of actually starting to go beyond that and you have an easy case for “Nietzsche simply didn’t believe in the process democracy”.
To all this he prefers “hierarchy” [Rangordnung]
Is that really the term Anglos use as a translation. “ranking” or even “precedence” might’ve been a better choice. Honestly just translate it literally: “Rank order”. In any case and I won’t dwell on it: Nietzsche always describes these rank relations as in flux, not set in stone, and makes fun of tying it to inheritance. I don’t see him at odds with Bakunin, here, who will readily bow to the authority of the bootmaker.
At the same time he warned of the dangers of not having such a thing, of insisting on some moral-metaphysical notion of inviolable human equality, and we just recently had the opportunity to see that kind of thing in action: I’m speaking of the masses of people unwilling to bow to the authority of virologists and epidemiologists, going “nu-uh I did my own research”, meaning they read some bullshit blog somewhere. Nietzsche himself might’ve rather thought about the Jacobine terror and stuff.
Overall, when reading Nietzsche I recommend starting with Thus spake Zahatrustra, as a work of philosophical mysticism, get to grips with what it means for the individual mind, and interpret the rest in that light, and specifically consider whether he might not have framed a lot of things very differently had he witnessed Nazi Germany.
A parallel which comes to mind here is Plato, who likely would be similarly at odds with the modern scientific method as Nietzsche is with the democratic process, stressing the importance of intuition as to not de-humanise the process: Are we, as peoples, really engaging in democracy, or do we let a system of mass psychology rule us?
Lastly, my psychological armchair: Was he someone who often felt alone in a crowd? Yeah, probably. Clowns to the left, jokers to the right.
One more point here, made clearly by Marx, is that understanding how systems shape humans both as individuals and as a society is not de-humanising, it’s possibly the most humanising something can be. To be human is to be shaped entirely by your environment and your reactions to it simultaneously, and mass psychology is how we come to have anything remotely psychological to be. It’s finding how to live as both a human individual and a human who partakes in, creates, or grows away from mass psychologies. This misunderstanding is exactly Nietzsche hate for the masses. He attempted to understand HIMSELF as not human in this way and create a philosophy around it, while he himself was calling back to individual, anti-change philosophies from the Greeks who did the same (Plato as opposed to Aristotle)
is that understanding how systems shape humans both as individuals and as a society is not de-humanising, it’s possibly the most humanising something can be.
Yes but no. It’s dangerous territory, promising both great rewards yet also containing fatal traps: The problem is reducing our own understanding and with that perception of the world to our intellectual understanding. To paint a caricature: When you start to measure mouth angles to figure out whether someone’s happy instead of relying on your mirror neurons (“subjective interpretation”, cry the Skinnerites). Psychology itself is a very good example here, they legitimately did have to make studies to prove that mood and posture are connected because there were just too many sceptics around with their heads up in their theories, disconnected from their own humanity, their perception of reality having become limited to those theories, not unwilling but unable to see things that don’t come with a p value. And that’s within psychology itself have a good guess how it’s in other disciplines. Not really that relevant in say mathematics, but in economics? As said: Fatal.
Evolution already gave us tools to understand the world. Sure, it also enabled us with rationality, the capacity for science, but to deny that natural understanding is just as bad as shutting off our rationality, it alienates ourselves from our own nature with contains both, in both cases we’re incomplete. And for the record: It also provided us with the capacity to mistake social conditioning for actual intuition.
And yes this all is very much the crisis of the millennium but OTOH you shouldn’t worry too much evolution already seems to have accounted for it: Skinnerites tend to be unfuckable. That’s because they’re alienated from their own nature, and that makes you ugly.
To be human is to be shaped entirely by your environment and your reactions to it simultaneously, and mass psychology is how we come to have anything remotely psychological to be.
There’s variance in human psychology that makes individual either more or less prone to move with the flock, or look at it critically, it’s a necessary condition for societies to be even half-way functional: With only pure flock swimmers we’d be blindly following each other down cliffs, with only pure critics we’d not be a social species in the first place. And a society made of solely flock swimmers would not develop a critical understanding of psychology in the first place. And when I say “variance” here I very much mean nature, not nurture, nurture in this instance only comes into play if the nature happens to be ambivalent.
Only replying to the first paragraph: you’re doing the exact thing I’m describing by defining “intellectual” in an individualized way (you say our, but you’re defining it as each individual, not understanding its basis in the collective).
I’m not gonna talk any more because you’re not really saying much interesting. You’re just defining everything as opposites and not seeing the dialectic between it, but then we’re getting to an ages old argument that just results in me saying ‘read Hegel’ and that’s it
you’re doing the exact thing I’m describing by defining “intellectual” in an individualized way
Collective understanding is a composite of individual understandings. How the fuck can you make this a contradiction. If (a sufficient number of) individuals make that mistake, then so does the collective. If the collective makes that mistake, then necessarily so do individuals – or, if they don’t, get burned at the stake or banished or ignored or whatever, metaphorically or literally.
read Hegel
I’m not a Hegelian. My theoretical scaffold is generally cybernetics. If you hear me use the term Aufhebung then only because people don’t know WTF a metasystem transition is.
I’m not sure what your intention is with this comment if I’m being honest but it just seems like a broad defense of Nietzsche based in misunderstanding the claims of Losurdo, honestly. Nietzsches obsession with the individual in that way and unwillingness to accept change outside of growing toward his übermensch are a basis for the most anti-communist philosophy.
If I’m honest, I just doubt you’ve really read Nietzsche as deeply as Losurdo
Oh I certainly haven’t read him as deeply as a Nietzsche scholar. OTOH your favourite Nietzsche scholar also isn’t the sole authority on Nietzsche. All I’m saying is that I don’t share Losurdo’s interpretation there.
As to anti-communist – why would I care, I’m an Anarchist. And yes Kerry Thornley definitely had a point when he said:
[…] Universal Enlightenment [is] a prerequisite to abolition of the State, after which the State will inevitably vanish. Or — that failing — nobody will give a damn.
This is because a stateless society cannot be built on anything but grassroots. And for those grassroots to support proper societal homeostasis, to not degenerate into or be co-opted by reactionary forces, we need a decent percentage of Übermenschen, people who can analyse the material conditions beyond good and evil, beyond master and slave morals, and share that understanding. Let’s say at least one in twenty so that everyone knows one, personally, face to face. Ideally, everyone, but I doubt that’ll ever be the case because division of labour.
As to anti-communist – why would I care, I’m an Anarchist.
Lol. Lmao, even.
I’d think you’d care for practical reasons, at least. Has there ever been an instance of severe persecution of communists without lumping in anarchists as well? I’m seriously asking; I just know that the Red Scare targeted anarchists just as much as communists, but idk if that changed at all over the course of the century.
I’d think that in the practical sphere it’s irrelevant what a philosopher says as there’s always going to be, say, a sister, which will bend the philosophy to whatever opinion the anti-intellectuals in charge like to hear.
The solution is to have a populace informed enough to not put such people in charge.
As to our own Red Scare over here: Yes the Radikalenerlass also targeted Anarchists but it was abolished before I started shool, or the GDR collapsed. What gets you in trouble nowadays is (as the constitution intended from the start) trying to undermine the free and democratic basic order and I don’t do that. I want to radically expand it, in a Kantean sense my politics are those which make it a natural law, see homeostasis.
The neopagan religion stuff (which is a pretty good signifier of neo-nazi ideology) and Wagner stuff does not come from the photo. There is evidence that he is a Nazi that has nothing to do with the photo. Idk, I feel pretty confident saying he’s a Nazi.
alright so I traced the neopagan thing back to its source, and it looks like it ultimately came from Radio Free Europe, an interview with a Wagner commander. Obviously not everything that RFE publishes is false, but it’s not really my favorite source to rest my claims on. It seems like all other reporting on Utkin being a neopagan comes from there. If you want to take a look, here (it’s archived).
I think the neo-Nazi stuff rests on more solid ground though
In that same report, Bellingcat includes a statement which confirms that the famous Dmitry Utkin who’s been tied to Russian mercenary activity is not the same Utkin whose (supposed) Nazi tattoo photo has been widely shared by pro-NATO propagandists on social media. Bellingcat states about Prigozhin’s catering company Concord, whose CEO’s name was also Dmitry Utkin: “the Dmitry Valeryevich Utkin in fact appointed as CEO was not the Wagner Group commander. In fact, this Dmitry Utkin was created just a month earlier – through a legal name change (permissible in Russia) of a little-known St. Petersburg resident, eighteen years younger than the original Utkin and having only three months of prior management experience running his own startup company: Alexey Karnaukhov.” Karnaukhov is the alleged neo-Nazi who these propagandists claim is a mercenary commander. In reality, he’s nothing more than a business partner of Prigozhin, a business partner whose role is wholly detached from mercenary activities. And because he looks vaguely similar to the shirtless, scowling man with Nazi tattoos on his shoulders who’s appeared in a viral photo, the Ukrainian disinformation agents have falsely claimed he’s the same person as this man.
Are you sure? Never heard that before.
Dmitry Utkin (who was also on the plane) is definitely a nazi, and Wagner has a lot of links to far-right elements in Russia. Wagner itself is supposed to reference Richard Wagner, Hitler’s favorite composer
so Prigozhin is definitely in bed with nazis but idk anything about his actual beliefs
Also the guy Nietzsche ghosted because he couldn’t stand his antisemitism.
…sorry random association the first existentialist gets maligned all too often. “Talks about nihilism and how it needs to be overcome == nihilist”, yeah sure.
https://redsails.org/kriegsideologie/ https://redsails.org/losurdo-und-telepolis/
I spam redsails but it’s such a convenient site. I read The Gay Science as one of my first philosophy books, but I completely turned around because of Losurdo
The antimodernism thing is like the least charitable take one can have on Nietzsche but at least it’s not one that’s based on his sister’s stuff.
Some quick thoughts:
His stance on democracy has to be understood in the context of its days, much less developed than now, and in the Kaiserreich also very much class-based, ruled more by mass psychology than consideration of what actually good politics would be – on both sides, though I won’t deny that the nobles and bourgeois of course needed their wings clipped. At the same time he’s very much an elitist in the sense of, erm, personal improvement, sees the need for the individual to transcend the forces acting around them and develop their own path as sublation of everything, contrast that with the political forces in parliament being not even close to that but simple thesis-antithesis with no sign of actually starting to go beyond that and you have an easy case for “Nietzsche simply didn’t believe in the process democracy”.
Is that really the term Anglos use as a translation. “ranking” or even “precedence” might’ve been a better choice. Honestly just translate it literally: “Rank order”. In any case and I won’t dwell on it: Nietzsche always describes these rank relations as in flux, not set in stone, and makes fun of tying it to inheritance. I don’t see him at odds with Bakunin, here, who will readily bow to the authority of the bootmaker.
At the same time he warned of the dangers of not having such a thing, of insisting on some moral-metaphysical notion of inviolable human equality, and we just recently had the opportunity to see that kind of thing in action: I’m speaking of the masses of people unwilling to bow to the authority of virologists and epidemiologists, going “nu-uh I did my own research”, meaning they read some bullshit blog somewhere. Nietzsche himself might’ve rather thought about the Jacobine terror and stuff.
Overall, when reading Nietzsche I recommend starting with Thus spake Zahatrustra, as a work of philosophical mysticism, get to grips with what it means for the individual mind, and interpret the rest in that light, and specifically consider whether he might not have framed a lot of things very differently had he witnessed Nazi Germany.
A parallel which comes to mind here is Plato, who likely would be similarly at odds with the modern scientific method as Nietzsche is with the democratic process, stressing the importance of intuition as to not de-humanise the process: Are we, as peoples, really engaging in democracy, or do we let a system of mass psychology rule us?
Lastly, my psychological armchair: Was he someone who often felt alone in a crowd? Yeah, probably. Clowns to the left, jokers to the right.
One more point here, made clearly by Marx, is that understanding how systems shape humans both as individuals and as a society is not de-humanising, it’s possibly the most humanising something can be. To be human is to be shaped entirely by your environment and your reactions to it simultaneously, and mass psychology is how we come to have anything remotely psychological to be. It’s finding how to live as both a human individual and a human who partakes in, creates, or grows away from mass psychologies. This misunderstanding is exactly Nietzsche hate for the masses. He attempted to understand HIMSELF as not human in this way and create a philosophy around it, while he himself was calling back to individual, anti-change philosophies from the Greeks who did the same (Plato as opposed to Aristotle)
Yes but no. It’s dangerous territory, promising both great rewards yet also containing fatal traps: The problem is reducing our own understanding and with that perception of the world to our intellectual understanding. To paint a caricature: When you start to measure mouth angles to figure out whether someone’s happy instead of relying on your mirror neurons (“subjective interpretation”, cry the Skinnerites). Psychology itself is a very good example here, they legitimately did have to make studies to prove that mood and posture are connected because there were just too many sceptics around with their heads up in their theories, disconnected from their own humanity, their perception of reality having become limited to those theories, not unwilling but unable to see things that don’t come with a p value. And that’s within psychology itself have a good guess how it’s in other disciplines. Not really that relevant in say mathematics, but in economics? As said: Fatal.
Evolution already gave us tools to understand the world. Sure, it also enabled us with rationality, the capacity for science, but to deny that natural understanding is just as bad as shutting off our rationality, it alienates ourselves from our own nature with contains both, in both cases we’re incomplete. And for the record: It also provided us with the capacity to mistake social conditioning for actual intuition.
And yes this all is very much the crisis of the millennium but OTOH you shouldn’t worry too much evolution already seems to have accounted for it: Skinnerites tend to be unfuckable. That’s because they’re alienated from their own nature, and that makes you ugly.
There’s variance in human psychology that makes individual either more or less prone to move with the flock, or look at it critically, it’s a necessary condition for societies to be even half-way functional: With only pure flock swimmers we’d be blindly following each other down cliffs, with only pure critics we’d not be a social species in the first place. And a society made of solely flock swimmers would not develop a critical understanding of psychology in the first place. And when I say “variance” here I very much mean nature, not nurture, nurture in this instance only comes into play if the nature happens to be ambivalent.
Only replying to the first paragraph: you’re doing the exact thing I’m describing by defining “intellectual” in an individualized way (you say our, but you’re defining it as each individual, not understanding its basis in the collective).
I’m not gonna talk any more because you’re not really saying much interesting. You’re just defining everything as opposites and not seeing the dialectic between it, but then we’re getting to an ages old argument that just results in me saying ‘read Hegel’ and that’s it
Collective understanding is a composite of individual understandings. How the fuck can you make this a contradiction. If (a sufficient number of) individuals make that mistake, then so does the collective. If the collective makes that mistake, then necessarily so do individuals – or, if they don’t, get burned at the stake or banished or ignored or whatever, metaphorically or literally.
I’m not a Hegelian. My theoretical scaffold is generally cybernetics. If you hear me use the term Aufhebung then only because people don’t know WTF a metasystem transition is.
I’m not sure what your intention is with this comment if I’m being honest but it just seems like a broad defense of Nietzsche based in misunderstanding the claims of Losurdo, honestly. Nietzsches obsession with the individual in that way and unwillingness to accept change outside of growing toward his übermensch are a basis for the most anti-communist philosophy.
If I’m honest, I just doubt you’ve really read Nietzsche as deeply as Losurdo
Oh I certainly haven’t read him as deeply as a Nietzsche scholar. OTOH your favourite Nietzsche scholar also isn’t the sole authority on Nietzsche. All I’m saying is that I don’t share Losurdo’s interpretation there.
As to anti-communist – why would I care, I’m an Anarchist. And yes Kerry Thornley definitely had a point when he said:
This is because a stateless society cannot be built on anything but grassroots. And for those grassroots to support proper societal homeostasis, to not degenerate into or be co-opted by reactionary forces, we need a decent percentage of Übermenschen, people who can analyse the material conditions beyond good and evil, beyond master and slave morals, and share that understanding. Let’s say at least one in twenty so that everyone knows one, personally, face to face. Ideally, everyone, but I doubt that’ll ever be the case because division of labour.
Lol. Lmao, even.
I’d think you’d care for practical reasons, at least. Has there ever been an instance of severe persecution of communists without lumping in anarchists as well? I’m seriously asking; I just know that the Red Scare targeted anarchists just as much as communists, but idk if that changed at all over the course of the century.
I’d think that in the practical sphere it’s irrelevant what a philosopher says as there’s always going to be, say, a sister, which will bend the philosophy to whatever opinion the anti-intellectuals in charge like to hear.
The solution is to have a populace informed enough to not put such people in charge.
As to our own Red Scare over here: Yes the Radikalenerlass also targeted Anarchists but it was abolished before I started shool, or the GDR collapsed. What gets you in trouble nowadays is (as the constitution intended from the start) trying to undermine the free and democratic basic order and I don’t do that. I want to radically expand it, in a Kantean sense my politics are those which make it a natural law, see homeostasis.
You in bed with Nazis, you’re a Nazi. Don’t matter if you’re a true believer or just grifting.
The guy with nazi tatoos is not Dmitry Utkin, they don’t look like the same person.
everything I can find on Utkin says he was into Nazi and pagan shit, and that the name Wagner came from him
1: It’s based on one photo that doesn’t even look like him, this is how he really looks like, compare the 2 photos:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5c/Dmitry_Utkin_passport_photo_(cropped).jpg/220px-Dmitry_Utkin_passport_photo_(cropped).jpg
The neopagan religion stuff (which is a pretty good signifier of neo-nazi ideology) and Wagner stuff does not come from the photo. There is evidence that he is a Nazi that has nothing to do with the photo. Idk, I feel pretty confident saying he’s a Nazi.
If you could elaborate further on the neopagan stuff that isn’t from the photo that would be nice.
alright so I traced the neopagan thing back to its source, and it looks like it ultimately came from Radio Free Europe, an interview with a Wagner commander. Obviously not everything that RFE publishes is false, but it’s not really my favorite source to rest my claims on. It seems like all other reporting on Utkin being a neopagan comes from there. If you want to take a look, here (it’s archived).
I think the neo-Nazi stuff rests on more solid ground though
sry I meant neonazi stuff
Also this is from Rainer Shea https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2020/08/14/pmc-structure-exposed/
In that same report, Bellingcat includes a statement which confirms that the famous Dmitry Utkin who’s been tied to Russian mercenary activity is not the same Utkin whose (supposed) Nazi tattoo photo has been widely shared by pro-NATO propagandists on social media. Bellingcat states about Prigozhin’s catering company Concord, whose CEO’s name was also Dmitry Utkin: “the Dmitry Valeryevich Utkin in fact appointed as CEO was not the Wagner Group commander. In fact, this Dmitry Utkin was created just a month earlier – through a legal name change (permissible in Russia) of a little-known St. Petersburg resident, eighteen years younger than the original Utkin and having only three months of prior management experience running his own startup company: Alexey Karnaukhov.” Karnaukhov is the alleged neo-Nazi who these propagandists claim is a mercenary commander. In reality, he’s nothing more than a business partner of Prigozhin, a business partner whose role is wholly detached from mercenary activities. And because he looks vaguely similar to the shirtless, scowling man with Nazi tattoos on his shoulders who’s appeared in a viral photo, the Ukrainian disinformation agents have falsely claimed he’s the same person as this man.
Thug for hire is more like it. And now Wagner is exporting it to Africa, thugging it up for dictators, military or otherwise.