At the end of the day I know I am really just a dude who works at a fucking grocery store. I think that’s why I feel insane most days to exist in a world with so many contradictions and hypocrisy to the ideals and orders that we are raised to kind of accept without any question whatsoever. Part of me feels pretty lucky that I never pursued a degree at a college that probably spends more money on amenities and sports teams than developing an actual academic program. At a younger age I wouldn’t have considered what monied interests whether religious or socio-economic shape said academic program to build good soldiers for corporate America either. This isn’t even to get into these institutions of higher education which are now run as for-profit businesses that like most businesses in America exist to centralize capital for investment. Every organization in this country exists as a body of investment and as it turns out since October 7th of 2023 a lot of young people in America found out how much of their school’s investment is sent to Israel. I personally think schools should be schools and Mcdonalds should be hamburger but in a globalized economy they both land both feet firmly in a discussion of ethnic cleansing. I feel pretty self-satisfied that these schools never got my money even if Mcdonalds gets it from time to time in exchange for mcnugget. The self-satisfaction also is heavily derived from this inkling I have always had that I personally, am a fucking moron and I know I could have been very susceptible to being tricked about the way the world is. I will take my 20 years on the floor of a grocery store to give me an education in class consciousness that I don’t know I would have gotten otherwise.
I spent a lot of my life absorbed in trying to hit the road in whatever band I was in. Minimizing the amount of money it would take to keep me alive so I could pour every dollar and cent extra into hardcore because it was the only thing that pushed the overall discomfort I have being alive to my periphery. As adulthood set in and work has consumed more and more of my time, the void for understanding that used to be filled with road trips and stagedives, was being left vacant for longer and longer periods of time. It took some time but this eventually lead to me doing something that in my early twenties I shuddered to imagine. I started fucking reading. Until that point in my life I had read in full 3 books. I had read an Elmore Leonard novel my dad gave me after we watched Jackie Brown together and for some reason I read Jurassic Park and the Autobiography of Malcolm X a couple times each. Pretty fucking stupid that of the 3 books I’d read I read a couple of them multiple times instead of reading SOMETHING ELSE. But at that time I thought reading was fucking boring. In the past few years I have read like 20+ books and aside from Animal Farm most of them have not been easy books, one of the first books I started in with was Peter Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread and for anyone who tackled that bear, well fucking done.
I felt the need to explain all of this to level with anyone reading this crap that I don’t think I am a genius, far fucking from it, I am really just a guy who works at a grocery store and I play in a few stupid bands. But saying that means that if I have the capacity for this comprehension then most of you do too along with your friends and family. And with everything going on right now I wanted to suggest a book I read a few months ago. I bought it over a year ago and it sat dormant waiting for me to open it. After the election of Trump and after seeing a lot of upheaval around the world with many incumbent parties, right and left, being ditched for the alternative, I felt like it was time to start this book that I knew wouldn’t be necessarily a fun read, I opened up my copy of The Jakarta Method.
We are witnessing a crackdown on free speech in this country with what has happened to the likes of Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Yunseo Chung and various others being snatched up which should chill everyone in this country. And that is the point, it is to chill dissent. Suppression of speech is something we are all raised to associate with Communist countries that act backwardly, godless heathens who hate freedom. I do not defend the suppression of speech under the likes of Stalin or the CCP but the fact that I feel the need to say that, much like you must condemn Hamas to advocate for Palestinian freedom is again the whole point. We are brain broken and this book does an excellent example of explaining the events that brought about this global chilling of dissent. The ability to contextualize things is a strong suit that I think punk and hardcore possess that is so absent in most subcultures because this thing is meant to be a counter culture. The punk movement replaced the hippie movement and though it has become commodified and industrialized like anything else by American culture, I don’t think any other mobilizing force has retained the resilience to co-optation or resistance to bad actors ability to astroturf. We certainly see plenty of things that may well be “industry plants” but these things fall out of our purview swiftly because punks are a hereditarily observant bunch. I implore any of you interested in parallels between the events of today and the historical record to check out this book.
The author Vincent Bevins does an excellent job not just laying out the historical events that lead up to the state-sanctioned mass killings that took place in Indonesia during the cold war years, but also grounding them in the stories of people who lived through the events all around the world. He very expertly juxtaposes the events transpiring in that country with covert U.S. involvement to the open war we were waging in Vietnam at the same time. It gives a clear case that what we learned as a country is that we were not going to crush mass movements of liberation through the exercise of external force by occupying armies, we would need to engender that violence within the countries themselves by funding the most violent blood-thirsty and repressive forces and organizations that already existed. (often the existing militaries). He lays bare how the events in Indonesia directly inspired and provided a blueprint for anyone imagining to do the same to follow. He contextualizes national disgraces such as the School for the Americas that trained the Latin American death squads that terrorized hundreds of thousands throughout the 70’s and 80’s, as well as demonstrating the influence that the Chicago School of Economics under Milton Friedman had on justifying all of the violence that saturated that time. We just had to do it to em.
The book is a tough read and can at times feel pretty hopeless reading deathcamp level numbers of casualties, but I think absorbing this information is key to understanding that mass organized killing didn’t end with the Nazis in WWII. It continued on often with U.S. support or if not at the very least an assured wink and nod. I know I am a very “America bad” person but I went to a pretty rough middle school and learned very early on that “if you don’t start no shit there won’t be no shit” and I just wish we had more of that in our foreign policy. Our involvement in crushing democracy in our own country as well as others has seeded untold amounts of blowback on us and I would just like for more people to see what is happening right now with these deportations and follow it to its logical end. They start with the most vulnerable and will keep that energy on the next group until they are stopped. These are people you cannot give an inch to. The normalization of this will inspire vigilantes to act more than they already are. The Indonesian state couldn’t have killed a million people in a year without the help of everyday people willing to get in on the violence. I don’t know what the solutions are to any of this I just think it’s important to identify things that are happening and point them out. And talk about these things with people who might be afraid to admit how put off they are by all of this. Fear is something intrinsic to life but it is responsible for so much weakness in will. I think about that quote about the holocaust often and how most people leave off the first part.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
—Martin Niemöller
To deport some of these people to their nations of origin is to carry out a death sentence. To deport the next phase of dissidents would likely be a death sentence. To deport people born in this country would most likely be to a Salvadoran prison. These acts are not much different than shooting them and throwing them in a river yourself, but simply more evidence of America outsourcing jobs it doesn’t have the gall to carry out. I can’t wait to see what happens when the gig economy gets ahold of this.
-Tyler
“What will you do? When it happens to you?” - Restraining Order
Keep the book reviews and suggestions coming. Going to check Jakarta and Devils Chessboard out.
If you really wanna get in a “I wish these bastards all had one neck and I had my hands on it” mood, check out The Devil’s Chessboard by David Talbot