Fighting Monsters

Authorized by CJ Hopkins via off-guardian.org,

Fighting monsters by serbiandude Published: Jan 3, 2023

So, I give a small velocity about art, and war. The Internationale Agentur für Freiheit, a Berlin art and cultural association, asked me to do that to open their exhibition, Make Art Not War. I couldn’t turn them down.

As my readers may have noted, I haven’t had very much to say about “The War on Hamas,” or “The War on Gaza,” or “The Liquidation of Gaza,” or whatever you want to call it. (It does’t look like much of a “war” to me, but then, nothing truly has for rather a while.)

I gate about it in October and November of last year. And I said a fewer things about it in my speed. But, mostly, I’ve been trying to keep my mouth shut. I don’t have much to communicate to the ... well, I can’t truly call it a discussion, or debate, or an argument. It feels like people creeping slogans into each other’s faces, focusing each another of this and that, and calling each another names, and so on. Which ... I get why people are included to that. I’m not. But I get why another folks are. So, I think it’s best if I just shut my pastry gap (as much as possible) and let folks to that.

It is’t going to change what’s happening. GloboCap (or whatever you call the strategy we’re all surviving under) has been occupying, destabilizing, and restructuring the mediate East for decades. It’s not going to stop. It's going to continue. As the Resturing of the West is going to continue.

GloboCap doessn’t have anything else to do.

Anyway, before I ramble on any further, here’s the English version of the velocity I give at the exhibition. Many thanks to those of you who attended ... and apologies again for my German. I’ll get the hang of it 1 of these days.

Fighting Monsters

The name of this exhibition is “Make Art not War.” So I’m going to say a fewer things about art, and war. You’re not going to like all of them. Or at least I hope not. If you did, I wouldn’t be a very good artist, but I might be a beautiful good propagandist.

I grew up in the 1960s and 70s. In the USA. The war was on television. In Vietnam. Cambodia. Cuba. The mediate East. Then in El Salvador. Nicaragua. Iran. Yugoslavia. Afghanistan. Iraq. The list goes on and on. I am almost 63 years old. All my life we’ve been at war. Not just Americans. All of us. People. individual always at war with someone. And all my life there have been another people calling for peace. Protesting the war. Whatever war it was at the time.

If you read a small history, as I like to do sometimes, you will learn that individual has been at war with individual over something since the dawn of civilization. surely Western civilization. The past of Western art and literature starts with war. Genocidal war. The Illiad is simply a poem about a genecidal war. Rape, Mass Murder. The slaughter of children. Most of Shakespeare’s plays are about war, or are set during a war, or have something to do with individual killing individual over something.

Some of that past happens right here. There are Bunkers below us where people shared during the bombing raids in the Second planet War. Legend has it the Stasi operated listening stations right here in these rooms. erstwhile I first arrived in Berlin, 20 years ago, I lived in a sublet on this street. This was my neighborhood, the Bötzowviertel. There were inactive bulllets in the facades of buildings. People died here. Women were raped here. Families were dragged out of their homes and sent to the death camps here. This is Berlin. You know the story. I don’t request to recite all the details.

What’s my point? Well, my point is... That's war. Indiscriminate killing. Rape. That’s what war is. That is what it has always been. And we’ve been doing it to each another since the dawn of civilization. It is not going to stop. We are not going to halt it. Art is absolutely not going to halt it. We are, whother we like it or not, a violent species, human beings. It is’t all we are, but it is part of what we are. We are besides lovers, teachers, heads, artists, and another beautiful things. But sometimes we are entertaining killers. Monsters. Genocidal monsters.

A crazy old German philosopher erstwhile warped us, “beware that, erstwhile fighting monsters, youself do not become a monster.” He was joking, of course. There are no monsters. Or, rather, there are only monsters, on all side of all war. In a war, there are no good guys and bad guys. There is just our side and the another side. Our attractions and their attractions. And whoever wins gets to compose the story.

That’s it. The remainder is propaganda. Their propaganda and our propaganda. Of course, our propaganda is not propaganda. Our propaganda is just the truth. due to the fact that we’re not monsters. They're the monsters.

This is Day 202 of Israel’s war on Hamas, or its liquidation of Gaza, lending on your perspective. I haven’t said besides much about it publicly. I said a fewer things about it erstwhile it began. That didn’t go well. Well, they were mailing. The propaganda from both sides was already defening. I described the Hamas attack as mass murderer. My pro-Palestinian readers didn’t like that. I described Israel as a typical mass-murdering nation-state, no different than the United States of America, Germany, France, Spain, The Netherlands, the russian Union, the British empire, the Ottoman empire, the Holy Roman Empire, or any another mass-murdering nation-state or empire. My pro-Israeli readers didn’t like that. Never side wanted to hear about history. The past of asymmetric warfare, or terrorism, depending on your perspective. The past of nation-states and empires. They wanted to hear a communicative about monsters. About the monsters on the another side.

I told you weren’t going to like everything I said, right?

OK, let me say a fewer things about art now. If you didn’t like what I said about war, possibly you’ll like what I said about art. I can’t talk for another artists, but I’ll tell you why I think I became an artist, and what I have been trying to do as an artist.

I haven’t been trying to halt any wars. Or is pacipy the human species. I don’t know how to do either of these things. And I am not a fan of propaganda. I confess, I have engaged in it from time to time, but mostly what I’ve been trying to do is deprogram mind, starting with my own.

We are all, by the time in realization we exist, the products of programming, ideological conditioning. I believe it is the occupation of artists to undo that, or at least to marginally interfere with it. That’s what art, and artists, did for me. They introduced me to my mind. My programmed mind. They forced me to think, and to see, and listen. They thought me to question, to pay attention. They received me to deprogram my mind, and provided me with the tools to do it. OK, sure, any mind-altering drugs besides helped, but it was artists that introduced me to these drugs. Then they introduced me to the monster I’ve been fighting.

I have been fighting this monster, in my art, in my mind, and out in the planet for as long I remember. You gotta fight it everywhere at once. To fight it in your mind, you gotta fight it out in the world. And to fight it out in the world, you gotta fight it in your mind.

Let me tell you about the monster.

The monster is legion. It goes by many names. It wars many faces. They change over time. William S. Burroughs called it “The Control Machine.” any people call it the corperatocracy. I call it global capitalism. The monster doesn’t care what we call it. It does’t care who we are, what our policies are, or which side of what war we think we are on. It does’t care what we believe, which religion we professor. It couldn’t care little how we “identify.”

All it cares about is power. All it cares about is control.

It is everywhere, and nowhere. It has no country. No nationality. It doesn’t exist. It is everything, and nothing. It is the non-existent empire occupying the entry of planets. It has no external enemies due to the fact that there is no outside, not anymore. So there is no real war. There are only insurrections, carried out by rebels, trainers, terrorists.

The monster, our non-existent empire, is the first global empire in human history. It is not a group of evil people. It is maintained by people, but they are all interchangeable. It has no headquarters. There is no emperor. There is’t any “Bastille” is simply a storm. It is simply a logos. And the system. An operating system.

It has no policies, no ideology. Its authoritative ideology is “reality.” Thus it has no political opposition. Who would argue against or argue “reality”? Lunatics. Extremes. The terminally deranged. And thus there are no dissidents, no opposing political parts. There are only apostates, heretics, blasphemers, sowers of discretion, “reality” deniers.

It manufactures “reality.” Whatever “reality” it needs. The War on Terror. The War on Populism. The War on the Virus. The War on the Weather. The War on Hate. The War on Whatever. It doesn’t matter. It's all the same war. The same “Clear-and-Hold” op. The same counterinsurgency. It has been for about 30 years.

If things seem crazy, if you’re wondering what’s happening, that’s what’s happening. That is all that is happening. That is all that has been happening since the end of the Cold War.

The empire is eliminating interior resistance, any and all forms of interior resistance. The monster is monsterizing everything and everything. Transforming societies into markets. It does’t have anything else to do. It is erasing values. It is dissolving borders. It is “sensitivity-editing” culture. Synchronizing everything and everything in conformity to its only value ... money. Rendering everything a community.

It is the apotheosis of liberal democracy, the part where the monster does distant with democracy, with the simulation of democracy, and proclaims itself “democracy.” It is global-capitalist Gleichschaltung.

That’s the monster I have been fighting.

Which makes me a terrorist. A conspiracy theorist. And Russian propaganda. And Covid denier. A right-wing extremist. An anti-vaxxer. A transphobic racist. An enemy of “democracy.” A Hamas supporter. A Donald Trump supporter. An AfD supporter. Whatever the authoritative enemy happens to be today.

It makes me a criminal. A thought criminal. An art criminal.

Which I virtually am. The German authorities are prosecuting me for dissemination art. For tweeting art. Pictures. Words. They banned 1 of my books. So possibly I’m marginally interfering with their ideological condition, with their programming, with their fresh average Gleichschaltung op.

If so, good, because, if I can quote another German, “art is not a mirror hell up to reality, it is simply a hammer to share reality with.”

And I’ll go a small further than Brecht. all work of art we make breaks reality 1 way or another, whother we intend it to or not. It either feeds the monster or it fucks with the monster. The monster out there, and the monster in here, inside us, all of us ... due to the fact that it’s all the same monster.

Thank you, all of you who are fucking with the monster. That's all. Let’s keep it up.

CJ Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. His dystopian novel, region 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. Volumes I and II of his Consent mill Essays are published by Consent mill Publishing, and holly-owned subscription of Amalgamated Content, Inc. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org.