The master of upper-enchilada-level Tung Tung Tung Sahur wrote….
Infinite America
2,500 years of the USA
You really believe the United States of America is only 250 years old? You really think that? No way, man. That’s crazy. The real number—well, there’s what I can prove, which is that America is much older, ten times that, vastly ancient, falling deep into antiquity: two and a half thousand years old, easy. Everything you think you know is wrong. You believe in the Founding Fathers? You think little George Washington chopped down that cherry tree? Listen, the real George Washington lived thousands of years ago. His naked body was splattered with vermilion; his face was covered in tattoos of a giant serpent devouring the Sun. He presided over the Constitutional Convention as it worshipped a secret flame in a temple littered with human bones. You think the United States started on the East Coast and gradually spread westward? Not true. Totally fake. It began, if it began, right in the centre, the Mississippi valley, the heart of the continent; it’s a riverine civilisation, like Egypt or China. Over its long long history it expands and contracts, diastolic and systolic, like a heart; when it reaches outwards it brushes against the oceans and sometimes it can even cross to the opposite shores; when it draws in again, the fringes of the empire revert to barbarism. It’s been doing that for thousands of years. Maybe more. America is two hundred and fifty thousand years old. Two and a half million years old, maybe. It’s always existed. It lives outside time.
I spent America’s alleged 250th birthday in Los Angeles. It’s amazing how little anyone seemed to care about the big number. Clearly the old myths are wearing thin. In 1976, the whole nation entered a patriotic frenzy to mark the alleged bicentennial. Everyone was donning a tricorn hat and breeches. Everyone toted a real working musket. Fat Chicagoans with Polish last names were strutting around in powdered wigs. People called Lopez and Hernandez were reenacting the crossing of the Delaware on the snakeweed-lined banks of the San Juan River. (Most of the events of the so-called eighteenth century are actually cultural memories of 1976.) The Queen and Prince Philip made a full state visit, and in every city they visited they had to allow themselves to be symbolically tried and executed for crimes against republicanism and liberty. They didn’t do anything like that this time round. In Washington DC they put up a sad little thicket of MAGA-themed paper tents made up to look like triumphal arches. A few dead-enders limped about in the heat. You could try to blame it on recent events. What’s to celebrate? The US just lost a war. But the celebrations in 1976 came barely a year after the last helicopters scattered out of Saigon, and that didn’t stop anyone. Even now, people still want to eat hot dogs about their country. On the night of the fourth, every city from one coast to the other was a sea of fireworks. It’s the other stuff no one cares about any more, the sad motheaten wigs, the white guys with wooden teeth, the quarter of a millennium, the eighteenth century. They don’t know why, exactly, but they can tell that it’s all bullshit, and their country is older and stranger than they’ve been told.
Just look, if you can, at Los Angeles. It’s nice here. The sun shines every day and the streets are all hung with magnolias and jacarandas, and if that ever gets boring you can just step onto one of LA’s many convenient city buses to encounter some of the most diseased people in the world. (On the 20 to Santa Monica: a man in rags two rows in front of me, scrolling on his phone; while fiddling with one of those blowtorch lighters in the shape of a pistol. Every fifteen seconds he would have a jerking spasm, press the gun against his head, and furiously click the trigger. Slight whiff of singed hair. All the videos on his feed were about the USS Liberty.) But after a few stops you can prance out and get a turmeric crush smoothie at Erewhon, named after Samuel Butler’s utopia in which people are punished as criminals for being ugly. I’ve been eating Mexican food. I’ve been eating Korean food. I’ve been eating Mexican-Korean fusion where you put the bulgogi in the taco. I’ve been firing a gun off the balcony of a Hollywood director’s son. Classic California stuff. Any small portion of Los Angeles can be very pleasant, as long as that’s all you can see, and most of the time it is. When you’re in that enormous basin, it’s just your cute little house, your cute little garden, your hydrangeas. Even from the elevated freeways the city appears as a zone of palm trees and Denny’s signs hanging like barrage balloons over the plains. But when you’re flying in to LAX you see the whole thing, all at once. I don’t know how people manage it.
Once you’ve seen LA from above, it’s obvious why nobody cared about the 250th. According to the myth, America was founded as a nation of yeoman farmers, prudent Anglos with buckles on their hats, reading Horace and Livy in their three-room houses, self-sufficient in wheat, rye, flax, wax, and lumber, guarding their homesteads and their liberty, urbanisation rate around 3.5%, fewer wage-labourers than outright slaves, with the two conditions generally held to be more or less the same thing. How on Earth could this have anything to do with the scenes outside your window? How could that rustic Jeffersonian fantasy have possibly created such a crystalline gigacity, hovering over the edge of reality? All these jobs and all this shopping: a society of total but invisible control, this impersonal grid that reaches deep down into the wet stuff of your brain and tugs you around by the desires. It’s not just the size of the place, although that is, obviously, terrifying: ten trillion neat bungalows slotted into ten trillion rectangular lots, stretching into Orange County and over the curvature of the Earth. What’s really unsettling about Los Angeles is how, from the air, it doesn’t really look like a city at all. That endless regular grid, with all those human bodies filed away; the bright specks shuttling along the avenues and onto the freeways: the sense of an enormous contraption, a massively complicated abacus with ordinary lives as its moving parts, flows of money and traffic and consumer goods and fame, zapping through logic gates, calculating—well, what? Once you’ve seen the city like that, it’s hard to be fully comfortable in whatever little bit of it you find yourself inhabiting. Here’s your nice house, here are your nice flowers, but you’re like Kelvin at the end of Solaris, living pleasantly on the surface of an alien star.
The crazy thing about America is that it’s running several of these machines. Southern California, but also South Florida, and Houston, and Chicagoland. Where did it come from, the society that could build these things? One strange thing you might have noticed about the traditional account is that it’s actually come to us twice, in two different versions. According to the dominant version, America begins with a small group of exiles carrying a deep but idiosyncratic Christian faith. They’re from England, but they’ve been exiled to the Netherlands; in 1620 they leave the Old World seeking freedom, set out on a westward journey across the Atlantic, and land at Plymouth Rock. Soon, these righteous pilgrims form a prosperous colony, in which their crops and livestock flourish, and they build great cities. Eventually they fight against a powerful leader from their homeland called George, with the struggle focusing on a sacred document called the Declaration of Independence. They defeat him, but soon afterwards it becomes clear that the new society is deeply divided against itself: half of it, called Dixie, has been stained by the evil of slavery, and a terrible war is fought between brothers. There’s a victory, but that doesn’t end things; in every generation there’s a constant political struggle between the righteous and unrighteous; secret societies (the Klan, Antifa, etc) try to destabilise the political order; in the end, inevitably, the whole thing will fall apart. But millions of Americans also believe in a separate version of the same story, called the Book of Mormon. America once again begins with a small group of exiles carrying a deep but idiosyncratic Christian faith—but this time the year is 600 BC and they’re from Jerusalem, exiled to somewhere on the Red Sea. They fight against a powerful leader from their homeland called Laban, with the struggle focusing on a sacred document called the Plates of Brass. They leave the Old World seeking freedom, set out on a westward journey across the Atlantic, and land in the Promised Land. Crops and livestock flourish, they build great cities, but the new society is deeply divided against itself: the Lamanites are stained by the evil of rebellion, and a terrible war is fought between brothers. In every generation there’s a constant political struggle between the righteous and unrighteous; a secret society called the Gadianton Robbers tries to destabilise the political order; in the end, inevitably, the whole thing falls apart.
What are we supposed to make of this? One approach is to argue that one of these stories is a corrupted, mythologised version, a kind of parasitic retelling of the other, which is more or less true. Since the Book of Mormon is dramatically older—collated from texts written over the course of a millennium, and engraved on metal plates around the year 400 AD—it makes sense that this would be the true version, and the Pilgrim Fathers and George Washington are just a garbled version of Lehi and Moroni. The problem is that the events of the ‘false’ narrative appear to be referenced in the Book of Mormon itself. (See 1 Nephi 13.) Clearly neither account is primary, and both versions descend from another myth that was already circulating in the Americas in the first millennium. In the intervening years the two streams have intermingled and influenced each other, until the idea of an eastern origin permeated the culture. And it’s true that there have been centuries of cross-Atlantic migrants seeking refuge in America. But when you think about it, it’s a bit credulous to assume that the old stories are true, and the entire country was actually founded by settlers from overseas.
To find the real history of America, you have to stop worrying about what people say about themselves, and start looking at how they actually live. Is there anything in the past of this country that looks like a prototype of Miami or LA? Well, yes, in fact, there is. A thousand years ago, North America was home to huge, sprawling cities; the largest of them was a site near modern-day St Louis that archaeologists call Cahokia. At its peak in the twelfth century, Cahokia may have been home to more than 40,000 people, significantly more than London or Paris. It still didn’t have as many people as the real population centres of the time, like Baghdad or Kaifeng, but Cahokia was physically large in a way totally unlike any other city on Earth. The great cities of Europe and Asia—and, for that matter, Mexico and Peru—were crammed tangles of alleys and tenements. Abbasid Baghdad had a population density of around 14,000 people per square kilometre; so did Tenochtitlan. (For comparison, that’s nearly a third denser than present-day New York City.) Cahokia was something entirely different. The ceremonial centre was an enormous plaza, overlooked by Monks Mound, a hundred-foot earthen mound, vaster than the Great Pyramid of Giza, crowned with two buildings, probably a royal palace and a temple. There were twenty or thirty more mounds ringing the square: maybe three million tons of soil dug out of the ground and piled up in baskets. This complex was surrounded by a wall five metres high and two miles long, made from twenty thousand enormous logs, and after that the real city began. A typical house in Cahokia had one room, maybe 180 square feet, with a thatched roof and walls made of saplings and reeds, but there were thousands of them. Beyond the ceremonial core the city sprawled in every direction: houses spread out in an immense grid, wide pathways within neighbourhoods, elevated causeways connecting them, here and there subsidiary ritual complexes, more temples, more palaces, more workshops and gardens, sweat lodges, astronomical henges, suburb after suburb, stretching into the far distance. We still don’t know exactly how extensive the place was; less than 1% of the site has been fully excavated. During construction of the I-270 freeway in 1978, the construction crew dug up the footprints of hundreds of undiscovered houses. Magnetometry is still discovering new sites miles and miles away from the monumental zone. With all this uncertainty it’s hard to get a precise figure, but Cahokia’s population density was probably around 500 to 1000 people per square kilometre, pretty much in the range between Los Angeles County and Miami-Dade. Something like this:
The other interesting discovery at Cahokia was the corpses. In 1967, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee team led by Melvin L Fowler discovered an elite burial at Mound 72. A man and a woman had been interred, atop a beautiful carpet of twenty thousand shell beads arranged in the shape of a bald eagle. At their feet were the remains of more than fifty young women, all under 25, all apparently strangled. Elsewhere at the site were mass graves of victims who died with their skulls caved in or sliced off, hack-marks in their bones, arrowheads in their ribs. Some of the skeletons had soil clenched in their hands: these sacrifices had been buried alive. A thousand years ago, there was something at the confluence of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Illinois rivers that looked exactly like the United States of America, and behaved exactly like the United States of America too.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to say much for certain about what the society that built Cahokia was really like. We have their mute material stuff; we know they sat at the centre of a trading zone that stretched from the Great Lakes to the Gulf Coast; we have their DNA, which tells us that the city was a cosmopolis, with its population drawn from every corner of North America. We know they played a game called chunkey—where you roll a disc across the ground and then try to throw a spear at it such that it lands very close to the disc but doesn’t actually hit it—because we keep digging up chunkey discs. A lot of them were decorated with what look like underworld motifs, or man-headed eagles clutching a sheaf of arrows. This seems like something that might be important, but we can only guess what it meant. We can’t ask how they saw the world, because these people left no writing, and not long after the zenith of Cahokia the entire society collapsed in spectacular fashion and for totally mysterious reasons. The site was totally abandoned; for centuries the fertile flood plains where it stood were a desolate place, religiously avoided by whatever survivors still haunted the woods, until eventually everyone forgot that the mounds were anything other than hills.
Almost everyone, anyway. One offshoot of the Mound Builder culture that produced Cahokia did survive long enough to have been described by European explorers. They were called the Natchez, and they lived five hundred miles downriver in what’s now southern Mississippi. In 1682 they were visited by René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle as he was attempting to claim the entire American interior for France. Like a lot of the Europeans that followed him, La Salle found the Natchez strangely charismatic: they were a tiny, measly, impoverished tribe, a few thousand people at most, but they were ruled with a kind of despotic grandeur. Their poky villages were arranged around two tall earthen mounds, and on top of those mounds the Great Sun lived and tended the eternal fire in his temple. The Great Sun was a filthy savage covered in tattoos, eagles and serpents, with a ridiculous crown of eagle feathers on his head, but to the Natchez he was literally the Sun, the living embodiment of the Sun on Earth. Natchez were forbidden from looking directly at either his earthly or celestial body; whenever he appeared they wailed and bowed their heads. The Great Sun had the power to kill anyone he wanted, or seize anyone’s property at any time; when he died dozens of his followers would be killed with him, and then all their bones would be strewn around the temple fire, which was also a fragment of the Sun. (The Natchez were convinced that if the fire ever went out, the world would be destroyed.) The other tribes La Salle had encountered were egalitarian woodland bands, but the France he’d left was also governed by a sun-king; this one was called Louis XIV. The Natchez must have seemed like God’s parody of home.
But in fact, the ethnographic corpus on the Natchez describes a very strange society. Their language is an isolate, unrelated to any other known Native American language, or any other language on the planet. Their social setup similarly resembles nothing else in human history, with the sole exception of the present-day United States of America. See, for instance, their class system. They had a strict hierarchy: the Suns, or the royal household, were at the top, followed by nobles, honoured people (a caste of warriors, bureaucrats, and executioners), and finally the foul-smelling ones or stinkards, which is how the Natchez described the commoners who made up nine-tenths of their own population. This is, historically, fairly common; the strange thing is that these noble castes were strictly exogamous. Suns and nobles could not marry other suns and nobles; they had to marry stinkards. What’s more, Natchez society was matrilineal. The children of a noble woman would keep their mother’s status; the children of a noble man would lose one rank per generation. When a noble woman married a common man, the husband would usually become a kind of domestic servant, generally abused and humiliated by a wife who was more or less free to go out and fuck whoever she wanted. We have marriage to guarantee paternity, but for the Natchez paternity wasn’t particularly important; their institution of marriage was extremely weak. Meanwhile, when the Great Sun died, his heir wouldn’t be any of his own children, but his oldest sister’s son. For all his infinite power, the male-line great-grandchildren of the Great Sun would be ordinary stinkards.
What Natchez society produced is a historically unprecedented level of class mobility. The hierarchy is very present, and extremely brutal, but over time the entire society is drawn gradually upwards. This is what anthropologists have called the Natchez Paradox. The children of noble women and stinkard men are all automatically nobles, while the children of the opposite pairing only decline one step per generation, which means there are always more stinkards climbing up the class ladder than there are nobles descending. Game this out for a dozen generations or so and soon there are more nobles than stinkards. A large and growing number of nobles are left with no one they can legally marry. This seems impossible, which is why in 1971 White, Murdock, and Scaglion successfully solved the paradox by replacing the Natchez social system as described by everyone who actually encountered it with another that made more mathematical sense. But there is another solution. The paradox stops being a paradox if Natchez society keeps constantly integrating immigrants at the stinkard level.
According to the Natchez themselves, the reason for this bizarre system was to prevent incest. Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz lived among the Natchez in the 1720s; they told him a story in which the first Suns, ‘being brothers and sisters, were unable to intermarry without committing a crime, and it was necessary in order to have descendants that they marry stinkard men and stinkard women.’ If you know anything about psychology you’ll know what’s really going on here. The omnipotent Great Sun could, if he wanted, ensure that his own children would succeed him; all he has to do is fuck his sister. The system that’s supposed to prevent incest actually makes incest incredibly tempting. In the rest of the world, the great structuring incest-fantasy is parental, Oedipal; only the Natchez are obsessed with brother-sister incest instead. According to Freud’s myth in Totem and Taboo, this shouldn’t be possible. Society begins as a horde of apelike creatures, in which the great patriarch has unlimited sexual access to the women of the family, while his sullen, brooding sons don’t get anything at all. Eventually the jealous sons band together to kill their father. ‘Of course these cannibalistic savages ate their victim. This violent primal father had surely been the envied and feared model for each of the brothers. Now they accomplished their identification with him by devouring him and each acquired a part of his strength.’ As soon as they do, though, they’re wracked by a sudden terrible guilt. It’s suddenly impossible for them to start sharing out the father’s harem. In the end the brute selfish prohibition of the primordial father becomes the superego’s first ethical command: NO SEX WITH YOUR OWN FAMILY. The patriarchy is born.
But Freud had, in fact, encountered a society that functioned very differently. After his visits to America, he started describing it as a society of brothers, a society without the hereditary male line of kings, without the father, without the paternal principle at all. Somehow, in America, things got suspended in that moment of triumph when the brothers eat the corpse of their father, before they knew how to feel guilt. Europeans live in an Oedipal world of structures and prohibitions, a long-settled order that you can slot yourself into by fucking your mother. Not Americans. America is a world of dangers and possibilities that you explore by fucking your sister. Haven’t you seen the porn they make over here? What are you doing, stepbro, now you’re liberated from all patriarchal bonds? This is what it means when they talk about Liberty and the Rights of Man; it’s all code for sisterfucking. It doesn’t have anything to do with personal independence; you’re still stuck in a hive-like hierarchy, subject to the terrifying power of the Great Sun, but your incestuous fantasy is arranged horizontally instead of vertically. And that really is a kind of freedom; maybe the only kind to ever really exist.
One last interesting thing about the Natchez. During his time with them, du Pratz asked his hosts where they’d originally come from. They pointed, and told him that ‘before we came into this land we lived yonder under the Sun.’ They thought they came from somewhere far away, over the distant oceans to the East: of course they did; they were religiously obsessed with the Sun, and the land over the eastern horizon is where the Sun travels from every morning.
Actually, one more. In the Natchez language, the first Great Sun’s title is uwahšiL, pronounced oo-wah-shee-hl. According to the mythic origin of the United States, it was founded by a man called Washington.
What really happened in 1776? Probably nothing at all. The present-day United States had to come from somewhere, but I don’t think it emerged directly out of the Natchez. It can’t have; they were all wiped out. In 1729 they attacked a French trading post at Fort Rosalie, killed all the men and abducted all the women. The French liked the Natchez, but they didn’t like them that much. In response, they wiped out an entirely different tribe, the Chaoacha, who had absolutely nothing to do with the revolt, and then moved along the river, destroying every Natchez village they found. The Great Sun and his sisters were sold into slavery in the sugar plantations. Whoever survived fled north; the last heirs of Cahokia assimilated into the Muskogee. (Chateaubriand wrote an enormous prose epic about the Natchez, in which the total destruction of their society is dealt with in a few brief paragraphs right at the end. ‘Une nuit les Natchez déterrèrent les os de leurs pères, les chargèrent sur leurs épaules, et ils prirent la route du désert sans savoir où ils trouveraient un asile.’) The USA must have come out of somewhere else.
Most likely, the Natchez were just an offshoot, and the Mound Builders just an offshoot, of a culture that has always existed on this continent. For a while it was disorganised, and there were Frenchmen and Spaniards running around in North America, and later it formed a state, and the same Europeans turned into desperate immigrants. This pattern’s been going for a while. Before Cahokia there was the Hopewell Interaction Sphere, a continent-spanning cultural nexus that raised earthen mounds across Ohio, and strangely spread-out cities around them. Before Hopewell there were the people who built Poverty Point, an enormous monumental earthworks constructed in Louisiana around 1700 BC, the same time as the golden age of Knossos and Babylon. We know almost nothing about the Poverty Point people, but I can guess. Their language was unrelated to any other Native American language. They had a highly stratified class society with a bizarrely high degree of social mobility, exceptionally weak marriage bonds, no Oedipus complex, and a kinship system that ought to be mathematically impossible. They deployed eagle or birdman imagery. They were hungry for immigrants, a constant flow of warm bodies to keep all the moving parts in their society moving. They believed they came from a distant land under the sunrise. They lived in wide, dispersed settlements. They practised human sacrifice. They were Americans.
We know America has always been there, because the people of the Old World knew about it. Long before the alleged voyage of Columbus, Europeans were telling stories about the land of sexual freedom and material plenty that lay across the western ocean. All cranks inevitably mention Atlantis, but surely it’s significant that Plato described a place beyond the Pillars of Hercules, with mountainous coasts and a broad central plain, perfectly square fields, a wealth of rare minerals, ruled by a highly advanced empire—and that place turned out to actually exist, exactly as described. (One fun detail: in the Critias, Plato says that the Atlanteans were born from Poseidon and a mortal woman called Cleito. To keep Cleito safe, the god ‘enclosed the hill in which she dwelt all round, making alternate zones of sea and land, encircling one another; there were two of land and three of water, which he turned as with a lathe.’ There is only one such island on a lake on an island on a lake on an island on a lake, anywhere in the world, and it’s in North America. It was discovered in 2012 by people clicking about on Google Maps.)
But obviously Atlantis isn’t the only memory. The Irish knew about the enchanted land of Uí Bhreasail or Hy-Brasil, a paradise of youth and plenty hidden in the misty seas to the west. Across Europe, peasants dreamed of the Land of Cockaigne, where the weather is always wonderful, ready-roasted pigs trot around with knives in their backs for easy carving, nuns bathe naked in rivers of booze, and any man can sleep with a different woman every week. This place is real. Go to the hot food bar at Erewhon, stumble around half-paying attention, looking at your phone, swiping on Feeld while gorgeous women in their athlunderwear mill about you unseen: the peasant paradise exists. Maybe all this easy fulfilment totally neuters desire, but no one ever promised it wouldn’t. You dreamed of a land where cooked geese would fly into your mouth, and now you can summon siu ngo on Doordash. It’s real. And where did the fourteenth-century poets say it was? ‘Fur in see bi west Spaynge/ Is a lond ihote Cokaygne…’
If the 1776 narrative refers to anything, it’s probably a few minor skirmishes with the European kingdoms, bolted onto events that took place very long ago. A half-remembered solar leader with a title that sounded like Washington, who led a local rebellion against a previous centralised state. The other Founding Fathers are, like King Arthur and his knights, a grab-bag of dimly remembered historical figures, secularised deities, and culture-heroes. Thomas Jefferson originally had a role similar to the Tattooed Serpent among the Natchez, who was the younger brother of the Great Sun and usually his diplomatic representative with other tribes. Benjamin Franklin’s name is probably related to shankolt, the Natchez word for a bird: native American traditions generally identify the bird as a trickster figure, ancient keeper of arcane wisdom, the bringer of lightning who knows the secrets of the sky. Alexander Hamilton is most likely a corn god, borrowed through contact with Uto-Aztecan peoples, a figure of plenty and increase, the first fruits, all paid for with a tax in human blood. Corn deities are often also underworld deities; in Nahuatl the phrase for something coming from the Underworld would be Hualmictlān. At some point the list of presidents transitions from mythological figures to actual historical leaders, but it’s anyone’s guess where the actual boundary is. Van Buren? Lincoln? FDR? It doesn’t really matter.
More interesting to consider some of the other stories. According to the 1776 narrative, the Great Compromise at the Constitutional Convention led to the creation of an upper and lower house on Capitol Hill. But this is clearly a just-so story: you might remember that the Monks Mound at Cahokia was also a hill divided between two houses, the palace and the temple; the Natchez were similarly bicameral. The Senate and House have lost most of their religious function in the last thousand years, but not all of it. There’s a persistent story that the US Capitol contains, in its catacombs, an eternal flame, guarded by an ancient cryptkeeper paid to make sure the fire never goes out. This is allegedly an urban legend, but it’s an urban legend that was repeated by at least one actual US President, James Garfield, who wrote in the Atlantic Monthly that ‘in the crypt constructed under the dome of the Capitol, as the resting-place for the remains of Washington, a guard was stationed, and a light was kept burning for more than half a century.’ Maybe the same flame was rescued from some mound-temple, where it once scorched the bones of the first President and those of his human sacrifices.
But there are other questions, too big for me to really even consider. I said before that when you’re flying into LAX the city looks like an enormous abacus, a computing device made of human lives and human desires, and maybe our deaths as well. The United States of America has been building these machines for at least three and a half thousand years. What are they for? What do they do? I don’t know. I think it’s possible they don’t always work perfectly. This is evident once you’ve driven around LA a bit. Something’s clogged, the freeways are all jammed up, the gears are straining against themselves. Some psychic fluid leaking from the city, which is why half the people on LA city buses look like they’ve seen the true face of God and found it full of fangs. Sometimes there are catastrophic errors, and you get stuff like the sudden depopulation of Cahokia. But whatever this thing is doing, it’s hard to imagine that it’s for us. The Natchez thought that their political leaders were manifestations of the celestial world; maybe they were right. The city-machines could be tunnelling through the stuff of the universe, opening it up to whatever unfathomable timeless world it is where America really began, all so some being, visibly or invisibly, can walk the surface of our tiny hurtling rock. Maybe they’re just ancient data centres, generating twelve-dimensional alien porn. Maybe we’ll never know.
However terrifying the real answer is, though, it’s still better than the alternative. Imagine if it were all really true, George Washington and tricorn hats and the Declaration of Independence in 1776, all of it. If that were true, then that would mean that the United States is a propositional nation that no longer believes in its own proposition, can barely even comprehend what those dead men in wigs once meant by liberty or enlightenment, the idea of humanity growing out of its self-imposed childhood, because the realisation of that idea is a society of children, scared in the world, desperately wanting someone to tell them what to do, some vast impersonal system of rewards to tell them what to desire, a society that can’t recognise itself in the mirror of history, left with nothing at all, just the world’s biggest cars, the world’s firmest tits, the world’s most overflowing supermarkets, the world’s most advanced bombs falling on distant villages on the other side of the world. But that can’t be it. You really believe that? You really think we’re all speeding rudderless into the future? That’s crazy. No way, man. It’s been like this forever. It will be like this until the last suns die.

Need a new jersey?
Congratulations, you’ve been issued @npub16xn…s8ep article.
The Inversion: On Grievance Socialism and the Politics of the Other
National Socialism was a racial mutation of socialism. So is this. And neither started with the people who felt the pain.
CHRIS ÁBRÁHÁM
JUN 10, 2026
The most important thing to understand about every great grievance movement in history is this: the people who built the machine were never the ones who felt the pain.
Hitler was not starving. Lenin was not a factory worker. The architects of every racial socialism in history found people with real wounds, handed them a jersey and an enemy, aimed them, and counted on them to be expendable when the power consolidated.
The German people had real wounds. The hunger was real. The Versailles humiliation was real. The hyperinflation was real. The boots on the neck from France and England were real. They were not wrong to feel it. They were exploited by people who did not share their pain and would eventually consume them too. The SA brownshirts who beat people in the streets believed in the mission. The Night of the Long Knives killed them for it. The Strasser brothers believed National Socialism meant what it said about socialism. Hitler shot Gregor Strasser and drove Otto into exile. The machine eats its fuel. The true believers are always first.
Black and brown Americans have real wounds. Slavery was real. Jim Crow was real. Redlining was real. The documented disparities in wealth, health, incarceration, and education are real and measurable. They are not wrong to feel it. The question this essay is asking is not whether the pain is legitimate. It is whether the people engineering the political framework around that pain share it—or whether they are doing what Lenin did, what Hitler did, what every architect of grievance socialism has always done: finding people with genuine wounds, handing them a jersey and an enemy, and counting on them to be expendable when the power consolidates.
The innocent party is always the people with the real wound. The guilty party is always the engineer who found the wound and aimed it.
This distinction is the moral center of everything that follows. Without it the essay becomes an accusation against populations who were victimized twice—once by history and once by the people who claimed to be fighting on their behalf. With it the essay becomes what it is intended to be: an observation about a machine that has no permanent operator and no permanent victim class. Only permanent fuel.
Socialism has never had a stable definition. That instability is not a bug—it is the feature that makes socialism so durable as a political technology. Strip away the specific economic claims and what remains is the collectivist mechanism: the individual dissolves into the group, the group has a historic grievance, the grievance justifies the machine.
The machine has been running for two centuries. It just keeps changing jerseys.
The original socialist project was class-based. The proletariat—the industrial working class—was the aggrieved collective. Capital was the enemy. History was the story of exploitation. That was the theory. Marx was explicit that morality was not a safeguard—communism abolishes it rather than preserving it on a new basis. Lenin was explicit that alliances are tactical not moral—the moment an ally stops being useful they become an enemy regardless of past service. The people who believed their good intentions protected them were not mocked for being stupid. They were instrumentalized for being expendable.
In practice the Soviet Union tried to run class-based socialism on an agrarian society with no industrial proletariat to speak of and had to improvise brutally. Collectivization killed millions. The Great Terror killed the true believers who had built the revolution. The machine ate its fuel on schedule.
Mao’s China was even more agrarian and pivoted entirely. The Cultural Revolution was socialism operating through identity, loyalty, and the destruction of class enemies defined by culture rather than factory ownership. Intellectuals, teachers, artists, doctors—anyone whose identity marked them as insufficiently revolutionary—were purged, humiliated, killed. The economic argument became secondary. The collectivist mechanism remained.
Nazi Germany made its own mutation. And this is where the comfortable story breaks down.
National Socialism has socialism in the name. This is not an accident and not merely cynical branding. The party fought bitterly internally over what socialism meant—the Strasser brothers led a genuine anti-capitalist wing that meant it the Marxist way—until Hitler purged them on the Night of the Long Knives to consolidate support from industrialists. The word was weaponized, yes. But it was weaponized because it meant something real to enough people to be worth stealing.
What Hitler understood was that the German working class would not be organized by economic class. It would be organized by race. The Volk—the people, the racial community—replaced the proletariat as the collective whose interests the state existed to serve. The means of production stayed nominally private. But hearts, minds, marriages, children, labor, and loyalty belonged to the racial collective. Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz: the common good before the private good. The individual dissolved into the nation. That is collectivism regardless of what you call it.
National Socialism was a racial mutation of socialism. The class analysis was replaced by a racial analysis. The proletariat was replaced by the Volk. The capitalist enemy was replaced by the racial enemy. Same machine. Different jersey.
But here is what gets erased in every comfortable retelling: Nazi Germany was not built on supremacist pride. It was built on fomented grievance aimed at a population with real wounds.
The Germans were not the dominant power declaring their superiority from a position of strength. They were the aggrieved minority within a broader European and global order that had crushed them. Versailles had stripped them of territory, treasure, and dignity. The war guilt clause made them responsible for a catastrophe they experienced as engineered against them. Reparations were economically strangling a population already devastated. France and England had them cornered from without. The Slavic peoples vastly outnumbered them to the east. Pan-Germanic bloodlines were a tiny minority within the broader European population. Germany was surrounded, outnumbered, humiliated, and being squeezed from every direction.
And then the Great Depression hit.
Germans were taking wheelbarrows of Deutschmarks to buy a loaf of bread. They were watching their savings evaporate, their farms foreclose, their children go hungry. And in the cities they could see Jewish families having dinner parties, running businesses, going to the opera, thriving in the professions. Whether that perception was accurate or distorted by propaganda is almost beside the point. The felt experience was: we are dying and they are fine. We are losing everything and they are gaining. In our own country. While we suffer.
That is the most combustible combination in human politics: real economic desperation plus visible prosperity of the designated other plus an available explanation for why. The Nazis did not create the German people’s pain. They found it, named it, aimed it, and handed people a jersey.
The Jews were not aggrieved. They were just living their lives. The Romani were not aggrieved. They were just living their lives. The Slavic peoples were not aggrieved. They were just living their lives. The designated enemies of the Volk were not organizing against Germany. They were trying to keep their heads down and wait out the crazy.
The grievance belonged entirely to the accusers. The accused were just trying to survive.
And the German people—the ones who marched, who voted, who believed, who wore the jersey—were not monsters. They were people with real wounds who were handed a framework that explained their pain and an enemy to aim it at. They were fuel. When the war was lost and the machine needed someone to blame for that too, the German people discovered what the fuel always discovers: the machine does not love you. It uses you.
There is also a mythological layer underneath the politics that almost never gets discussed in this context. The Nazi blood-and-soil ideology was a twisted version of Rousseau’s noble savage—the idea that there exists a pure natural human uncorrupted by modernity, and that civilization has stolen that purity. The Nazis claimed the Aryan race was the only pristine embodiment of natural humanity. Modernity, cosmopolitanism, and the designated racial enemy were the corrupting forces. Heinrich Himmler sponsored pseudo-archaeology, astrology, and mysticism to invent a supernatural history for the German people—claiming descent from ancient god-like beings, connecting German blood to sacred soil and ancient forest. This is not incidental to the politics. It is the mythology that makes the grievance feel cosmic rather than merely political. We were not just robbed economically. We were robbed of our divine destiny.
Every racial socialism needs this mythological layer. It converts political grievance into sacred mission. It makes the useful idiots willing to die.
Now look at the present moment without the comfortable distance of seventy years.
The American progressive left has spent the last two decades constructing a new racial mutation of socialism. Not economic socialism—that project failed to gain mass traction in the most individualist country on earth. Not cultural socialism in the Maoist sense, though that element is present in the DEI architecture and the institutional capture of universities, corporations, and media. Something newer: anti-racist socialism, organized entirely around race as the master category of justice, history, and political identity.
Anti-racist is, by its own internal logic, racial. Race is the organizing principle. Every policy question runs through a racial lens. Every historical grievance is racial. Every institutional outcome is measured by racial disparity. The individual dissolves into the racial collective—you are not a person with a specific history and specific circumstances, you are white or non-white, oppressor or oppressed, and your position in that binary determines your moral standing before the argument even begins.
Notice what happened to the categories. A hundred white ethnicities—Irish, Italian, Polish, Hungarian, Jewish, Greek, Slavic, Scandinavian, Anglo—were collapsed into a single undifferentiated whiteness. A hundred African ethnicities, a hundred Asian ethnicities, a hundred indigenous ethnicities were sorted into their respective bins. The complexity of human difference was reduced to two teams: white and non-white. Oppressor and oppressed. The jersey determines everything.
This is exactly how you build a revolution. You cannot mobilize a hundred ethnicities with their competing grievances and loyalties. You can mobilize two teams. You make the categories legible, you assign the moral valence, and you let the othering machinery run.
And here is the contemporary parallel to the Nazi mythological layer: the pre-colonial world as uncorrupted natural state. The noble savage myth returns, now racially coded. Indigenous and non-white cultures are positioned as the pure natural humanity that white civilization corrupted and stole. The grievance is not merely political—it is cosmic. A sacred inheritance was taken. A divine destiny was interrupted. This too converts political argument into sacred mission. This too makes the useful idiots willing to sacrifice.
But here is the question the essay is actually asking about Black and brown Americans who have been handed this framework: are the people handing them the jersey the same kind of engineers who handed the German people theirs?
The Black and brown Americans who feel this pain feel it because the pain is real. Slavery happened. Jim Crow happened. Redlining happened. The disparities are documented. They are not wrong to feel it. But the academic architects of anti-racist theory—the people who built the framework, secured the institutional positions, wrote the books, collected the speaking fees—do they share the pain? Or did they find the wound, build a framework around it, aim it at a target, and count on the fuel to be expendable when the tenure and the contracts and the foundation grants are secured?
This is not a rhetorical accusation. It is a genuine question that the history of every grievance socialism demands we ask. The German people asked it too late.
And here is the inversion nobody wants to name clearly.
In Weimar Germany, the aggrieved party named themselves. The grievance was fomented but it landed on real wounds. The accusers were pointing at Jews, at Romani, at Slavic peoples, at the cosmopolitan enemy. The accused were not organizing against Germany. They were just living their lives.
In contemporary America, the aggrieved party is being named by their accusers. White Americans are not a mass movement declaring themselves victims. They are a hundred different ethnicities with competing histories and no shared racial consciousness to speak of. They are not organizing around racial identity. They are mostly just living their lives—going to work, raising kids, watching their towns struggle, trying to keep their heads down and wait out the crazy.
It is the anti-racist left that is aggrieved. It is the anti-racist left that has built an entire political identity around historical injury, around the designation of a villain, around the demand for collective guilt and collective justice. The grievance belongs entirely to the accusers.
And here is the most precise structural parallel to Nazi Germany: the accusers are pointing at the accused and saying—look at them, look how aggrieved they are, look how fragile and dangerous their privilege is to us. The accused are not aggrieved. The accusers are. But the accusation itself is designed to produce in the accused the very emotional and political state they are being accused of having. It is a remarkable piece of political engineering. Project the grievance onto the target. Watch the target react. Use the reaction as evidence of the original accusation.
The categories keep shifting depending on what the moment requires. White women are oppressors until they are victims. Gay white men have privilege until they don’t. The sorting is not stable because the sorting is not really about justice—it is about maintaining the binary. Two teams. The moment the categories get complicated the machinery breaks down, so the categories have to be policed constantly. Anyone who steps out of their assigned jersey gets called a coon, a race traitor, a white Hispanic, a white adjacent. The machine requires the binary to function. The binary requires constant maintenance.
Before going further the essay needs to state something plainly that the appendix covers in detail: white supremacists, neo-Nazis, KKK members, and right-wing extremists are real, active, and dangerous in America and Europe. Nick Fuentes openly advocates for white Christian civilization as a political project and has made statements that Holocaust historians describe as minimization or denial. Replacement theory directly inspired mass shootings in El Paso, Pittsburgh, and Christchurch. These movements are genuine racial grievance organized into genuine racial hatred. They represent the machine running in the other direction—economic desperation, cultural displacement, and fomented victimhood aimed at a different enemy with a different jersey.
The existence of genuine white supremacy does not validate anti-racist collectivism as a response. It validates the observation that the machine runs in any direction given sufficient fuel. And it raises the same question in reverse: are the people handing white nationalists their jersey sharing their pain, or finding their wound and aiming it?
Tucker Carlson is not living in a dying Ohio factory town. Richard Spencer grew up wealthy. The architects of white nationalism are as much engineers of fomented grievance as the architects of anti-racist theory. The fuel on both sides is real people with real pain. The engineers on both sides are doing quite well.
There is one crucial difference between Weimar Germany and contemporary America that keeps the contemporary machine from catching fire the way it did in Weimar.
America is a terrible host for this particular virus.
The conditions that made Germany explosive were felt in the body. Real starvation. Real hyperinflation. Real wheelbarrows of currency to buy bread. Real boots on the neck from Versailles. Real visible contrast between the suffering majority and the thriving designated other—seen with your own eyes on your own street in a country that had just lost a catastrophic war.
America’s conditions have to be manufactured. The emergency has to be declared because it is not felt in the body by enough people to combust spontaneously. Nobody is taking wheelbarrows of dollars to buy groceries. The prosperity is too widespread, the mixing is too thorough, the actual lived relationships across racial lines are too human and too ordinary. White people do not hate Black people. Black people do not hate white people. People mostly just like each other. America got over most of its overt racism not through revolution but through proximity—through integration working slowly and imperfectly but working. People who live next to each other, work together, go to school together, fall in love across the lines the machine is trying to draw—they forget to hate each other. The machine cannot allow that forgetting.
That is why the revolutionary racial project requires people to stop trusting their own experience and start trusting the ideology instead. That is why it has to be so loud. That is why it requires institutional capture of universities, media, and corporations. You have to drown out the signal of ordinary human life with enough ideological noise that people forget what they actually know from living next to each other. You have to make them distrust the evidence of their own relationships and defer to the framework instead.
The old Panhead won’t turn over. The fuel mixture is wrong. America is too full, too mixed, too basically decent for the combustion to catch the way it caught in Weimar.
But the machine is still running on both sides. And machines that keep running without catching eventually either break down or find better fuel. Economic conditions can change. Desperation can arrive. The wheelbarrow moment is not impossible.
Same machine. Different jersey. Same destination if the fuel ever arrives.
The question worth asking—the one that makes everyone uncomfortable regardless of which jersey they’re wearing—is not which side is doing it this time.
It is: who built the machine? Who benefits from it running? Who gets eaten when it wins?
The answers are always the same. The engineers built it. The engineers benefit. The fuel gets eaten.
The German people were the fuel. The Black and brown Americans being handed a framework of total racial war are being positioned as fuel. The white working class Americans being handed replacement theory are being positioned as fuel. The useful idiots on every side are the people with real wounds who were handed a jersey instead of a remedy.
The remedy for real wounds is never a jersey. It is never a binary. It is never a machine that runs on the pain of the people it claims to be saving.
It is always slower, harder, less satisfying, and more human than that.
And it is why we keep reaching for the machine instead.
APPENDIX
A. What the Author Is Actually Saying: A Plain-Language Summary
This essay makes one structural argument: racial socialism—the organization of political collectivism around race rather than class—is a recurring human technology. National Socialism in Germany was one iteration. The contemporary anti-racist progressive movement in America is another iteration with the polarity inverted. The mechanism is the same. The moral outcomes are not equivalent and the author is not claiming they are.
The essay’s central moral claim is that the people who feel the pain are almost never the people who build the machine. The German people were exploited by leaders who did not share their suffering. Black and brown Americans with legitimate historical grievances are potentially being exploited by institutional architects who do not share their suffering. White working class Americans with legitimate economic grievances are being exploited by white nationalist leaders who do not share their suffering. In every case the fuel is innocent. In every case the engineer is not.
The author is not saying:
That the progressive left is Nazi
That Black Americans are equivalent to Nazis
That white Americans are victims
That systemic racism does not exist
That the Holocaust was not uniquely catastrophic
That anyone currently in America is planning genocide
That white supremacists are not real or dangerous
That Nick Fuentes is anything other than what he says he is
The author is saying:
Grievance socialism as a political technology recurs across history regardless of which racial group is operating it
It always requires reducing human complexity to binary categories
It always requires a designated villain class assigned collective guilt
It always begins with fomented rather than organic grievance
The followers are always used as fuel by leaders who do not share their pain
When the machine wins it eats the fuel that powered it
The mechanism does not belong to any one race era or political tradition
The innocent parties are always the people with real wounds
The guilty parties are always the engineers who found the wounds and aimed them
B. The Exploitation Machine: How Grievance Becomes Fuel
The mechanism by which genuine pain becomes political weapon follows a consistent pattern across every instance of grievance socialism in history.
Step one: Find the wound. Every population carries historical injury. The wound does not need to be invented—it only needs to be found, named, and amplified. German humiliation after Versailles was real. Black American economic disparity after centuries of legal exclusion is real. White working class economic collapse after deindustrialization is real. The engineer does not create the pain. The engineer locates it.
Step two: Provide the framework. Raw pain is not politically useful. It needs a narrative—a story that explains why the pain exists, who caused it, and what justice would look like. The framework converts personal suffering into collective identity. You are not just hurting. You are hurting because of them. You are not alone. You are part of us.
Step three: Designate the enemy. The framework requires a villain. The villain must be identifiable, legible, and collectively guilty. Individual complexity cannot be allowed—it would undermine the binary. The enemy must be a category: Jews, whites, globalists, the bourgeoisie. The individual members of the enemy category are guilty by membership regardless of personal action.
Step four: Hand out jerseys. Once the framework and the enemy are established the population sorts itself. Those who accept the framework join the collective. Those who resist are either enemies or traitors. The jersey is mandatory. Refusing it is evidence of guilt.
Step five: Consolidate power. The framework, the enemy, and the jerseys create political energy that the engineer can direct. Elections are won. Institutions are captured. Laws are changed. Power consolidates around the architects of the framework.
Step six: Eat the fuel. Once power is consolidated the useful idiots become a liability. They believed in the mission. They expected the mission to protect them. They are wrong. The Night of the Long Knives kills the SA brownshirts. The Great Terror kills the Bolshevik true believers. The Cultural Revolution turns on the intellectuals who enabled it. In every case the people who felt the pain most deeply and believed most sincerely are the first to be consumed when the machine no longer needs their energy.
Marx anticipated this explicitly. Lenin theorized it as doctrine. The pattern is not an accident. It is the design.
C. The Innocent Fuel: Why the German People and Black and Brown Americans Are Not the Villains of This Story
This section exists because the structural argument of this essay can be misread as an accusation against the populations who were handed jerseys. It is not.
The German people who voted for Hitler, marched in the rallies, believed in the Volk—most of them were people with real wounds who were handed a framework that finally explained their suffering and gave them an enemy to aim at. They were not uniquely evil. They were uniquely desperate at a uniquely vulnerable historical moment with uniquely skilled engineers of grievance pointing them in a catastrophic direction. Under different conditions—without Versailles, without hyperinflation, without the Great Depression, without Hitler—most of them would have lived ordinary decent lives. The horror of the Holocaust is not that it was done by monsters. It is that it was done by people.
Black and brown Americans who have embraced anti-racist frameworks are responding to real documented historical injury with the political tools that were handed to them by institutional architects. The pain that motivates them is legitimate. The disparities they point to are measurable. Their anger is proportionate to what was done. The question this essay raises is not about their pain or their anger. It is about whether the framework they were handed serves their interests or the interests of the people who built it—and whether they will be the fuel or the beneficiary when the machine reaches its destination.
History suggests they should ask that question very carefully.
White working class Americans who have embraced white nationalist frameworks are responding to real documented economic collapse and cultural displacement with the political tools that were handed to them by people like Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes. Their economic pain is real. Their communities are dying. Their desperation is proportionate to what happened to them. The question is the same: does the framework they were handed serve their interests or the interests of the engineers? And will they be the fuel or the beneficiary?
History suggests they should ask that question very carefully too.
The innocent party in every grievance socialism is always the people with the real wound. The essay is written in their defense, not against them.
D. Counter-Arguments and the Author’s Responses
Counter: You cannot compare anything to the Holocaust. It was unique.
The Holocaust was historically unique in scale, systematic organization, and industrial efficiency of murder. No comparison diminishes that. The comparison in this essay is structural—examining the political mechanism that preceded and enabled the Holocaust, not the Holocaust itself. Understanding how the machine was built is not the same as minimizing what the machine did.
Counter: Systemic racism in America is real and documented.
Agreed entirely. Redlining, wealth gaps, policing disparities, educational inequities, health outcome disparities—these are documented and real. The essay does not dispute this. It questions whether the specific political framework of anti-racist socialism is the most effective or honest response to those documented realities, and whether that framework reproduces the same collectivist machinery that has historically produced catastrophic outcomes for the very populations it claims to serve.
Counter: White people have real power and real privilege. This isn’t the same as Jewish persecution.
The power differential is real and acknowledged. The essay is not claiming equivalence of power or historical position. It is claiming equivalence of mechanism—the reduction of a diverse population to a single categorical villain, the assignment of collective guilt to individuals, the projection of grievance onto a target group. Mechanism and power differential are different variables.
Counter: You’re defending white supremacists.
The essay explicitly acknowledges that white supremacists, neo-Nazis, KKK members, and right-wing extremists are real, active, and dangerous. See Section F. The existence of genuine white supremacy does not validate anti-racist collectivism as a response any more than the existence of genuine capitalist exploitation validated Stalinism. Both can be true simultaneously: white supremacy is real and dangerous, and anti-racist collectivism reproduces the same machinery in the other direction.
Counter: This is just right-wing talking points dressed up as analysis.
The essay critiques both sides of the binary it describes with equal structural force. The white nationalist movement also runs on fomented grievance, engineered by people who do not share the pain of the fuel they are burning. Tucker Carlson is not living in a dying Ohio factory town. Richard Spencer grew up wealthy. Nick Fuentes is a professionally comfortable political entertainer. The machine doesn’t care which jersey you’re wearing. The analysis applies to everyone running it.
Counter: You’re saying Black people are like Nazis.
No. The essay is saying Black and brown Americans with legitimate historical grievances are potentially being positioned as fuel by institutional engineers who do not share their pain—exactly as the German people with legitimate historical grievances were positioned as fuel by Nazi engineers who did not share their pain. The parallel is between the exploited populations in both cases, not between the ideologies. Both are innocent. Both are fuel. Both deserve better than the jersey they were handed.
E. The Real White Supremacists: They Exist, They Are Dangerous, and This Essay Is Not About Them
White supremacist, neo-Nazi, and white nationalist movements are real, active, and dangerous in America and Europe. This is not a caveat or a disclaimer. It is a fact that the structural argument of this essay depends on acknowledging.
The KKK—founded 1865, responsible for thousands of lynchings and terrorist acts across American history. Responsible for the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963 that killed four young girls. Still active in diminished form across multiple states.
Neo-Nazi organizations—including the National Socialist Movement, Patriot Front, Blood and Honour, and various European equivalents. They explicitly embrace Hitler’s ideology including racial hierarchy, antisemitism, and in some cases genocide. They are not fringe internet trolls. They organize, recruit, and act.
The alt-right—a rebranding of white nationalism for the internet age. Richard Spencer explicitly calls for a white ethnostate. He did not build this position in a garage—he built it in conference rooms with donors and a communications strategy.
Nick Fuentes—self-described America First activist and avowed Catholic nationalist. Fuentes is open about his agenda: the preservation of white Christian civilization as the organizing principle of American political identity. He has made statements that Holocaust historians and major Jewish organizations describe as denial or minimization. He has had access to political events and politicians at the highest levels of American government. He is not a fringe figure. He is a professionally produced political operator who found a population of young men with real grievances about cultural displacement and economic anxiety and handed them a jersey. He is an engineer of fomented grievance, not a victim of it. This essay’s structural argument applies to him with full force.
Replacement theory—the belief that a deliberate conspiracy is replacing white populations in Western countries with non-white immigrants. This theory directly inspired the El Paso Walmart shooting in 2019 killing 23 people, the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in 2018 killing 11 people, and the Christchurch mosque shooting in 2019 killing 51 people. These are not theoretical harms. These are bodies.
The January 6th Capitol riot—included explicit white nationalist organizations including the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers alongside ordinary Americans who believed they were defending democracy. The ordinary Americans were the fuel. The organizational leadership was the engineering. Several of the organizational leaders have since cooperated with prosecutors. The fuel went to prison. Some of the engineers cut deals.
The existence of these movements is the most important reason to understand the machine rather than simply pick a side within it. The machine produces these movements on the right exactly as reliably as it produces their mirror images on the left. The fuel on both sides is real people with real pain. The engineers on both sides are doing quite well.
F. Timeline: Racial Socialism and Its Mutations
1762—Rousseau publishes The Social Contract and develops the noble savage concept. Natural humanity is pure. Civilization corrupts. This idea will be twisted into blood-and-soil mythology 150 years later and into indigenous primitivism another 50 years after that.
1848—Marx and Engels publish The Communist Manifesto. Class-based socialism enters mass politics. Morality is explicitly subordinated to revolutionary necessity.
1902—Lenin publishes What Is To Be Done? Vanguard party theory developed. Useful idiots theorized as tactical assets.
1917—Russian Revolution. Economic socialism imposed on an agrarian society. Improvisation through mass violence follows.
1919—Treaty of Versailles. Germany stripped of territory, assessed war guilt, burdened with reparations. The wound that will be exploited is created.
1920—NSDAP founded. The party’s 25-point platform includes explicitly socialist economic demands: nationalization of trusts, profit-sharing, abolition of unearned income. The Strasser faction means it.
1923—German hyperinflation peaks. Wheelbarrows of currency required to buy bread. Economic desperation becomes body-felt.
1929—Great Depression begins. German unemployment reaches 30%. The combustion conditions are complete.
1930-1933—Nazi electoral rise. Blood and soil mythology, Aryan supremacy narrative, Jewish conspiracy theory deployed to organize genuine economic desperation into racial collectivism.
1934—Night of the Long Knives. Hitler purges the SA leadership and the Strasser faction. The genuinely socialist wing and the true believing brownshirts are killed. The machine eats its first round of fuel.
1935—Nuremberg Laws. Racial categorization becomes state law.
1938-1945—Holocaust. Six million Jews, 500,000 Roma, millions of Slavic peoples, gay people, disabled people murdered industrially.
1945—Germany defeated. The German people, who were the fuel, bear the consequences. The Nazi leadership, who were the engineers, mostly flee, die, or stand trial at Nuremberg.
1949—Mao’s China. Cultural socialism replaces economic socialism.
1966-1976—Chinese Cultural Revolution. The intellectuals who built the revolution are purged by it. The machine eats its fuel.
1955-1968—American civil rights movement. Dignity-culture organizing, legal reform, and integration produce documented progress on racial equity. This is what working looks like.
1990s—Critical race theory developed as an academic framework for analyzing structural racism in law schools. Legitimate scholarly work.
2010s—Critical race theory moves from academia into institutional policy. DEI infrastructure expands. The academic framework becomes an institutional ideology.
2012—Trayvon Martin killing. Black Lives Matter founded the following year.
2016—Alt-right achieves mainstream visibility. Richard Spencer, Nick Fuentes, and associated figures move from fringe internet spaces into political conferences and eventually proximity to elected officials.
2019—El Paso, Pittsburgh, Christchurch. Replacement theory produces mass murder. The machine’s fuel is real people with real pain. The bodies are also real.
2020—George Floyd killing. Mass protests. Rapid institutional adoption of anti-racist frameworks. The binary of white versus non-white becomes dominant public discourse across media, corporations, universities, and government.
2021—January 6th. White nationalist organizations participate in Capitol riot alongside ordinary Americans who believed they were defending democracy. The organizational leadership cuts deals. The fuel goes to prison.
2020-present—Both machines running simultaneously. Both feeding the binary. Both burning their fuel. Both doing quite well for their engineers.
G. Key Terms and What They Mean
Racial socialism—the organization of socialist or collectivist political structures around racial rather than class identity. The author’s analytical term for a recurring historical pattern. Not a standard academic category.
Fomented grievance—grievance that is real in its emotional and historical roots but is deliberately amplified, directed, and weaponized by political leaders who do not themselves share the underlying pain. Distinct from organic grievance which arises and organizes itself without engineering.
Useful idiots—Lenin’s concept describing followers who serve a revolutionary movement’s tactical needs without understanding that they are expendable once power is consolidated. Marx explicitly theorized that morality does not protect such followers. The phrase is not an insult to the people it describes—it is an accusation against the people who use them.
Volksgemeinschaft—the Nazi concept of the people’s community. The racial collective that superseded individual identity, class identity, and religious identity. Membership determined by blood. The template for every subsequent racial collectivism.
Blut und Boden—Blood and Soil. The Nazi ideology connecting racial identity to the German land and forest. A pseudo-religious framework claiming sacred biological connection between the Aryan people and their natural environment. The mythological layer that converts political grievance into sacred mission.
Collectivism—any political framework that subordinates individual identity, rights, and interests to the group. Distinct from community or cooperation. Collectivism requires the dissolution of the individual into the collective rather than the voluntary association of individuals.
Anti-racist socialism—the author’s analytical term for the contemporary progressive framework that organizes political identity and policy entirely around racial categories, with race as the master variable for justice, history, and moral standing.
The binary—the reduction of complex human diversity to two categories: oppressor and oppressed, white and non-white. A necessary precondition for racial socialism regardless of which direction it runs. Requires constant maintenance because human reality constantly complicates it.
Dignity culture—a culture in which individual worth is inherent and cannot be taken away by insult or accusation. The American civil rights movement operated primarily within dignity culture frameworks. Contrasted with honor culture in which worth must be defended, and with grievance culture in which worth is defined by the injury done to you.
Noble savage—Rousseau’s concept of natural humanity uncorrupted by civilization. Twisted by Nazi blood-and-soil mythology into Aryan racial purity. Present in contemporary progressive frameworks as the positioning of pre-colonial indigenous cultures as uncorrupted natural states destroyed by white civilization. The mythological layer that makes political grievance feel cosmic.
The Night of the Long Knives—June 30, 1934. Hitler ordered the murder of SA leadership including Ernst Röhm and the purge of the Strasser faction. The machine ate the fuel that built it. The true believers who meant the socialist part of National Socialism were killed by the engineers who never meant it.
Replacement theory—the belief that a deliberate conspiracy is replacing white populations in Western countries with non-white immigrants. A contemporary example of the same framework the Nazis used: the aggrieved majority is being replaced by the designated enemy. Directly inspired multiple mass shootings. Actively promoted by figures including Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes.
H. Who Are the Players
Karl Marx—German philosopher, economist, author of The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital. Theorized class-based revolution. Explicitly subordinated morality to revolutionary necessity. Did not share the factory floor with the workers whose liberation he theorized.
Vladimir Lenin—Russian revolutionary, first leader of the Soviet Union. Developed vanguard party theory. Theorized the tactical use of allies who would later be discarded. The engineers of the revolution were not the proletariat. They were the intellectuals who organized the proletariat as fuel.
Gregor and Otto Strasser—leaders of the genuinely socialist wing of the Nazi party. Believed National Socialism meant what it said about socialism. Believed the workers’ revolution was real. Were the fuel. Gregor was killed in the Night of the Long Knives. Otto fled into exile. The machine ate them on schedule.
Heinrich Himmler—head of the SS. Primary architect of the Holocaust. Also primary sponsor of Nazi occultism, pseudo-archaeology, and the mythological apparatus of Aryan racial destiny. An engineer, not fuel. Died by suicide after capture to avoid accountability.
Rousseau—18th century French philosopher. Developed the noble savage concept. Did not intend his philosophy as a racial weapon. His ideas were twisted into blood-and-soil mythology by Nazi ideologues and echo in contemporary primitivist strands of progressive thought. The ideas outlived his intentions in both directions.
Nick Fuentes—American far-right activist, self-described America First Catholic nationalist. Open about his white Christian civilization agenda. Has made statements interpreted as Holocaust minimization by major Jewish organizations and Holocaust historians. Has had access to the highest levels of American political events. Is professionally comfortable. Is an engineer of fomented grievance, not fuel. The young men he recruits are the fuel.
Tucker Carlson—former Fox News host, now independent media operator. Primary mainstream amplifier of replacement theory in America. Grew up wealthy. Is professionally comfortable. Is an engineer of fomented grievance, not fuel. The working class white Americans who watch him are the fuel.
Richard Spencer—white nationalist, explicit advocate for a white ethnostate. Grew up wealthy. Is an engineer, not fuel.
Ibram X. Kendi—author of How to Be an Antiracist. His framework organizes anti-racist politics around a binary of racist and anti-racist with no neutral position available. Has received substantial institutional support, foundation grants, and speaking fees. The question this essay raises about him is the same question it raises about all engineers of grievance frameworks: does he share the pain of the people whose pain he has organized into a political product?
Robin DiAngelo—author of White Fragility. Her framework defines any white resistance to racial accusation as evidence of the fragility being accused. A closed loop that converts target reaction into proof of original accusation. Has received substantial institutional support and speaking fees. The same question applies.
The German people 1933-1945—the fuel. People with real wounds who were handed a framework that explained their pain and an enemy to aim it at. Not monsters. People. Used and then blamed for what they were used to do.
Black and brown Americans 2020-present—people with real wounds and real documented historical grievances who have been handed a framework by institutional architects. Whether they are fuel or beneficiary depends on questions the history of every grievance socialism demands they ask loudly and soon.
White working class Americans 2016-present—people with real wounds from deindustrialization, opioid crisis, declining life expectancy, and cultural displacement who have been handed a framework by right-wing engineers. Whether they are fuel or beneficiary depends on the same questions.
I. What Mainstream Historians and Textbooks Say—and Where This Essay Departs
Mainstream academic consensus holds that Nazism is a far-right ideology characterized by ultranationalism, racial hierarchy, and totalitarianism. The Nazi use of socialist in the party name is widely understood as tactical branding. The Holocaust was a uniquely catastrophic historical event. Systemic racism in America is a documented structural reality. Critical race theory as an academic framework is a legitimate field of scholarly inquiry. White nationalist and neo-Nazi movements represent genuine domestic terrorism threats.
This essay departs from mainstream consensus in the following specific ways:
The essay treats the Nazi collectivist mechanism as functionally socialist regardless of whether the economic program was Marxist. Mainstream historians generally reject the socialist label for Nazism entirely. The essay argues the label debate distracts from the collectivist mechanism which is the actually dangerous element.
The essay applies structural analysis across political lines in ways that mainstream academia generally avoids. Comparing progressive racial frameworks to historical collectivist movements is not standard academic practice. The essay argues the structural comparison is analytically valid regardless of its political discomfort.
The essay treats fomented grievance as a near-universal feature of racial political movements rather than a characteristic specific to right-wing extremism. Mainstream scholarship generally treats right-wing and left-wing grievance politics as categorically different phenomena. The essay argues the mechanism is the same regardless of direction.
The author acknowledges these departures explicitly and invites engagement with the specific arguments rather than the associations they produce.
The author is a geopolitical realist and non-interventionist writing from Arlington, Virginia. He has no political affiliation, accepts no funding from any political organization or movement, and is genuinely happy to be wrong about any specific claim in this essay. Show him where specifically rather than what it implies about him and he will update publicly. He has aphantasia and cannot visualize any of this, which may explain the relentless need to describe it in words.
Subscribe to Chris Abraham
By Chris ÁBRÁHÁM · Launched 6 years ago
Memetic Engineer on Memetic Engineering and Fitness
Subscribe
By subscribing, you agree Substack's Terms of Use, and acknowledge its Information Collection Notice and Privacy Policy.
Discussion about this post