This fascistic moment

A brilliant video reveals dark rumblings of discontent

I. A brilliant video captures the public imagination

LOTS of people are talking about “Storm” — a seven-and-a-half-minute film directed by Romain Gavras that features the Swedish rapper Yung Lean (Jonatan Leandoer Håstad, his stage name is a play on words: lean is a recreational street drug made by mixing prescription cough syrup with soda and hard candy). The video consists of two parts — “Storm I” which is a short drama set in an all-boys school and “Storm II” that includes stunning choreography by Damien Jalet.

Let’s start with Storm II because that’s the clip that is generating the most discussion. (Watch on YouTube starting at 4:18.)

Storm II is beautiful, mesmerizing, hypermasculine, violent, terrifying, thrilling, and easily the most brilliant choreography I’ve seen in years. I couldn’t take my eyes off of it and, as others have reported, I found myself watching it again and again. Notice that the entire dance routine is a single shot without any edits. Numerous rehearsal videos show that this is NOT the product of artificial intelligence.

However to fully understand the video one must start at the beginning and watch the full seven minutes and 34 seconds (Storm I & II). In context, a very different picture emerges. (Trigger warning: it’s very violent.)

In the full video, Yung Lean is the alpha male gang leader at an all-boys school who bullies the weaker boys to adopt his violent ethos. It’s Lord of the Flies or The Chocolate War but with better choreography.

What becomes apparent rather quickly is that one is watching an overtly fascistic theater piece.

The video is about bringing order out of chaos, celebrating a certain hypermasculine violence in service of power, and the overarching goal is hierarchy and control.

I went back and read the lyrics of Storm II and those raise an eyebrow as well.

We stand united through the storm
Lay all your love right on my door
I’ll never fall, I’m standing tall
Go take the darkness out my heart

Okay maybe he’s singing to his sweetheart. Or maybe he’s just really bonded with his minions. Then things take a turn.

It feels like a drug drug drug
Give you no love love love
Until the sun comes up

You’re all out of luck luck luck
We don’t give a f*ck about what
Comes out of your neck or tongue
When you see the stars better run

I’m no ethnomusicologist but I’m pretty sure Yung Lean is talking about inflicting harm on his rivals alongside his enthusiastic and obedient crew.

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II. Making sense of this moment

I already feel like a joyless scold and that’s not my intention here. The video is extraordinary. All art is subject to interpretation and perhaps my interpretation is off base. But what I’m curious to explore is WHY this video emerged now and why it resonates with so many people. The artists pulled it out of the air — the zeitgeist — and the essence they distilled is pure fascism. So why is fascism the electrical current we can feel in the air right now?

As a point of comparison, the video for “Stop Me From Falling” by Kylie Minogue features excellent choreography but no one comes away from that feeling like civil war is imminent. With “Storm” it’s different. The video has captured the public’s imagination with endless reshares and reaction videos on social media — a gravitational pull that persists even when one is troubled by the imagery. The audience is participating in, dare I say hungry for, the same dark energy as the artists. (In fairness, most people are responding to Storm II and are unaware that Storm I exists.)

Before I go any further I need to define fascism, because that word is often stretched until it means little more than “things I dislike.”

Historian and political scientist Roger Griffin (1991) argues that the ideological core of fascism is palingenetic ultranationalism — palingenesis meaning rebirth. Fascism is animated by an organizing myth: the nation was great, it has fallen into decadence and humiliation, and only a violent, cleansing rebirth, led by a strong man and a mobilized people, can restore its glory. Authoritarianism merely wants order. Fascism wants resurrection.

That’s a pretty good description of “Storm” as well. Decline, humiliation, a charismatic leader, a mobilized band of brothers, the violent restoration of a lost order and beneath all of it, the ecstatic feeling of being reborn into something powerful. The video has no political program. It is the mood of palingenesis, condensed and set to music. But again why would that land with the American audience right now?

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III. Historical comparison

The reasons usually given for the emergence of fascism in Germany after World War I include:

1. Hyperinflation, debt, and unemployment (particularly male unemployment);

2. A toxic combination of shame, guilt, and humiliation following the military defeat; and

3. The failure of liberal democratic institutions to improve living conditions for ordinary citizens.

The U.S. is very different from post-World War I Germany. And yet, after more than fifty years of neoliberalism and the complete hollowing out of our economy by the management consultants, private equity firms, and banksters there are lots of interesting parallels between the two eras.

Official inflation numbers in the U.S. are inaccurate but actual measures compiled by Reality Index show a 65% overall price increase and a real GDP loss of 11% since 2019.

U.S. national debt is $39.3 trillion ($114,653 per person in this country) and government doesn’t even try to bring that number down anymore. 19 cents of every tax dollar is now spent on servicing the debt (interest payments to bondholders) instead of promoting the well-being of the American people. Consumers carry an additional $18.8 trillion in debt via credit card balances, car loans, and mortgages.

Workforce participation for men has declined steadily since the 1950s:

While disability rates have skyrocketed:

What fascinates me most is the shame, guilt, and humiliation piece of this dynamic. As the American economy has become predatory toward its own people, and as the fundamental basis of our economy has shifted from manufacturing consumer products to stealing the health and wealth of the average citizen via iatrogenic injury, daily life has become a series of humiliations — chronic illness, unjustly denied insurance claims, ever-increasing charges for declining levels of service, and a general inability to keep up in spite of diligent effort and qualifications. There is a seething rage beneath the surface of American society that politicians are occasionally able to harness but then they inevitably fail to deliver necessary reforms once in office.

And then obviously nearly all institutions in the U.S. and throughout the developed world (government, universities, corporations, civil society, the media, etc.) failed during Covid, abandoned actual science in favor of self-dealing and mass murder, and are so corrupt that they actually make life worse for the average citizen.

The takeaway from all of this is that Germany at the end of World War I experienced a rapid collapse and the U.S. since 2020, and really since 1971 or even 1913, has undergone a slow collapse with some of the same features.

So it’s not entirely surprising that Americans of all political persuasions would yearn for some sort of order and control (or perhaps even violence) amidst the chaos and degradation of daily life.

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IV. The hijacking of populist rage by the ruling class

There’s another step in this dynamic that I really want to highlight. Both interwar Germany and modern American society are characterized by monopoly industrial capitalism in decline and a ruling class eager to reassert itself. So the ruling class finds politicians who can hijack the rhetoric of the public’s anger and then writes laws and policies to make things much worse (to give the ruling class even more control).

One can choose an earlier start date but fascism comes clearly into view in the U.S. in 2020 — the last year of Trump’s first term. The Covid response in general and Operation Warp Speed in particular are textbook fascism — the merger of the state and corporations.

Fascism is now bipartisan, so rather than reverse course the Biden administration deepened and accelerated the Covid genocide. Over a million Americans were killed by Covid shots, mandates, blocked treatments, lockdowns etc. during Biden’s term.

The Democratic Party is now an overtly fascist party (they just have a slightly different mix of patrons that benefit from corporatism). Democrats’ enthusiastic embrace of deadly junk science vaccines and vaccine mandates enslaves the population via chronic illness. Once all wealth has been drained from individuals and their families, Democrats use Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) to euthanize the injured.

In the second year of Trump’s second term the MAGA faction of the Republican Party has become overtly fascistic as well with hero worship (Trump depicted as Jesus) and blind obedience to any commands from their leader (including a successful primary challenge against the best member of the House of Representatives, Thomas Massie, to punish him for releasing the Epstein files and opposing the U.S./Israeli war against Iran). Palantir and the Tech Bros get whatever they want from this administration and are aggressively expanding the surveillance state in spite of widespread public opposition.

So populist rage on both the political left and the right provided the shock troops that the ruling class then co-opted to deepen our immiseration. Populist rage DIRECTED TOWARD an appropriate enemy (e.g. Big Pharma, the surveillance state, the military industrial complex, the corruption of academia and the media) with a genuine political program of structural change can be a tool of liberation. Populist rage untethered from anything other than the joy of catharsis is highly vulnerable to co-optation and that’s what worries me about this video.

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V. A coda

I’ve spent the last several days watching other works by Romain Gavras to try to understand his perspective and give him the benefit of the doubt. That guy loves depicting violence on screen. Gavras directed:

• M.I.A.’s “Born Free” which meticulously portrays a genocide of people with red hair;

• Justice’s “Stress,” six minutes of urban hooliganism set in France;

• Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “No church in the wild,” a five minute riot in a nondescript city; and

• The feature film Athena, a two-and-a-half-hour race riot set in the Parisian suburbs.

The temptation is to try to understand Gavras’s work as a critique of violence or as a glorification of violence. But that’s the wrong binary. I think violence is just entertainment to Gavras, he depicts it because it’s exciting and strangely beautiful. In that sense then what we may be looking at is vaccine injured filmmaking.

In some people with vaccine injury the regions of the brain that process justice and fairness become heightened (justice sensitivity). In others, the categories of right and wrong seem to be replaced with exciting and not-exciting (and they want to maximize exciting). That’s what we see with Kanye West’s flirtations with Nazism and praise for Hitler, for example. Given that vaccine injury is everywhere these days it is not surprising that it would change how entertainment is created and consumed. Of course we are not supposed to talk about any of this publicly because our society celebrates vaccine injury and has made vaccine injury the fundamental basis of our economy.

So we are left with brilliant choreography, amidst dopamine-seeking violence, absent any intended critique of the system. That’s my take, but I’m curious to read your reactions to the video in the replies.

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Blessings to the warriors. 🙌

Prayers for everyone fighting to stop the iatrogenocide. 🙏

Huzzah for everyone building the parallel society our hearts know is possible. ✊

In the comments, please share your thoughts about “Storm” and what it might tell us about this moment.

As always, I welcome any corrections.

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