Tag: Thiel

Bismarck

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Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, was a man marinated in vice. Wine, a crimson serpent, coiled around his mornings, slithered through lunch, and tightened its grip at dinner. Beer, a frothy trollop yeasty serpent, slithered down his gullet between courses, leaving a trail of burps that could curdle milk. And cigarettes, glowing embers of damnation, were his constant companions, wisping their tendrils of addiction into his lungs. Tobacco, a fiery succubus, latched onto his lips, whispering sweet oblivion in puffs of acrid smoke.

And when the sun dipped below the horizon, Bismarck wouldn’t be caught dead (well, not yet) with a mug of chamomile tea. Sleep? A mere drunken stupor, a surrender to the green fumes of absinthe that clouded his dreams. No, sleep arrived on a flood tide of schnapps, a potent oblivion that painted the world a blurry shade of Prussian ambition.

At the Berlin Conference, where they carved Africa like a rotten melon, Bismarck wasn’t just a player, he was a force of nature fueled by fermented grapes and barley. Pickled herrings, those translucent messengers of the deep, found their way into his maw with a two-handed frenzy. Bismarck wasn’t a statesman, he was a fiend at a banquet. Pickled herrings, those translucent messengers of decay, found their way into his maw with a speed that defied cutlery. Two hands, like meat hooks, wrestled the oily fish, a grotesque ballet fueled by schnapps and avarice. The room reeked of power, sweat, and pickled fish, a fitting olfactory accompaniment to the dismemberment of a continent.

Was he drunk? Who the hell cared. Drunk or sober, Bismarck was a shark in a feeding frenzy, and Africa, dripping and glistening, was the blood in the water. One imagines the negotiations, a grand guignol of ink-stained maps and diplomatic double-entendres, punctuated by the belch of a man pickled himself, both literally and figuratively. The ink on the treaties might as well have been blood, Bismarck’s own fiery spirit staining the parchment. A whirlwind of diplomacy and debauchery, the Iron Chancellor left a trail of fumes and fumes alone in his wake.

One could argue Bismarck’s boozy brilliance was a double-edged sword, a Molotov cocktail of realpolitik served lukewarm. Sure, he unified Germany under a Prussian fist, but was it a foundation built on sand, mortared with hangover sweat?

It was the first domino in Germany’s tragic waltzing with oblivion. Imagine the map of Africa being carved up not by a steely-eyed statesman, but by a bleary-eyed baron with a tremor in his hand. Did the borders of the Congo sprawl outwards because Bismarck saw double after a particularly potent schnapps?

Perhaps. And perhaps those shaky lines, drawn in a haze of hops and hangover, laid the groundwork for future conflicts. Resources, resentment, a festering sense of injustice – a potent cocktail, even without the booze.

Then consider the domino effect. Bismarck’s legacy, built on unsteady legs, crumbles. The power vacuum sucks in a new breed of leader, hungry and paranoid. Enter Hitler, a teetotaler fueled by a different kind of intoxication – a twisted ideology that had him high as a🪁 (kite) on delusions of grandeur.

So yes, there’s a delicious irony, wouldn’t you say? Bismarck, the boozer, might have unwittingly paved the way for a dry drunk who’d plunge the world into a firestorm. The Iron Chancellor, brought low not by iron, but by cirrhosis. A cautionary tale, indeed, for leaders who confuse a full flagon with a full head.

Perhaps, if Bismarck had swapped the schnapps for seltzer, things might have been different. But that’s just another line in the mad scribble of history, a “what if” lost in the haze of his perpetual inebriation.One could argue Bismarck’s boozy statecraft was a recipe for Deutschland’s descent into the inferno. Imagine, the fate of entire nations decided by a man reeking of stale beer and pickled brine! His proclamations, no doubt, slurred pronouncements delivered through a haze of nicotine and schnapps.

It’s a heady cocktail of speculation, for sure. But with Bismarck swigging wine at breakfast and Hitler frothing at the podium, one can’t help but wonder if Germany just couldn’t find the right balance. Perhaps the answer wasn’t rock bottom or uptight abstinence, but a healthy dose of moderation. A nation, like a man, needs a clear head to navigate the treacherous waters of history.

Scapegoats

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The Unspeakable Real: A Lacanian Burroughsian Scapegoatology

In the churning id of organizations and belief systems, a primal drama unfolds. The scapegoat, a spectral Other, becomes the stage upon which unspoken desires are projected. A witch hunt, a play defined by the absence of the Real (the true source of societal ills), demands a sacrifice. To admit the accused’s innocence is to shatter the narcissistic mirror of the group, revealing their own festering lack.

This, the Real, a Lacanian term for the ungraspable, the forever outside-of-language, lurks beneath the signifying order that binds these structures. This spectral Other, a dangling signifier on the Lacanian stage, is the target of a repressed, primordial violence. But here’s the rub, mon ami – to utter this truth is to rip the scab off the social order, exposing the raw, pulsating id beneath.

Imagine, if you will, the Witch Hunters – those grim cowboys of righteousness. To confess the witches’ innocence would be to castrate their own power, to render their brand of control as limp as a forgotten phallus. No, the witches must be burned, their screams a perverse symphony that binds the group in a morbid jouissance.

Those agents of the symbolic order, cannot integrate the truth: their victims, mere sacrificial pawns. To acknowledge their innocence would be to sever the very limb upon which they perch, to dismantle the power they wield.

Girard, the subsidized explorer of the human psyche, delves into the grimoires of history, myth, and sacred texts, unearthing a treasure trove of scapegoating rituals. He exposes this mechanism – the most potent secret in the human drama. Why secret? Because it’s the perverse engine that drives group cohesion, yet whispers of its existence are met with a deafening silence within the collective ear. This primal script demands silence. To utter its name is to rupture the symbolic order, the carefully constructed reality of the group. The scapegoat mechanism, a perverse communion, binds yet forbids recognition. We are all tangled in its viscid web.

This is the true horror: the blind spot. We, entangled in the web of mimetic desire, fail to perceive the very scapegoats we manufacture. The persecution continues, a grotesque ballet of violence, while each player clutches their self-righteous mask, absolving themselves of guilt.

The human condition, a grotesque carnival of mimesis, compels us to punish. We are blind to the glint of the scapegoat’s fabricated guilt in our own eyes.

Even Girard, the supposed seer, confesses his own blindness. “My own [scapegoating] eludes me,” he confesses, mirroring the plight of his readers. We traffic only in the realm of “legitimate enemies,” conveniently blind to the universe overflowing with innocent victims. The persecutor? Always the Other. We are all flagellants, whipping the innocent while screaming accusations at phantoms. The “enormity of this mystery” pulsates with a primal horror – a truth we desperately claw away from. The scapegoat becomes the fleshy avatar of our collective shadow, a sacrifice to the insatiable maw of our own unconscious desires.

The enormity of this mystery, a Burroughsian virus infecting the human condition, speaks to the depth of this scapegoating impulse. Mimetic rivalry, the insatiable desire to possess what the Other possesses, fuels the fires of punishment. Any suggestion that the victim might be undeserving ignites a primal resistance. Thus, the dance continues, a macabre charade fueled by the unspoken, the unspeakable. The scapegoat, a spectral figure haunting the margins, a constant reminder of the Real that threatens to tear apart the fragile fabric of our symbolic world.

So, the next time you find yourself pointing the finger, remember – you might just be dancing to the silent symphony of the scapegoat. A symphony fueled by desire, veiled by righteousness, and conducted by the unconscious.