Post Category → THE HUMAN POLITIC

Propaganda Kills: The Murder of Refaat Alareer

A photo of Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, with the text "death & propaganda" against a black background.

[This essay on the murder of Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer is presented on the 2-year anniversary of his death. It originally appeared in the AUTOMACHINATION literary magazine.]

…The moon’s an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun.

– Shakespeare, Timon of Athens

It’s been years since I’ve written a takedown of a poseur or freak, largely because they are such time-sinks, yet offer so little themselves. They seek unearned attention, and, if attention is given, seek to take one away from deeper aims. To wit: Ben Shapiro (does it not damage my essay that I expect you to know who this was?) might ultimately get exhumed by trivia hunters, but this would only be slightly better than Shapiro’s own goings to and fro on the earth. Coleman Hughes certainly represents a ‘type’, but hasn’t this type been discussed to the point of acquiring its own slur? Such cons are obvious, yet the Russian émigré poet Maxim D. Shrayer lords over a grift many won’t pick up on, not only due to their ignorance of immigrant politics, but also the ease with which nonimmigrants get brow-beaten by American liberals. Shrayer’s recent essay on murdered Palestinian academic Refaat Alareer has exposed this grift, though it requires another ex-Soviet to identify its parts. And so, as I enter a more mindful middle age, I can only justify writing of losers if I also expound upon their fiefdoms—particularly if these are lesser-known fiefdoms with poorly understood dynamics.

Maxim Shrayer, a … Continue reading →

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Russia’s Wild 1990s Are Coming To America (Video Essay)

An image from Russia's Wild 1990s, including the murdered Russian-American journalist Paul Klebnikov, a youthful Vladimir Putin, the Chechen gangster Khoza Noukhayev, and Donald Trump, who is now setting the stage for a similar dynamic in modern-day America.

[This is the transcript for Alex Sheremet’s video essay on Russia’s Wild 1990s, told through the eyes of murdered American journalist Paul Klebnikov. “The Murder and Resurrection of Paul Klebnikov” can be watched here. The transcript originally appeared in Alex’s literary magazine, AUTOMACHINATION.]

“God did not create all men equal. What is inside them is not equal.” – Khoza Noukhayev

Twenty years have passed since the killing of Paul Klebnikov (Павел Юрьевич Хлебников) on a Moscow street. Although he was an American citizen, born in America to American-born parents, his unsolved murder is better known in Russia than in the United States. A business journalist for Forbes Magazine, Paul Klebnikov’s seminal book, Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the Looting of Russia, must be read in softcover. The hardback is long out of print and there are no electronic versions available. Paul is known as Pavel in Russia—another man, almost, for his death had even deeper implications abroad. Today, Klebnikov would be 61 years old. He is, like the Russians looking back, grounded in time, as the country they leave behind grows older, stranger, with a future not their own. Yet Klebnikov flowed in the opposite direction, towards Russia, as America itself grew less and less recognizable. After all, if one points to the dangers of journalism in Russia, Russia can point to America’s increasing tolerance for the murder of their own journalists on foreign soil. In the minds of oligarchs and warlords—the world Paul Klebnikov got … Continue reading →

The Limits of Joy: How Kamala Harris Can Lose In 2024

Side-by-side photos of Kamala Harris with the words "Breaking Brat", as part of Alex Sheremet's article predicting Donald Trump's 2024 election and Kamala's loss.

[This essay was first published in Alex Sheremet’s AUTOMACHINATION literary magazine. For a post-mortem on the 2024 election, check out Alex Sheremet’s video essay on the reasons for Donald Trump’s win.]

Though the outcome of America’s upcoming election is a foregone conclusion, not all is lost. Either Trump or Kamala will inherit an economic slowdown, a voting population at turns radicalized and ambivalent, and a degraded country stuck in frozen conflict—with only some of it abroad. Neither Trump nor Kamala have the tools to deal with insoluble problems, while the freakish nature of this cycle’s independent candidates suggests how little can be produced through the miasma. And yet, the Democratic Party’s latest crisis provides a rare glimpse into political power, down to the brazen discussion of how Joe Biden was forced to give up his re-election campaign. Insiders are accused of plotting a ‘coup’, but this word suggests something out of the ordinary. In reality, both parties are financed by corporate bribes and beholden to special interests. If funding dries up, the campaign is over—a fact that, to quote Nancy Pelosi, can be impressed upon the candidate “the easy way, or the hard way”. At the time, I suggested the Party lean into its undemocratic principles, such as calling for a fake primary (if there should be a primary at all) ending with Kamala Harris’s anointment. Now that this has transpired, it is instructive to reflect on why. For, despite Kamala’s decision to run on “joy”, … Continue reading →

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How 2024 Came To Pass: Grading Joe Biden’s Presidency

A slightly blurred, noisy photo of the New York Times depicting a smiling Joe Biden on its cover, wrapped with an orange rubber band.

[This article first appeared under a different title in 2021, in my literary magazine, AUTOMACHINATION. Its core prediction has come to pass: Joe Biden, for structural reasons, has been unable to enact the reforms voters might consider ‘good enough’, even as crises pile up. COVID measures went from punitive to laissez faire; inflation has suppressed real wages, leaving Americans feeling worse-off than in 2019; lobbyist spending has led to political and humanitarian disaster with unqualified, bipartisan support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza; nonwhite voters have continued to leave the Democratic Party; the militarization of police has accelerated; any promise to reverse Trump’s tax cuts was dead from the beginning. I argued that Joe Biden would be more superficially ‘progressive’ than Barack Obama, but that it wouldn’t be enough to really be felt. The response to Trump’s 2024 campaign has been to disqualify and/or imprison him, largely due to the fact that the Biden administration was paralyzed from the beginning. These are sentiments echoed by Benjamin Studebaker in our discussion of American democracy.]

In the last few decades, the term forever war has come to denote an unpleasant fact for imperial ambition- namely, that superpowers have ceased to exist, dislodged by regional actors limited to their own spheres of influence, while influence itself grows narrower and more abstract. Thirty years after America failed to take Vietnam, it would fail for much the same reason in Afghanistan and Iraq: lately, empire cannot explain its purpose even to itself, much … Continue reading →

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White Guilt, White Fragility: Robin DiAngelo Doesn’t Understand Race

A shirtless black man with a snake around his neck, from Juvenile's "Ha" video in New Orleans. Robin DiAngelo denied the city's problems in her book, "White Fragility".

[This is the transcript for Alex Sheremet’s video essay, White Guilt, White Fragility: Why Robin DiAngelo Doesn’t Understand Race. It first appeared in the AUTOMACHINATION literary magazine.]

In 2011, an academic named Robin DiAngelo coined the phrase “white fragility” in reference to white people’s perceived defensiveness over questions of race. It didn’t explain this defensiveness—it only gave it a name. And it named only a small part of a more general condition. We’ll get to the condition of the white race in a bit, but for now, suffice to say that there are many types of white person. Some are just as fragile, yet break in a less predictable direction. Under the right circumstances, they could pressure themselves into joining a revolution. In more stagnant periods, they reach out to anyone willing to touch them. This is still fragility because it is unstable, because it is easy to recruit, because it is so common. Yet Robin DiAngelo—who is technically a scholar of ‘whiteness studies’—has little space for it. This means that ‘whiteness’ itself is not really being examined, and in failing to explain whiteness, or to give a credible story of what it means to be white, she cannot properly deal with race. Her work alludes to her own racial anxiety, but will not make sense of it. Her theory of racism is a theory of rugged individualism—and this is why it’s popular. The individual is tasked with the burdens of racism. So the individual, as under all … Continue reading →

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