#Contradict by Techno Westerns | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

all-things-are-nothing-to-me · 5 years

Text

Communization: The senile decay of anarchy

Communization: The senile decay of anarchy (or re-inventing anarchy) – fragment of the unpublished pamphlet “FAI Reloaded” by the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire.

i) Frozen Marxism

Today’s era smells like engine oil, cheap labor sweat and naphthalene of the morality of voluntary obedience… We do not want to be defined by the culture of techno-industrial fascism, the white uniforms of scientists, the neckties of technocrats, the eager silences of ordinary people, the stupid smiles of consumers… We do not match with the aesthetics of the glass world of flat television screens, the digital imitation of the life of social media, the display windows of lifestyle, the lens of security cameras. We do not fit in the society of captivity, the police checks of our identification papers, the supervision of security guards, the laws of the judges, the locked doors of prisons. We do not settle for the average normality dictated by morality, we don’t amuse our boredom with psychotropic drugs, we aren’t covered by the coldness of empty relations, we don’t read… Marx.

Today we live to the rhythm of a generalized crisis. Our daily life is throttled from the tyranny of numbers. Our life resembles an accounting book, whose calculations always find it deficient and indebted. They overwhelm us with financial terms and definitions, one half of which are unknown and the other half of no interest to us. The wandering charlatans of all ideologies, roam from one financial conference to the other and bombard us with ramblings and often incomprehensible interviews-speeches, each of them presenting his own social antidote to the economic crisis. On the shelves of the ideological supermarket every faithful consumer will find the antidote that suits him, in all shades. There are “revolutionary” antidotes, even “anarchist” ones. In Greece, the neo-communists, ex-anarchists, mix in the cauldron of ideologies anarchist labels, with plenty of frozen Marxism, anti-imperialism and a pinch of disguised national liberation. The new tension of “serious” anarchy dresses itself in a formal way and launches the trend of anti-capitalist struggle on a red background. The rhetoric of the neo-communists – “anarchists” talks about everything. In an effort to build a social marketing of propaganda for the masses, it promotes generalizations sanctifying the “oppressed people” and “workers” who, obviously, for them are “not accountable” for their responsibilities and silences, uses covertly socially palatable national references, such as “the Greek people”, “our country” and promises “social salvation” with the coming of post-revolutionary society, preaching in the assemblies of the need for centralized-structures… It seems that some neo-communists already rehearse their future offices. Perhaps, this what they train themselves for now, selling hegemony, experience coming from age and the wisdom of a leader within the anarchist milieu.

There, then, where some see an opportunity, because of the economic crisis, we see a trap. A trap of sinking in the swamp of confusion, of fantasies about the social “good” deriving from Marxist analysis, of certainties about revolutionary subjects, of economism.

First of all, the global crisis we are experiencing today is not just a crisis of numbers, financial figures and mathematics, but part of the overall crisis of values and conscience in the world of authority. It is the cannibalistic crisis of western lifestyle which after it grew big consuming blood and oil from the “underdeveloped”, it now feeds from the flesh. Today, the “developed world” not only lives in the grip of economic tyranny, but also in the desert of spiritual and emotional bankruptcy.

Unlike the Marxists and their “anarchist” great-grandchildren, who want to interpret life with the rationality of mathematics, we seek our liberation inside the blasts of a permanent existential revolt of relations, situations, values, morals, and everyday life.

Even the economy, which is the center of the tedious analysis of the communists, for us it is not a series of ordered numbers leading to the equation of the class struggle. Instead, the economy is, first and foremost, a hierarchical social relationship that speaks the language of money. Money is a symbol of accumulated power. It is a property title that owns objects, land, time, admiration, relationships, people. The anarchist challenge, then, cannot be trapped in the demand for “better wages”, “lower taxes”, “economic equality”… One cannot destroy the morality of property by making it equal and uniform to all.

The experiment of communist totalitarian regimes spawned monsters, dictatorships of the proletariat and obedient subjects. One cannot exorcise ugliness with a new ugliness, simply by changing the name to something more “social” and imagining that through the “anti-imperialist struggle”, the country won’t become a “modern colony “.

Even if one removes money, authority will find new beads and mirrors to swap for the obedience of the natives. Besides, authority is older than capitalism and money. So we laugh, but also get bored from the analysis and the texts of the anarcho-marxist theoretical moles. They write and rewrite super-analysis, but their figures don’t add up, as they cannot understand that life does not fit in the labels they stick to it … “proletariat,” “class struggle,” “anti-imperialist struggle”… First of all, anti-imperialist struggle does not require an overall anti-state perception of the anarchist struggle. Anti-imperialist struggle is also being conducted by the bureaucratic fossil of KKE (Greek Communist Party). At the same time, reading behind the lines both in the texts of the ex-anarchist now communists, we see a deliberate crypto-patriotism. National references (our country, the Greek people, etc.), focusing on the “foreign capital” (as if capital has a nationality), combined with the complete absence of anti-state edges is at least suspicious. The neo-communists – ex-anarchists do not speak for a moment about the destruction of the state. Instead, they speak in a denunciatory, political way aiming for its wide consumption and present themselves as the far left of the left government, which they denounce, but without openly declaring war against it. The extra-parliamentary opposition to the leftist government of SY.RI.Z.A. has nothing to do with anarchy and freedom. We do not seek neither a reform of the system, nor its leftist grooming; all we want is its total destruction. However, we live in strange days and we have to rearm even the most fundamental parts of anarchy…

Authority, then, is not just ugly, sullen faces attached to miserable bodies decorated with suits and ties, in the same way anarchy is not “honest worker’s sweat” and “The reading of the complete works of Marx and Bakunin“… Surely the first ones must become ideal shooting targets for Kalashnikov bursts, but this is not enough…

Authority is a social relationship.

Authority is born even in our friendships, in our meetings, in our love, in our daily lives.

Again, we have to cast it out of our relations. Of course, this is done only through a belligerent/armed confrontation with the existent, as our searches are not a hippie inner meditation but practical wishes best expressed when our fingers fill magazines with bullets and our hands arm our weapons to “talk”…

ii) Overcoming revolutionary myths

The class of the poor, the oppressed, the “ones at the bottom”, the workers, is a faded label, which for us does not represent anything in itself . They are words that are lost in the void and their echo is immersed in a past that has been overcome. The working class is a massive forced social identity, which crushes the uniqueness and particularity of the individual, of every different man under its weight. The people is the fairytale that connects a variety of persons with completely different perceptions, habits, anxieties, thoughts, personalities, characteristics most of them regressing into confusion, homogenized in the mouths of politics experts with the name “the people”. The people, the society is the realm of contradictions. It is the common place of origin, and we who deny the ethics and values of society also come from it, but it leads to different options of destinations. Within the society reside slaves who want to look like their bosses, subjects who worship order, conservatives who defend normality, the petty bourgeois who worship property, the fascists who fear everything different, the good citizens who fall in love with the privacy of their home and the cleanliness of their furniture, the underclass that envy the ensconced, the ensconced who are indifferent, the poor who grumble but are afraid to act, immigrants, delinquents who admire the privileged… At the same time, within the same society, there are progressives, sensitive philanthropists, leftists, pacifists, communists, libertarians, anarchists, revolutionaries even the nihilists-negators of society.

What is called “the people”, “society” is all the above mosaic of relations between a fog of persons, some of them connected with an affinity of perceptions and experiences, others at a fierce war with each other.

The people is always seen in a positive way. The people are claimed by all, from the fascists and conservatives to leftists and anarchists. The people are “poor”, “honest”, “depressed”, “wronged” and of course “wise” when voting… The people and the working class, according to political experts, is eternally deluded, thus always in need of guidance. Marxists and their anarchist great-grandchildren are always willing to guide (in the name of “the people” of course) and offer the promised land, the post-revolutionary society. In their texts, posters and events, they always speak in plural, using the collective “we” of the people, the workers, the proletariat, considering that, presenting themselves as part of the proletariat, they will become more likeable and the take the people on their side. The funny thing is that, usually, the political representatives of the proletariat have no connection with it, as, to put it in a “class” way, they come from petty bourgeois or middle-class layers (eternal students, regulars and owners of coffeehouses, economically dependent from their parents etc. .).

As new messiahs–liberators , they address the motley mass of the working class, considering it as the ultimate revolutionary subject. But from within the working class comes the indifference of many, the misery of the petty bourgeoisie, the patriotic cannibalism, the 500,000 voters of the fascist Golden Dawn, law-abiding citizens, informants, the conservatives, the pious of the churches, the faithful TV-viewers, the zombies of the digital world and social media, the happy consumers…

What connects us as anarchists with all these people?… From the absolute nothing, until irreconcilable hostility. Anarchy and the labor movement followed two parallel lines and it is geometrically proven that parallel lines do not intersect. Why, then, should we acknowledge the oppressed in a general and vague way as “brothers” and talk about class war, along people with whom we do not have anything in common? Better to put forward the overall anarchist attack that eliminates all these illusions of the common front of the oppressed. Because right now, all that connects us with the oppressed is the economic condition we are required to live in. But the common coercive economic condition we experience as marginalized, along with the poor, the unemployed, workers, migrants is a forced condition and not a conscious choice. Except from all of us who consciously chose the social margin and refused material privileges, what most oppressed people desire is not to destroy the world of exploitation, but to move to their bosses’ mansions, wear their clothes, imitate their manners and, in turn, oppress all those under their authority. The slave who seeks rights without having a liberating conscience will soon seek to wear his master’s suit. One only needs to notice the accumulated micro-authority that oppressed ones bear inside them when they express it against all those they believe to be “weaker” than them; the native against the immigrant, the immigrant against his family, the “most experienced” workers against their new colleagues… This is the class of modern proletarians. A mix of mercenaries of misery and cannibalism, ready to offer their services to the highest bidder. Oppressed people with oppressed complexes, wanting to be like their bosses.

We don’t want, therefore, to seek comrades and allies inside coercive common conditions we did not choose, but through common choices.

We are neither tricked nor pleased by ephemeral alliances with those who fight for a better salary or rights and reforms of the existent’s misery. We may find ourselves next to them behind barricades or in conflicts with the cops, but we’ll never meet with them substantially unless they demolish their internal moral identity of the worker, the student, the unemployed, the demonstrator and unless they refuse the world of order and laws all together.

We don’t care about those who, having nothing to lose, go out in the streets, but about those willing to lose everything to regain their lives from the beginning…

Besides, among the first ones, you’ll find the biggest traitors, who, in the first hitch or in front of the lure of an economical promise, will desert you, squeal you or even turn against you…

In contrast, in the latter case, you’ll find some of your closest and most authentic comrades and accomplices… How many times have we not found ourselves in the middle of a stormy sea of confusion and contradictions? The same people with whom we were side by side, throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at the cops and sharing times and moments behind flaming barricades, in the context of a corporatist claim of a “wild strike” for better salaries, returned fast to their daily routine and shielded themselves again with the uniform of the lawful citizen, voter, family man, TV-viewer right after their claim was either satisfied or rejected. From the “wild strike” of Chalybourgia, we ended up with the mobilization’s total control by the union adjacent to the Communist Party and the warm welcome of Golden Dawn’s MPs, who rushed to show their solidarity to the “Greek worker’s” struggle. From the barricades and the flaming nights in Keratea and the sabotage of the landfill facility installation in the area, we ended up with high election rates for the Golden Dawn in the same area.

But even the “wild youth” reciprocates in its contradictions. From student squats and attacks against cops it jumps without a second thought to pogroms against immigrants and panegyric fiestas of national pride (“athletic” successes of the national football team).

It is not enough, therefore, only to occasionally overcome the law by throwing a rock or a Molotov cocktail. This is surely a necessary step. However, along with the bank or the police vehicle which we’ll torch, we ought to torch all the authoritarian residues inside us, the moral preconceptions and the conservative stereotypes we inherited from this world.

Of course, as we hate criticism for the sake of criticism and the degradation of digital pseudo-nihilist dirge, that criticizes everything except from the deformed “super-ego”, our position is clear. As much as we want to want to crush the petty politics of the newly minted anarcho-marxists, we evenly want to demolish the ivory tower of the “ideologists’” theory of pure anarchy.

We analyze and decode the complex of society’s explosive contradictions, not to remain spectators and admire our “authority”, but to organize strategically our anarchist attack. There are the so-called intermediate social struggles, some of which (i.e. students’ squats) are interesting due to their composition and their diversion, which may trigger chaotic situations that are the ideal field of expression of our hatred for the system. Obviously, we’ll not be absent from these struggles, without forgetting, of course, that the “ideal” is blotted by reality and what’s left from the rose is the thorn.

However, as we don’t cage ourselves into demands and reformist notions, we maintain our characteristics and don’t lose ourselves in petty political discounts to become socially “liked”. Therefore, we invade as anarchists and don’t hide behind other social masks (unemployed, worker, demonstrator); in contrast, we wear the hood and attack, without fearing the pit of contradictions of the intermediate struggles.

So, if we want to destroy this world of organized exploitation and boredom, we must talk about the overcoming of classes and not wiggle the shroud of “class struggle” as a flag. Red anarchists that talk about class struggle have a corpse in their mouths which has begun to rot. In continuous anarchist insurrection, all classes are abolished. The individual, discovering in a liberating manner its conscious self, is in total rupture with the class of which it comes from, whether this is the proletarian one or the petty bourgeois. We refuse every class because it’s a result of fissions triggered by the system. Every class bears inside it the characteristics and ethics of the existent. The beloved child of red “anarchists”, the proletariat, carries inside it the ethics of labor, the pseudo-pride of patriotism, the worship of petty ownership, the remains of religious conservatism… This is the sad representation of the confusion which triumphs inside the intermediate reformist labor struggles that never overcome their myopic self to acquire an overall liberating perspective.

iii) About Black Anarchy

We renounce, therefore, any notion of “class struggle” which, in its most radical form, the Marxist variation, aims to the conquest of power through the dictatorship of the proletariat. We spit on the “experts” of revolution, the communist leadership, the veterans and the “anarchist” personas of public relations that compete with each other for the position of the greatest helmsman of revolution.

Besides, liberation will come when we smash the heads of our self-appointed “liberators”.

We refuse to wait for the objective conditions of mass uprising. The preparation of big masses as a precondition for the “revolution” against authority only triggers postponement.

We know we live in times of “crisis”. Some ex-anarchists chose to follow the Marxist rhetoric of pragmatism, economism, thinking that they speak the language of political realism. They could not stand as anarchists; they’ll prove to be incompetent as Marxists…

Their arguments already transform and lead to obsolete alliances with individuals and political milieus that define themselves in terms of political opposition. Anarchy no longer has anything to do with them…

We insist on anarchy’s blackness.

In chaos, disorder, living dangerously, nihilism of action, in the armed confrontation with the existent, in the fire of the continuous anarchist insurrection.

We reject all the idealized principles that revolutionary theories talking about the future liberation and social harmony promise. Life offers no guarantees. The time is now and the place is here…

Let’s be honest; we don’t know how a liberated tomorrow will be “functional”. That’s exactly why it’s liberated.

Because it’ll be full of possibilities, questions and doubts. Whoever seeks for certain answers and Marxist certainties will soon seek the guarantee of authority and priesthoods of red power.

We maintain our questions and black flag…

This is black anarchy.

Anarchy, however, demands the organization of the new anarchist urban guerrilla, if we don’t want it to degenerate into a meaningless poetic chatter, doomed to be followed by the alternative integration in the system. Concepts that are not armed, like anarchist individualism, nihilism end up being harmless words in the mouths of even more harmless individuals who confuse anarcho-nihilism with the subculture of “antisocial lifestyle”.

Anarcho-nihilism combines the propaganda of words with the propaganda of shootings, fire, dynamite. Its dynamics is forged on the anvil of actions where consciousness and experience meet in a never ending dance and not in the keyboards of the digital world of noting.

Therefore, the anarchist urban guerrilla has the possibility to carry anarchy from abstract theory to practice where our desires are armed and trigger our own reality.

The Conspiracy of Cells of Fire and FAI are the reflection of our desires. We promote the creation of an informal network of cells and groups of anarchist affinity with the aim to diffuse the practical theory and attacks. We weave our own spider web… We organize our attacks against the outposts of the world of organized exploitation and boredom. We hit the banks, the police stations, the courthouses, the prisons, the ministries, the party offices, the corporate empires and whatever guards and reproduces the values of this world. Of course, we don’t forget that new anarchist urban guerrilla’s target is not just the blowing up of things and execution of authority’s officers, but, simultaneously, the destruction of social relations that bear inside them the poison of power. Therefore, in parallel with the organization and diffusion of FAI and CCF via bullets and bombs, we desire to smash with our texts all these daily social conventions and slap the mentality of willing obedience that are half of the authority’s power…

We hate the hand that holds the whip as much as we hate the back of those who uncomplainingly accept its hits…

Don’t follow me… I’m not leading you…

Don’t walk ahead of me… I’ll not follow you…

Carve your own path… Become yourself…

WE ORGANIZE 10, 100, 1000 cells of Informal Anarchist Federation and Conspiracy of Cells of Fire

ATTACK FIRST AND ALWAYS FOR ANARCHY

Conspiracy of Cells of Fire – FAI/IRF

Imprisoned Members Cell

#Conspiracy of Cells of Fire #ccf #anarchy #communism #nihilism #post left anarchy #the invisible committee #tiqqun #anti tiqqun #fai #irf #attack #direct action

35 notes · View notes

o-ooo-oo · 4 years

Text

Solarpunkish

An idea that has been continuously presented to me in the streams I inhabit is an aestheticization of vertical forests in a sea of harmonious techno-based cohabitation between plant/animal/human… images like these are produced by people who decidedly and rebelliously choose to imagine a "hopeful" future, despite the overwhelming evidence that Business As Usual has no foreseeable end and we are heading for multitudinous catastrophe with a side of apocalypse. Although I find these utopian manifestations ravishing, I don't see them as palpable or realistic, and I worry that they might simply be feeding an educated upper-class fantasy based in the historic idealization of the sublime aspects of nature, and the conception that electronics and architecture would be the ultimate solution to all human problems.

Could it be just as hopeful to imagine the thriving of alternative lifeforms, as is quite likely?

What if the cognitive humanoid whose existence persists reveals itself to be an evolutionary descendent of seals, or octopi? What if seals and octopi are already humanoids, or in Peter Singer's sense, members of personhood? (1) Do we need something to be sentient to extend our empathy toward it? As moral agents, by what criteria do we choose moral patients, and why? Is it to avoid moral corruption in ourselves, or is it because we in fact see the value of the subject, object, thing, in itself? What might it mean for a person to be moral towards a plant, a chair, a building, a river, a biosphere, a virus, a political system, a moth? We don't even know a world where we extend the same level of empathy to all people, so it is very difficult to even begin to imagine the logical next steps.

In order to deconstruct and to question, in the way that Derrida bulkily alludes to, we need to point and create terminology.(2) Morton says that it is important to acknowledge wholes, holism, but it is just as important to see the parts, and seeing to that the parts might add up to the whole, unlike the label of humanity, where human individuals add up to more than the conception of humanity. Morton coined the term Agrilogistics which is the idea that we have blended things together in order to colonize them more easily to further the existence of human-kind. This ideology seeks to eliminate contradiction, fear and anxiety; it smooths the world out for us, exchanging ambiguity for industrialized perception. We need to find new ways to talk about entities that capture their animacy.(3)

Erased in the process of white Western Agrilogistic development has been the contradictory narratives of other peoples' cultures. The movement for counter-cartography has been one of many tools in aiding the reclamation of territorial sovereignty for many indigenous folks, such as the aforementioned Zuni, and also several nations within Canada. (4) The extraction of big data to exploit ecological resources is not new to Google Maps, the only difference is that now people are either unwittingly or voluntarily subjecting themselves to the mining.

In Teran's 2012 cartographic work The Little Yellow House, a narrative was constructed about this image of a yellow countryside house somewhere in Denmark by democratic participation of the work online. The user can only fully experience the narrative if they provide Terran with some data through an online form. Once submitted, the user receives instructions from the artist. The first 100 participants became a part of a publication which told the story of the house. Teran's goal with this piece was to "create a work that causes us to reflect on storytelling and the distances manifest in the physical and the digital online worlds respectively. How communication changes according to speed and distance, as well as how stories can be created over the network."(5)

I am interested in creating space-time representations for the quarantined, alternatives to the evil pervasive maps that dominate broadband activity, that do not undermine or overmine the subjects, and are able to peer into inter-object relations, without anthropocentric leanings. This might mean creating a virtual object, one that exists in electron pulses, as a self-contained network, with viscous manifestations in the minds of the participants. A map does not need to be used as an economic tool, it can also be a spiritual reckoning.

1. Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. London: The Bodley Head, 2015.

2. Morton, Timothy. “Ecology Without Nature.” Ecology Without Nature (blog), October 11, 2015. http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2015/10/what-is-agrilogistics.html.

3. Lawlor, Leonard, "Jacques Derrida", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/derrida/>.

4. Kirk Jalbert, Douglas Shields, Matt Kelso, Samantha Rubright. (2019) The power to plan: mineral rights leasing, data justice, and proactive zoning in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. Environmental Sociology 5:2, pages 164-176.

vimeo

youtube

#Michelle Teran #Timothy Morton #Derrida #Harman #Solar Punk

2 notes · View notes

bikexit · 5 years

Text

Istanbul

Istanbul is a city of contradiction. Brutalist concrete high rise is juxtaposed against ancient Ottoman architecture, raki is sold in shops streets away from the Blue Mosque, modern high streets with exclusive western brands are flanked by armoured trucks with water cannons, high speed internet is beamed to modern smart phones only to be selectively censored, speakers blast the call to prayer during the daylight hours and pulsing techno music long after dark.

It’s jarring and takes a while to get your head around, East say hello to West, you don’t know each other, but remember Abraham, you both knew him at some point. Though like the strait that divides the city, the different cultures are yet to really combine, like oil and water, when it works you get the odd glint of a rainbow of colour that would be otherwise unseen.

Still it is fascinating and utterly intoxicating. I have been suffering from withdrawal ever since I left.

#istanbul #turkey #cyclelife #cycling #bikexit #the end

1 note · View note

filmstruck · 6 years

Photo

A Meeting of East and West: Bowie and Sakamoto in MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE (’83) By Thomas Davant

The island is somewhere in the South Pacific. Clouds sever the tops of soaring mountains. Lush jungle, thick and mosquito-infested, rolls like a green carpet over the land. Amidst this verdant space a compound of bamboo and metal sits low and sturdy. A man is punched, kicked and dragged before a line of soldiers. One of the sergeants hands him a short sword. The man buries it into his stomach and with heaving motions disembowels himself. The soldiers look straight, ignoring his screams. An Englishman in their midst fights back tears.

A brutal and somewhat uneven war film set in a Japanese-run internment camp, MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE (’83) finds a complex dynamic between prisoners of war, commandants and the intermediaries who flow between the two as translators and, when possible, peacemakers. It’s a bizarre film bolstered by assured direction by Nagisa Oshima (as if this film wasn’t an indication of the strange path his career was taking, his next found Charlotte Rampling having an affair with a chimpanzee) and featuring captivating performances by David Bowie and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Both men were innovative musicians and their combined appearance in this film marks a profound meeting of East and West.

Bowie needs no introduction. The space before the camera was far from foreign for the singer-songwriter, who had just come off an emaciated, crazed portrayal of Bertolt Brecht’s BAAL (’82) for Alan Clarke and years earlier turned in the seminal role of his acting career with THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (’76), a move which channeled his Martian-like stage presence and space-infused sound.

Here he plays Jack Celliers, a POW with a shock of surf-blonde hair which stands out prominently against the lush green of the Japanese jungle. Bowie’s stare, with one pupil forever open thanks to a scuffle in his teenage years, seems to reflect a lifetime of sadness. In a particularly detailed backstory, we learn that Celliers failed to come to the aid of his brother, a hunchback who was tormented at boarding school. Haunted by his failure to stand up for the meek, Celliers becomes the camp’s most vociferous prisoner spokesman, caring for the dying and whispering words of hope. Stubborn in his will to persevere, he finds his match in the camp commandant Captain Yonoi.

Ryuichi Sakamoto had never acted before. Like Bowie, he was a trailblazer, an innovative force in music who saw what other musicians were doing and ran the opposite direction. A member of the three-man techno-pop group Yellow Magic Orchestra, Sakamoto was drawn to all things fringe and rebellious. In an interview he recalled that his favorite filmmakers were Godard and Oshima, two fearless creators themselves. Oshima set fire to a system he found restrictive and hypocritical. It was all a beautiful arrangement of the stars that these three outlaws were able to work together.

In a beautifully reflective interview on the Criterion edition, Sakamoto recalls how Oshima had been transfixed by a black and white portrait of the musician featured in a book of photographs. The director offered Sakamoto the role, and the latter accepted on the condition he could score the picture. Oshima agreed without hesitation, a testament to the faith he put in collaborators.

Taking as inspiration the score for CITIZEN KANE (’41), a potpourri of Christmas carols and his background in electronic sampling, Sakamoto spent months writing and then overlaid the track. He found that where he believed there should be music, Oshima agreed almost to a T. In composing the final score, he realized: “The music shouldn’t be specific to any place, but should seem exotic both to us as Asians as well as to Westerners, like music from a nowhere land.” The score has become something of a classic, its innovative use of synthesizers, bells and the gamelan (a complex set-up of mallets and gongs) infusing the film with a melancholy that strikes right at the heart.

Working with Oshima was also a dream for daring producer Jeremy Thomas, who found a New Zealand protectorate where the film crew could construct a prison camp on the cheap and avoid the public eye. This was a welcome change for Bowie, a superstar the world over, who jumped at the chance to work with idol Oshima and to pour every ounce of his being into his role. Though Sakamoto’s performance wobbles as he overcomes his nervousness, the two musicians achieve a hypnotic harmony as two enemies engaged in a clash of culture, fury and homoerotic fascination.

The film’s most famous scene features a kiss between the two men and it’s a profound moment of East meets West. With Sakamoto’s score building to a spine-tingling crescendo, Celliers walks through the prisoners to stand before a soldier Yonoi is poised to cut down. The Japanese commandant rises his sword over his head. The westerner stares him back. Then he reaches out and puts their faces together, kissing both cheeks. Oshima cuts to Yonoi’s reaction, his eyes staring to something beyond, his mouth open, a truly orgasmic moment. The men fall apart and are knocked down by the release.

In preparing for the scene Sakamoto understood that Yonoi was feeling the terrible contradiction of joy and shame. With the first take he closed his eyest was too much to endure. Oshima stepped in to offer what the musician recalled his only direction: keep the eyes open. The result elevates the film to a whole new level: both men, with their eyes open, absorbing a long-awaited moment of consummation.

In an interview shot after the film had been released, Bowie and Sakamoto sit down to discuss nuclear war and the absolute necessity of retaining peace. In the meeting of two nations who put behind a history of violence against one another to move forward together, others can take inspiration. Beneath the two musicians’ poignant conversation, Bowie’s cigarette smoke entwining their heads, Sakamoto’s score chimes softly, taking us back to those cloud-covered mountains, lush jungles and bloodied prison grounds, to a time we can only hope to leave in the past.

#FilmStruck #Criterion Collection #David Bowie #StreamLine Blog #Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence #Nagisa Ôshima #Ryuichi Sakamoto

443 notes · View notes

sunsetcarnation264 · 3 years

Photo

how did I forget to upload this, what the fuck me- But aight, this one might need some explanation with why I specifically chose the character and song combination. The song, "Contradict" by Techno Westerns (good band by the way check them out), feels like it's about pointing out their own flaws and admitting that yeah the narrator of the song can be a dick sometimes. He encourages the person it's directed to to ignore him, hate him, and how he's gonna let himself down and how it'll continue, possibly letting the other person down too. I feel like it fits Howard so much from him to Randy, because he can really be a jackass at times and have his priorities skewed (i.e. not being there focused on what's needed to be done vs what he wants, like wanting to keep Randy there with him even if he can't at the moment because y'know Ninja stuff, save the world, etc.) but get it straight in the end. Whether he realizes it or not, though, I feel it's sort of debatable but personally I feel like he does realize it and unless it gets heavily deconstructed in some way (like Randy gets fed up with it and spends some time apart from him even if it hurts them both because of Howard's shit and Howard has to think about how he's acting, or some other way), I don't think he'll change in that aspect. Then again, some people never change in some areas, so who knows what the case would be for him. But then again it's probably just my interpretation of everything and I might be fucking it up, idk. As a character he is kinda interesting to me and I wouldn't mind deconstructing him at some point, but then again I wouldn't mind digging deeper into all of the other characters in the show since I love a majority of the cast. Since I'm hyperfixated on the show, I might be able to actually have the time and energy to work on all of that lmao I just need to make playlists for the characters which will probs take awhile-

#Randy Cunningham 9th Grade Ninja #Howard Weinerman #Lil's Art #Chromesthesia

1 note · View note

morethanboomtschk · 3 years

Photo

“Ten Cities” is not an unreflective celebration of partying. With all their empathy for their subject, the authors repeatedly work out inherent contradictions and parallel developments. In this way, the stories unfold a magical and de-exoticizing effect at the same time. Because which music gets caught where and what is celebrated how is, of course, inextricably linked with very tangible, socio-political and historical parameters on site.

Clubbing ist ephemer. What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas - This promise, which is not only aimed at the permission to cross otherwise valid boundaries, but also includes the lack of evidence beyond the moment, is part of the nightlife to this day. This is one of the reasons why there are again and again rare opportunities in which the synchronously experienced present can still manifest itself at all. With their fleeting character by definition, nocturnal spheres have repeatedly eluded a classifying view. You don't know that much about recent party events, and if so, then only from the retrospective. The former epicentres of clubbing are only slightly better documented and, hardly surprisingly, they are primarily located in the northwestern hemisphere. “Ten Cities - Clubbing in Nairobi, Cairo, Kyiv, Johannesburg, Naples, Berlin, Luanda, Lagos, Bristol, Lisbon. 1960 - March 2020” is almost a small sensation in this respect: 60 years of leaving, exemplified by this geographical selection, has never existed before. Under the title of the same name, the Goethe-Institut has initiated musical encounters from Berlin and Nairobi in recent years, and now the extensive reference work on the metropolises involved is published. Two detailed essays are dedicated to each city, each with a focus on “Music / Spaces” and “Spaces / Politics”, supplemented by photographs. One can compare social and physical spaces at different locations or contrast the political framework conditions of nightlife in Eastern and Western European, North and South African metropolises.

Right at the beginning, “Ten Cities” also provides a possible explanation why techno, as the definitive global musical language, often had a harder time in African cities than elsewhere - many regional rhythmic traditions are comparatively complex, often interspersed with syncope, for example, so getting used to over-simple music could only happen slowly and perhaps less forcefully. In this way, the authors collect the prejudice, which is also repeatedly formulated in Germany, that the dull, pounding beat of techno is reminiscent of supposedly “African rhythms”. "Ten Cities"shows how ways and possibilities have always opened up to celebrate outside of established or commercial structures: Stokvel, private “Spar clubs”, are worked out as a subversive possibility of informal encounters among black homosexuals in Johannesburg during apartheid, or tuk-tuks as mobile music - and party stations in Luanda.

Precisely because club rooms are by their nature apolitical or at least not ideological, one should not underestimate their social potential as open spaces beyond the well-known party metropolises. In addition to African metropolises, “Ten Cities” sheds light on epicentres of nightlife that are also less of a focus within Europe - such as Lisbon, Naples or Kiev. From music combos that merged polyphonic singing and Carpathian rhythms into a funky liaison, to illegal record trading on X-ray material, to the dance palaces that closed at eleven o'clock, the Soviet worker had to be rested after all.

“Ten Cities” is not an unreflective celebration of partying. With all their empathy for their subject, the authors repeatedly work out inherent contradictions and parallel developments. In this way, the stories develop a magical and de-exoticizing effect at the same time. Because which music gets caught where and what is celebrated how is, of course, inextricably linked with very tangible, socio-political and historical parameters on site.

#Books #Clubscene #Music #Musicscene #Electronic Music #History #Read #Ten Cities

0 notes

timalexanderdollery · 4 years

Text

Accelerationism: the obscure idea inspiring white supremacist killers around the world

Chris Malbon for Vox

How a techno-capitalist philosophy morphed into a justification for murder.

Blaze Bernstein, age 19 at the time of his murder, loved to cook.

Before he traveled back to his home in California for the 2017-’18 winter break, the University of Pennsylvania sophomore had been elected managing editor of a campus cooking publication called Penn Appétit. It’s a position he ended up never filling.

On the morning of January 2, his parents noticed that he’d left their house in the Orange County community of Foothill Ranch and tried to contact him. When he didn’t respond, they checked his Snapchat account and found messages between their son and Sam Woodward, a former high school classmate. The two had planned to hang out at a local park.

Bernstein, who was gay and Jewish, texted friends that he and Woodward were meeting for a sexual encounter. Less than a week later, investigators discovered Bernstein’s body in the park, hidden by a tree branch and a mound of dirt. He had been stabbed 19 times in the neck.

Authorities quickly identified Woodward as a suspect and found Bernstein’s blood in his car and on a knife in his possession. They learned that Woodward was a member of Atomwaffen Division — one of the most extreme neo-Nazi groups in the country. He was arrested; he pleaded not guilty and is still awaiting trial.

The local Jewish community center celebrated Bernstein’s memory by naming its cooking school in his honor. Atomwaffen celebrated Woodward by making T-shirts emblazoned with his mugshot.

Bernstein’s 2018 slaying marked the beginning of an extraordinary period of white supremacist violence — a spate of murders and mass shootings that has continued through this year.

The October 2018 shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue was the deadliest act of anti-Semitic violence in American history. The March 2019 Islamophobic attack on mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, was the deadliest mass shooting in the country’s history. It was followed in April by another attack on an American synagogue (this time in Poway, California), and an August 2019 shooting at an El Paso Walmart that was one of the most brutal attacks targeting Hispanics in US history.

In late July, FBI Director Christopher Wray reported that the FBI had made as many domestic terrorism arrests in 2019 as it did in all of 2018 — and further, that “a majority of the domestic terrorism cases that we’ve investigated are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence.”

These killings were often linked to the alt-right, described as an outgrowth of the movement’s rise in the Trump era. But many of these suspected killers, from Atomwaffen thugs to the New Zealand mosque shooter to the Poway synagogue attacker, are more tightly connected to a newer and more radical white supremacist ideology, one that dismisses the alt-right as cowards unwilling to take matters into their own hands.

It’s called “accelerationism,” and it rests on the idea that Western governments are irreparably corrupt. As a result, the best thing white supremacists can do is accelerate their demise by sowing chaos and creating political tension. Accelerationist ideas have been cited in mass shooters’ manifestos — explicitly, in the case of the New Zealand killer — and are frequently referenced in white supremacist web forums and chat rooms.

Accelerationists reject any effort to seize political power through the ballot box, dismissing the alt-right’s attempts to engage in mass politics as pointless. If one votes, one should vote for the most extreme candidate, left or right, to intensify points of political and social conflict within Western societies. Their preferred tactic for heightening these contradictions, however, is not voting, but violence — attacking racial minorities and Jews as a way of bringing us closer to a race war, and using firearms to spark divisive fights over gun control. The ultimate goal is to collapse the government itself; they hope for a white-dominated future after that.

Accelerationism has bizarre roots in academia. But as strange as the racist movement’s intellectual history may be, experts believe it has played a significant and under-appreciated role in the current wave of extremist violence.

“It’s not an ideology that exists in a theoretical sense,” says Joanna Mendelson, a senior investigative researcher at the Anti-Defamation League. “It’s an ideology that has actually manifested in real-world violence.”

Bizarre origins

The earliest version of “accelerationism” was, ironically enough, in some ways a celebration of the status quo.

The mainstream ethos of the 1990s was thoroughly capitalist, the collapse of the Soviet Union creating a sense that the spread of the American economic and political model was inevitable and irresistible. This coincided with a technological revolution — the rise of widespread internet access and the birth of mass internet culture, a sense of a world defined by and connected through technology in previously incomprehensible ways.

At the University of Warwick, a relatively new but well-regarded English university, a young philosophy professor named Nick Land argued that the triumph of capitalism and the rise of technoculture were inextricably intertwined. Drawing on the work of famously dense continental theorists like Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Jean-Francois Lyotard, Land argued that capitalist technological advancement was transforming not just our societies, but our very selves. The self, he believed, was being dissolved by the increasing speed and pace of modern life — the individual was becoming less important than the techno-capitalist system it found itself in.

“Modernity has Capitalism (the self-escalating techno-commercial complex) as its motor,” Land wrote in an email to Vox, in characteristically cryptic style. “Our question was what ‘the process’ wants (i.e. spontaneously promotes) and what resistances it provokes.”

The “we” he’s referring to is the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), a group of Warwick faculty members and graduate students who worked with Land to examine the questions that would come to define this early accelerationism. The writing that came out of CCRU’s work has a hallucinatory, ethereal quality that makes it hard to figure out exactly what they’re trying to say (Land’s marquee book is titled Fanged Noumena). It also feels very of its time; CCRU members obsessed over electronica and used the word “cyber” a lot, all conveying a sense of a society rapidly accelerating toward an exciting future.

The CCRU was a fount of mad energy, obsessed with the pace of life under late capitalism; its members had utter disregard for traditional academic norms about scholarship and behavior. This could not last long. The CCRU split from Warwick in 1998, long after the university’s philosophy department had grown tired of its antics.

According to Andy Beckett, a journalist who chronicled the CCRU’s rise and fall in the Guardian, Land and his remaining followers moved into a home in Leamington formerly owned by prominent British satanist Aleister Crowley, part of an obsession with the occult that had flourished in the accelerationist ranks. Beckett describes a psychologically tortured group that would scribble strange diagrams on the walls of Crowley’s former home. In Fanged Noumena, Land describes his “tool of choice” during his darkest period as “the sacred substance amphetamine ... after perhaps a year of fanatical abuse [I] was, by any reasonable standard, profoundly insane.”

After the CCRU’s collapse, its members spread across British academia as well as fields ranging from journalism to music production. Its ideas rose to prominence again in the early 2010s, taking two separate, and opposed political turns.

One was left-wing and academic, a school of Marxist thought focusing on how technology can be conscripted toward building a post-capitalist future. The other was right-wing, and in major part a product of Land’s mind.

After his breakdown, Land moved to China and became enamored with its techno-authoritarian political system. He worked as a journalist, reporting uncritically and favorably on the Chinese regime’s accomplishments. When I asked him which politicians he admired, he said he’s “not huge on political figures” on the scene today. However, he added, “[Singaporean technocratic authoritarian] Lee Kuan Yew and [former Chinese leader] Deng Xiaoping were greats.”

Land turned this admiration for technocratic strongmen into an entire political ideology. Linking up online with the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Curtis Yarvin — who writes under the pen name Mencius Moldbug — he helped construct the doctrine of “neoreaction,” or NRx, essentially an argument that democracy had outlived its usefulness. In his 2013 series of essays on the topic, titled The Dark Enlightenment, Land argues that the ideal state is a capitalist monarchy described as “gov-corp,” the state-controlled by an authoritarian CEO organizing policy according to the dictates of “rational corporate governance.”

Christina Animashaun/Vox; Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon has reportedly read neoreactionary literature.

It was essentially a hard-right spin on accelerationism. Neoreactionaries argue that egalitarian and democratic policies described as “progressive” by left-liberals are, in fact, a way of slowing down the only progress worth having — acceleration toward techno-capitalist singularity. Neoreaction is a version of accelerationism adapted to address this problem.

“Neoreaction is Accelerationism with a flat tire,” Land wrote in a 2013 blog post. “Beside the speed machine, or industrial capitalism, there is an ever more perfectly weighted decelerator ... comically, the fabrication of this braking mechanism is proclaimed as progress. It is the Great Work of the Left.”

Though NRx has no mainstream proponents, it does have connections to prominent figures. Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon has reportedly read neoreactionary literature, and Trump-backing venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s fund supported Moldbug’s tech startup Urbit. In emails to right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos obtained by Buzzfeed, Moldbug claimed to be “coaching Thiel,” telling Yiannopoulos that he “watched the [2016] election at [Thiel’s] house ... He’s fully enlightened.”

Neo-Nazi accelerationism and the alt-right

The extreme right-wing internet is a small place. The rise of neoreaction inevitably led it to cross paths with another online fringe movement of the mid-2010s: the alt-right.

Members of the two movements didn’t agree on everything: While Land and Moldbug valorize capitalism and see democracy as the major barrier to a better future, alt-right ideologues like Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor valorize whiteness and see Jews and non-whites as the problem. Nonetheless, the two shared core ideas, like an emphasis on the role of genetics in creating human hierarchies, that make them comfortable coexisting in the same online spaces. “Although I am not a white nationalist, I am not exactly allergic to the stuff,” as Moldbug once put it. (Land is somewhat more critical, writing in The Dark Enlightenment that “the opportunity for viable ethno-supremacist politics disappears into a logical abyss.”)

The result is considerable cross-pollination between neoreactionaries and the alt-right. Ideas and terminology crossed the different group lines; some fringe influencers, such as the YouTuber Colin “Millennial Woes” Robertson, have described themselves as being both neoreactionaries and members of the alt-right. A 2018 Southern Poverty Law Center investigation found that several posters on The Right Stuff , an alt-right website, were heavily influenced by neoreaction.

“Many of the ideological seeds that would make me open to Hitlerism started with Dark Enlightenment,” one of the posters quoted in the study wrote.

This is the most likely means through which the racist movement became introduced to the term “accelerationism.” There’s no meaningful use of the term or attention paid to Land among American racists prior to the alt-right’s encounter with The Dark Enlightenment — and why would there have been? An abstruse techno-capitalist philosophy seems to have little in common with the herrenvolk hatred of the KKK. It wasn’t until the rise of neoreaction and the alt-right — two very online movements that shared members in common — that the encounter would have happened.

It’s somewhat ironic, then, that “accelerationism” has displaced the alt-right in the eyes of many internet racists.

Christina Animashaun/Vox; Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

White nationalist and alt-right ideologue Richard Spencer (third from right) takes part in an anti-immigration march near the White House in December 2017.

In popular usage, the “alt-right” is generally taken to refer to racists on the internet. That’s actually a bit imprecise: The alt-right is a specific subset of online racists, one that believes white nationalism can triumph by trolling journalists and staging real-life demonstrations like Charlottesville. The basic model is Hitler and the Nazi party: Win power through democratic elections, then enact your goals.

This has long been a controversial strategy in the neo-Nazi community. It had been tried before in the 1950s and 1960s by the American Nazi Party, whose charismatic leader, George Lincoln Rockwell, attempted to turn it into a legitimate force. Rockwell staged a rally on the National Mall, demonstrated against civil rights, and planned marches through Jewish neighborhoods on Jewish holidays. This amounted to very little politically and, in 1967, Rockwell was assassinated by a former member of his own party.

The alt-right’s leaders believed the time was right for another try, in large part thanks to Donald Trump and the internet.

Trump is seen by the alt-right not as a crypto-Nazi, but as an outsider sympathetic to white nationalist goals. He served as a figurehead, a rallying point that could help them convert larger numbers of Americans to their cause. The internet allowed them to try out their message with a mass audience: memes and trolling and message boards allowed them to bypass media gatekeepers and reach Trump fans who might be receptive to white nationalist ideas directly. Indeed, the combination of Trump’s rise and alt-right online activity did swell the movement’s ranks considerably.

The 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was supposed to be proof of concept, a demonstration that the pro-Trump shitposters could be turned into a real-world political movement. What actually happened was a wave of national revulsion and backlash, particularly after the murder of counterprotester Heather Heyer by a white nationalist. The alt-right lost access to social media platforms, was hounded out of public demonstrations by Antifa, and unequivocally denounced by virtually everyone in American politics (except Trump). The second Unite the Right rally, held in DC in 2018, was a pathetically low-turnout affair.

Christina Animashaun/Vox; Zach D. Roberts/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Neo-Nazis, alt-right, and white supremacists take part in the night before the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 11, 2017.

The silver lining for the alt-right — the president’s “very fine people” comment — wasn’t enough to salvage things. Trump, despite all his vicious rhetoric and anti-immigrant policies, had failed to stop what white supremacists see as the existential threat to America: the country’s long-term movement toward becoming a majority-minority country. The alt-right’s theory of change through elections lost favor with others on the white supremacist fringe.

“From 2015, when Trump announced and attacked Mexicans that first day, through around Charlottesville, these people really thought they were going to be victorious in the electoral [process] and be able to take a peaceful route back to power,” says Heidi Beirich, the director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. “That has been completely given up on.”

This was the moment that neo-Nazi accelerationism really began its rise to prominence — and promote its new and more violent theory of change to supplant the ideas of the “alt-cucks,” as accelerationists derisively termed their white nationalist opponents.

Like neoreaction, neo-Nazi accelerationism holds that the liberal-democratic order is a failure — that we should move beyond it toward a better future, and that the task of political action should be to accelerate the speed of that transformation. Only in their view, that “better future” is not capitalist authoritarianism, but the total collapse of a degenerate and corrupt Western society — and the rebirth, out of its ashes, of a new political order more hospitable to white domination.

Their main inspiration on how exactly to “accelerate” this process came from James Mason, a previously unheralded neo-Nazi writer who produced a newsletter called Siege in the 1980s. In Siege, Mason uses the collapse of George Lincoln Rockwell’s political strategy to claim that any attempt to work inside the parameters of normal politics was doomed to failure. A better approach, he argued, was pioneered by serial killer Charles Manson — a correspondent of Mason’s who deeply influenced the theories developed in Siege.

The murders committed by Manson and his disciples served, in his mind, as a model of decentralized violent action that would be hard for authorities to stop. If neo-Nazis emulated Manson on an individual level, killed and tortured select targets, eventually they could help spur a white uprising against the system — accelerate the pace of a societal collapse already made inevitable by Jewish and non-white corruption, and set the stage for its replacement by a Fourth Reich.

“If I were asked by anyone of my opinion on what to look for (or hope for) next I would tell them a wave of killings, or ‘assassinations’ of System bureaucrats by roving gun men who have their strategy well mapped-out in advance and well-nigh impossible to stop,” Mason writes in Siege. “His greatest concern must be to pick his target well so that his act may speak so clearly for itself that no member of White America can mistake its message.”

Mason is still alive today. He lives in Denver and looks like an unremarkable bearded white man — that is, when he isn’t wearing his vintage Nazi uniform and a swastika arm band. He languished in obscurity until 2017, when members of the militant neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen tracked him down. The group was founded in 2015 and had long admired him; many of its members were on Iron March, a neo-Nazi web forum that was an early promoter of violent accelerationism.

After linking up with Mason in real life, they received his blessing to continue aggressively promoting his ideas, to promote websites with names like Siege Culture aimed at updating Mason’s framework for modern times. The accelerationism they preached centered on heightening the contradictions, using violence both to target their enemies and force a harsh response from the political system — eventually, they hoped, demolishing the state apparatus that stands between us and a white-dominated future.

Christina Animashaun/Vox; Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

Alt-right supporters walk toward a rally in Portland, Oregon, in August 2019.

2017 was a good time for such a doctrine to begin spreading: The alt-right was buckling under post-Charlottesville strains, drawing adherents from those extremists disenchanted with the alt-right’s comparatively cautious approach. They adopted the alt-right’s tactic of trolling and shitposting to popularize their more violent ideas; the phrase “Read Siege” became a meme they pushed on social media.

Atomwaffen organized itself into cells: Adherents would meet up at physical “hate camps,” practice with rifles, and plan their next move. Accelerationist ideas flourished separately on social media platforms and extremist web forums like 8chan and Fascist Forge, reaching neo-Nazi groups around the globe.

The dedication to violence in accelerationist spaces is scary. They openly fantasize about the need to kill Jews and non-whites and even celebrate ideologically opposed acts of violence — like Islamist terror attacks — as a blow against the system.

Though violence is celebrated as the preeminent tactic, they’re willing to endorse non-violent means as well. Accelerationists have proposed distributing flyers for racist rallies alongside ones for a counter-rally, to stoke social division and create conflict. They suggest you should always vote for the most radical candidate in any election, regardless of their position on the political spectrum, to undermine the system’s coherence. One poster I saw even heralded the rise of Bernie Sanders, a Jewish socialist, on the grounds that his proposed expansions of the welfare state would bankrupt the US government and thus undermine its grip on power.

In their view, any sort of increase in social tension is good as long as it accelerates us toward system collapse — and individuals have an obligation to do what they can to hasten us along this path. Even, or more precisely, especially committing murder.

“I would be willing,” as one Fascist Forge contributor put it, “to use all resources possible for accelerationism.”

How accelerationism spread terror

Starting in 2017, Atomwaffen members began practicing what they preached. From that year on, the group has been publicly linked to at least five killings, including Blaze Bernstein’s. In October 2019, police in Washington arrested Kaleb Cole, believed to be the leader of the state’s Atomwaffen division, and seized eight guns from his residence. They believed he was about to commit a mass shooting.

But the thing about accelerationism today is that it does not require any organized plot or group to lead to mass murder. Accelerationist justifications for violence have suffused online white nationalist spaces to the point where anyone can encounter it and draw their own murderous conclusions.

“There is an entire subculture of individuals who are promoting this concept, who advocate for sabotage and destruction against the system,” Mendelson, the Anti-Defamation League researcher, says. “It only takes that one individual who’s inspired by the rhetoric on that message board to act.”

The internet has allowed James Mason’s original vision, “lone wolf” violence, to become a reality, not just in the United States but globally: Accelerationism seems to have played a role in the March 2019 Christchurch shooter’s decision to gun down Muslims while they prayed.

Christina Animashaun/Vox; Carl Court/Getty Images

A gathering to remember victims of the New Zealand’s Christchurch mosque attack, which left 51 people dead. The shooter explicitly touted accelerationist ideas.

Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant’s motivation was a mix of hate and fear: Like all contemporary white supremacists, he believed non-white population growth was an existential threat to his race. His manifesto is titled “The Great Replacement,” a term coined by a French writer but in context refers to the theory of “white genocide” by demography that goes back decades in the white supremacist movement. Tarrant’s plan for stopping white genocide drew liberally from accelerationist ideas; he literally titled a section of the manifesto “Destabilization and Accelerationism: tactics for victory.”

“Why did you carry out the attack? ... To add momentum to the pendulum swings of history, further destabilizing and polarizing Western society in order to eventually destroy the current nihilistic, hedonistic, individualistic insanity that has taken control of Western thought,” he writes. “The change we need to enact only arises in the great crucible of crisis.”

It’s difficult to overstate the influence of Tarrant’s attack and manifesto on the internet’s racist right. The Christchurch shooting claimed 51 lives, one of the deadliest white supremacist terror attacks in modern history. The sheer violence of the assault on New Zealand’s small Muslim community turned his manifesto into a must-read on the racist right — and made accelerationism into one of the dominant ideas on the fringe right today.

Christina Animashaun/Vox; Carl Court/Getty Images

People view flowers and tributes to remember victims of the Christchurch mosque attacks, on March 23, 2019.

“Atomwaffen was a relatively insular universe. When the Christchurch shooter starts describing this, it makes a big jump to the wider consciousness of the white supremacist movement,” the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Beirich says. “That clear statement of accelerationism in the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto took this to another level. Now, pretty much everybody on the radical right has read this stuff, imbibed this stuff — and he put it into the public domain for white supremacists.”

In April, about a month after Christchurch, a man named John Earnest entered a synagogue in Poway, California, and began firing on worshippers. Earnest’s manifesto is a mix of old-school Christian anti-Semitism and internet-era hatred; the manifesto cites both Tarrant and 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooter Robert Bowers as inspiration, but seems particularly inspired by Tarrant’s writing (“Tarrant was a catalyst for me personally,” he writes).

At one point, Earnest explicitly borrows a clearly accelerationist idea from Tarrant’s manifesto: the idea that using a gun in an attack could hasten the state’s collapse by stoking conflict over gun control.

“I used a gun for the same reason that Brenton Tarrant used a gun,” he writes. “The goal is for the US government to start confiscating guns. People will defend their right to own a firearm — civil war has just started.”

Several months after Christchurch and Poway, a third white nationalist named Patrick Crusius shot up a Walmart in El Paso, specifically targeting Hispanic patrons. Like Tarrant, Crusius was obsessed with the idea of a demographic threat from non-white immigrants. He pledged his allegiance to the New Zealand killer’s way of thinking.

“I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto,” he wrote in a pre-attack screed. “The Hispanic community was not my target before I read The Great Replacement.”

Christina Animashaun/Vox: Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images

People gather at a makeshift memorial outside the Walmart where 22 people were killed in El Paso, Texas, on August 3, 2019.

It’s tricky to say definitively that accelerationism “caused” Blaze Bernstein’s murder, other acts of Atomwaffen violence, or the three white supremacist mass shootings of 2019. There is almost always a complex web of personal reasons for why an individual chooses to kill; It’s possible they would have turned violent regardless of what ideas they were exposed to. The influence of accelerationism is clearer in some of the killers’ writings than in others (Crusius’s manifesto, in particular, doesn’t seem too indebted to the theory).

Accelerationism is a diffuse idea, and it’s best to think of its influence as such. Neo-Nazis didn’t need accelerationism to be violent, but rather the doctrine’s omnipresence in online far-right spaces makes it more likely that both groups and individuals are inspired to embrace terrorism as a tactic. The frequent expressions of support for violence increase the baseline risk that someone turns to it.

“As late as Dylann Roof [the 2015 Charleston, South Carolina, church shooter], the reaction of white supremacists was kind of ambivalent,” says Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League. “Now ... they want more people like that to emerge.”

It’s hard to even say how many spaces there are encouraging that process. Atomwaffen is not the only organized group promoting accelerationism; other groups whose ideas fit the doctrine are the Bowl Gang, a small group of online propagandists who lionize Roof; and The Base, a trans-Atlantic neo-Nazi umbrella group that explicitly aims to turn online chatter into real-world violence.

These groups have also largely moved beyond open web forums like Iron March, Fascist Forge, and the now-shuttered 8chan. You can find their content on major social media platforms like YouTube and Twitter, but most of it has to be masked or heavily censored in order to avoid bans. (One accelerationist video I watched on YouTube bleeped out the word “Nazi” in the narration in an effort to dodge the censors.)

The real hubs of accelerationist activity are secure messaging platforms like Telegram, apps that are harder for law enforcement to surveil and easier to keep free of outside influence. Journalists and professional hate-watchers have gotten access to their channels, but it’s impossible to know exactly how many are operating outside of anyone’s view. Barring federal regulations weakening the encryption protections for these platforms — a proposal that raises serious privacy and data security concerns — it may not be possible to effectively keep tabs on what accelerationists are saying to each other and what they’re planning.

White supremacist violence tends to come in waves, with high-profile killings typically inspiring copycats until the movement is exhausted. In that sense, the current wave of accelerationist-influenced violence is hardly unprecedented.

But this is the first such wave in the era of internet ubiquity and is largely made up of young, digital-native men. Accelerationists instinctively understand that their statements and actions can rapidly reach a planetary audience. They are exploiting the speed of life under late capitalism to spread hate to the masses, a dark parody of the techno-capitalist singularity posited by CCRU theorists in the early 1990s.

In our correspondence, Nick Land told me that “the assumption” behind accelerationism was that “the general direction of [techno-capitalist] self-escalating change was toward decentralization.” It seems that this was partly correct — but in a far more horrifying way than anyone at the time could have anticipated.

Sarah Silbiger/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images

A confederate flag is burned by demonstrators protesting the Unite the Right 2 rally near the White House in August 2018.

Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers political ideology and global politics. He also hosts Worldly, Vox’s podcast on foreign policy and international relations.

Chris Malbon is an illustrator and designer based in Bristol, UK.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/32YKZTJ

#Vox - All

0 notes

shanedakotamuir · 4 years

Text

Accelerationism: the obscure idea inspiring white supremacist killers around the world

Chris Malbon for Vox

How a techno-capitalist philosophy morphed into a justification for murder.

Blaze Bernstein, age 19 at the time of his murder, loved to cook.

The local Jewish community center celebrated Bernstein’s memory by naming its cooking school in his honor. Atomwaffen celebrated Woodward by making T-shirts emblazoned with his mugshot.

Bernstein’s 2018 slaying marked the beginning of an extraordinary period of white supremacist violence — a spate of murders and mass shootings that has continued through this year.

Bizarre origins

The earliest version of “accelerationism” was, ironically enough, in some ways a celebration of the status quo.

Christina Animashaun/Vox; Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon has reportedly read neoreactionary literature.

Neo-Nazi accelerationism and the alt-right

The extreme right-wing internet is a small place. The rise of neoreaction inevitably led it to cross paths with another online fringe movement of the mid-2010s: the alt-right.

“Many of the ideological seeds that would make me open to Hitlerism started with Dark Enlightenment,” one of the posters quoted in the study wrote.

It’s somewhat ironic, then, that “accelerationism” has displaced the alt-right in the eyes of many internet racists.

Christina Animashaun/Vox; Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

White nationalist and alt-right ideologue Richard Spencer (third from right) takes part in an anti-immigration march near the White House in December 2017.

The alt-right’s leaders believed the time was right for another try, in large part thanks to Donald Trump and the internet.

Christina Animashaun/Vox; Zach D. Roberts/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Neo-Nazis, alt-right, and white supremacists take part in the night before the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 11, 2017.

Christina Animashaun/Vox; Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

Alt-right supporters walk toward a rally in Portland, Oregon, in August 2019.

“I would be willing,” as one Fascist Forge contributor put it, “to use all resources possible for accelerationism.”

How accelerationism spread terror

Christina Animashaun/Vox; Carl Court/Getty Images

A gathering to remember victims of the New Zealand’s Christchurch mosque attack, which left 51 people dead. The shooter explicitly touted accelerationist ideas.

Christina Animashaun/Vox; Carl Court/Getty Images

People view flowers and tributes to remember victims of the Christchurch mosque attacks, on March 23, 2019.

“I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto,” he wrote in a pre-attack screed. “The Hispanic community was not my target before I read The Great Replacement.”

Christina Animashaun/Vox: Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images

People gather at a makeshift memorial outside the Walmart where 22 people were killed in El Paso, Texas, on August 3, 2019.

Sarah Silbiger/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images

A confederate flag is burned by demonstrators protesting the Unite the Right 2 rally near the White House in August 2018.

Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers political ideology and global politics. He also hosts Worldly, Vox’s podcast on foreign policy and international relations.

Chris Malbon is an illustrator and designer based in Bristol, UK.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/32YKZTJ

#Vox - All

0 notes

corneliusreignallen · 4 years

Text

Accelerationism: the obscure idea inspiring white supremacist killers around the world

Chris Malbon for Vox

How a techno-capitalist philosophy morphed into a justification for murder.

Blaze Bernstein, age 19 at the time of his murder, loved to cook.

The local Jewish community center celebrated Bernstein’s memory by naming its cooking school in his honor. Atomwaffen celebrated Woodward by making T-shirts emblazoned with his mugshot.

Bernstein’s 2018 slaying marked the beginning of an extraordinary period of white supremacist violence — a spate of murders and mass shootings that has continued through this year.

Bizarre origins

The earliest version of “accelerationism” was, ironically enough, in some ways a celebration of the status quo.

Christina Animashaun/Vox; Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon has reportedly read neoreactionary literature.

Neo-Nazi accelerationism and the alt-right

The extreme right-wing internet is a small place. The rise of neoreaction inevitably led it to cross paths with another online fringe movement of the mid-2010s: the alt-right.

“Many of the ideological seeds that would make me open to Hitlerism started with Dark Enlightenment,” one of the posters quoted in the study wrote.

It’s somewhat ironic, then, that “accelerationism” has displaced the alt-right in the eyes of many internet racists.

Christina Animashaun/Vox; Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

White nationalist and alt-right ideologue Richard Spencer (third from right) takes part in an anti-immigration march near the White House in December 2017.

The alt-right’s leaders believed the time was right for another try, in large part thanks to Donald Trump and the internet.

Christina Animashaun/Vox; Zach D. Roberts/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Neo-Nazis, alt-right, and white supremacists take part in the night before the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 11, 2017.

Christina Animashaun/Vox; Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

Alt-right supporters walk toward a rally in Portland, Oregon, in August 2019.

“I would be willing,” as one Fascist Forge contributor put it, “to use all resources possible for accelerationism.”

How accelerationism spread terror

Christina Animashaun/Vox; Carl Court/Getty Images

A gathering to remember victims of the New Zealand’s Christchurch mosque attack, which left 51 people dead. The shooter explicitly touted accelerationist ideas.

Christina Animashaun/Vox; Carl Court/Getty Images

People view flowers and tributes to remember victims of the Christchurch mosque attacks, on March 23, 2019.

“I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto,” he wrote in a pre-attack screed. “The Hispanic community was not my target before I read The Great Replacement.”

Christina Animashaun/Vox: Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images

People gather at a makeshift memorial outside the Walmart where 22 people were killed in El Paso, Texas, on August 3, 2019.

Sarah Silbiger/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images

A confederate flag is burned by demonstrators protesting the Unite the Right 2 rally near the White House in August 2018.

Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers political ideology and global politics. He also hosts Worldly, Vox’s podcast on foreign policy and international relations.

Chris Malbon is an illustrator and designer based in Bristol, UK.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/32YKZTJ

#Vox - All

0 notes

gracieyvonnehunter · 4 years

Text

Accelerationism: the obscure idea inspiring white supremacist killers around the world

Chris Malbon for Vox

How a techno-capitalist philosophy morphed into a justification for murder.

Blaze Bernstein, age 19 at the time of his murder, loved to cook.

The local Jewish community center celebrated Bernstein’s memory by naming its cooking school in his honor. Atomwaffen celebrated Woodward by making T-shirts emblazoned with his mugshot.

Bernstein’s 2018 slaying marked the beginning of an extraordinary period of white supremacist violence — a spate of murders and mass shootings that has continued through this year.

Bizarre origins

The earliest version of “accelerationism” was, ironically enough, in some ways a celebration of the status quo.

Christina Animashaun/Vox; Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon has reportedly read neoreactionary literature.

Neo-Nazi accelerationism and the alt-right

The extreme right-wing internet is a small place. The rise of neoreaction inevitably led it to cross paths with another online fringe movement of the mid-2010s: the alt-right.

“Many of the ideological seeds that would make me open to Hitlerism started with Dark Enlightenment,” one of the posters quoted in the study wrote.

It’s somewhat ironic, then, that “accelerationism” has displaced the alt-right in the eyes of many internet racists.

Christina Animashaun/Vox; Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

White nationalist and alt-right ideologue Richard Spencer (third from right) takes part in an anti-immigration march near the White House in December 2017.

The alt-right’s leaders believed the time was right for another try, in large part thanks to Donald Trump and the internet.

Christina Animashaun/Vox; Zach D. Roberts/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Neo-Nazis, alt-right, and white supremacists take part in the night before the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 11, 2017.

Christina Animashaun/Vox; Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

Alt-right supporters walk toward a rally in Portland, Oregon, in August 2019.

“I would be willing,” as one Fascist Forge contributor put it, “to use all resources possible for accelerationism.”

How accelerationism spread terror

Christina Animashaun/Vox; Carl Court/Getty Images

A gathering to remember victims of the New Zealand’s Christchurch mosque attack, which left 51 people dead. The shooter explicitly touted accelerationist ideas.

Christina Animashaun/Vox; Carl Court/Getty Images

People view flowers and tributes to remember victims of the Christchurch mosque attacks, on March 23, 2019.

“I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto,” he wrote in a pre-attack screed. “The Hispanic community was not my target before I read The Great Replacement.”

Christina Animashaun/Vox: Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images

People gather at a makeshift memorial outside the Walmart where 22 people were killed in El Paso, Texas, on August 3, 2019.

Sarah Silbiger/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images

A confederate flag is burned by demonstrators protesting the Unite the Right 2 rally near the White House in August 2018.

Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers political ideology and global politics. He also hosts Worldly, Vox’s podcast on foreign policy and international relations.

Chris Malbon is an illustrator and designer based in Bristol, UK.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/32YKZTJ

#Vox - All

0 notes

asktheadeptus · 7 years

Text

Horus Lupercal

"The road to Terra is open. The time has come for us to take the war to the Emperor in his most impregnable fastness! We will make immediate preparation for the invasion of Terra and an assault on the Imperial Palace. Make no mistake, and it will be ours, my brothers! This will be no easy task, for the Emperor and his deluded followers will fight hard to prevent us from interfering with his plans for godhood. Doubtless much blood has yet to be spilled, theirs and our own, but the prize is the galaxy itself...Are you with me?"— Warmaster Horus, Master of Istvaan

Horus Lupercal, also known more simply as the Lupercal during his lifetime by the Astartes of his Luna Wolves Legion, was one of the 20 genetically-engineered Space Marine Primarchs created by the Emperor of Mankind from the foundation of his own DNA before the start of the Great Crusade to lead the armies of the newborn Imperium of Man. Horus was the Primarch of the Luna Wolves Legion of Space Marines (later renamed the Sons of Horus), the first Imperial Warmaster, the most favoured son of the Emperor of Mankind, and ultimately, the greatest Traitor in the history of Mankind. Horus' home world was the Hive World of Cthonia which lay only a few light years from Terra. Horus was thus the first Primarch to be rediscovered by the Emperor after the Great Crusade began in the early 31st Millennium. Horus was responsible for unleashing the horrific 7-year-long civil war known as the Horus Heresy upon the Imperium of Man in the early 31st Millennium which killed billions of men, women and children in pursuit of his mad ambition to overthrow the Emperor of Mankind and replace him as the ruler of the human race. While Horus ultimately lost his bid for power and was slain by the father he had once so loved during the Battle of Terra, his actions damaged the Imperium of Man beyond repair and inaugurated the current Age of the Imperium, when Mankind is beset by countless horrific dangers to its existence and the Imperium itself has become a stagnant, repressive, intolerant and dehumanizing galactic presence.

History

Early Life

Created as a genetically-engineered organism by the Emperor in the Imperial gene-laboratories under the Himalayan Mountains on Terra in the late 30th Millennium, Horus, along with his brother Primarchs, were scattered across the Milky Way Galaxy through the Warp by the machinations of the Ruinous Powers of Chaos. This is said to be when the Dark Gods first planted the seeds of heresy into the infant Primarch, whispering darkly into his soul and tempting him to their cause. The capsule carrying the infant Horus came to rest on the Mining World of Cthonia, the primary planet of a star system within a reasonable slower-than-light distance of Terra. Whereas the early history of many Primarchs is extensively if unevenly documented, the same cannot be said of Horus. Contradiction and omission tarnishes all accounts of Horus' formative years. It is clear that the Emperor did find Horus and also that he took command of the XVI Legion early in the Great Crusade. Beyond these manifest facts, agreement between the early Imperial sources is decidedly lacking, some even placing Horus on Cthonia as a foundling.

Like many of his superhuman brethren, these sources say that the young Primarch thrived in Cthonia's harsh environment, learning his first lessons in war and killing from Cthonia's tech-barbarian kill-gangs. The world of Cthonia had been settled in the very earliest days of Mankind’s exploration of the stars, its rich natural resources ruthlessly exploited until they were all but played out. Thus, Horus grew to maturity amongst the anarchic gangers that populated the post-industrial nightmare of a world honeycombed with long-extinct mines and dominated by decaying hive cities. Though Horus had not been raised during his formative years on Cthonia -- uncommonly, for a Primarch, he had not matured on the cradle-world of his Legion -- he spoke the harsh language known as Cthonic fluently. In fact, he spoke it with the particular hard palatal edge and rough vowels of a Western Hemispheric ganger, the commonest and roughest of Cthonia's feral castes. Later on, it always amused some of the Battle-Brothers within the XVIth Legion to hear this accent. They assumed that Horus spoke in this manner because that was how the Warmaster had learned the language, from just such a speaker, but many would come to doubt this hypothesis later on. Horus never did anything by accident, and there were those who believed that the Warmaster's rough Cthonic accent was a deliberate affectation so that he would seem, to the Astartes of the XVIth Legion, as honest and low-born as any of them. It was from the hyper violent gang-scum of Cthonia that many of the earliest inductees into the Space Marine Legions were recruited, and it was there that the Emperor had found the first of his lost sons.

Another source claims that Horus returned to Terra itself. It is said that Horus grew at the Emperor's side, learning from his father even as they took back the Sol System and forged the alliances between the techno-barbarian nations of Terra and with the Mechanicus of Mars that created the Imperium of Man. Other highly creditable claims state that the Emperor found Horus, the first of his lost sons, but neither source specifies where, or the location of this finding. Surrounded in millennia of myths and allegory, the truth of Horus' origins will more than likely never be known. As a result, Horus was for many standard years the Emperor's only son, and there was a great affinity between them. The Emperor spent much time with his protege, teaching and encouraging him. Horus was soon placed in command of the XVI Legion, which had already come to be known as the Luna Wolves -- 10,000 Astartes created from his own genetic code. With these superhuman warriors to lead, Horus accompanied the Emperor for the first thirty standard years of the Great Crusade that had begun in ca. 800.M30, and together they forged the initial interstellar expansion of the young Imperium of Man.

Great Crusade

Cthonia, relatively close to Terra in the void, and with whom some minor intermittent contact had been maintained even through the Age of Strife, had its murderous and strife-torn population marked by one of the first expeditionary fleets to leave the Sol System. With its resources stripped it had little strategic worth and its people were judged largely beyond illumination, but the fledgling Imperium needed teeth as well as ideals and that necessity saved Cthonia. Its youth was harvested in their tens of thousands, first as impressed troopers for the Crusade armies and then the finest specimens were taken for the Legion. On Luna these chosen sons of Cthonia were reborn as warriors of the XVIth Legion. With these new recruits came a further accolade. The Emperor in honour of their new birthplace, the ruthless propensities of the Cthonians and the victories of the past, gave the XVIth Legion a name to strike fear into his enemies. As they scattered to spill blood amongst unclaimed stars their enemies would know them as the Luna Wolves.

For thirty standard years, the Emperor and Horus fought the opening campaigns of the Great Crusade side by side, the Primarch learning at the foot of his sire. When at length the Emperor detected another of the Primarchs and departed to locate him, Horus was left at the head of his master’s hosts, entrusted with the command of the conquering armies. Horus was well suited to the task, and the lessons he had learned in the previous three decades served him well. As one by one the Primarchs were united with their gene-father and their brothers, Horus came increasingly to be regarded as the greatest of their number, the first amongst equals. While happy that he would soon meet one of his brothers, Horus swore to himself that he would always remain the Emperor's favoured child. The Luna Wolves waged war for two hundred years, pushing back the darkness with fire and blood. Their victories were manifold and Horus' generalship was legend, and so it was that the respect of their brother Legions rose to almost unrivaled heights.

While many of his brothers and the Space Marine Legions created in their genetic image were gifted in specific fields of military science, Horus was a natural leader, his greatest genius his ability to meld seemingly divergent allies into a coherent whole. This skill was not only of use on the battlefield, for it carried over into contacts with the peoples the Great Crusade met. It was Horus’ way to treat with the populations of newly-contacted worlds according to the cultural traditions of each, and this highly successful doctrine was repeated in each of the Imperial Expeditionary Fleets. Horus believed that to do so would lessen the hostile reaction of opponents who wished to parley. Tragically, it might also have been the cause of the Primarch’s fall, and with him fully half of the Space Marine Legions.

As the Great Crusade pushed outward, and more Primarchs were discovered, the Emperor's time became divided, pulled in more and more directions. Horus was often placed in overall strategic command of the Crusade, a position in which he proved his skill as a leader time and time again. He quickly won the approval and support of the other Space Marine Legions, along with their leaders. One of the skills that made Horus such a great leader was that he possessed an innate understanding of human psychology; he was able to read people in such a way that he could choose to promote their strengths or exploit their weaknesses. This allowed him to find a non-military solution in several campaigns as he used his sheer charisma and negotiation skills combined with the ever-present threat of the Space Marine Legions' unstoppable force to bring other human-settled worlds into Imperial Compliance without bloodshed.

His understanding of the human mind allowed Horus to bring out the best within his fellow Primarchs, which allowed him to deploy the various Legions into the battlefield roles to which they were best suited. He quickly learned of the skill displayed by the White Scars and Night Lords in deploying for rapid strikes, while the Imperial Fists and Iron Warriors were always placed at the forefront of planetary sieges. Horus was said to wield the Space Marine Legions, and later the human soldiers of the Imperial Army, as a lesser general would position individual squads to perform to their advantages. He was also responsible for promoting competitive rivalries between certain Space Marine Legions in the desire to spur these Astartes on to greater heights, but these rivalries would eventually transform into outright hatred when the Great Crusade took a turn for the worse.

Triumph at Ullanor

Though the Luna Wolves had won many victories in their years of ceaseless conflict, one would eclipse all others and see them reborn once again. The greatest of the nascent Imperium's victories during the high point of the Great Crusade came in the form of the defeat of the largest Ork empire ever encountered. The Ullanor Crusade was a vast Imperial assault on the Ork empire of the Overlord Urrlak Urruk. The capital world of this Greenskin stellar empire, and the site of the final assault by the Space Marine Legions, lay in the central Ullanor System of the galaxy's Ullanor Sector. The Crusade included the deployment of 100,000 Space Marines, 8,000,000 Imperial Army troops, and thousands of Imperial star ships and their support personnel. The Ullanor Crusade marked the high point of the Great Crusade's vast effort to reunite the scattered colony worlds of humanity.

The Orks of Ullanor represented the largest concentration of Greenskins ever defeated by the military forces of the Imperium of Man before the Third War for Armageddon began during the late 41st Millennium. Following the defeat of the Orks of Ullanor, the Emperor of Mankind returned to Terra to begin work on His vast project to open up the Eldar Webway for Mankind's use. In His place to command the vast forces of the Great Crusade He left Horus. In the aftermath of this Ullanor Crusade, Horus was granted the newly-created title of "Warmaster," the commander-in-chief of all the Emperor’s armies who possessed command authority over all of the other Primarchs and every Expeditionary Fleet of the Great Crusade. Before returning to Terra to oversee the next phase of the creation of His stellar empire, the Emperor suggested to Horus that he rename the XVIth Legion the "Sons of Horus," in honour of their Primarch and to show his preeminent place amongst the other Primarchs. Horus initially declined this honour, not wishing to be set above his brothers, and so his Legion continued as the Luna Wolves for a little while longer. But Horus and the other Primarchs never came to terms with the Emperor's absence. Their hurt feelings over His seeming abandonment of the Great Crusade to pursue a secret project whose purpose He chose not to reveal to His sons laid the seeds of jealousy and resentment that would ultimately blossom into the corruption that begat the Horus Heresy.

Following his promotion to Warmaster, Horus had solicited the opinions and advice of all his brother Primarchs on the subject since the honour had been bestowed upon him. Being named Warmaster set him abruptly apart from them, and raised him up above his brothers, and there had been some stifled objections and discontent, especially from those Primarchs who felt the title should have been theirs. The Primarchs were as prone to sibling rivalry and petty competition as any group of brothers. Guided by the shrewd political hand of his Equerry Maloghurst, Horus had courted his brothers, stilling fears, calming doubts, reaffirming pacts and generally securing their cooperation. He wanted none to feel slighted, or overlooked. He wanted none to think they were no longer listened to. Some, like Sanguinius, Lorgar and Fulgrim, had acclaimed Horus's election from the outset. Others, like Angron and Perturabo, had raged biliously at the new order, and it had taken masterful diplomacy on the Warmaster's part to placate their choler and jealousy. A few, like Leman Russ and Lion El'Jonson, had been cynically resolved, unsurprised by the turn of events.

But others, like Roboute Guilliman, Jaghatai Khan and Rogal Dorn had simply taken it in their stride, accepting the Emperor’s decree as the right and obvious choice. Horus had ever been the brightest, the first and the favorite. They did not doubt his fitness for the role, for none of the Primarchs had ever matched Horus’ achievements, nor the intimacy of his bond with the Emperor. It was to these solid, resolved brothers that Horus turned in particular for counsel. Dorn and Guilliman both embodied the staunchest and most dedicated Imperial qualities, commanding their Legions' expeditions with peerless devotion and military genius. Horus desired their approval as a young man might seek the quiescence of older, more accomplished brothers.

Corruption by Chaos

Shortly after the Luna Wolves Legion and their allies declared victory in the great Ullanor Crusade against the mightiest Ork empire faced by the Imperium until the 41st Millennium, the Emperor offered Horus the honour of renaming his Legion the Sons of Horus in honour of himself and to show his preeminent place among the other Primarchs. Horus refused this honour, characteristically not wishing to be set above his brothers, but was promoted to the newly-created rank of Imperial Warmaster, serving as the new Supreme Commander of the Imperium's millions-strong armies while the Emperor left the Crusade in Horus' capable hands and returned to Terra to pursue the secret Imperial Webway Project that he hoped would draw the newborn Imperium together in unbreakable bonds.

Despite the majestic rank and unparalleled authority bestowed on him, it was said that Horus was not content. The wording of the Emperor's declaration, claiming the glory of Horus' victories as entirely his own, chafed. Although this was the usual rhetoric for such Imperial announcements, Horus saw that while the Emperor remained behind in the Imperial Palace on Terra for reasons that he would not share even with his sons, Horus would be out in the field of battle, winning the Emperor's Imperium for him. It seemed that a deep-rooted resentment and jealousy had begun to simmer in the corners of the Warmaster's mind. As the Imperial Warmaster, Horus took over command of the Great Crusade, and accepted his new duties with earnest dedication. However, there was much dissension in the ranks of the Primarchs and other parties in the Imperium over the Emperor's decision to withdraw from the campaign and return to Terra as well as to reorganize the political administration of the Imperium under the control of a Council of Terra headed by his regent, Malcador the Sigillite. Only a handful of the Primarchs, amongst them a scheming Lorgar, remained steadfast beside the Warmaster during this period of conflict. Horus also disagreed with many of the decrees passed by the newly established Council of Terra, a ruling body of Imperial nobles and bureaucrats, which were intended to shift the burden of taxation and administration onto the newly-conquered Imperial Compliant worlds. Even worse, Horus came to believe in his heart that he was failing his father, and was deeply wounded that the Emperor had revealed to none of the Primarchs, not even his most favoured son, why he had secluded himself upon Terra and the truth behind his secret Imperial Webway Project. These seeds of bitterness, resentment and frustration grew, and would soon bear deadly fruit.

First Chaplain Erebus of the Word Bearers, the XVIIth Space Marine Legion that was secretly in league with the Forces of Chaos since they had been humiliated by the Emperor for their violations of the Imperial Truth on the world of Khur over 40 years before the start of the Horus Heresy, became a very close confidante and adviser of Horus. The Words Bearers, who originally had worshiped the Emperor as a God and whose Primarch Lorgar had penned the Lectitio Divinitatus before he turned against his father following the events on Khur, had been brutally reprimanded for their constant erection of temples and shrines dedicated to the worship of the God-Emperor on newly conquered worlds, a policy that had directly violated the Emperor's secularist philosophy and had slowed the XVIIth Legion's progress in the Great Crusade to a crawl. In the wake of his humiliation and the reprimand against his Legion on Khur, Lorgar had sought to discover whether there truly were divinities worthy of human worship during the quest that came to be known as the Pilgrimage of Lorgar. During this journey, Lorgar entered the Eye of Terror and came face-to-face with the power of Chaos, a force that he believed was truly divine and worthy of his service and the worship of all Mankind. He brought this faith to his Legion, and soon all the Astartes of the Word Bearers believed that the Chaos Godswere more worthy of their loyalty and worship than the Emperor who had proved himself to be a false god. With the guidance of the Ruinous Powers, Lorgar and the Word Bearers hatched their secret plans over the course of the next four decades to convert humanity to the service of the Dark Gods, starting with Horus.

After Lorgar placed his agent near Horus, Erebus slowly managed to twist the thinking of Horus against the Emperor and turn half of the Mournival, the Warmaster's most trusted advisers within the XVIthLegion, towards the same path of treachery by exploiting their intense loyalty to their Primarch over that for their far more distant Emperor. This plot reached its climax on the moon of the Feral World of Davin, where Horus was wounded during a struggle against Eugen Temba, the former Planetary Governor of Davin who had rebelled against the Imperium following his corruption by Chaos. An ancient xenos artefact blade sacred to Nurgle known as the Kinebrach Anathame had been stolen by Erebus from the museum of an advanced human civilisation called the Interex during the Luna Wolves' brief sojourn on their world of Xenobia and had been given by him to Temba. Temba had become the mutated servant of Nurgle, the Chaos God of disease and decay, and managed to seriously wound the Warmaster with the corrupted blade. The Apothecaries of the XVIth Legion proved incapable of healing the Warmaster's wounds despite every form of advanced medical technology at their disposal, until it seemed that Horus would surely die.

Erebus then convinced the Luna Wolves' warrior lodge to allow him to take the Warmaster to a secret sect on Davin and use sorcery at the Temple of the Serpent Lodge in order to treat the Warmaster. The creation of a warrior lodge within the Luna Wolves and many other Space Marine Legions based on the lodges used by the savage warriors of Davin had been another of Erebus' ploys to infiltrate and corrupt the Astartes into turning against the Emperor. However, not all Astartes of the Legions joined the lodges, as many saw them as a direct violation of the Emperor's desires that all Space Marines dedicate themselves to truth and openness. The lodges would prove to be the primary purveyors of corruption in those Legions which turned Traitor in the days immediately preceding the start of the Horus Heresy and those Astartes within those Legions which lodges which held themselves aloof from those secretive organisations were marked as Imperial Loyalists who would later be betrayed at Istvaan III.

The secret sect on Davin was in truth a Chaos Cult, and using sorcery, which was outlawed by the Emperor, the cultists managed to warp the mind of the Warmaster against the Emperor by playing on the seed of jealousy and resentment that he felt for his father after the Emperor had left the Great Crusade behind to return to Terra. During the dark rituals that followed within the temple, Horus' spirit was transferred from his body into the Immaterium. There, he bore witness to a nightmare vision of the future. He saw the Imperium of Man as a repressive, violent theocracy, where the Emperor and several of his Primarchs (but not Horus) were worshiped as Gods by the masses. While this vision of the Imperial future granted by the Chaos Gods was a true one, it was ironically an outcome largely created by the Warmaster's own actions. The Dark Gods portrayed themselves as victims of the Emperor's psychic might, and claimed that they had no real interest in the happenings of the material world. Magnus the Red, the sorcerous Primarch of the Thousand Sons Legion, had also traveled into the Warp via sorcery to try and stop Horus from turning to Chaos. Magnus explained that the Warmaster's vision was only one among many possible futures, but one that Horus alone could prevent. Horus, already jealous and resentful of the Emperor, proved all too receptive to the Ruinous Powers' false vision. The Chaos Gods' pact with Horus was simple: "Give us the Emperor and we will give you the galaxy." Driven by his jealousy, desire for power and anger at what he saw as his father's abandonment of him, Horus accepted the Ruinous Powers' offer. They healed his grievous wound and filled him with the powers of the Warp. Renouncing his oath to the Emperor, Horus led his Legion, renamed the Sons of Horus, into worship of the myriad Chaos Gods in the form of Chaos Undivided. He then sought to turn many of his fellow Primarchs to the service of Chaos, and succeeded with Angron of the World Eaters, Fulgrim of the Emperor's Children and Mortarion of the Death Guard, who were the first of many to follow, along with many regiments of the Imperial Army and several Titan Legions of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

Magnus the Red, the Primarch of the Thousand Sons Legion, foresaw Horus' actions through his Legion's own use of forbidden psychic sorcery. Magnus then attempted to forewarn the Emperor of the impending betrayal of his favorite son. However, knowing that he would have to find a means of quickly warning the Emperor, Magnus used sorcery to send his message to the Emperor. The message penetrated the potent psychic defenses of the Imperial Palace on Terra, shattering all the psychic wards the Emperor had placed on the Palace -- including those within his secret project in the Imperial Dungeons, where he was proceeding with the creation of the human extension into the Webway. Refusing to believe that Horus, his most beloved and trusted son, would actually betray him, the Emperor instead mistakenly perceived the traitor to the Imperium to be Magnus and his Thousand Sons, who had long suffered from a near-debilitating run of mutations because of the instability of Magnus' own genome and were known to have practiced the sorcery that had been expressly outlawed in the Imperium. The Emperor ordered the Primarch Leman Russ, Magnus' greatest rival, to mobilize his Space Wolves Legion and the witch hunters known as the Sisters of Silence and take Magnus into custody to be returned to Terra to stand trial for violating the Council of Nikaea's prohibitions against the use of psychic powers within the Imperium. While en route to the Thousand Sons Legion's homeworld of Prospero, Horus convinced Russ, who had always been repelled by Magnus' reliance on psychic powers, to launch a full assault on Prospero instead, even though Magnus had been entirely willing to face the Emperor's judgment once he realized he was being manipulated by the entities that called the Immaterium home.

Horus Heresy

Istvaan III Atrocity

Unknown to the Emperor, the Word Bearers Legion had been devoted to Chaos Undivided for some time before this event. The Imperial Planetary Governor of Istvaan III, Vardus Praal, had been corrupted by the Chaos God Slaanesh whose cultists had long been active on the world. Praal had declared his independence from the Imperium, and practiced forbidden sorcery, so the Council of Terra charged Horus with the retaking of that world, primarily its capital, the Choral City. This order merely furthered Horus' plans to overthrow the Emperor. Although the four Legions under his direct command -- the Sons of Horus, the World Eaters, the Death Guard and the Emperor's Children -- had already turned Traitor and now pledged themselves to Chaos, there were still some Loyalist elements within each of these Legions that approximated one-third of each force; many of these warriors were Terran-born Space Marines who had been directly recruited into the Astartes Legions by the Emperor himself before being reunited with their Primarchs during the Great Crusade. Horus, under the guise of putting down the religious rebellion against Imperial Compliance on the world of Istvaan III, amassed his troops in the Istvaan System.

Horus had a plan by which he would destroy all the remaining Loyalist elements of the Legions under his command, a plan that would ultimately unfold into the nightmare of what Imperial scholars would later name the Istvaan III Atrocity. After a lengthy bombardment of Istvaan III, Horus dispatched all of the known Loyalist Astartes down to the planet, under the pretense of bringing it back into the Imperium. At the moment of victory and the capture of the Choral City, the planetary capital of Istvaan III, these Astartes were betrayed when a cascade of terrible virus-bombs fell onto the world, launched by the Warmaster's orbiting fleet. Captain Saul Tarvitz of the Emperor's Children, however, was aboard his Legion's flagship Andronius and discovered the plot to wipe out the Loyalist Astartes of the Traitor Legions. He was able, with help from Battle-Captain Nathaniel Garro of the Death Guard who was in command of the Death Guard frigate Eisenstein, to reach the surface of Istvaan III despite pursuit and warn the Loyalist Space Marines he could find of all four Legions of their impending doom. Those that heard or passed on Tarvitz's warning took shelter before the virus-bombs struck. The civilian population of Istvaan III received no such protection: eight billion people died almost at once as the lethal flesh-dissolving virus called the Life-Eater carried by the bombs infected every living thing on the planet. The psychic shock of so many deaths at one time shrieked through the Warp, briefly obscuring even the Astronomican. The Primarch of the World Eaters, Angron, realizing that the virus-bombs had not been fully effective at eliminating all the Loyalists, flew into a rage and hurled himself at the planet with 50 companies of Traitor Marines. Discarding tactics and strategy, the World Eaters Legion's Traitors worked themselves into a frenzy of mindless butchery. Horus was furious with Angron for delaying his plans, but the Warmaster sought to turn the delay into a victory and was obliged to reinforce Angron with troops from the Sons of Horus, the Death Guard, and the Emperor's Children. Fortunately, a contingent of Loyalists led by Battle-Captain Garro escaped Istvaan III aboard the damaged Imperial frigate Eisenstein and fled to Terra to warn the Emperor that Horus had turned Traitor.

On Istvaan III, the remaining Loyalists, under the command of Captains Tarvitz, Garviel Loken and Tarik Torgaddon, another Loyalist member of the Sons of Horus, fought bravely against their own traitorous brethren. Yet, despite some early successes that delayed Horus' plans for three full months while the battle on Istvaan III played out, their cause was ultimately doomed by their lack of air support and Titan firepower. During the battle the Sons of Horus Captains Ezekyle Abaddon and Horus Aximand were sent to confront their former Mournival brothers, Loken and Torgaddon. Horus Aximand beheaded Torgaddon, but Abaddon failed to kill Loken when the building they were in collapsed. Loken survived and witnessed the final orbital bombardment of Istvaan III that ended the Loyalists' desperate defense. To prove his worth and loyalty to Lord Commander Eidolon of the Emperor's Children -- and thus to his Primarch, Fulgrim -- Captain Lucius of the 13th Company of the Emperor's Children, the future Champion of Slaanesh known as Lucius the Eternal, turned against the Loyalists that he had fought beside because of his prior friendship with Saul Tarvitz. Lucius slew many of them personally, an act for which he was then accepted back into the Emperor's Children on the side of the Traitors. In the end, the Loyalists retreated to their last bastion of defense, only a few hundred of their number remaining. Finally, tired of the conflict, Horus ordered his men to withdraw, and then had the remains of the Choral City bombarded into dust for a final time from orbit.

Preparations and Allegiances

Much of Horus' later success arose from the thorough groundwork he had laid before the opening shots of the Heresy were fired at Istvaan III. He had already swayed the Primarchs Angron and Mortarion, of the World Eaters and Death Guard Legions, respectively, to the side of Chaos because of their own various personal grudges against the Emperor. Fulgrim of the Emperor's Children had been lured to the side of the Warmaster by the promise of power and personal perfection that the Chaos Gods, especially Slaanesh, offered to him and his vain Astartes. Lorgar of the Word Bearers, who had been responsible for the nascent rebellion and Horus's own corruption by Chaos, was also with the Warmaster. Three of the most loyal Legions who could not be swayed to the side of Chaos, the Dark Angels, Blood Angels and Ultramarines and their Primarchs, were sent on missions by the Warmaster far from Terra and the Istvaan System. The Imperial Fists and White Scars were too close to Terra to be contacted without raising suspicion, though Horus believed -- mistakenly -- that the White Scars' Primarch Jaghatai Khan, would ultimately take his side. Shortly before the Drop Site Massacre on Istvaan V, Fulgrim also attempted to sway his friend Ferrus Manus of the Iron Hands Legion to Horus' cause by using many of the same inducements that had been offered to the Adeptus Mechanicus, with whom the Iron Hands were closely allied in both temperament and philosophy. This attempt failed, and Fulgrim barely escaped with his life. Angered by the rebuff, Fulgrim promised he would deliver Manus' severed head to Horus in recompense, a promise he kept on Istvaan V. The Blood Angels were sent to the daemon-infested Signis Cluster and the Ultramarines to the world of Calth, where a large Word Bearers force, under First Captain Kor Phaeron, had massed to hold Roboute Guilliman's equally massive Legion in place while Horus made his play for Terra.

Of the other eventual Traitor Primarchs, Konrad Curze, the Night Haunter, was due to face disciplinary action from the Emperor which he did not believe he deserved; the Alpha Legion Primarch Alpharius had always been closer personally to his brother Horus than to his father the Emperor, although some evidence indicates that he and his twin brother Omegon's turn to Chaos was driven by mistaken loyalty to the Emperor; and the Iron Warriors' Primarch Perturabo's open and bitter rivalry with Rogal Dorn of the Imperial Fists and his feeling that he and his Legion were handed the worst tasks in the Great Crusade for which they never received the recognition they believed they were due made him an easy target for corruption.

The Thousand Sons had never planned to join Horus, but the path Tzeentch had mapped for that Legion and their potent psychic Primarch Magnus the Red ultimately led them to Chaos regardless. Unfortunately, the Space Wolves' unexpected assault on the Thousand Sons' home world -- a brutal campaign remembered as the Scouring of Prospero -- resulted in the destruction of the libraries of precious knowledge that Magnus and his fellow Thousand Sons held so dear. Mortally wounded by Leman Russ, Magnus fell to temptation as he watched Tizca, the capital city of Prospero and its famed libraries of ancient knowledge burn and he called out to the Chaos God Tzeentch to save both himself and the remains of his Legion. The God of Sorcery was only too happy to oblige and he transported Magnus and the Thousand Sons through the Warp to the Daemon World later known as the Planet of the Sorcerers. Magnus became a Daemon Prince of Tzeentch and now desired only vengeance against the Emperor for what he saw as a betrayal, never realizing that it was Horus who had truly engineered his downfall and corruption.

The remaining Space Marine Legions -- the Raven Guard, Salamanders, Iron Hands and Space Wolves -- remained staunchly loyal to the Emperor, though all but the Space Wolves would pay dearly for it in the battles to come. Beyond the Legions, Horus had already swayed Magos Regulus of the Adeptus Mechanicus to his side with promises of the Standard Template Construct (STC) databases of ancient technology recovered during the war with the Auretian Technocracy. This alliance delivered crucial Adeptus Mechanicus and Titan support to the Warmaster's Traitor Legion and Traitor Imperial Army forces.

Meanwhile, Horus and his confidante and mentor in the ways of Chaos, the Word Bearers' First Chaplain Erebus, conducted a ritual designed to communicate with the Chaotic entities of the Warp. They established contact with a daemon called Sarr'kell, who acted as an emissary of the Chaos Gods to Horus and the Traitor Legions. Horus was then deceived by the daemon into believing that the Chaos Gods had no interest in dominating the material universe, and were only lending their support so that Horus could overthrow the Emperor, who they claimed was creating devices that could destroy the daemonic beings of the Immaterium. Horus agreed, and promised to swear loyalty to Chaos Undivided after his fateful operations on Istvaan III.

Drop Site Massacre

The Istvaan System’s third world, comfortably close enough to the Istvaanian sun to support human life, had become a virus-soaked mass grave marking the anger of Horus Lupercal in the aftermath of the Istvaan III Atrocity that marked the start of the Horus Heresy. The world’s population was nothing more than contaminated ash scattered over lifeless continents, while the bones of their cities remained as blackened smears of burnt stone – a civilization reduced to memory in but a single day. The orbital bombardment from the Warmaster’s fleet, payloads composed of incendiary shells and virus-laden biological warfare pods, had seemingly spared nothing and no one anywhere on the world. Istvaan III lingered in silent orbit around its sun, almost grand in the extent of its absolute devastation, serving as the scarred tombstone for the death of an empire. With the destruction of the last surviving warriors on Istvaan III, the Traitor Legions of Horus made their way to Istvaan V, a flotilla of powerful warships and carriers bearing the martial pride of four Space Marine Legions, their ranks fully comprised of those whose loyalty was to Horus and Horus alone. Mass conveyors of Imperial Army units brought millions of armed men and their tanks and artillery pieces. Bloated Dark Mechanicum transports bore the Legio Mortis to Istvaan V, the dark Tech-priests ministering to the Dies Irae and its sister Titans as they prepared to unleash the unimaginable power of those war machines once more.

Final victory for the Traitors on Istvaan III had been bought with many lives, but in its wake the Traitor Legions were tempered in the crucible of combat to do what must be done to seize control of the Imperium. The process had been long and bloody, but the Warmaster's army was ready and eager to fight its brothers, where the lackeys of the Emperor would find their readiness to strike down their kith and kin untested. Such mercy would be their undoing, Horus promised. Horus would strike a vicious blow against the Imperium and the False Emperor -- a blow that would resonate down through the millennia for all time.

As Horus made the opening moves of his rebellion on Istvaan III, Ferrus Manus' oldest and dearest friend Fulgrim was ordered by the Warmaster to meet with the Iron Hands' Primarch aboard his flagship Fist of Iron in the hope that he could be swayed to the side of the Traitor Legions who now served Chaos. Fulgrim had sent the bulk of his III Legion and the 28th Expeditionary Fleet on to meet Horus and the 63rd Expeditionary Fleet in the Istvaan System while he and a small force aided the Iron Hands' 52nd Expeditionary Fleet in retaking the world of Callinedes IV from Orks. Great bonds of friendship and brotherhood had long existed between the two Legions, and Fulgrim felt that he could convince Ferrus of the righteousness of Horus' cause. Fulgrim's hope proved disastrously wrong and the meeting of the two Primarchs in Ferrus' private inner sanctum in his flagship's Anvilarium did not go well, as Ferrus was utterly outraged that his brothers would turn against their father the Emperor. The meeting ended in violence as The Gorgon made his difference of opinion over continued loyalty to the Emperor known to the Phoenician with his weapons, determined to stop Fulgrim's betrayal of the Imperium before it could begin.

The Warmaster was enraged at Fulgrim's failure at converting their brother Ferrus to their cause. Nevertheless, he still had to make preparations for the inevitable response of the Emperor, which was likely to arrive more quickly than anticipated and the Traitors needed to be prepared for it. Fulgrim was tasked to take a detail of Emperor's Children to the ruins of the alien fortresses that existed on Istvaan V and prepare that world for the final phase of the Istvaan operation. Though the Phoenician recoiled at the horrifying prospect of the menial role placed upon him, Horus explained that the Istvaan V phase of his plan was the most critical, and he could entrust this vital task to no other. Fulgrim supervised the vast teams of Dark Mechanicus earthmovers as they shifted the black sand of Istvaan V and formed a vast network of earthworks, trenches, bunkers and redoubts that stretched along the ridge of the Urgall Plateau. Laagers of anti-aircraft batteries were set up in the shadow of the walls, and mighty orbital torpedoes on mobile launch vehicles hid in the warrens of an ancient alien fortress. Fulgrim had set up his command within the remains of the keep and begun the work of ensuring that it would be a bastion worthy of the Warmaster. If the Emperor’s Legions wanted to destroy the Traitors, they were going to have to come down to the surface of Istvaan V to do so, as no orbital bombardment would be powerful enough to dislodge the defenders or crack their resolve.

Overcome with mind-numbing rage at their brothers' treachery, Ferrus Manus and his Iron Hands Legion gratefully received the Emperor's orders through his brother Rogal Dorn. In response to Horus' betrayal of the Loyalist Astartes in the Sons of Horus, Emperor's Children, World Eaters and Death Guard Legions at Istvaan III, the Primarch of the Imperial Fists Legion, Rogal Dorn, on the direction of the Emperor who had learned of Horus' actions from the Loyalist survivors aboard the Eisenstein, ordered seven Loyalist Space Marine Legions to Horus' base on the world of Istvaan V to challenge the Warmaster's rebellion. They would attack in two waves and fall under the supreme command of the Iron Hands' Primarch Ferrus Manus. The Legions comprising the first wave were the Iron Hands, Salamanders, and the Raven Guard. The Legions comprising the second wave, who would arrive at Istvaan V after the first wave, were the Alpha Legion, Night Lords, Iron Warriors, and a large contingent of Word Bearers that their Primarch Lorgar had stationed in the star system. Unknown to Dorn and Ferrus Manus, the Night Lords, Alpha Legion, Iron Warriors and Word Bearers had all turned from their service to the Emperor and pledged their loyalty to Horus, and been instructed to keep their new allegiance to Chaos a secret.

Thousands of Drop Pods and Stormbirds were deployed for the initial assault. The first wave was under the overall command of the Primarch Ferrus Manus and besides his own Xth Legion, the Salamanders led by Vulkan, and the Raven Guard under the command of their Primarch Corax joined him. Vulkan's Legion assaulted the left flank of the Traitors' battle line while Ferrus Manus, the Iron Hands' First Captain Gabriel Santor, and 10 full companies of elite Morlocks Terminators charged straight into the center of the enemy lines. Meanwhile, Corax's Legion hit the right flank of the enemy's position. The odds were considered equal; 30,000 Traitor Marines against 40,000 Loyalists. Horus was aware of the location of the Loyalists' chosen drop site and his troops fell upon the Loyalist Legions.

The battlefield of Istvaan V was a slaughterhouse of epic proportions. Treacherous warriors twisted by hatred fought their former brothers-in-arms in a conflict unparalleled in its bitterness. The mighty Titan war engines of the Machine God walked the planet’s surface and death followed in their wake. The blood of heroes and traitors flowed in rivers, and the hooded Hereteks Adepts of the Dark Mechanicum unleashed perversions of ancient technology stolen from the Auretian Technocracy to wreak bloody havoc amongst the Loyalists. All across the Urgall Depression, hundreds died with every passing second, the promise of inevitable death a pall of darkness that hung over every warrior. The Traitor forces held, but their line was bending beneath the fury of the first Loyalist assault. It would take only the smallest twists of fate for it to break. The forces on the surface have been embattled for almost three hours with no clear victor emerging. The loyalists waited for the second wave of 'allies' to make planetfall, believing they would be reinforced for their final advance. The traitors all knew their parts to play in this performance. They were all aware of the blood they must shed to spare their species from destruction, and install Horus as the Master of Mankind.

Though the Iron Hands, Raven Guard and Salamanders had managed to make a full combat drop and secured the drop site, the Urgall Depression, they did so at a heavy cost. Overwhelmed with rage, the headstrong Ferrus Manus disregarded the counsel of his brothers Corax and Vulkan and hurled himself against the fleeing rebels, seeking to bring Fulgrim to personal combat. His veteran troops -- comprising the majority of the XthLegion's Terminators and Dreadnoughts -- followed. What had begun as a massed strike against the Traitors’ position was rapidly turning into one of the largest engagements of the entire Great Crusade. All told, over 60,000 Astartes warriors clashed on the dusky plains of Isstvan V. For all the wrong reasons, this battle was soon to go down in the annals of Imperial history as one of the most epic confrontations ever fought.

The Urgall Depression was churned to ruination beneath the boots and tank treads of countless thousands of Astartes warriors and their Legion’s armour divisions. The loyal primarchs could be found where the fighting was thickest: Corax of the Raven Guard, borne aloft on black wings bound to a fire-breathing flight pack; Lord Ferrus of the Iron Hands at the heart of the battlefield, his silver hands crushing any traitors that came within reach, while he pursued and dragged back those who sought to withdraw; and lastly, Vulkan of the Salamanders, armoured in overlapping artificer plating, thunder clapping from his warhammer as it pounded into yielding armour, shattering it like porcelain.

The traitorous Primarchs slew in mirror image to their brothers: Angron of the World Eaters hewing with wild abandon as he raked his chainaxes left and right, barely cognizant of who fell before him; Fulgrim of the lamentably-named Emperor’s Children, laughing as he deflected the clumsy sweeps of Iron Hands warriors, never stopping in his graceful movements for even a moment; Mortarion of the Death Guard, in disgusting echo of ancient Terran myth, harvesting life with each reaving sweep of his scythe.

And Horus, Warmaster of the Imperium, the brightest star and greatest of the Emperor’s sons. He stood watching the destruction while his Legions took to the field, their liege lord content in his fortress rising from the far edge of the ravine. Shielded and unseen by his brothers still waging war in the Emperor’s name. At last, above this maelstrom of grinding ceramite, booming tank cannons and chattering bolters – the gunships, drop-pods and assault landers of the second wave burned through the atmosphere on screaming thrusters. The sky fell dark with the weak sun eclipsed by ten thousand avian shadows, and the cheering roar sent up by the loyalists was loud enough to shake the air itself. The traitors, the bloodied and battered Legions loyal to Horus, fell into a fighting withdrawal without hesitation.

The second wave of "Loyalist" Space Marine Legions descended upon the landing zone on the northern edge of the Urgall Depression. Hundreds of Stormbirds and Thunderhawks roared towards the surface, their armoured hulls gleaming as the power of another four Astartes Legions arrived on Istvaan V. Yet the Space Marine Legions of the reserve were no longer loyal to the Emperor, having already secretly sworn themselves to Chaos and the cause of Horus. The Night Lords of Konrad Curze, the Iron Warriors of Perturabo, the Word Bearers of Lorgar Aurelian, and the Alpha Legion of Alpharius represented a force larger than that which had first begun the assault on Istvaan V. The secret Traitor Legions mustered in the landing zone, armed and ready for battle, unbloodied and fresh.

The Iron Warriors had claimed the highest ground, taking the loyalist landing site with all the appearance of reinforcing it through the erection of prefabricated plasteel bunkers. Bulk landers dropped the battlefield architecture: dense metal frames fell from the cargo claws of carrier ships at low altitude, and as the platforms crashed and embedded themselves in the ground, the craftsmen-warriors of the IVth Legion worked, affixed, bolted and constructed them into hastily-rising firebases. Turrets rose from their protective housing in the hundreds, while hordes of lobotomised servitors trundled from the holds of Iron Warriors troopships, single-minded in their intent to link with the weapons systems’ interfaces. The Word Bearers bolstered their brother Legions on one flank of the Urgall Depression while the Night Lords took positions on the opposite side. Down the line, past the mounting masses of Iron Warriors battle tanks and assembling Astartes, First Captain Sevatar of the Night Lords and his First Company elite, the Atramentar took up defensive positions. Both the Word Bearers and the Night Lords were to be the anvil, while the Iron Warriors would be the hammer yet to fall. The enemy would stagger back to them, exhausted, clutching empty bolters and broken blades, believing their presence to be a reprieve.

Dragging their wounded and dead behind them, Corax and Vulkan led their forces back to the drop site to regroup and to allow the warriors of their recently arrived brother Primarchs of the second wave a measure of the glory in defeating Horus. Though they voxed hails requesting medical aid and supply, the line of Astartes atop the northern ridge remained grimly silent as the exhausted warriors of the Raven Guard and Salamanders came to within a hundred meters of their allies. It was then that Horus revealed his perfidy and sprung his lethal trap. Inside the black fortress where Horus had made his lair, a lone flare shot skyward, exploding in a hellish red glow that lit the battlefield below. The fire of betrayal roared from the barrels of a thousand guns, as the second wave of Astartes revealed where their true loyalties now lay. Ferrus Manus looked on in stunned horror as Fulgrim laughed at the look on his brother's face as the forces of his "allies" opened fire upon the Salamanders and Raven Guard, killing hundreds in the fury of the first few moments, hundreds more in the seconds following, as volley after volley of Bolter fire and missiles scythed through their unsuspecting ranks. Even as terrifying carnage was being wreaked upon the Loyalists below, the retreating forces of the Warmaster turned and brought their weapons to bear on the enemy warriors within their midst. Hundreds of World Eaters, Sons of Horus and the Death Guard fell upon the veteran companies of the Iron Hands, and though the warriors of the Xth Legion continued to fight gallantly, they were hopelessly outnumbered and would soon be hacked to pieces. The Iron Hands had damned themselves by remaining in the field.

The Raven Guard front ranks went down as if scythed, harvested in a spilling line of detonating bolter shells, shattered armour and puffs of bloody mist. Black-armoured Astartes tumbled to their hands and knees, only to be cut down by the sustained volley, finishing those who fell beneath the initial storm of head- and chest-shots. Seconds after the first chatter of bolters, beams of achingly bright laser slashed from behind the Word Bearers as the cannon mounts of Land Raiders, Predators and defensive bastion turrets gouged through the Raven Guard and the ground they stood upon. The Iron Warriors and Word Bearers kept reloading, opening fire again, hurling grenades and prepared to fall back. The Word Bearers Legion had taken up landing positions on the west of the field, ready to sweep down and engage the Raven Guard from the flank.

The Raven Guard were confronted by the treacherous Word Bearers, with their Primarch Lorgar, the First Captain Kor Phaeron and the First Chaplain Erebus at their vanguard. The two Legions fought one another in bitter combat. In the midst of this battle, the Word Bearers unleashed the elite unit known as the Gal Vorbak -- Astartes who had allowed themselves to be possessed by daemons. They attacked the Raven Guard's Primarch en masse, but despite the advantage of their numbers, Corax's formidable abilities as a consummate warrior proved to be more than a match for the possessed Astartes, and he slew them with impunity. Seeing the slaughter of his most favoured sons, Lorgar intervened and prevented the death of the remaining Gal Vorbak Astartes. The two opposing Primarchs then duelled one another in close combat, and the Raven Guard's Primarch quickly gained the upper hand over his outmatched brother. Lorgar had always been more of a scholar than a warrior and Corax prepared to execute him for his betrayal of the Emperor. Lorgar was spared from execution by the intervention of the Night Lords' Primarch, Konrad Curze, at the last moment. The Night Haunter and the Raven fought a brutal melee. Curze quickly gained the upper hand over his battle-weary brother and prepared to slay him, but Corax managed to escape death by taking to the sky with his master-crafted Jump Pack.

The outnumbered Loyalists were then surrounded and brutally butchered. Refusing to surrender, the remaining Raven Guard and Salamanders Astartes stubbornly defended themselves, trying to hold off the inevitable slaughter for as long as possible. Though they suffered an atrocious number of casualties, the Loyalists managed to hold their own, until the Primarchs Mortarion of the Death Guard and Angron of the World Eaters joined the fray. Bolstered by the support of the infamous Imperator-class Titan Dies Irae, the Traitors killed tens of thousands of Loyalist Astartes. At the height of the massacre the Warmaster Horus entered the fray, at the head of the elite Sons of Horus Terminators known as the Justaerin, slaughtering the Loyalists in wrathful anger.

Any hope for escape for the Loyalists was quickly crushed when the traitorous Iron Warriors destroyed the first wave's drop ships. The Loyalist star ships still orbiting the embattled planet were also largely annihilated by the vastly superior numbers of the Traitor's fleet. Despite the odds arrayed against them, some of the Loyalists on the ground managed to survive against these odds—they miraculously escaped through the tightening cordon of Traitors that surrounded their position. The Raven Guard fared better than the Salamanders in escaping the brutal massacre. But the Salamanders managed to assist a few surviving Astartes from the decimated Iron Hands Legion to also escape the slaughter. Imperial history does not record the fate of these surviving Salamanders or their missing Primarch Vulkan. The Raven Guard's Primarch just barely managed to board a fleeing Thunderhawk gunship to make good his escape, but was thwarted in the attempt when it was shot down almost immediately by the gunfire of the Traitors. The badly damaged ship crashed on the outskirts of the Urgall Plateau.

Horus Triumphant

After the killing had stopped and the dead were gathered into great funeral pyres across the broken desert of the Urgall Depression, the once-grey skies of the planet burned orange with the reflected glow of a thousand pyres. The firelight bathed the rippling, glassy sands in a warm radiance, and towering pillars of black smoke from the burning corpses filled the air. Thousands of Astartes loyal to Horus gathered before a great reviewing stand, constructed by the Tech-priests of the Dark Mechanicus with astonishing speed. As the sun began to sink beyond the horizon, the smooth black planes of the stand shone with a blood red glow. The stand was erected as a series of cylinders of ever decreasing diameter, one standing atop another. The base was perhaps a thousand metres in width, constructed as a great grandstand upon which the Sons of Horus stood, their pre-eminent position as the elite of the Warmaster in no doubt after this great victory. Each warrior bore a flaming brand, and the firelight cast brilliant reflections from their armour.

Atop this pedestal of flame was another platform, occupied by the senior officers of the XVI Legion. Above the senior officers of the Sons of Horus stood the Traitor Primarchs. The sheer magnificence of such a gathering of might was breathtaking. Seven beings of monumental power stood on the penultimate tier of the reviewing stand, their armour still stained with the blood of their foes, their cloaks billowing in the winds that swept the Urgall Depression. Finally, the uppermost tier of the reviewing stand was a tall cylinder of crimson that stood a hundred meters above the Primarchs. Horus stood on top of it, his clawed gauntlets raised in salute. A furred cloak of some great beast hung from his shoulders, and the light of the corpse pyres reflected from the amber eye upon his breastplate. The Warmaster was illuminated from below by a hidden light source, bathing him in a red glow that gave him the appearance of the statue of a legendary hero, as he stood looking down on the endless sea of his followers from the towering platform.

As the sun finally dipped below the horizon, a flight of assault craft roared over the Urgall Hills, their wings dipping in salute to the mighty warrior below. Solid waves of cheering crashed against the reviewing stand, howls of adulation torn from tens of thousands of throats. No sooner had the aircraft passed overhead than the massed Astartes began to march around the reviewing stand, their arms snapping out and hammering their breastplates in salute of the Warmaster. At some unseen signal a flame ignited on the northern slopes of the Urgall Depression and a blazing line of phosphor leapt across the ground in a snaking arc that described the outline of an enormous blazing eye upon the hillside. The adulation soared to new heights as the Eye of Horus seared itself into the sands of Isstvan V, the Warmaster’s forces roaring themselves hoarse in his praise. Super-heavy tanks fired in salute of Horus, and the towering immensity of the Dies Irae inclined its massive head in a gesture of respect. The ashes of the dead fell like confetti over Horus' mighty army as thousands of Traitor Astartes cheered, their cries of "Hail Horus! Hail Horus!" resounding long into the darkness.

Barely a handful of Loyalist Space Marines escaped with their lives from Istvaan V to bring dreadful word of the further betrayal of four more Space Marine Legions to the Emperor. A critically wounded Corax made the dangerous journey through the Immaterium back to Terra, arriving 133 days after departing the Istvaan System and finally reaching the Sol System -- the heart of the Imperium -- to seek audience with the Emperor. Vulkan was missing and presumed dead, though he would later reemerge after a harrowing journey back to Terra himself, to lead his Legion once more. The Salamanders, along with the Iron Hands and the Raven Guard, would spend the remainder of the Horus Heresy rebuilding their decimated Legions and were too weakened to play any further role in the great conflict.

In the days after the battle, the Traitor Legions salvaged a large number of vehicles, wargear and other war materiel from what the Loyalist Legions had left on the field. This salvage was repaired and modified for the Traitor Legions' use and then put back into front line service to be used against the Imperium. Some of this equipment would still be in service with certain Chaos Space Marine warbands in the late 41st Millennium. Orbital space around Istvaan V was busy as the vessels of 8 Legions assumed formation prior to transit to the system jump point. Over 3,000 vessels jostled for position above the darkened fifth planet, their holds bursting with warriors sworn to the service of Horus. Tanks and monstrous war machines had been lifted from the planet with incredible efficiency and an armada greater than any in the history of the Great Crusade assembled to take the fire of war into the very heart of the Imperium.

Following the victory of the Drop Site Massacre, Horus called for a conclave of the Primarchs of all 8 of the Traitor Legions aboard his flagship, the Vengeful Spirit. Five of the Primarchs, including four who had fought at Istvaan V, met in person, including Horus, Fulgrim, Angron, Mortarion and Lorgar. Three appeared through the use of hololithic emitters that transmitted their signals through the Warp, including Perturabo, the Night Haunter and Magnus the Red, who had only recently joined the Traitors after the Scouring of Prospero when the broken remains of his XVth Legion had been transported by Tzeentch into the Eye of Terror to the Planet of the Sorcerers. The Thousand Sons, bitter at what they perceived as their betrayal by the Emperor, now willingly became the eighth Traitor Legion. The council of Traitor Primarchs made their plans for the next step in their war against the Emperor and then each Legion went its way according to its assigned role.

The fleets of Angron, Fulgrim, Mortarion, Lorgar and Horus' own Legion would rendezvous at Mars, now that word had come from the Tech-priest Regulus, the Mechanicus' liaison with the 63rd Expeditionary Fleet, of that planet’s fall to Horus’ supporters within the Mechanicus during the internecine conflict known as the Schism of Mars. With the manufacturing facilities of Mondus Gamma and Mondus Occullum wrested from the control of the Emperor’s forces, the forges of Mars were free to supply the Warmaster’s army. The eager warriors of the Alpha Legion were singled out by Horus for a vital mission, one upon which the success of the entire venture could depend. Following Horus' manipulation of Leman Russ into assaulting the homeworld of the Thousand Sons, the Space Wolves were known to be operating in the region of Prospero. In the nearby system of Chondax, the White Scars of Jaghatai Khan were sure to have received word of Horus’ rebellion and would no doubt attempt to link up with the Space Wolves. Horus could not allow such a grave threat to appear, and so the warriors of Alpharius were to seek out and attack these Legions before they could join forces.

The Night Haunter’s fleet had already departed, bound for the planet of Tsagualsa, a remote world in the Eastern Fringe that lay shrouded in the shadow of a great asteroid belt. From there, the Night Lords’ terror troops would begin a campaign of genocide against the Imperial strongholds of Heroldar and Thramas, star systems that, if not taken, would leave the flanks of the Warmaster’s strike on Terra vulnerable to attack. The Thramas System was of particular importance, as it comprised a number of Mechanicus Forge Worlds whose loyalty was still to the Emperor. This campaign would also serve to tie up the dreaded Dark Angels Legion, so that the forces of the Lion wouldn't be brought to bare against Horus and his upcoming campaign against Terra.

The ships of the Iron Warriors prepared to make the journey to the Phall System where a large fleet of Imperial Fists vessels were known to be regrouping after a failed attempt to reach Istvaan V in time to join the Loyalist assault. Though Rogal Dorn’s warriors had played no part in the Drop Site Massacre, Horus could not allow such a powerful Loyalist force to remain unmolested. The enmity between bitter Perturabo and proud Dorn was well known, and it was with great relish that the Iron Warriors set off to do battle with their old rivals. With his flanks covered and the Space Marine forces that could potentially reinforce the heart of the Imperium soon to be embroiled in war, the Traitors were ready to unleash 7 Terran years of devastating civil war upon the Imperium in the name of Horus and the Dark Gods.

Battle of Terra

Landing on Terra

The Battle of Terra began with an orbital bombardment by the Warmaster Horus' fleet as the prelude to invasion. Although the Loyalist fleets and defenders fought back and the massive orbital defenses on Luna reaped more than a quarter of the star ships in the Traitor fleet they, like the Loyalist soldiers on the surface, were too few to face the combined forces of so many Traitor Legions, and were mowed down without mercy. After days of bombardment, the Chaos Space Marines landed on the surface of Terra in Drop Pods and advanced on the two spaceports nearest the location of the Imperial Palace to secure them in preparation for the main landings of the Traitor forces. Elements from five of the Traitor Legions participated in the battle, aided by the Traitor forces already on the surface. Despite the brave efforts of the Loyalists, the Eternity Wall and the Lion's Gate Spaceports fell within hours to the Forces of Chaos. Dark Chaos Cultists made their invocations, calling down the Greater Daemons of Chaos from the Warp directly onto Terran soil. With the spaceports secured, Horus' remaining troops of the Traitor Legions and their Traitor Imperial Army and Dark Mechanicus support forces landed en masse, and the hulking transports carried thousands of troops each. They also landed the terrible Traitor Titans that served the Warmaster's cause and had been infected with the daemonic power of Chaos. The transports' immense size made them prime targets for Terra's defense lasers. Although many of the Traitor landing craft were destroyed in-atmosphere, many more made it to the surface, disgorging yet more soldiers, main battle tanks and Traitor Titans to add to the besiegers' strength. They met stiff resistance from the Loyalists as the Imperial defenders knew that the survival of the Mankind's home world, their Emperor, and the future of the entire human race rested on their shoulders.

Siege of the Imperial Palace

The Chaotic besiegers forced the Imperial defenders back to the walls of the Imperial Palace, where thousands died slowing the assault. The Primarch Angron of the World Eaters Legion, now a Daemon Prince of the Blood God Khorne, came forth before the walls of the Palace and demanded the Loyalists' surrender, saying that they were cut off, outnumbered, and defended a ruler unworthy of their loyalty. Many would have surrendered to Angron after seeing the sheer power of the Forces of Chaos that stood arrayed before them had it not been for the Primarch Sanguinius, the winged and seemingly angelic leader of the Blood Angels Legion. The two Primarchs, once brothers, gazed at each other, perhaps communicating telepathically. Eventually Angron withdrew from before the gates of the Imperial Palace, telling his forces, not without some relish at the prospect of slaughter, that there would be no surrender.

The siege of the Imperial Palace then began in earnest. Three times the Forces of Chaos scaled the walls, and three times were hurled back by Sanguinius and his Blood Angels. Outside the Palace walls, Space Marine and Imperial Army forces led by Jaghatai Khan, the Primarch of the White Scars Legion, unsuccessfully tried to draw the bulk of the besiegers' army away from the Palace. Soon the outnumbered defenders were pushed back into the maze of corridors and bulwarks within the Palace walls. Frustrated with his army's slow progress, Horus ordered the Legio Mortis (Death's Head Legion), a Traitor Titan Legion, to demolish entire sections of the wall. Despite grievous losses, the Titans, led by the infamous Imperator-class Battle Titan Dies Irae, gouged open breaches in the Imperial Palace's defences, which the Traitors then flooded through.

Facing a breach and potential collapse of the Imperial defenses, Jaghatai Khan decided on a change of plan. Rather than assaulting the almost-invincible flanks of the Chaotic army, Khan redirected his highly mobile White Scars Space Marines and the surviving Loyalist Tank Divisions of the Imperial Army to Lion's Gate Spaceport. At dawn Jaghatai's lightning raid caught the Traitor garrison at the spaceport completely by surprise, and reclaimed the spaceport for the Imperium. The Khan ordered his troops to reactivate the spaceport's defense lasers to prevent the Traitor fleet from bringing down any more troops and equipment and form a defensive perimeter to hold their newly reconquered territory. Khan's troops repelled several frenzied counter-attacks from the Traitors, and began firing on Horus' unprotected drop ships. The Khan's plan worked perfectly: the flow of the Traitors' men and machines to the Imperial Palace had been cut in half at a single stroke. Inspired by this success, the Loyalists also tried to seize back the Eternity Wall Spaceport, but were driven back by the Chaos forces without difficulty, as they had reinforced their garrison following the loss of the Lion's Gate.

Inside the Palace, the defenders had been forced back to the Eternity Gate, the sole point of entry into the inner sanctum of the Imperial Palace. The Astartes of the Blood Angels and Imperial Fists tried to hold back the attacking Chaotic troops, while the remaining Loyalists made it through the Gate. Soon the mighty Bloodthirster Greater Daemon Ka'bandha came forth and bellowed out a challenge to Sanguinius in the name of his master Khorne. The daemon hurled itself at the Angel of Baal, barely allowing him time to parry the daemon's strikes. The two took to the air, trading blows and battle cries high above the heads of the two forces. Already fatigued from the long siege, Sanguinius was cast down by the daemon, pulverizing the ferrocrete below upon impact. The Loyalist forces seemed to collectively groan at the fall of their great champion.

Yet the Blood Angels' Primarch was not beaten, only stunned by the force of the impact. Sanguinius cleared his head, forced himself back to his feet, and once again took to the sky. The Angel seized the gloating daemon, holding it by the right ankle and arm. The Primarch hefted the creature high and broke its back over his knee, before hurling the daemon's carcass back at the besiegers, who howled in despair as the last Loyalists fell back and made it into the Imperial Palace's inner sanctum before the great portal of the Eternity Gate was shut tight behind them. Of course, as a daemon, Ka'bandah could not truly be slain, only banished to the Warp for a 1000 standard years, but the Bloodthirster's spirit was sent howling back into the Immaterium to meet the displeasure of his master the Blood God.

The Eternity Gate was closed.

Endgame

The siege of Terra following the initial assault on the Imperial Palace lasted for 55 days. Both sides knew that the defeat of the Imperium of Man was near after the defense of the Eternity Gate. Sensing this, and knowing that he must complete the siege before the arrival of Loyalist reinforcements from the other Space Marine Legions that were already on their way, Horus prepared to teleport to the surface from his flagship, the Vengeful Spirit, to lead his forces in person. Before this could happen, the Word Bearers' First Chaplain Erebus broke the news to Horus: their daemonic allies in the Warp had informed them that the Dark Angels and Space Wolves Legions were nearing Terra; and the Ultramarines were only a short distance behind.

At that moment, Horus despaired; his gamble had failed, weeks of further conflict would be needed to break the defenders and the Emperor's reinforcements would arrive in mere hours. What happened next is disputed in the Imperial historiography of the Heresy; some believe Horus disabled his Void Shields as he experienced one last moment of regret for his betrayal of his father and his turn to Chaos, while others believe it was a personal challenge to the Emperor. Nevertheless, Horus lowered the Void Shields of his flagship, the enormous Battle Barge Vengeful Spirit. The lowering of the vessel's shields was detected by the Loyalist vessels in orbit and the information was relayed to the Imperial Palace.

The Emperor of Mankind rose to the challenge, leading members of His elite personal guard, the Legio Custodes, the Primarchs Sanguinius and Rogal Dorn, and several companies of Imperial Fists and Blood Angels Veteran Space Marines in the assault and teleported aboard the Vengeful Spirit. Horus used his Chaotic powers to scatter the Emperor's force throughout the massive warship when they teleported up through the Warp. Each fought a series of battles against the elite Forces of Chaos aboard the corrupted starship, attempting to link up with their comrades and confront Horus.

It was Sanguinius who reached his brother Horus first. The Warmaster attempted to turn the Blood Angels' Primarch, his oldest and closest friend among the other Primarchs, to Chaos one last time. When Sanguinius refused to be corrupted, Horus attacked. Wounded from his many battles on Terra and the terrible battle with the daemon Ka'bandah, Sanguinius proved to be no match for Horus, now at the peak of his daemonic power after his long alliance with the Ruinous Powers. Horus strangled the Angel of Baal with ease. An alternate version of this event sometimes recorded in the Imperial records has Sanguinius cutting a small hole in Horus' Terminator Armour before he died, as this hole aided in the Emperor's final defeat of Horus.

When the Emperor finally entered the throne room of the Vengeful Spirit, he saw the winged corpse of the angelic Sanguinius lying at Horus' feet. Horus called the Emperor foolish for refusing the power that the Chaos Gods offered to Men, and timid for not taming them to His will if He was truly the Master of Mankind as He claimed. Horus proclaimed that if the Emperor would kneel before him, then he would spare his life. But the Emperor, tens of millennia older than his misguided and once beloved son, knew well the ancient trap that had snared Horus. The Emperor told the corrupted Primarch that he was the deluded slave of Chaos, not its master, for no mortal could ever truly claim to be more than simply a pawn of the Ruinous Powers. Snarling, Horus hurled bolts of daemonic lightning at the Emperor, but the Emperor nullified them with His own immense psychic abilities. The die was cast. Each god-like being knew that the fate of humanity now hung in the balance.

The Emperor and Horus engaged one another in the throne room of the massive Battleship, a battle that was both physical and psychic in nature. Though the Emperor's psychic gifts and martial skills were unequaled, He found Himself unwilling to summon His full strength against His beloved son. The Emperor suffered grievous wounds at Horus' hands, and after a score of thrusts, parries and counter-thrusts between the Emperor's Runesword and his own Lightning Claw, Horus sliced open the Emperor's chest armour, then opened his jugular and severed the tendons in his right wrist, disarming the Emperor. A psychic blast seared the flesh from the Emperor's face, destroying one of the Master of Mankind's eyes. After tearing the Emperor's right arm from its socket, Horus raised his father's broken body high over his head, and broke his back over his knee.

At that moment, a lone Loyalist warrior entered the bridge, just as the Emperor fell. Horus, gloating in victory, showed the Imperial warrior the Emperor's broken form and laughed, taunting the Loyalist's uselessness and defeat. The valiant Imperial warrior, far from being daunted, roared in defiance and interposed himself between the Emperor and the Warmaster, heroically holding the line against the Chaos-corrupted Primarch. He was flayed alive for his defiance by a glancing psychic blast from Horus.

The exact identity of the brave warrior is a source of much debate amongst Imperial historians, for today only the Emperor knows the truth. The Adeptus Ministorum tell the story that it was a lone Imperial Army trooper named Ollanius Pius who held the line, going as far as to canonize the man as the Guardian Saint of the Imperial Guard in the 32nd Millennium, yet many doubt that mere humans would have accompanied the Emperor and His Primarchs to confront Horus. The Imperial Fists maintain it was one of their Terminators who challenged Horus, however some see this as a desperate attempt to lessen their collective guilt stemming from the fact that Rogal Dorn never could participate in the fighting. Most savants now agree that it was probably one of the Adeptus Custodes who interceded, yet the other stories continue to be told and retold over the whole of the Imperium of Man.

The casual brutality of the Warmaster's act galvanised the Emperor as He realized what awaited Mankind under the rule of Horus and the Chaos Gods. Realizing at last that His favoured son was truly lost to the corruption of Chaos, the Emperor finally gathered His full and awesome psychic power in the Immaterium and unleashed a lance of pure Warp energy that pierced the gloating Horus' psychic defenses and ripped his body apart. In some versions of the tale, this blast was only able to pierce Horus' body through the hole that had been made by Sanguinius before his death. Just before Horus died, he looked his father in the eye, shedding a single tear, begging his father to forgive him for his betrayal. The Emperor saw regret in his fallen son's eyes. The Emperor also knew that the Ruinous Powers could attempt to possess Horus again, and that He would not be there to stop his son again if they did. Driving all of the near-infinite reserves of compassion from His mind for the sake of the humanity He had served and loved all the years of His long life, the Emperor destroyed Horus utterly, his essence burned from existence in both the physical world and the Immaterium so that the Ruinous Powers could not resurrect Horus as a Daemon Prince through their claim on his soul.

The destruction of Horus' soul sent a psychic shockwave surging across the Solar System, casting the daemons of Chaos back into the Warp, and spreading mass panic among the Traitor Legions and other Traitor forces on the surface of Terra in seconds as the Chaos Gods found their powers disrupted temporarily by the death of their favoured mortal vessel. It became clear to the Forces of Chaos that their leader had been defeated. A terrible, berserk fury later known as the Black Rage had encompassed the Blood Angels at the moment of their Primarch's death, and they were surging forth to scatter the attackers. Retreat turned to rout, and rout soon turned to bloodbath; thousands upon thousands of Chaos Space Marines and Chaos Titans fell attempting to flee. The ground before the Sanctum Imperialis ran red with the blood of Traitors and Heretics.

Source: http://warhammer40k.wikia.com

#horus heresy #warhammer 40k #adeptus sororitas #adeptus mechanicus #adeptus astartes #adeptus arbites #adeptus custodes #Astra Militarum #Adeptus Astra Telepathica #officio assassinorum

200 notes · View notes

enchantedzuyorker · 4 years

Text

SMASH CIV

The issue of civilization and its real nature during the whole period of history and especially the latest years holds a prominent position amongst the self announced radical anarchist circles. Various analyses and perspectives have been expressed and we are certain that many more will be expressed during this age, where technology, more and more inaccessible to the average citizen reveals even more its side that has to do with the management and the conservation of the present order of things. The economic flurries and intensification of class stratification limited the role of technology in the daily life of the simple citizen to systems of control, security systems and in a torturing consuming withdrawal syndrome, as they watch technology contribute to the development of new products, they are not able to obtain them anymore, now helplessly with empty pockets observing them in the windows of stores or TV screens.

So certainly, what is expected in the upcoming years is an antiscientific and anti-technological delirium by the economically weaker classes since technology from affectionate and compassionate mother became a shrew that abandoned her children to their fate intervening only for their restriction and the aggravation of their economic predicament. A nostalgia for the older years will flourish, when the scientific specialization wasn’t so widespread and the goods of technology were more accessible for the hoi polloi. When the scientific terms didn’t need a five year studying and postgraduate studies to be understood. But let’s leave all this for later.

What is the renowned civilization? Most approaches present it as the technological totalitarianism and the violent capitalist rationalization. Others refer to the techno-industrial system and the big urban zones which base on the objectification and the repeatedly exploitation of the natural world. Others having a primitivist base refer to the development of authoritarian structures and ways of organization of the people in specific geographic areas that extended, conquering and ravaging communities in harmony with the natural environment. Certainly civilization is all of these and many more that nullify the root of the above perceptions. If we don’t want to confine ourselves in a superficial interpretation of the western civilization, being the most prevalent, we ought to proceed to the admittance that civilization existed since almost always. It was created by the first attempts of the human to cope with the natural alienation. Mayans also had civilization. The nomadic tribes of Africa had civilization. The Natives in America had civilization. Also the tribes of the Amazon have civilization. Even the so called “uncivilized” by the west have a different civilization, which the west feels compelled to annihilate as so to ensure its own survival since any civilization when developing simultaneously with another constitutes a thorn that must be removed.

Civilization built on uniformity is impossible to accept a different culture or a different way of life, even if this is uniform. Pluralism of opinions inside a civilization can only be something seeming. Questioning is acceptable only when it doesn’t question the fixed values that ensure the development of the civilized culture. In our society Christianity can be questioned but not the faith in something superior in itself. Democracy can be questioned but not the political management of the movements of the rabble. There are standards on which cohesion and coexistence are validated, which don’t accept the slightest questioning and when they start to creak it is a sign of decadence and collapse for the edifice. This creak could be caused by the invasion of new moral perceptions and existential values that their exponents proving there is an alternative way of life beyond the given, set under questioning the basic traditions which for years constituted pillars of the big roof under which the crowd was concentrated. This is why racism is an inherent part of every mass society. The hate of the Greeks against the immigrants is completely justified if we consider the ruptures these people could bring by just breathing.

How does the most merciful Jesus, for whom so much blood has been spilt, allow to the heathens to breathe? And vice versa of course. Regardless if the full pockets in periods of consuming plenty constitute a useful distraction, being a common cultural element of the puddle that the herd hides in its soul. So we observe, that civilization is in no case global regarding the forms it can take. On the contrary, the differences of civilizations can be so chaotic that can justify all genocides, slaughters, annihilations and destructions throughout history. So if we want, to speak about the human civilization and not about the forms it has taken throughout history we will have to look for the related elements between these civilizations and analyze them.

The par excellence related element on which each civilization and society has been founded is the domination of the collective imaginary. The sphere of the collective imaginary includes morality, culture, perception, communication, reality, truth and the spirit which condition a civilization. We could say that civilization is the consolidation of a herd, the stabilization of its interior. The creation of some unquestionable values which ensure the social cohesion and the continuous adherence to the dominant collective imaginary. The so called traditions, which rarely receive a radical questioning that leads to the crisis of the edifice, whereas whichever alteration usually needs work of many years and generations. The most possible thing is that these traditions, which give a specific identity to the crowd who is under the roof of a civilization, will have very few common contact points.

The common point which would help us discuss about civilization in its entirety cannot be looked for in terms such as “anthropocentrism”, “rationalist domination”, “scientific dogma” and “objectification of the natural world” because all of these existing situations characterize the western monstrosity and not all the facets of civilization. The word that could give us ground for the conduct of dialogues on the total questioning of civilization, beyond the domination of the collective imaginary, is “systematization”. Systematization is something much more than institutionalized rights, method of management of human resources and conversion of subjective thoughts into objective communication. Systematization expresses the gregarious need for setting a common, rational, global course. If we verge on the matter of systematization historically we will see that it has its roots at the dawn of the first organized societies, where humans facing a hostile towards them natural world, which included the survival of the fittest, were forced to confederate into herds claiming their own share of life. Though the passage from the stage of natural alienation to the one of social demanded some retreat of the individual in favor of the mass and the further development of the herd instincts.

Society, as to consolidate, develop civilization and annihilate its contradictions ought to subjugate to a system which would call “truth”. Truth, whichever form it took, from the moment it constituted a product of social reality, would automatically justify the existence of society and the crushing of individual autonomy putting as shield its artificial imaginary prescripts. Without a system that would define the right or wrong, the moral or the immoral, the natural or the unnatural it would be impossible for humans to co-exist under those forms that a co-existence would be possible taking under consideration the reality of this era, thus even their extinction would be possible.

All civilizations were built effortlessly as natural defense of the human-ape against its environment or to put it more correct the conclusion of the instinct of survival driven by cowardice. The construction of various civilizations and their oncoming conflicts was an unavoidable fact which would deluge history, insomuch as mentioned before, the parallel existence of two civilizations constitutes for both simultaneously a carcinoma that ought to be annihilated since it questions the truth of each one of them and threatens their cohesion. Systematized life and domination of the collective imaginary are two inseparable terms, inextricably connected with what we call civilization of all human kind, the facets of which for centuries dominate, enslave, classify and confine the possibilities of life. The endless collision of global realities had led us today in a situation, which the primacy is being held by the western rational model having opposite of it opponents that can’t pose a serious threat, like the muslim states, where the cultural chasms are ostensible, since everywhere the common faith in scientific progress, industrial expansion, technology and anthropocentrism are dominant.

Verging on Civilization from this point of view, we localize concisely its heart, in the systematization of life under the consolidation of some common standards necessary for the organization of mass survival. Standards that must seem necessary and natural, of which the questioning and overthrow will root new ones. Having in mind the above, the effort of this approach is done for nothing but the localization of the components of authority and all the barriers for a free and chaotic life, as so the total attack on the foundations and the world of domination will be more effective in the here and now. Civilization as matrix of organized centralized structures followed an evolutional course of expansion of the chains of authority. From the human domination and exploitation of the earth and non human animals and from the statutory domination to the social diffusion and its reproduction. Alongside this codes of values were created and the morality which will decorate and provide the suitable alibi.

On the steering wheel of this course are the ideologemes of progress and modernization.

The achievements of which both on a cultural level and material are inextricably connected with the needs of domination. They ought to bring profit for the capitalist machine, to ensure control and cohesion of mass societies and reproduce authority on their inside. The window of western civilization and progress is no other than the complex science-technology. Trying to touch on science in essence, we perceive it as the result of the pursuit of the human mind to put in order “reality”. In a few words science with rationalism as a guide, elevates the human guiding it to classify the uncertain and alarming stimuli that the senses receive from the environment. An ability of domination of the senses and the instincts by the human cerebration.

The findings of science as a social dogma are unquestionable, their demolition cannot come from anything else but from the same way of determinism and rationalism. So science as another religion, which places this time in the centre the human, aims at the objectification of the world, the order and control of everything. Not for the imaginary of a neutrality, since we know well that this complex is in the service of domination. It’s worth for one more time to emphasize on the extensive use of DNA identification as the contemporary imprint, in the service of domination. The mechanization of contemporary life with the diffusion of technology in every human activity, constitutes the best means of surveillance and domination of humans. And we don’t speak only about cameras and control systems. The findings of technology that are meant for mass consumption must become compatible with the citizen-consumer. Thus the individual adjusts to the ways and perception of a machine or a computer so that its use can be feasible. Behaviors, thoughts, emotions, life, convert to mechanical procedures.

The raw murderous nature of western civilization we have no other way to see, but in its industrial dimension. We live in times that industrial civilization expands apace in every corner of the planet ravaging humans, earth and nonhuman animals so the capitalist machine can be fed and the needs of the cementitious cemeteries named cities to be covered. The humans like undead in them, look like machines programmed on a wretched repetitiousness, the massive road networks that connect them allow the mass transport of humans and commodities. Industrial civilization demolishes every form of life in its way, its activities spread mainly in the so called “ underdeveloped” countries in which its creation will return under the form of tons of garbage. Deforestation, nitrates in seas and rivers and methane in the air are some things of which the meat industry grants to life. The mass imprisonment and murders of animals as much as biotechnology that experiments on them for the creation of more efficient organisms, verify the ultimate domination over living beings. The mining activities drain the Earth and pollute everything around them.

On the other hand the endoauthoritative competition for control of energy presage the new bloodshed on the planet at the time when the resources will be increasingly depleted. We often listen by classic anarchists to perceive as means and project the management or self-management of the techno-scientific achievements of civilization as much as the means of production with a liberatory prefix. Though the complex of science-technology not only has been made according to the needs of domination, but also carries the seed of authority in its core. The anthropocentric perception, the monolithism where it emanates, the specialization and apportionment of work in an industrialized environment, is the crop of authority that must be eradicated. This project of some anarchists reveals among others their post-revolutionary need to rise new standards and the reality of their civilization with the new “anti-authoritarian” dogmas.

The spectacularization of nature being targeted by the existential insurrection.

Negation of the existent and every civilization is our way. Though our desire for the annihilation of society and civilization doesn’t emanate from the identification of a primitivist ideal or some form of faith in an ideal society in complete harmony with the environment and the ecosystem. Our acquaintance with the world from the first moment we met with our senses had been guided through the prism that the universality of the western model, through which we were socialized, imposed.

The separation nature—civilization is a false separation since behind both terms is hidden the same “truth” that the contemporary citizens worship and it is no other than the gregarious interpretation of the chaos of existence with only purpose the conservation of the authoritative structure that feeds the present sickly nature under the name Humanity. The western pattern drawing its roots on the ancient greek philosophy and mainly Plato, who preached the separation of senses and spirit, fortified its primacy through the urban revolutions and Enlightenment, concentrating under the name “nature” all the aspects of human which ought to stay in the past, with purpose the prosperity of humanity under the guidance of the rationalist spirit. Of course in the eras of economic domination everyone can obtain a piece of “natural wilderness” as a form of vacation from the everyday urban routine, as the faithful are allowed to redeem commercialized “sin”. If our reading continues to march on the same segregative dogma of nature—civilization it is unavoidable not to find ourselves in front of contradictions which do not belong to us.

Both “wild nature” and civilization belong to the spectacularized reality of the crowd, the same as with all contradictions that condition the readings which keep on adhering to the aforementioned dogma. We do not want to interpret this chaos into a common dialect with utter purpose the rise of yet another ideal, but to enjoy it since we accept we constitute part of it. We desire to restore the innocence of becoming and extort it from the jaws of every kind of cultural domination. Against every dogmatism, deification and universality, our speech seeks the forgotten traces of instincts craving the total harmonization with them with purpose the setting of a course of power, life and freedom. The compass of this course doesn’t have any indicators, nor points of the horizon. For us, chaos is the negation of every monolithic reality, every dogma, every exaltation.

The monolithism of every standard imposes the classification of everything that surrounds it and its hetero-determination. The compass of chaos is this that leads to the infinite possibilities of life liberated from authoritative relations. Chaos and anarchy are inextricably connected inside the journey towards the unknown of possibilities, where each moment gestates its own surprise. The constant insurrection, the continuous polemic against every authority, tears down the idols and everything that attempts to occupy the throne of truth.

0 notes