‘Men have been found to resist the most powerful monarchs and to refuse to bow down before them, but few indeed have been found to resist the crowd, to stand up alone before misguided masses, to face their implacable frenzy without weapons and with folded arms to dare a no when a yes is demanded. Such a man was Zola!’
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
‘We’re in our own Holocaust. It ain’t never ended, it all depends.’
Ye (the artist formerly known as Kanye West), ‘Slave Name’ / ‘Last Name’ (unofficial, unreleased track)
‘Since the forth century after Christ, there have been three anti-Jewish policies: conversion, expulsion, and annihilation. The second appeared as an alternative to the first, and the third emerged as an alternative to the second. […] The missionaries of Christianity had said in effect: You have no right to live among us as Jews. The secular rulers who followed had proclaimed: You have no right to live among us. The Nazis at least decreed: You have no right to live.’
Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews
‘No anti-Semite, for example, would ever conceive of the idea of castrating a Jew. He is killed or sterilized. But the Negro is castrated. […] The Negro symbolizes the biological danger; the Jew, the intellectual danger.’
Frantz Fanon, ‘Black Skin, White Masks’
‘The true criminals hide under the cloak of the accusers.’
Expelled Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky’s critique of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who’s purges in Russia culminated in the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico — with an ice pick.
‘Israel is often portrayed as David confronted by Goliath, but the converse is closer to the truth. […] Powerful states can maintain flawed policies for quite some time, but reality cannot be ignored for ever.’
Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby, London Review of Books, 2005.
‘A society where making black and white people equal means making them equally subordinate to a (mainly white but, really, what does it matter?) ruling class is not a more just society, just a differently unjust one. That’s the trouble with disparity.’
Adolph Reed Jr. and Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble With Disparity
‘Few imagine that U.S. forces will become directly involved in the fighting or that Russia will dare use nuclear weapons.’
John Mearsheimer, ‘Playing With Fire In Ukraine,’ Foreign Affairs, 2022
‘We must contain China as America contained the Soviet Union. And we should be prepared to go further if necessary to prevent the kind of war that China’s further rise will provoke. We must above all else face our fear, and accept the rule of reason, not the paranoia of passion.’
Edmund Wilson, ‘Fear: Why everyone downplays the China crisis’
‘We, as a species, have already changed the Earth to suit our needs. Now we must change our own institutions if we are to adapt to the world we have created. Before it is too late.’
Edmund Wilson, Climate, China, Capital: The triple crisis of the twenty-first century
‘Racism still alive, they just be concealing it.’
Kanye West, The College Dropout, 2004
‘Some people graduate, and they still stupid.’
Kanye West, Graduation, 2007
‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.’
Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859
‘For if Men are to be precluded from offering their Sentiments on a matter, which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences, that can invite the consideration of Mankind, reason is of no use to us; the freedom of Speech may be taken away, and, dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the Slaughter.’
George Washington, speech to the Continental Army, 1783
‘Ye says a lot of things: most of them serious, few of them literal.’
Edmund Wilson, Twitter, 2023
‘Drake is the greatest rapper ever.’
Ye, 2022
‘Woke liberalism is fascism.’
Edmund Wilson, Twitter, 2023
‘The divine does not divide[;] she permeates.’
Lori Kauffman, Twitter, 2023
‘Truth and justice, so ardently longed for! How terrible it is to see them trampled, unrecognized and ignored!’
Emile Zola, ‘J’Accuse!’
I have been reading a startling book, one which was rejected by many publishers until it was eventually accepted, to no small degree of controversy, into the canon of works that now seem to influence every aspect of our thought. Or do they? Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews is, as an early review noted, at once ‘impressive and depressing.’ It constitutes the first, and perhaps the last, definitive account of the Holocaust — similar to how Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism is taken to be a definitive account of totalitarianism. But like Arendt’s work, whose predecessors include Franz Neumann’s Behemoth and the less well-known Ernst Fraenkel’s The Dual State (to this day the most important account of totalitarianism, in my judgement — given Fraenkel stayed as a Jewish labor lawyer in Nazi Germany right up until Kristallnacht, in 1938), Hilberg’s account has its own predecessors. Arendt herself discouraged the publication of Hilberg’s book — but it encapsulates her phrase ‘the banality of evil’ (from Eichmann In Jerusalem) nicely, and draws on some of the texts Arendt herself prescribes to her students. (In one exam, students were instructed to critically examine Holocaust survivour David Rousset’s concept of a ‘concentration camp society’.) In 2019, I read Arendt’s Origins for the first time, and since then I have dived into the earlier works by Neumann and Fraenkel from the Frankfurt School of critical theory that loosely inspired Arendt’s magnum opus. I also read Arendt’s The Human Condition and its influence from Heidegger’s Being and Time, which Arendt herself contributed research assistance to. I have, in other words, immersed myself in the history and philosophy of the twentieth century — despite my preference for studying less proximate and depressing times. I feel I have a duty to use my limited skills to help draw some lessons from history and apply them to the present. I know others do this, too — but based on my limited knowledge, almost every extrapolation of twentieth century events to inform twenty-first century politics is entirely mistaken. I am appalled by the state of the field. Indeed, I write on my blog because the field of speculative inference from the past is so full of nonsense that I cannot begin to explain myself to a publisher. I need to tell you the truth — as I see it — and nothing but the truth. The whole truth. Here goes.
Hilberg outlines some crucial aspects of the history of the Holocaust that go largely unnoticed in contemporary accounts, despite the universal acknowledgement — and perhaps consequent misreading — of Hilberg’s history. To understand the significance of this account, let me read it in the light of more recent events, through which I will interweave the theory implicit, and at times explicit (especially in the tripartite division between ‘conversion,’ ‘expulsion,’ and ‘annihilation’ — or ‘destruction’) in Hilberg’s intricate historical analysis of the past. This is my political-philosophical analysis, or future history, for what it is worth. The style here will change because my analysis becomes inevitably more polemical rather than strictly literal. But I must change up the style in order to let the substance shine through. I hope the philosophical message is communicated in such a way that justifies this historical prelude and the political title of this article. Here goes:
The left is dead.
The woke liberal totalitarianism goes hand-in-hand with marketisation — and the left has thus become the new totalitarian right by positioning itself in the cultural centre.
As Janan Ganesh notes — the left seems to dominate culture, while the right seems to dominate politics.
When social media companies censor people for attacking ‘protected’ attributes of others, the distinction between protected and unprotected attributes becomes increasingly fuzzy — soon all attributes could plausibly be protected, but that would negate the function of these criteria: censorship.
There are not protections but justifications for annihilation.
Woke liberalism is not simply Nazism.
It is, potentially, even worse.
Woke liberalism not only asserts that a sizeable number of people must be targeted for their beliefs, but also that these people have forfeited their right to live.
It is a class war of the professional class against the working class — and essentially relies on a logic of extermination.
The professional class seeks to enact a Holocaust of the working class, starting with the political neutralisation of this class as inherently ‘racist’ and therefore unworthy of political, and ultimately biological, life.
This is Hitlerism with a twist: it is not the middle or upper classes that are being targeted, but the very bottom.
In this way to be white and working class is to be the new Jew in today’s Nazi society.
This society calls people ‘Nazi’ to avoid calling them ‘Jew’, and hides behind the rhetoric of antifascism to push through deeply fascist changes to the social structure.
The first target is Ye; the artist formerly known as Kanye West. Neither white nor working class, Ye is targeted because he is a contradiction: he is black, but does not conform to any stereotypes of black men — as either violent, or compliant. Ye chooses to use words to challenge taboo — and this linguistic violence is unacceptable to the establishment.
A further example is Andrew Tate, whose working class background offends the view of all white men as privileged. His outspoken critique of feminism makes him the prime target for censorship. As with Julian Assange and Edward Snowden before him, Tate is now being threatened with legal charges in order to prevent further discursive disorder that threatens the status quo.
In this way woke liberalism is essentially a fusion of racism, antisemitism, and — paradoxically — antiracism. But antiracism, as Professors Adolph Reed Jr. and Walter Benn Michaels have shown, functions essentially as a mask for racism. So the liberal establishment, far from condemning the remarks of Ye in 2022, wishes to go ‘further’ than Ye is taken to have gone (a length to which he did not, in fact, go), and annihilate all members of minorities who do not conform to conventional and progressive stereotypes — which amount to the same thing.
Alas, liberal progressivism is a lie to mask fascist neoreaction. But the true neoreactionaries are the progressives — and the true progressives are the so-called ‘reactionaries.’ It is not Ye who is Hitlerite, therefore, but his critics. To quote the Obama-era musical ‘Hamilton,’ ‘the world turned upside down.’
The Holocaust of the Whole is thus not simply the destruction of ‘bad’ (non-conventional) Jews, Muslims, Christians, whites, blacks, and any other ‘imagined community’ (Benedict Anderson) you can mention, but the destruction of free thought in general. In this way the old World Wars have been replaced with a War for the Whole. The entire fate of humanity hinges on decisions we make today.
If we fail to stop this inferno, then the steps of the Holocaust will be repeated by the labour aristocracy of the professional-managerial class, at the behest of the left-wing of capital. This ‘left-wing racism’ (to coin a phrase from Peter Hitchens, who has economically left-leaning views tied to social conservatism and a background in Marxism) will progress in the following steps, as Raul Hilberg showed in The Destruction of the European Jews:
1. Conversion,
2. Expulsion, and
3. Annihilation.
Whenever someone fails to capitulate to woke-liberal standards (conversion), they will be removed from any position of power (expulsion). This will be followed by their denial of the means of subsistence as every job turns them down; and ultimately the creation of ‘reeducation camps’ — like the ones in Xinjiang, China, in which 1.8 million largely Muslim people have been forcibly interned in the ‘People’s War on Terror’ — potentially leading to the death of tens of millions of innocent people on the grounds of their refusal to forfeit their freedom to their ‘woke’ neoliberal / capitalist (and what is the difference, really?) overlords.
Why might the right not enact such a policy? Because the right is no longer right-wing but left-wing in disguise. The right is the real new left and is the party of the working class, which has not received the same corrupting University education that professional elites have. They are not indoctrinated in the upside-down ideology of the Universities, an ideology which is a bourgeois distortion of real Marxism and progressivism. To represent the working class’s rhetorical nonchalance and economic desperation, the right, or new left, will contain capitalism and censorship. This will undo the policies of the left and the centre in recent decades — as well as the right during the War on Terror.
Trumpism is not fascism, but Bidenisn is quite close to it. For Trump is reacting to woke liberalism, not vice versa. Just as NATO expansion is the cause of Russia’s resurgence, so is woke liberalism the cause of Trumpism’s rise. But neither Russia nor Trump are the principal foes of liberty, but the foes manufactured by neoliberal paranoia. The principal threat to peace is the chaos unleashed by climate change, capitalist markets, and the rise of totalitarian neoliberal China.
For America is caught between capitalism and socialism. And in this false middle ground, the spectre of fascism has appeared — not on the right, but on the left. And the centre allows this to happen by adhering to left-wing cries of ‘fascism!’ against the right. This is sinister. But it is real.
The only way to avert the forced conversion, expulsion, and eventual annihilation of free thinkers through denial of access to trade and violent deployment of the security state, then, is to stop supporting the left, anywhere.
The left is a lost cause. Forget it.
The only way is to embrace the so-called ‘right’ and push it towards democratic socialism.
This requires taking right-wing stances on culture war positions, which are masks for the political economy of class conflict. As Marx argued in 1859, conditions precede consciousness, not vice versa. The culture war between ‘left’ and ‘right’ is a mask for the class war between professionals and workers.
But as with the war in Ukraine, where realist John Mearsheimer predicts continued western support will leave Putin with no option but the tactical deployment of nuclear weapons, it is possible that liberalism’s hatred of conservatism will lead the right to become an image of what liberalism claims to oppose: fascism. But an image is not a reality. When Ye expressed his love for Hitler, he did not condone a new Holocaust. He opposed it with an ethic of universal love, not particularising hatred.
‘We’re in our own Holocaust. It ain’t never ended, it all depends,’ as Ye said on the unreleased song Slave Name or Last Name (relating to his name change from Kanye ‘West’, a slave-owner’s slave name, to Ye). Frantz Fanon commented on the similarities between the targeting of Jewish people and black people. Now we see this affinity reaching a pinnacle as Ye becomes the new Dreyfus, on whom all the world’s ills can be blamed. This is a mere prelude to the horrors to come, just as Dreyfus’ exclusion from public life in the 1890s was a prelude to the horrors of the twentieth century. Emile Zola’s ‘J’Accuse’ letter exonerated Dreyfus by accusing his critics, led by a conspiracy of right-wing German generals, of targeting him unfairly to escape responsibility for France’s failure to contain Prussia.
Fast forward to 2022, and America has provoked a war with Russia by expanding NATO close to its doorstep, while failing to contain China — which is the second-largest economy and military spender, second only to America. Russia cannot dream of catching up to the new superpowers.
Ye is, like Dreyfus before him, being blamed for the failure to contain China. Ye is being accused of condoning Holocaust — when America is trading with China despite the domestic Holocaust of Muslims endorsed by President Xi Jinping. China is, like Nazi Germany, contemplating wolfing up new territories — in China’s case, Taiwan, and the South China Sea, where China had been militarising islands for offensive warfare for the best part of a decade. But the West turns a blind eye, and passes the buck to free thinkers like Kanye ‘Ye’ West.
But Ye has risen to the occasion, arguing for the containment and ultimate Christianisation of China. This makes sense — as if China is contained within its borders externally and forced to change its regime and ideology domestically, it will cease to be a great power for long — and the Thucydides trap which caused the world wars between rising Germany and ruling Anglo-America will be avoided. America will remain hegemon, but it will have been tested, and will think again about allowing a new power to dominate a region as critical as southeast Asia. To do this, America will need to ally with Russia to contain China — requiring Ye’s stated intention to have talks with Putin to resolve the dispute over Ukraine and its underlying cause (regardless of the misleading, moralistic rhetoric of both western and, at least to some degree, non-western leaders): NATO expansion. NATO could be transformed into alliance for containing China. And with that, the new totalitarian threat externally will be overcoming — and the ongoing threat of a Holocaust instigated by Chinese leaders will be evaded. The camps in Xinjiang will be closed as a condition for China’s peaceful acceptance into world politics as a minor, non-military power. The pride of China’s leaders will be the price of peace — but this, all things considered, is a price well worth paying to avert a Third World War and a new Holocaust.
It is said the Holocaust is a unique event in human history. It is. But it is clear people worry about antisemitism because they fear it will lead to a new Holocaust. I share this fear — but I think we have mistaken who the real antisemites are. The new antisemitism is perpetrated not by people saying traditionally antisemitic slogans, though this may be a part of it, but by the censors of free speech: the professional aristocracy that pressures the corporate oligarchy into putting in place limits on free speech on online and media platforms.
The result is that anyone who criticises someone else by noting one of their ‘protected attributes’ of race, gender, or other such shibboleth identity labels is automatically deplatformed, or brought close to this expulsion from the Agora of modern society. This is not driven principally by oligarchs like Elon Musk, who is somewhat pro-free speech, but by market forces responding to the demands of the woke liberal left — the same ‘left’ that derailed the economic campaigns of Corbyn and Sanders in the late 2010s by distracting from class war with bogus culture war.
This market Maoism/Stalinism is now being enacted in a continuous cultural revolution — where anyone can be targeted. Some on the right seek to censor the left on the grounds of their anticapitalism being seen as identical with antisemitism. Meanwhile the left finds the traditionally antisemitic or racist views of right-leaning people, who are reacting in large part to the left’s creation of totalitarian taboos that beg to be broken, to be grounds for their elimination from public life.
These new Nuremberg Laws — the right-wing condemnation of antisemitism and the left-wing condemnation of racism — are converging in a centrist totalitarianism, where all real views are homogenised. Fictitious ‘polarisation’ masks the fact we all agree on almost everything nowadays. Ye is asking us to think again, but is it possible to think in a world as thoughtless as this?
The destruction of free thought may begin with the targeting of the Dreyfus/Churchill figure of Ye, who advocates as Churchill did the containment of the rising totalitarian power (a warning that falls on deaf ears), but it will not end there.
The system of free trade dictates that power must change hands — and so new powers rise and old powers fall. The rise of China internationally is matched only by the rise of the professional-managerial class domestically. But unlike China, which is endeavouring to catch up with America on economic and military measures, the professional-managerial class lacks the discipline and vision to attack capital directly. So instead it strikes downwards — just as it accuses working people of striking at minorities. For all the college-educated elite’s talk of ‘diversity’ and confronting prejudice, we have seen the formation of a managerial aristocracy that is the least diverse and most prejudiced in history — similar to how the ethnically Han leadership of China strikes down at Muslim ‘terrorists,’ all two million of them. Islamophobia functions much like antisemitism in the Global War on Terror, initiated under George Bush who Kanye West was once ridiculed for correctly noting that ‘George Bush doesn’t care about black people.’ And then Kanye was asked to leave the country after, echoing Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, he was demonised as the black man preying on Taylor Swift, a white woman, when he — as a result of the death of his mother and the break-up of his engagement — drunkenly announced that Beyoncé made a better music video than Taylor did. When he denied the stereotypes of black people only supporting Democrats by endorsing Trump after his election as President, he was labelled as a racist, similar to the right-wing view of Marx as a ‘self-hating Jew.’ And Ye was condemned for insisting that people could choose to be free, since he explained this by saying, ‘slavery is a choice’ — the media conveniently papered over the way Ye talks about mental slavery, slavery to an idea, as analogous to chattel slavery.
Marx similarly noted how the ‘invisible threads’ of wage slavery bound the labourer to the capitalist just as the physical chains of chattel slavery bound slaves to their masters before the rise of industrial capitalism. Under Abraham Lincoln, the Republican Party abolished slavery. It was only as a result of two world wars that the Democrats shifted their support to the northern industrial states and the Republicans became a conservative southern bloc that resisted the America-wide movement for civil rights.
But now a new realignment is occurring in the shadow of the Cold War, the War on Terror, the financial crisis of 2008 and the coronavirus crisis of 2020. The Democrats are becoming increasingly dependent on wealthy donors as their midwestern support dries up. The Republicans dominate middle America while the Democrats cling to the coastlines, almost begging to join with capitalist China or the dilapidated old imperial hubs of western Europe, which finds Chinese investment as attractive as Russia, Africa, and many parts of the American continent do.
The Holocaust began with racialised prejudice across Europe. Today this prejudice is masked by ideological prejudice, which has become the new menace. But it does mask real racism — racism that asserts all members of a minority must conform to the stereotypes of that minority. To be a Jewish or black person who likes Ye, for instance, has itself become an offence. To be white and Trump-opposing is forgivable, since to be white and Trump-supporting is one of the stereotypes that warrant expulsion from public life. Soon all imagined minorities and majorities will face this choice: conform to the stereotype of your attribute, or face annihilation.
Of course, it depends whether you have a ‘protected’ attribute or not, as social media censorship rules maintain, on the grounds of defeating ‘hate speech.’ But the real linguistic violence is censorship itself, which enacts violence on all violators of ‘protected’ attributes, or identitarian labels. This mirrors precisely the Nazi divide between ‘protected’ Aryans of the fatherland, and those whose attributes were not only unworthy of protection, but worthy of extermination.
This is the world we live in. The destruction of free thought will lead to the destruction of free thinkers — just as Nazism’s destruction of Judaism ended with the destruction of millions of Jewish people. We cannot allow this evil to repeat itself, albeit in a mutated ideologised form — in contrast to the racialised tradition from which this new horror has grown, and to which it may well return. In other words, rather than leading to the protection of minorities such as homosexual people, transgender people, women, black people, Jewish people, Muslims, and Christians, woke liberalism may end up deliberately isolating members of these groups for annihilation — first on the ideological grounds of their being free thinkers (like Ye), and second on the racialized grounds of their being black, or Jewish, or gay — or perhaps straight, white, and male. This system would seem perfectly rational any of its sycophantic followers, since it is a system that carefully categorises annihilation by boxes — if you don’t like racism, you can join the squad for hunting down racists on the right and in the working class. If you don’t like antisemitism, you can hunt down antisemites on the left and in the middle class. If you don’t like capitalism, you could eat the rich — but they are likely to remain protected, just as Germany’s capitalists did. Totalitarian censorship was arbitrary then and it is arbitrary now. But it does rely on a capitalist base to sustain the liberal-fascistic superstructure. The market economy of buyers and sellers sustains a Manichean ideology of good and bad people, or friends and enemies as Nazi-supporting jurist Carl Schmitt put. Trade generates chaos that censorship seeks to contain by limiting people’s freedom to vent their frustration — thereby actually accelerating trade expansion and limiting human freedom against the ravages of market anarchy and stateless bureaucracy, an army of civil servants doing their job to defend private interests and identify public enemies. These apparatchiks like Holocaust administrator Adolf Eichmann exemplify what Hannah Arendt terms the ‘banality of evil.’ Evil is, as Arendt’s inspiration Augustine noted, not the presence but rather the absence of goodness.
As Franz Neumann similarly noted about the politics of the Nazi state, there is not so much state hierarchy as a market anarchy parading as a state. The state is created by the need to wage external war; the market is sustained by internal trade. This double existence led Ernst Fraenkel to term the new state form a ‘Dual State’, divided between the ‘normative state’ of profit and laws and the ‘prerogative state’ of power and censorship. Trade and totalitarianism went hand-in-hand with the traditional emphasis on the war economy. Returns on capital rose in the 1930s. Hitler was not economically left-wing — but he did anticipate left liberalism’s cultural worship of identity. Hitler sought to protect Aryans from Jews and Anglo-Americans. Woke liberalism seeks to protect minorities from the majority of working people.
But woke liberalism cannot win. It cannot, in fact, annihilate a majority or ‘bad’ members of minorities, as there would be no-one left!
But that should not lead us to complacency. This new tyranny is worse than anything we have seen in a long time; it is real, and it is growing.
In proposing to fuse ‘Bernie Sanders principles’ of economic redistribution with escalating Trump’s trade war on China and making good on promises for ecological harmonisation, Ye has already outlined his manifesto for President. Having broken linguistic taboos surrounding mental health and the scapegoated, falsely ‘protected’ status of black and Jewish people, Ye is demonstrating both considerable courage in confronting censorship and significant wisdom in critiquing the unbalanced effects of trade: inequality, and the rise of hegemonic challengers to upend the balance of power. His Christian message is equally prophetic, and belies a fundamentally Torahnic approach to the tragedy of class and great power politics — synthesising modern ideas echoing Marx and Mearsheimer with ancient traditions of prophecy from Moses and Jesus (‘like Hov and Yeezus,’ as Ye’s mentor Jay-Z rapped on the song ‘Jail’). Ye is not giving up now.
I think Ye is neither a nationalist nor a liberal, but is rather a republican in the sense of philosophers like Plato, Machiavelli, and James Harrington (having rapped he is ‘like Socrates, but my skin more chocolate-y’). He talks of MLK’s assassination as a tragedy because it denies people the economic rights that civil rights were meant to entail. ‘Racism still alive, they just be concealing it.’ And with this, Ye shows us his true colors:
Rather than being an antagonist in the coming era of great power conflict, or a new dictatorial figure in the coming turn to totalitarianism within countries, Ye represents an alternative path: peace, or the absence of war, abroad — and freedom, or the absence of totalitarian censorship, at home. The key to this balance is by addressing the deficit in technology and excess in reliance on wage slavery. By shifting towards an economy that is at once more ecological and more technological, Ye promises a version of Elon Musk’s space fantasy that is grounded in the material reality of ordinary people. ‘I wasn’t supposed to make it past twenty-five.’ And here he is, aged forty-five, on the cusp of saving the world from world war, genocide, and the underlying cause of these horrors: capitalism.
Ye, good luck. The future depends on you now.
We the people are with you.
The centrist-capitalist pull towards World War III and a Second Holocaust can be resisted. The War for the Whole need not lead to slavery, division, and death, but instead to freedom, unity, and life.
Perhaps there is a presidential candidate more viable than Ye — who promises a synthesis of Trump’s style with the substance of Sanders and Mearsheimer. If there is, let me know. For now, Ye is America’s best chance of avoiding catastrophe and instead changing the world for the better. How about it, Ye?
In the grim darkness of the immediate present, then, let there be light …
‘As I get a little older, I realise that life is perspective. And my perspective may differ from yours.’
Kendrick Lamar, The Heart Part 5
‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’
William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun
‘I ain’t above, or below none of y’all. We all equal.’
Kanye West, Saint Pablo tour
Disclaimer: Any similarity between names mentioned and actual individuals is purely accidental and largely theoretical. These are fun ideas to entertain but, as always, I may be mistaken. After all, what do I know?
Edmund Wilson 