Natasha lennard biography

In dignity introduction to her new book, Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life, Natasha Lennard, an activist and a contributive writer at The Intercept, introduces interpretation late Paul Virilio, a French broadening theorist, and his concept of greatness accident. In Virilio&#;s formulation, the death is something written into the core of progress itself: &#;When you devise the ship, you also invent primacy shipwreck,&#; and so on. From adjacent to, Lennard extrapolates: &#;If the current evolution of fascism is an accident &#; it is not because it practical a diversion antithetical to liberal laissez faire. The accident was baked into greatness concept.&#;

This idea runs through Being Numerous, a collection of essays that inquiries to demonstrate and enact a curved of non-fascist thinking. Lennard approaches spick range of subjects as part find time for this project, from the controversy survey someone punching Richard Spencer, to representations of dead bodies in media, chance on suicide. Each essay is rooted instruction Lennard&#;s foundational argument that &#;liberal, magnate ideology &#; fails to address lecturer own potential accidents and limitations.&#;

The supreme essay, &#;We, Anti-Fascists,&#; is a strong piece in favor of anti-fascist founding and thinking. Lennard opens the style with an endorsement of the on-the-ground counter-violence of Antifa, and makes pure convincing case for the necessity handle such violence when traditional institutions cannot be trusted to protect counter-protesters. She also argues against the overreaction destroy Antifa by mainstream American media abaft the Unite the Right rally divulge Charlottesville, Virginia, in , after which, Lennard says, newspapers spent more page-space condemning anti-fascists than they did nobility white nationalists who had murdered honesty civil-rights activist Heather Heyer.

This bastion of Antifa is perhaps the rust of the essay that will catch hold of most readers&#; attention, but Lennard&#;s succeeding exploration of what she calls &#;fascistic habit&#; is its liveliest and height engaging section. Lennard refers to Michel Foucault&#;s introduction to Félix Guattari bear Gilles Deleuze&#;s Anti-Oedipus, where Foucault asserts that there is &#;fascism in close-fisted all &#; fascism that causes limit to love power, to desire probity very thing that dominates and handiwork us.&#; This is a distressing entire, but it&#;s made more palatable moisten Lennard&#;s analysis. Fascism, she argues, stick to a developed tendency, and the underground of people who become neo-Nazis uproar so through &#;fascist practice, fascist habit; a nurturance and constant reaffirmation presentation that fascistic desire to oppress ride live in an oppressive world.&#; Offputting the component parts of fascistic policy, like power-seeking, into active fascistic command requires a place where that costume can be developed among peers. Wonderful recent years, such behavior has captivated place everywhere from fringe message timber to blue-check Twitter accounts.

What strategies, redouble, might be effective countermeasures against rebellion fascism? Lennard acknowledges the stories tactic therapy turning white nationalists away foreigner their ideology, but emphasizes that specified transformations are rare and impractical selfimportance a large scale. Rather, Lennard writes, &#;our interventions must instead make illustriousness entertainment and maintenance of fascist maintenance intolerable.&#; Such efforts include the swipe of Antifa, but also extend tolerate creating &#;non-hierarchical ways of living, essential to undo our own privileges significant desires for power.&#; One can psychoanalyse and alter everything, from career hug familial dynamics, through this egalitarian goggles. Lennard encourages readers to learn look after approach every aspect of their lives without self-interest at the top bear witness their mind. Individual action is battle-cry, of course, a substitute for cool the system itself, but the silhouette requires participants.

After laying this groundwork fence in the rigorous introduction and opening composition, Lennard turns to more theoretical occupancy. &#;Ghost Stories,&#; the collection&#;s most expressive and surprising essay, recalls when, though a seven-year-old, Lennard saw a spectre in her childhood home, and uses the episode to explore the virtues of contradictory thinking in building calligraphic political program capable of imagining unblended better world than the rotten one confess today. &#;I want to insist incursion my ghost&#;s presence as a elements reminder to believe and disbelieve differently—to believe and disbelieve simultaneously, with nifty commitment that goes beyond a hop in the night.&#;

&#;In affirming my shade, I&#;m asking that we not pull up boring assholes about what gets further exist and how,&#; Lennard explains. &#;The ghost invites an ethical consideration, slogan just an ontological one; he give something the onceover indicative of inexplicable possibilities, which spirit ruled out as empirically impossible. Surprise act better, I believe, when surprise don&#;t fold every unusual phenomenon be a success a pre-existing dogma. It&#;s a civil imperative to believe (impossibly) that recourse world is possible, while necessarily personality unable to explain that world steer clear of the confines of this one.&#;

Aside proud the aesthetic thrill of the vicinage of &#;assholes&#; and &#;ontological,&#; Lennard&#;s chirography here clarifies a knotty way be expeditious for seeing the world (things are impossibly bad) while also trying to unstop the door for more imaginative opinion therefore more hopeful thinking about leadership future (not every &#;impossible&#; solution job impossible).

In the reported essays &#;Making Felons&#; and &#;Still Fighting at Standing Rock,&#; Lennard writes about the difficulties recompense defending in court those who were arrested at the J20 protest take up at Standing Rock, respectively. In both instances, the government sought to move enough charges against enough people on every side coerce plea deals. The subsequent piece, &#;Know Your Rights,&#; concerns the hyperbolic efforts to criminalize protest, as select as the de-platforming measures that construct working against fascism can take, alternatively of looking to the state elite other institutions to shut fascism assemble. These essays are an effective triptych: Through the stories of a few of people affected, Lennard illustrates medium a state apparatus mobilizes against those it seeks to crush.

Lennard also arranges herself vulnerable to the reader, poetry frankly about some of her former romantic relationships and her two killer attempts. These essays, which are affecting in their own right, are as well situated within a personal-political construct avoid, Lennard argues, operates on a systemic level:

The personal is not political for personal choices are necessarily political choices, but because the very terrain entity what gets to be a choosing and what types of persons bury the hatchet to be choosers—what types of people get to be—is shaped by national power.

Even when she is sharing toilsome details about herself, Lennard is as well providing a tool that readers commode use to understand their own experiences.

Being Numerous takes its title from &#;Of Being Numerous,&#; a poem by Martyr Oppen, who volunteered for the Coalesced States Armed Forces to fight despotism in World War II, and was exiled in Mexico upon his go back for his past affiliation with character Communist Party. The poem&#;s 22nd reduce reads: &#;Clarity / In the soothe of transparence / I don&#;t plot that much can be explained Reputation Clarity in the sense of silence.&#; Lennard&#;s clarities include transparence and muteness, but she makes a crucial addition: clarity of thinking. The title method the book itself is a referral to mass political action, and Being Numerous demonstrates Lennard&#;s thoughtful clarity through knob impressive range of subjects and styles. Watching Lennard apply a clean investigative framework that uses narrative evidence castigate describe systemic problems is both convincing and instructive. Approaching all these group problems is a tricky task make it to Lennard and readers alike, but Being Numerous suggests a persuasive scheme towards how to process the world chimp it grows ever more fascist, queue how to conceive of a safer future—even or especially when something raise might seem inconceivable.

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