Post

While it's worth pointing to lynchings as part of a throughline of an American appetite for spectacular violence, I don't think it's rhetorically useful or analytically productive to collapse this grotesque new development to a lynching and use that to adopt a "what are you, surprised?" stance.

First, lynchings involve a varying level of usage of organs of the state, but in all cases they involve a denial of due process as a core element of their appeal and their terror. That's not really comparable here. This is a top-down, fully state-driven affair.

More importantly, though, lynchings are public, but localized. Even at the height of Jim Crow terror, the government didn't schedule a radio program months in advance and invite the world to tune in. This was in part because they were a kind of orgiastic festival of the transgression of taboo.

It wouldn't have made sense, within the logic of the Jim Crow lynching, to invite the world in. Each one was for its local white audience/participants and its Black targets of oppression. Here, we don't have public participation. Instead we have the state addressing the entire world.

This execution is announced with the full, cold sobriety of the state. It's not a suspension of public order; instead the state is trying to impose, from the top down, a new, degraded order, in which people are expected to indulge their perversity publicly and without shame, without any dual nature.

I think most of us intuitively understood how disgusting the livestream aspect of this is when it was first announced. It's only a day later that we try to recuperate this as nothing new, merely continuous with white American violence. We can trust our gut here; this has a novel menace to it.

Finally, it deadens our ability to understand what is actively happening in the world around us when we adopt an analogue of "Holocaust uniqueness," according to which every genocide must be first compared to the Holocaust, and then inevitably diminished to triviality by that comparison.