Media Madness: Film Sessions: Oligarchs will let the world burn by Thought Slime (New)

Editor's note: well, it's been an interesting past couple of days for me to say the least; if you're wondering why I'm not on Twitter, please check out my latest article on ninaillingworth.com - have yourself a merry Christmas indeed. In light of the week I've been having and the fact that we're all still living through a nightmare, neofeudalist, Captain Trips holiday season, I thought I'd pick a video for this week's film session that is both viscerally satisfying and not particularly taxing on the memory banks; hopefully you enjoy this one as much as I did.

Well, despite the fact that I’m having one of the crappier weeks of my professional life, I have managed to continue picking my way through left wing YouTube channels and video creators in the middle of all the chaos. In today’s film session, I’m going to highlight a sixteen minute feature on a channel called Thought Slime. The creator behind Thought Slime first came to my attention when I was researching an article about fascism and looking for reliable citations about the crypto-fascist street gang, the Proud Boys. Although I only ended up using that video for a couple of citations, I remembered this person’s excellent (if perhaps a bit stripped down) work, and decided to check out their channel when I was poking around for more content to familiarize myself and my audience with.

Although I really don’t know that much about this creator that you can’t find on their Wikitubia page, and I must admit the delivery is at times a little dramatic, this video appealed to me because it opens by focusing on an area I’ve studied and one of the more inexplicably monstrous decisions by established American power in living memory – the wholly unnecessary bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the closing phases of World War II; conducted primarily for the purposes of intimidating the Soviet Union and opening up the era of “mutually assured destruction” in what we know today as The Cold War.

Much to my delight however, it turns out this was only the beginning of the discussion and the focus of the video is actually an issue I write about constantly, even though it seems to alienate many of the folks around me – the fact that rich people are absolutely fine with killing every last one of us for pennies on the dollar, while trying to enact out unhinged Lex Luthor-esque fantasies about running to Mars, rather than surrender one single iota of power, influence or ability to exploit their fellow man for profit. On this issue, Thought Slime and I could not be more in agreement (which perhaps makes sense, since we’re both apparently anarchists) and it is refreshing to find someone, anyone else, willing to say this out loud; I am absolutely chuffed about the mere existence of this video.

In addition to World Wars and nuclear annihilation, Thought Slime also touches on the fossil fuel industry, a coronavirus response that looks like eugenics and how the election of Donald Trump caused them to question fundamental assumptions about how the world works, eventually leading our host to anarchism (and me to a couple more Youtube creators to add to my “check em out” list.) The end result is a highly entertaining attack on rule by elites, the power of the state and Piers Morgan eating something called a “Santa’s Yum Nut” - and for a sixteen minute video that also features a brief side discussion about Indigenous Christian Anarchism in Taiwan, that’s probably the most you can hope for.

If I do have one quibble however, it’s that Thought Slime clearly uses “the state” and “elite rule” to mean precisely the same things and that’s a fine rhetorical position to adopt, but probably could have been explained better to an audience that is unlikely to have read most of the books on the wonderful reading list the creator shows at 8:11. Naturally, as an anarcho-syndicalist myself, I’m not looking to eliminate the state so much as eliminate the difference between state power and people power – in essence, through an aggressively participatory democracy, to make the common people, into the state itself. Obviously however Thought Slime and I both clearly agree that elite rule has gotta go and thus, I had no real problem with how they were using the terms interchangeably – and including my favorite Rudolf Rocker book on the reading list certainly warmed my heart to see.