StJohnOfPatmos
1mo ago
The reason for the anger and resentment of the Magdeburg attacker is fairly clear. He was in contact with numerous people from his region of origin and felt that they were, in some specific cases, not treated fairly by German society.
I will never understand this thought process - he wanted the German state to expedite refugee claims for secular Saudi Arabians and to take a more anti-Saudi stance geopolitically, which would never happen due to the balance of power in the Middle East and energy/economic interests - so his solution is to select a Christmas market and kill random people shopping there? Why not stab someone walking out the Saudi embassy, attack a Wahhabist, Saudi-funded mosque or, heck, even travel to Saudi Arabia and attempt to do maximum damage there since it's the supposed main focus of his ire? Even attacking organs of the German state makes marginally more sense. Instead, he selected for a group of people that probably largely agreed with him and his cause.
It all seems somewhat convenient that after doing the deed, he allowed himself to be arrested without a struggle (maybe I'm wrong but I can't find a german-language article saying the opposite), will now face a fair trial in which he can argue for insanity and will most certainly be able to finish whatever sentence he gets before he dies of old age - and without fear of being targeted by muslims within the prison system, as might have been the case had he chosen Islam as his target. Maybe murdering Europeans has just become the most low-risk of political extremism with the least relative consequences?
StJohnOfPatmos
1mo ago
focusing on the victims and their stories.
Doesn't that inevitably engender talking about the carnage, the shooters, and their motive?
It feels like wishful thinking to believe you can control a story so meticulously that the most titillating, sensational and puzzling parts of a story - i.e. the components most people want to know more about - could be left out in favour of someone talking about how hard it is to lose their son or friend in such a violent manner (the one component of the entire story that we can already imagine and know intuitively without needing it reported to us)?
Also, I feel like school shootings (in the media sense of the term, not the usual gang related shootouts that make up the vast majority of cases) have been somewhat decreasing compared to the past decade - maybe we have become a bit numb to it through over-saturation and that's dissuaded potential school shooters? 30 years ago shooting up a school could make your name and face legendary, you could become a kind of patron saint for outcasts and losers overnight. Today it's a crowded space, much more difficult to become part of the school shooter Pantheon like those Columbine kids.
StJohnOfPatmos
1mo ago
I think Princip's motivations and actions were totally coherent and well-directed (he might not have imagined WW1, but the step-by-step consequences of his attack were exactly what he and the rest of the Black Hand had hoped for) and don't really fit our descriptor - I do agree about the "internal narrative" and I think that's an important component, that these sprees somehow make sense to the people committing them, no matter how wanton they seem from the outside.
StJohnOfPatmos
1mo ago
This is a good point, and I agree that jihadism is often more ethnocultural than people assume. What I have trouble with is the idea that Syrian/Afghan asylum claimants in Western Europe feel like they've "failed at life" - they literally experienced the single greatest upward mobility of their families' entire history in terms of living standards, security and access to healthcare and housing by moving from rural poverty to countries like Sweden or Germany. Their apartment is paid for by the state (and even the shabby social housing here is better than living without running water or electricity in a village with no public transit connecting it to urban centres), food and clothing are provided reliably by both government agencies and charity groups/NGOs, they get to live in centres of cultural activity many of which are completely free of charge to enjoy, they even receive a monthly stipend to spend as they wish (granted, not much, but it's literally unconditional free money), AND they have the very real possibility of having their family getting residency permits in the same Western country if one member been living there long enough - how is this "failing at life"? It sounds like unimaginable luxury and comfort for someone living in quasi-medieval standards in some hut in Afghanistan.
And all the benefits I've mentioned are unconditional! That's not even getting into the possibilities if you take language courses (also offered for free by the government) and then seek employment (aided by governmental institutions and NGOs that exist specifically to help refugees find jobs, also free of charge), at which point you're on track for eventual citizenship, which is a lifetime, intergenerational guarantee that your needs will be met.
If one is given all of this, and the reaction is a so severe feeling of failure that you must take revenge on the country that gave you these amenities by wantonly slaughtering its children, I have to assume that the base expectation of life in Europe as a refugee was so outrageously high and inordinate (big house, nice car, pricey status brands of clothing, probably a state-mandated white sex slave, AND not having to work nor even learn the local language to acquire this) that one can barely consider these people adults or even mentally able.
StJohnOfPatmos
1mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_and_violence#Notable_actions
Here's a pretty good survey of anarchist violence, you'll notice that the choice of targets is precise and systematic.
February 12, 1894 – Émile Henry, intending to avenge Auguste Vaillant, sets off a bomb in Café Terminus (a café near the Gare Saint-Lazare train station in Paris), killing one and injuring twenty. During his trial, when asked why he wanted to harm so many innocent people, he declares, "There is no innocent bourgeois." This act is one of the rare exceptions to the rule that propaganda by deed targets only specific powerful individuals. Henry was convicted and executed by guillotine on May 21.[5]
Interesting to note that even when anarchist violence was more "randomised", it still focused on bourgeois institutions and symbols like the Opera and established coffeehouses with wealthy patrons. I really think the comparison to these recent sprees doesn't hold up well.
StJohnOfPatmos
1mo ago
Yes, I thought of the stabbing sprees in China, but I know very little about it and am always cautious about Western reporting of these kind of events, so I didn't mention it. A similar process, as you hint at, might apply there, too: what started out as a precise method of autonomist/islamist terror became a modus operandi for expressing dissatisfaction no matter your politics or chosen targets.
StJohnOfPatmos
1mo ago
As far as I know, the anarchist attacks of the late 19th Century were not randomised at all, but targeted precise members of the existing power structures - royals, police chiefs, ministers, etc. They might have had a psychotic/romantic component to them, but they had a vaguely coherent moral system of who deserved to be the target of violence - can you name an anarchist attack in which someone stabbed a random child that just happened to be there? I think throwing a hand grenade at the Tsar's carriage and stabbing a group of kindergarteners is not comparable in the slightest.
StJohnOfPatmos
1mo ago
I'm curious about the potential for social contagion emanating from the recent wave of lone wolf terror attacks in Europe, especially Germany. I specifically don't mean male muslim asylum seekers/immigrants observing a terror attack and deciding to emulate it - they already have extremely powerful religious and ethnocultural dispositions towards such behaviour (and the deterrents are extremely weak - if you grew up in rural Syria or Afghanistan, German prison is comparatively nice, just commit your attack, then turn yourself in to police and you'll be rewarded with 10+ years of free room and board). I'm referring to otherwise non-jihad minded individuals, often people with psychiatric issues, shifting towards previously unheard of forms of randomized violence that conspicuously copy the exact methods pioneered by lone wolf jihadis.
Take the doctor who drove into a crowd of people at a Christmas market in Magdeburg - the right-wing in Germany was quick to point out he was an asylum claimant from a Middle Eastern country. But his extensive social media presence and past activist work point to an ex-muslim who fled Saudi Arabia on grounds of religious persecution, became a doctor in Germany and focused his political efforts on limiting Islamist power in Germany, going as far as expressing sympathy for the AfD. When this background information emerged, it was the German left-wing's turn to gloat and call him a far-right terrorist, which definitely matches his ideological profile better than jihadist. But why the fuck would an ex-muslim right-winger, obsessively terrified of an Islamised Europe, choose to drive a truck into a crowd of white Germans visiting a Christmas market, an obvious symbol of European christian heritage? If it was some kind of 4-d chess move to turn German opinion against refugees, it seems like a ludicrous goal for someone who has a record of constantly begging the German state to accept more secular Arab refugees persecuted by their home countries. If it was just a case of severe mental illness, why did his madness know to perfectly emulate a jihadi attack, right down to the method and target (cherished symbols of Western Christian culture and life)?
Equally perplexing is the recent car attack in Mannheim - the perpetrator is an ethnic German. Details are emerging that he was present at some far-right demonstrations in 2018, which for the political left in Germany makes this an open-and-shut case of right-wing terrorism. The police, however, is calling an ideological motive unlikely and highlight the attacker's psychiatric issues as the probable cause. Again, the same situation : why is a far-right terrorist (if he indeed is one) driving a car into a crowd of random Germans? There's virtually hundreds of more obvious targets he could choose that would conform to his ideology. And if he did it because of his severe mental health issues - why is this happening now? We now have centuries of documented experience of clinically insane people's behaviour and the risks thereof, and driving cars into crowds seems completely unheard of in the larger scale of things. Generally, randomised sprees of violence in which the victim's profile is irrelevant to the perpetrator are a historically extremely rare phenomenon - the recent stabbing spree in Villach in the Austrian region of Carinthia was apparently the first time EVER that such an attack took place in the entire region's history - not the first time in 50 years, not the first time since WW2, the first time ever. In a region that keeps documented chronicles of events since the Middle Ages. (This attack was committed by the usual suspect though, so it's less relevant to my argument.)
Does anyone have any ideas on what's going on here? Are we experiencing a jihadification of psychiatric issues and radical politics at large? Is there a growing sense among the extreme fringes of politics that lone wolf jihadism as a modus operandi has the highest ROI for influencing public life and political discourse, so one might as well emulate the methods and see where it goes? If you can't beat them, join them? Are mentally ill people who already harbour delusions of paranoia and grandeur enraptured by the vast amount of national attention and infamy these attacks receive, turning it into the method of choice for a kind of extreme attention-seeking/lashing out? Is social media somehow to blame?
I'm reminded of something Zizek stated about a decade ago in a discussion about lone wolf terror attacks - he said he could envision a future in which these events are sufficiently normalised to the point where they will happen without clear origin or purpose, almost as a new form of reactive behaviour your brain will simply intuitively tend towards due to it becoming a habitual social phenomenon rather than the progressive result of a precise form of Islamist theories around militant action. This seems increasingly possible - and absolutely terrifying.
StJohnOfPatmos
1mo ago
Being poor in a Western European country is still a better deal than receiving a generous salary to fight in a bloody war. The standard of living is too high for that tradeoff.
StJohnOfPatmos
1mo ago
Off the top of my head, Castro, Noriega, and Thomas Sankara come to mind as wearing everyday military attire, and I think Saddam usually wasn't wearing ceremonial uniforms. But yes Zelenskyy is definitely doing something more toned down and palatable.
StJohnOfPatmos
1mo ago
I think the male culture within seafaring could be a more accurate example - it's in large part a totally confined social space that developed over the course of millennia with next to zero female influence. We find strict hierarchies - but camaraderie is a given and mutiny an ever-present possibility should the captain fail his crew. It's also a very fratty environment in the sense that hazing is commonplace and there's usually a whole array of crew-specific rituals an shibboleths meant to confer a strong sense of shared identity.
StJohnOfPatmos
1mo ago
The closest approximation we have to that is roughly prison.
I don't disagree with the embedded implications of that concerning masculinity, but I find that example somewhat dishonest since prison 1) is not a voluntary or free environment and 2) is filled with people by and large not representative of the average male member of society. You could also have named the military, industrial seafaring, boy scouts or oil rigs, which all paint a much more nuanced view while still containing the same male traits of socialisation that impact prison life.
StJohnOfPatmos
1mo ago
Yes, there's probably something like that going on. What's funny about his martial-casual attire is that I very distinctively remember it being a truism when I was growing up that any head of state who routinely wore military attire was most likely a dictator or a warlord. It was even a pretty easy media trope in action and espionage movies to quickly establish that a ruler was evil by dressing the character in military uniform or some kind of martial aesthetic. There was supposed to be something unnerving and almost pathetic about a man not actively fighting on the frontline nor being an active member of the military in the conventional sense and still choosing to wear army garb each day. It's not like Thatcher wore a uniform during the Falklands War when she was in London governing, only when visiting the fighting troops.
I also remember - having gone to a French school - learning about how amidst the worsening Algeria crisis, De Gaulle responded to the erection of barricades in Algiers by appearing on state television wearing his old army uniform as a show of force and reminder of his past role in France's liberation. This move apparently shocked French society, especially on the political left, and strongly nourished already present fears that he was an authoritarian who might dismantle French Democracy.
Funny to see how quickly this association vanished with Zelenskyy, although maybe it was already an outdated 20th century relic anyway since most dictators today just wear business suits.
This is my first contribution to this forum. Please let me know if anything concerning the style and content of my post clashes with the etiquette here. This text became far longer than I had initially planned, and I simplified a lot for the sake of brevity, so tell me if this is unreadable or if any shortcut I made was inappropriate, misleading or reductive.
The historiography of Nazi Germany – and, by extension, the way we historically situate and contextualise Fascism and the Holocaust – appears to me at first glance as an extremely rare example of historical actors impressing a specific, directed and lasting reading unto an event successfully. By this I refer to the conscious decision of the Allied powers to organize the Nuremberg Trials not only as a necessary legal consequence of Germany’s defeat, but to equally structure the proceedings as an epochal “History Lesson” for present and future generations.
As such, the trials aimed at 2 outcomes, running paralel while remaining distinct in scope and function : on the one hand, dismantling any vestiges of Nazi power by punishing the leadership for its criminality and warmongering, on the other, establishing a clear narrative of how and why the Nazi movement gained power, and how and why it abused this power for atrocious wrongdoings. The second outcome was embedded with the pivotal function of establishing a lasting definition of what is “bad” within Western society after the chaotic political turmoil of the Interwar periods – a definition that became nigh-universally accepted (at least on the rhetorical level) across the entire Western political spectrum following the trials. This is what I mean by “extremely rare example of historical actors impressing a specific, directed and lasting reading unto an event successfully”: almost all attempts to craft a historical narrative when undertaken by actors contemporaneous to the events fail to take root in the desired manner.
Think of the monumental propaganda effort launched by the combined power of all European monarchies after Napoleon’s final defeat to posit his rise and power, and the French Revolution that preceeded it, as an abominable fluke upsetting the natural order of society as it had existed for the past millennia. The wanton violence of the Revolutionary Terror and the vast slaughter of Napoleon’s wars were presented as the logical consequence of abandoning the hierarchical order of divinely ordained monarchic societies, and were presented as a cautionary tale against political upheaval. The actors of the Congress of Vienna were able to suppress counter-readings of the French Revolution and Napoleon for the 3 ensuing decades, mainly by means of a burgeoning police state and an intense propaganda push towards domesticity and social harmony that heavily shamed and discouraged political discussions both in public and private. Despite this, the Pandora’s box opened by France in 1789 (which can be resumed as “the world, and the societies in it, are something we actively make, and can thus actively make differently if we so desire”) could not be closed again and the growing demand for new sociopolitical paradigms could only be slowed, not stopped entirely. That the “History Lesson” taught at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 had failed to take root became apparent by the middle of the 19th Century – liberalism, nationalism, socialism were on the road to full normalisation (with certain caveats depending on social class), and France had willingly resurrected Napoleon from the dead by electing his nephew as their leader, largely cheering him on when he quickly moved to resurrect the Empire itself. The kings present at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 believed they were consolidating their natural power after an irregular disturbance – today we see the event as the Beginning Of The End for the old order of monarchic, divinely ordained societies. Today, their “History Lesson” is absolutely obsolete : rather, the exact opposite narrative is now the dominant historical reading.
Back to Nuremberg :
Despite the trial itself not running as smoothly as planned and initially garnering a mixed, if not negative reception (the defence pointed out that many charges levied against Nazi Germany also applied to the Colonial powers present among the Allies, and Göring in particular noted the irony of being accused of illegaly seizing power and dismantling Weimar Germany by America, France, and the Soviet Union, all countries that came into being by violent upheaval against the legal order and whos entire national identity revolved around said upheaval), the ensuing Cold War and the economic miracle of post-war Europe rapidly erased these concerns and led to a progressive consolidation of the trials central takeaways : namely, that the ideological foundations of National Socialism – a term at this point used synonymously with Fascism – were irreonciliable with any meaningful definition of morality or freedom, and that the consequences of its rise to power – Totalitarianism, Oppression, War, and, most importantly, Genocide – were inevitable elements of the ideology itself. Here we arrive at the rhetorical post-war consensus that still dominates the way we view politics to this day, in which what is politically “bad” is essentially whatever seems closest to Fascism. In order to understand the total narrative victory of the Nuremberg Trials, consider that both Ukraine and Russia routinely accuse each other of being led by Nazis – somewhat strange when we consider that the Nazis considered Slavs as a subhuman race only fit for slavery, and that Ukraine’s President is literally jewish. In truth, if Zelenskyy or Putin were actual Nazis, sincerely believing in Hitler’s vision of the world, they would both either kill themselves out of self-loathing for being subhumans, or seek to become enslaved vassals of the superior Aryan nations who by virtue of biological superiority should be their natural leaders. Obviously, neither Zelenskyy nor Putin believe or want any of that, because they are not Nazis by any serious definition of the term. What they are actually doing by accusing each other is saying “History has taught us that bad politics lead to the worst crimes and barbarism, and my opponent is a bad politician, thus any means taken against him are fair game since they seek to avoid the most calamitous of all outcomes”. What’s interesting is that this reveals a shared consensus on both sides of the conflict – there is a line dividing what is acceptable politics from what is unacceptable politics, and both agree on Fascism defining the latter.
We can see the same dynamic in pretty much every political polarisation in the West – woke activism is Fascist, covid-induced lockdowns are Fascist, deporting illegal immigrants is Fascist, hate speech laws are Fascist, free speech absolutism is Fascist, etc. Funny to think that in times of such extreme polarisation we actually rhetorically agree more than ever on what is politically bad!
The problem with this development, of course, is that we have completely diluted the meaning of the term and with it any real understanding of what Nazi Germany actually was and what “Fascism” actually means. Starting with the most glaring issue : the Nazis never once called themselves Fascist, nor did they see National Socialism as a Fascist project. As far as Fascism can be defined in a sincere and historically rigorous manner, it was a specific post-WWI project led by Italian ex-Socialists and Bourgeois reactionaries to unite an economically and culturally disparate country roiled by poverty, sectionalism, and class conflict (remember that Italy as a country had barely existed for 60 years at the end of World War I and was composed of subgroups that often had next to nothing in common aside from a shared Roman Catholic faith – not even speaking the same language or belonging to the same ethnicity) by establishing a narrative of “national rebirth” in which individual markers of identity were to be sublimated into a collective force that, by nature of its united will acting as one cohesive unit, would lead to a prosperous and ordered society unmarred by ingroup/outgroup conflict. The symbol and namesake of Fascism, the ancient Roman “Fasces”, is a group of sticks bundled into one : individually, any twig can be snapped, but bound together as one, they are unbreakable. This symbol itself is of course also the official coat of arms of France today and is carved into the Halls of Congress in Washington.
Now, let me be clear that I’m not attempting an Apology of Italian Fascism, nor are my personal political opinions relevant to what I’m trying to get at. What I do want to state clearly is that in the one, single, actual example of a self-declared Fascist state in History (I’m not counting Franco’s clerical authoritarianism, nor Hirohito’s ultra-monarchism, nor Dollfuß’ half-baked pseudo-medievalist corporatism, nor any ultranationalist ethnic movement in the Balkans, nor Hitler’s ethnic Darwinism as examples of Fascism, since their political models developed largely independantly of Mussolini’s and only share certain principles that can also arguably be found in the Stalinist Soviet Union, Revolutionary France, or the British Empire), we have very few elements of what the average consensus definition of Fascism holds – as a matter of fact, most of the “consensus-fascist” policies of Fascist Italy were reluctantly adopted by Mussolini in order to strengthen his tactical alliance with Hitler after having been alienated and ostracised from other Western powers following his colonialist conquests (Italy was late to the party; had it invaded Ethiopia half a century earlier, no European power would have cared much as they were all doing the same) – by all intents and purposes, Mussolini saw antisemitism and racial supremacy as a German oddity completely foreign to Italian (and by extension ancient Roman) history, allowed Fascist Jews to occupy high political positions, and suggested “Italianisation” of conquered territories’ population by cultural and ideological means. Suffice to say, racial classification, extermination camps, antisemitic progroms and ethnic genocides are completely absent from Mussolini’s vision of Fascism and from Fascist Italy before the country backed itself into a geopolitical corner and reluctanctly agreed to emulate certain policies in order to appease Hitler, most likely expecting this to be a passing necessity until the Allied powers would sue for peace. By 1942, however, the tables were starting to turn on the Axis powers, and Mussolini was removed from office a year later so that the remaining Fascist leaders could broker a peace agreement with the Allies, not realizing that it was far too late for the Fascist State to survive after any eventual capitulation.
Enough with Italy. Back to the topic at hand : the “History Lesson” of Nuremberg and its continued narrative domination of Western discourse. I have noticed something interesting in the past decade of rising discontent with the way our Western societies are organised and run culturally, politically and economically: after roughly 80 years of brute-forcing Fascism and Nazis as “the one thing we all agree to be the opposite of” by institutions, parties and cultural tastemakers, these words have acquired an almost cosmic power – Nazism/Fascism is no longer the precise result of a certain historical context and situation (disenchantment with modernity, the trauma of WW1, the humiliation and economic misery wrought upon Germany by the Treaty of Versailles and the stock market collapse of 1929, enlightened scientific theories of racial classification, rapid technological advance, a poorly and hastily written Weimar constitution that most Germans never identified with from the get-go, etc.), but a sort of Original Sin or ambiant Samsara, a dormant evil that can awaken at any moment and cause the exact same barbarity as it did almost a century ago. This quasi-metaphysical perspective is of course mystification to the highest degree and precludes any real understanding of how historical trends take shape. Equally frustrating is the recurrent use of quotes by German intellectuals and politicians of the Weimar era saying “if only we had done X or Y, none of this would have happened”, as if Weimar Germany would have suddendly turned into a functioning society if only someone had killed Hitler as a baby or kept him locked up after the Beer Hall Putsch. Both this perspective and the vision of Fascism as Samsara engage in the same mystifcation. In truth, Weimar Germany was never functional, nor was it accepted by a critical mass of German society, and one can easily imagine alternative scenarios in which the country falls to a Monarchist coup, Communist insurrection, or some non-Nazi variant of Völkisch German supremacist ideology.
As such, we have become societies that neurotically conceive of Fascism as a kind of Sword of Damocles or Ragnarok-level event, ready to return at any moment, if not even destined to return by some kind of teleology of democratic crisis. And here is the craziest aspect of all of this : this actually might be true, albeit not at all for the reasons one might think. By defining itself as “everything except Fascist”, ruling institutions, parties and ideologies have actually strengthened the cosmic power of Fascism considerably – if crisis after crisis remains unsolved, if civil society no longer feels heard by its elites, if there is widespread distrust and contempt for institutions, if the standards of living and public safety keep declining, all while everyone in a position of power and influence keeps reminding you they are the opposite of Fascism – well, that makes Fascism pretty attractive, doesn’t it? In a way, it almost makes it the only alternative, since everyone in power – no matter if Social Democrat, classical liberal, conservative nationalist or libertarian tech CEO - and thus ostensibly responsible for the pauperisation, uncertainity and cynicism resounding across Western society today, will all be quick to remind you that the one thing they are not is Fascist. In France’s parliamentary elections this past summer, far-left Insoumis and neoliberal Macronists entered into tactical alliances in some areas in order to block a far-right victory in their First-Past-The-Post voting system – after years of calling each other the worst insults and claiming the other was responsible for much of France’s severe problems, be it rising poverty, crime, mass immigration, etc. Apparently, all these presumed existential differences became irrelevant the moment a presumed Fascist (I don’t think the RN is Fascist, but mainstream French institutions largely do) was the alternative. If I were a struggling Frenchman experiencing progressive impoverishment and fear, I would probably take such alliances as proof that there are only 2 meaningful political options – the Status Quo, and the Fascists.
In conclusion : perhaps the “History Lesson” of the Nuremberg Trials is closer to that of the Congress of Vienna than it seems at first glance – perhaps, by spending 3 decades saying “we are the opposite of Napoleon and of Republicanism”, the Monarchies of Europe made these spectres of the past far more powerful than they would have been otherwise. Perhaps they underestimated how much resenmtent had festered against them, much the same way resentment against our elite is festering within our societies today, making whatever is the opposite of them far more attractive than it would be in a vacuum. Already, we see figures like Musk toying with the Nazi salute – not because Musk believes in Aryan Lebensraum, but because Nazism has become counterculture, an expression of rebellion against the system and its increasingly hard to believe, self-serving and contradictory claims of morality and virtue. If Fascism returns, it won’t be like the original Fascism because it can’t be – we will never be in 1918 again, we don’t have a meaningful shared understanding of what Fascism even is, and our historical situation is our own. But it might well harness the rhetorical power we have given Fascism as the only believable way of saying “we are the opposite of them. They say so themselves. And you hate them.”
Where are you reading this? Skimming German newspapers gives me nothing on explosives. Also the idea that his body would be unidentifiable to the point where no one could conclusively claim his identity is ridicoulous, and not how forensics nor modern surveillance technology operates. And the biggest question - who committed this false flag? State powers? The AfD? Right AFTER an election when it will have minimal impact? I'm not buying it.
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