Homero Rómulo Cristalli, J. Posadas
Homero Rómulo Cristalli, J. Posadas
At points I was quite confused at times reading this book, majority of it is about life and deeds of J. Posadas and the organization (at one point quite influential) he was a key component of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International of Latin America (later after having lost the majority of it's influence split off into Fourth International Posadist), today Posadas is a meme among far-left internauts, throughout his life he was slipping through being a living breathing Argentinian zeitgeist to being a lolcowish meme.
My confusion stemmed from the onslaught of names being thrown around, in Argentina people use two surnames, a name and most of the people also had a alias used for party activities, so the same person often was called 4 different names and the author quite enjoyed creating longer sentences using all the names interchangeably, I'm not good with names.
Anyways, the story of the man was fascinating, how he found himself in positions of power, how his fate was entangled with the fate of the world (for example his very vocal support for thermonuclear war was concurrent with the Cuban missile crisis). It was funny in a tragic way how his descent into his eccentricities was in part caused by him ceasing to write and starting to record himself speaking to a voice recorder he bought for party money and delegating transcribing his ramblings to paper to people under him, truly, writing is the greatest form of self-censorship.
The final chapter of the book about neo-posadists, was my favorite part, people who long after Posadas mattered carried his ideas forth, first focusing on the Posadas's fusion of marxism and ufology, later post-ironic memesters, starting from Mineazzoli wich was the catalyst for the alien discourse in the organization, and later continued his goal of "trying to reforge ufology in a way Marx reforged philosophy", transforming something focused on observation into a tool for active positive change (with no results), ending on Facebook meme page owners that when ironically playing with Posadas desire for nuclear annihilation and sectarianism beautifully stated:
What we on the Left flatter ourselves in calling our political and even our revolutionary work is in fact nothing of the sort. It is more akin to religious ritual. Mass rallies, newspaper sales, endless meetings, electoral campaigning, street fighting, writing articles that no one will ever read and books absolutely no one will ever get any practical use out of … In another time, in another place, these rituals may have had a relationship to a broader movement, a broader strategy, and such stirrings have always accompanied revolutionary moments. And so, having no real conception of the thing itself, we try to grasp at revolution by playing out its inessential weirdnesses ad nauseam. This is what comes after farce. This is LARP.
The purpouse of the system is what it does.
Having finished previous book I found a meme online showing various serious and less so leftist ideologies as "aesthetics", nu-wojaks styled and dressed up like dolls with few key attributes, one of them was a Roswell grey dressed up spacesuit simmilar to one that the first generations of soviet cosmonauts were issued, one of the attributes mentioned was this book.
I heard about Posadas before, as a person that simmers online among all those silly leftist ideas (Posadas was mentioned even by Jreg). Well I think the books that I have read show quite clearly that I enjoy books post-ironically, it would be quite a shameful thing to admit to liking the nonfiction literature I do like but I sincerely read them through trying to get inspired by the direction and unbridled faith in their ideas of people that came before me.
Source of the screencap - The nu-wojak video
Meme that motivated me to read this book, probably I will read all the books from the video at some point which is a quite silly and maybe even an intellectualy dull idea, most of those are deeply entangled with other prerequesite literature