Journal articles: 'Trier Apocalypse' – Grafiati (2024)

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As we know, the European-American Western civilization and authority has started to form with the Greek civilization, and strengthened itself through the advent of monotheistic religions. After the Renaissance era and industrial revolutions, the transition from feudalism to industrialization and then to capitalism, made Europe a center of the world. Yet, today, the center has been shifted to the line of Europe-America. In the art of painting, the concept of apocalypse is as old as the first paintings that depict the narrations about human existence. Yet, we can see this concept in an intensified way in the film arts. Finding its inspiration from the social world we live in, film art has been deeply affected by the social class struggles, income inequality, cold war period followed by two major wars, and environmental disasters. By analyzing examples from the history of art and directors from film arts (such as Tarkovsky, Iñárritu, Lars von Trier, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan) who use metaphorical sceneries in dystopian /utopian contents, this article will focus on decoding the signification of the concept of apocalypse throughout the history of humanity.

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(Mis)reading Revelations: Apocalyptic Visions and Environmental Crisis Michael Young The Falling Birds of Beebe, ArkansasIn punishing contrast to the soaring and singing bird as a symbol of freedom, the quiet or injured bird might be a perfect symbol for environmental crisis. Dead and dying birds have long been associated with warnings of danger, having been used since the early twentieth century to predict air contamination in coal mines. Often understood to be a good indicator of ecological decline, birds have also been central to depictions of environmental apocalypse, most notably in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). Images of oil-soaked, dying birds punctuated the visual media after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, despite the best efforts of BP and local and federal officials to prevent photographers from documenting the carnage (see “Critters of the Gulf Oil Spill” and Peters). Later that year, Lars Von Trier showed images of dead birds slowly falling across the sky in the opening fantasia of his apocalypse film, Melancholia. Then, sometime around the stroke of midnight on New Year’s morning, 2011, scores of red-winged blackbirds began mysteriously falling out of the sky over Beebe, Arkansas, a small town in the American Bible Belt. ....Augury: ElegyJessica Marion Barr Just before midnight on New Year’s Eve 2011, in Beebe, Arkansas, 4,000 or so blackbirds fell out of the sky, dead. Around the same time, several hundred grackles, redwing blackbirds, robins, and starlings dropped dead in Murray, Kentucky. A few days later, 500 dead blackbirds, brown-headed cowbirds, grackles, and starlings were found on a highway in Pointe Coupee, Louisiana, while 200 dead American coots appeared on a bridge in Big Cypress Creek, Texas. On January 4, in Falköping, Sweden, 100 jackdaws were found dead in the street. And then on January 5, some 8,000 dead turtle doves rained down on the town of Faenza in Italy. Later that year, on October 23, 6,000 dead birds washed up on the southeastern shore of Ontario’s Georgian Bay, and then, remarkably, Beebe was again showered with the bodies of 5,000 blackbirds on New Year’s Eve 2012.It seems a little apocalyptic.One might well ask whether this series of mass deaths is a microcosm of humanity’s increasingly toxic impact on the non-human world. But we are not just poisoning an isolated wilderness “out there.” We are poisoning our ecosystems—our sources of food, water, and air; our only home. The warnings are everywhere, if we choose to see and heed them. Because those were a lot of canaries, and we’re all in this coalmine together.....AUGURY: ELEGY. Jessica Marion Barr.

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This essay examines the portrayal of the Vietnam War in one Vietnamese war film—Cánh Đồng Hoang (Wild Rice Field, also known as the Abandoned Field) and one American war film—Apocalypse Now. Released the same year (1979), both received acclaim from film viewers and critics, with the former winning the Golden Prize of the Moscow International Film Festival and the latter two Oscars. This study examines the starkly different way each cinematic product depicts the enemy and nationalism, provides an explanation of the contrast, and assesses how both films sustain, reinforce, and challenge the hegemonic and ideological structure of the two societies during that time. Apocalypse Now evokes sympathy for both u.s. soldiers and the Vietnamese, but its portrayal of these Asian people as faceless and inferior illustrates a culturally imperial approach toward a Third World people. Cánh Đồng Hoang conveys a romanticized, conventional version of the war where the “us” triumphs over the “them” in the defense of the nation. This essay seeks not to show that one film is better, but rather how a large gap exists in American and Vietnamese understanding of one another. Only bridging that gap will promote a better appreciation of each side’s political, social, and cultural background and perspectives.

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This article tries to be funny in a very serious way, following Virginia Woolf’s call in Three Guineas that, in the face of man-made disasters, we may have to make fools of ourselves in relation to common sense. Apocalypses, such as the Anthropocene, climate change, and mass extinction require—like the Second World War that Woolf refused to simplify—a tentative search for knowledge, not controlling and predictable methods in the search for a solution. The article is based on how Jacques Derrida’s discussion with Immanuel Kant regarding how truth should sound before the apocalypse over the years has increasingly come to describe contemporary doxa, within which there is only room for mystagogues, who inaugurate followers in the “real truth” behind “fake news”, or scientisticists, who believe that facts and truth are the same thing. When Derrida shows how these two positions depend on each other, sharing the modern belief that knowledge is associated with development, boundaries and control, he also shows how this narrows knowledge down to the predictable, and, thus, makes it complicit with the mistaken efforts of control responsible for today’s challenges. Against this background, the article analyzes works by the artist, Eva Löfdahl, and links them with questions concerning connections between truth, knowledge, art, and science.

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L’industrie cinématographique nous a donné, ces dernières décennies, une quantité impressionnante de films à caractère apocalyptique. Ces films couvrent l’ensemble des situations associées à une fin du monde, depuis les premières annonces de la fin jusqu’au monde d’après la fin. Les films oscillent entre des Apocalypses traditionnelles et des apocalypses intimes, de ces fins vécues sur un mode restreint et qui condensent le destin de l’humanité entière. Des films tels que The Tree of Life de Terence Malick (2010) et Melancholia de Lars von Trier (2011), qui seront décrits ici, sont de telles apocalypses intimes qui se tiennent en retrait des spectacles à grand déploiement. Malgré tout, d’importances différences les séparent, surtout en ce qui a trait à leur traitement de la fin et de ses significations. Car, si le premier s’ouvre sans compromis à un imaginaire chrétien, où la fin est envisagée dans la perspective d’une renaissance à Dieu, suggérant de façon à peine voilée que la vie se poursuit après la mort, le second engage une posture résolument athée et déclare plutôt, dans un matérialisme radical, que toute vie cesse une fois la mort venue. Ces films engagent des imaginaires de la fin distincts, l’un, un imaginaire traditionnel à bien des égards et teinté de transcendance, l’autre, un imaginaire contemporain, de facture nihiliste.

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The article discusses the commentary of St. Caesarius of Arles on the Apocalypse of St. John. The bishop of Arles wrote his commentary on the basis of the Ticonius’s study. Due to this fact, the work of Caesarius, which has been saved all in one piece, is an extremely important source of information about the com­mentary of Ticonius and may be very useful in the process of its reconstruction. The explication of the Apocalypse, written by the Gallic shepherd, is practical. The author tried to make comments on the Apocalypse in the context of the situa­tion of the Church in Gaul. He was more interested in ecclesiological message of St. John’s text rather than in its eschatological message. In consequence, the com­mentary was very practical and might have been used by priests who had to face such problems as the schism of the Church, rebaptism and relations with heretics.

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Today the most disputed subject is the global financial crisis. Laymen and experts say their point of view and wonder when and how will end this "apocalypse" of the financial world. But to understand it, it needs to make it the "radiology", to establish a "diagnosis" and of course an appropriate "treatment", which I tried to "build” in these few words.

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This paper argues that eco-awareness is presented in Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood as a remedy for apocalyptic eco-phobia. The study focuses on apocalypse and eco-phobia as a motivation of the characters’ eco-awareness. Accordingly, the novel depicts several scenes of natural apocalyptic regarding the decline of the environment. There is an obvious relationship between apocalyptic eco-phobia and eco-awareness because they are environmental elements. Therefore, the study examines Atwood’s perception of apocalypse that threatens the ideal nature; she offers alternatives to avoid it via elevating the characters’ eco-awareness. Consequently, eco-awareness exemplifies the ideal natural state needed by the characters because imminent apocalypse endangers its safety and significance to their lives. Here, the study scrutinizes eco-awareness as a remedy for possible destructive environmental disaster. Hence, it applies Scott Slovic’s concept of eco-awareness as a remedy for apocalyptic eco-phobia to unravel Atwood’s obsession with contemporary negative exploitation of nature. By interpreting the contradiction between eco-awareness and apocalyptic eco-phobia, it tries to contend that environmental perfection would exacerbate the characters’ eco-awareness. The novel encourages readers to deduce the vitality of eco-awareness and its capacity to promote the characters’ need for ideal environment. This finding accentuates the characters engagement with nature since it exalts their eco-awareness as a therapeutic antithesis to apocalyptic eco-phobia; whereby they become convened to cease exploiting nature in negative way. Thus, the study explores how Atwood’s descriptive portrayal of natural apocalypse prompts the characters’ eco-phobic feelings; and how it could be mitigated by dint of their eco-awareness

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Doomsday is the end of the life of this world and the beginning of the life of the hereafter, and various information is given in the Qur'an about it in many suras. The aim of the Meccan surahs is to establish the foundations of faith. Therefore, we can record that the information about the apocalypse is more in the Makki verses. In the article, the events that will occur at the break of the apocalypse or at the time of resurrection in the Makki Surahs of Tekvîr, Infitâr and İnşikâk, where the depictions of the apocalypse are intensely included, are examined. this study was carried out on the axis of Kalam and Arabic language disciplines. It is seen that there is a thematic connection between these three suras and the order of the suras complement each other. In this context, it can be noted that it is important to consider these three suras together. It is interesting in terms of rhetoric that all three suras begin with the conditional preposition (إذا). This preposition has the meaning of possibility in common usage. However, considering the encompassing knowledge of Allah, it is accepted as an envelope of time. It is seen that the verbs in the verses about the Day of Judgment are mostly used in the past tense and without mentioning the perpetrator. It is possible to explain this style by the fact that these events will definitely occur. On the other hand, God is not subject to time and space. In the study, it has also been tried to separate the events that will occur during the break of the apocalypse and the events of resurrection in the context of the relevant surahs.

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AbstractIn Derrida's last book (posthumously published in 2006), L'animal que donc je suis, there is a kind of refrain: “il ne suffit pas de …” (it is not sufficient or enough to . . . ). Derrida utters this refrain in relation to all the discourses on animality and animal suffering found in the Western philosophical tradition. None of these discourses are sufficient. This last book revolves then around the idea of an insufficient (not enough) response. The idea of an insufficient response is not restricted to the problem of animal suffering; it extends to what we must call, following Derrida, “the problem of the worst.” The worst is the end, in the sense of total violence or total suicide: apocalypse. In this essay, I have tried to construct the beginnings of a more sufficient response that urges us to move toward the least amount of violence towards all living beings, while recognizing nevertheless that even this response is not sufficient. The more sufficient response is based on Derrida's transformation of the concept of waiting into being late found in Aporias. This transformation is at the heart of Derrida's thought of the messianic. We are so late in relation to the problem of the apocalypse that we can no longer wait for someone else to come and save us. We are so late that we—there's no one else coming—must take action now.

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The paper is devoted to Ewa Kuryluk’s poetry and art. The author describes intermingling dimensions of the poet’s artistic identity – existential, hermeneutical and aesthetical – presenting three major tensions present in her work. The first one is between the apocalypse and utopia. The second one may be described by the phrase from one of her poems, establishing the first rule of hermeneutics, according to which she tries to understand herself and the world. The poet defines existence and understanding as a “journey towards oneself and from oneself”. The idea of the third tension may be defined as a spread between the shade/contour and the reflection/picture. The author focuses on presenting the parallels between Kuryluk’s artistic work and her early poems.

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With its violent images of heavenly and earthly combat, the book of Revelation has been criticized for promoting a vengeful and distorted version of Christ's teachings. Gerd Lüdemann, for example, has attacked the book as part of the “dark side of the Bible,” and Jonathan Kirsch believes that the pernicious influence of Revelation “can be detected in some of the worst atrocities and excesses of every age, including our own.” Yet, surprisingly, nonviolent pacifists have also drawn on the Apocalypse for encouragement and support. This was especially true for generations of Russian Spiritual Christians (dukhovnye khristiane), a significant religious minority whose roots trace at least as far back as the 1760s, when the first “spirituals” (dukhovnye) were arrested and tried in Russia's southern provinces of Tambov and Voronezh. Although they drew upon apocalyptic martial imagery, the Spiritual Christians were pacifists, some of whom came to identify themselves with the Woman Clothed in the Sun of Revelation 12.

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This research was conducted on the curiosity of researchers related to the difficulty of finding studies and discussions of fantasy literature subject. That's why researchers tried to start research to prove fantasy literature could be created from developing local myth, especially, studies related to it are rarely found. The method chosen here is a qualitative descriptive comparative literary approach using intertextual theory by comparing webtoon 7 Wonders that developed its setting on the basis of Nawang Wulan figure from folklor "The Legend of Jaka Tarub" with popular culture concepts such as "Lucifer the Fallen Angel" and "Nyi Roro Kidul". From the development was created a characterization setting. On the other hand, Omnicient Readers developed his work with the dokkaebi and Bihyeong figure of "Lady Dohwa and Banchelor Bihyeong" against the concept of post-apocalypse world, gods, and stream channel or network as target of creating a new world setting in the story. From the conclusions obtained in the result of two works, it can be known that myth such as folklore proved can be made as a reference to fantasy literature.

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This article introduces the editorial history of the most important of Isaac Newton's posthumously published scholarly writings, a history so far unwritten. Often attributed solely to Newton's executor, John Conduitt, the Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728) was in fact co-edited with the antiquarian Martin Folkes, who would eventually follow in Newton's footsteps and become President of the Royal Society. Likewise, the Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St John (1733) was edited by at least half a dozen of Newton's closest friends and colleagues. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but in particular during the twentieth, these publications were treated as solely Newton's, and analysed as such by both contemporaries and modern historians. However, as this paper shows, the Chronology and in particular the Observations were as much the product of their editors as of their author, and should be considered as such. Reconstructing the editorial history of Newton's posthumous publications reveals a fascinating tale of how his friends, relatives and colleagues tried to piece together meaning from the thousands of manuscripts with which they were confronted, a challenge that continues to this day.

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Abstract Five hundred years ago, in troubling theological and spiritual developments of the Roman Church, Martin Luther critically approached its teaching about the soteriological value of works. The result of his inquiry was the famous sola fide doctrine. However he did not ignore the issue of works and tried repeatedly to explain their relationship with the faith. But, unfortunately, he did not consider the important contributions of the Epistle of St James and of St John’s Revelation. In the introduction to the Apocalypse he expressed the possibility that he was missing “more than one thing in this book”. His intuition was right. The book of Revelation conceals many mysteries, but first of all that of salvation. It speaks a lot about Christ and His salvific work, but also about the works of the faithful. In fact, the mystery of salvation is closely related to works. They play a crucial role in the preparation of the wedding of the Lamb with His bride. The accomplishment of God’s plan depends on them. The judgment will be done according to the works. Therefore, a lot of onceignored things stand before us. Have they the potential to bring more light on the much-disputed relationship between faith and works?

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Jeet Thayil is a versatile figure in Indian Literature whose contributions to world literature includes many poems, novels and music. His song collection include Gemini (1992), Apocalypso (1997), English (2004), These Errors Are Correct (2008). He also edited many books, which includes Divided Time: India and the End of Diaspora, The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets and 60 Indian Poets. He is famous for his first novel Narcopolis, which is set in Mumbai. This work is shortlisted for Man Booker Prize for fiction in 2012.Gyan Prakash is another important figure in modern historic India whose handouts lead India through a focus of wealth and secured life. He is also a professor of history and included as a member of subaltern studies. Prakash’s writings mainly focus on problems of post colonialism. His famous work is Mumbai Fables: A History of an Enchanted City. This paper tries to find out the history of Mumbai Metropolis with the comparison study of Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis and Gyan Prakash’s Mumbai Fables. Both these works shows the hidden history of Mumbai with its both positive and negative structures.

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Introduction Despite existing observations of religious delusions in epilepsy in classical psychiatric literature, such clinical cases are rare in current practice. Objectives To reveal features of disease progression, interference of combined mental pathology, treatment specifics, markers of possible harmful behavior. Methods Psychopathological, Multichannel eyes closed resting EEG in interictal period. Results Patient N, 39 years old, manifested her illness at age 13 with affective bipolar disorder; phases lasted several months each. From age 19, rare recurrent generalized convulsive paroxysms preceded by an aura; non-convulsive paroxysms were observed. The patient was uncritical of paroxysms and discontinued anticonvulsive therapy. At age 29 and 30 she suffered two psychotic attacks (lasting several weeks) with sensory delusions of meaning, staging, persecution, megalomaniacal ideas of apocalyptic content (ideas that she was responsible for possible outbreak of nuclear war, coming of the Apocalypse, her son was the antichrist). Delusional behavior (tried to take the naked infant out into the cold, throwing him out of the window). Anticonvulsive therapy accompanied by antipsychotic medications. Schizoaffective disorder and epilepsy diagnosed. From age 35, acute psychotic attacks with apocalyptic delirium preceded by the same aura lasted maximum one day, followed by partial amnesia. Epileptiform polyspikes (up to 150 μV) registered in the right temporal-central EEG leads. Conclusions Presence of religious delusion in combined schizoaffective disorder and epilepsy, requires special approach: combination of anticonvulsants and antipsychotics. Religiosity of patient should be taken into account as well. Disclosure No significant relationships.

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This research aims at knowing the implementation of pedagogical ecocriticism to enhance environmental awareness after two years pandemic era shape the teaching and learning process passively. As a quantitative research design, this research tried to reveal the power of pedagogical ecocriticism towards environmental awareness. As a means of pre-experimental research, the researcher pointed a statistic parametric test with paired sample t-test to determine the significance of defectiveness between pedagogical ecocriticism and environmental awareness. SPSS for Windows (Evaluation Version 22) was used for the analysis. The instrument used was the modified instrument from Gerrad (2012) which cover Pollution, Apocalypse, Position, Pastoral, Future, Wilderness, Dwelling, Animist, Sacred Place, Mysticism, and the Earth. There were forty students from the Islamic University of Majapahit Mojokerto, half students from the English Department, and a half from the Indonesian Department. Based on statistical analysis, pearson product-moment was used to correlate the pre-test and post-test, and it shows that the correlation value was .423 and sig. Value was .063. Its means that the significant result; 063 was higher than 005, and (2-tailed) was .000 < 0,005 or .000 is smaller than 0,05. It can be concluded that hypothesis H1 was accepted and H0 was rejected. There is significance result between pedagogical ecocriticism and environmental awareness at the data of pretest and posttest. The final result proved that Ecocriticism has a great significance to pay heed of pedagogical in environmental awareness in general.

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This paper is meant to study the apocalyptic scenario of the at the perspectives of the Great Acceleration. the apocalyptic scenario is not a pure imagination of the literature works. Instead, scientific evidences are in favour of dramatic change in the climatic conditions related to the climax of Man actions. the modelling of the future climate leads to horrible situations including intolerable temperatures, dryness, tornadoes, and noticeable sear level rise evading coastal regions. Going far from these scientific claims, hom*o Sapiens Sapiens extended his imagination through the Climate-Fiction (cli-fi) to propose a dramatic end. Climate Fiction is developed into a recording machine containing every kind of fictions that depict environmental condition events and has consequently lost its true significance. Introduction The Great Acceleration may be considered as the Late Anthropocene in which Man actions reached their climax to lead to dramatic climatic changes paving the way for a possible apocalyptic scenario threatening the existence of the humanity. So, the apocalyptic scenario is not a pure imagination of the literature works. Instead, many scientific arguments especially related to climate change are in favour of the apocalypse1. As a matter of fact, the modelling of the future climate leads to horrible situations including intolerable temperatures (In 06/07/2021, Kuwait recorded the highest temperature of 53.2 °C), dryness, tornadoes, and noticeable sear level rise evading coastal regions. These conditions taking place during the Great Acceleration would have direct repercussions on the human species. Considering that the apocalyptic extinction had really caused the disappearance of many stronger species including dinosaurs, hom*o Sapiens Sapiens extended his imagination though the Climate-Fiction (cli-fi) to propose a dramatic end due to severe climate conditions intolerable by the humankind. The mass extinction of animal species has occurred several times over the geological ages. Researchers have a poor understanding of the causes and processes of these major crises1. Nonetheless, whatever the cause of extinction, the apocalyptic scenario has always been present in the geological history. For example, dinosaurs extinction either by asteroids impact or climate changes could by no means denies the apocalyptic aspect2.At the same time as them, many animal and plant species became extinct, from marine or flying reptiles to marine plankton. This biological crisis of sixty-five million years ago is not the only one that the biosphere has suffered. It was preceded and followed by other crises which caused the extinction or the rarefaction of animal species. So, it is undeniable that many animal groups have disappeared. It is even on the changes of fauna that the geologists of the last century have based themselves to establish the scale of geological times, scale which is still used. But it is no less certain that the extinction processes, extremely complex, are far from being understood. We must first agree on the meaning of the word "extinction", namely on the apocalyptic aspect of the concept. It is quite understood that, without disappearances, the evolution of species could not have followed its course. Being aware that the apocalyptic extinction had massacred stronger species that had dominated the planet, hom*o Sapiens Sapiens has been aware that the possibility of apocalyptic end at the perspective of the Anthropocene (i.e., Great Acceleration) could not be excluded. This conviction is motivated by the progressive defaunation in some regions3and the appearance of alien species in others related to change of mineralogy and geochemistry4 leading to a climate change during the Anthropocene. These scientific claims fed the vast imagination about climate change to set the so-called cli-fi. The concept of the Anthropocene is the new geological era which begins when the Man actions have reached a sufficient power to modify the geological processes and climatic cycles of the planet5. The Anthropocene by no means excludes the possibility of an apocalyptic horizon, namely in the perspectives of the Great Acceleration. On the contrary, two scenarios do indeed seem to dispute the future of the Anthropocene, with a dramatic cross-charge. The stories of the end of the world are as old as it is, as the world is the origin of these stories. However, these stories of the apocalypse have evolved over time and, since the beginning of the 19th century, they have been nourished particularly by science and its advances. These fictions have sometimes tried to pass themselves off as science. This is the current vogue, called collapsology6. This end is more than likely cli-fi driven7and it may cause the extinction of the many species including the hom*o Sapiens Sapiens. In this vein, Anthropocene defaunation has become an ultimate reality8. More than one in eight birds, more than one in five mammals, more than one in four coniferous species, one in three amphibians are threatened. The hypothesis of a hierarchy within the living is induced by the error of believing that evolution goes from the simplest to the most sophisticated, from the inevitably stupid inferior to the superior endowed with an intelligence giving prerogative to all powers. Evolution goes in all directions and pursues no goal except the extension of life on Earth. Evolution certainly does not lead from bacteria to humans, preferably male and white. Our species is only a carrier of the DNA that precedes us and that will survive us. Until we show a deep respect for the biosphere particularly, and our planet in general, we will not become much, we will remain a predator among other predators, the fiercest of predators, the almighty craftsman of the Anthropocene. To be in the depths of our humanity, somehow giving back to the biosphere what we have taken from it seems obvious. To stop the sixth extinction of species, we must condemn our anthropocentrism and the anthropization of the territories that goes with it. The other forms of life also need to keep their ecological niches. According to the first, humanity seems at first to withdraw from the limits of the planet and ultimately succumb to them, with a loss of dramatic meaning. According to the second, from collapse to collapse, it is perhaps another humanity, having overcome its demons, that could come. Climate fiction is a literary sub-genre dealing with the theme of climate change, including global warming. The term appears to have been first used in 2008 by blogger and writer Dan Bloom. In October 2013, Angela Evancie, in a review of the novel Odds against Tomorrow, by Nathaniel Rich, wonders if climate change has created a new literary genre. Scientific basis of the apocalyptic scenario in the perspective of the Anthropocene Global warming All temperature indices are in favour of a global warming (Fig.1). According to the different scenarios of the IPCC9, the temperatures of the globe could increase by 2 °C to 5 °C by 2100. But some scientists warn about a possible runaway of the warming which can reach more than 3 °C. Thus, the average temperature on the surface of the globe has already increased by more than 1.1 °C since the pre-industrial era. The rise in average temperatures at the surface of the globe is the first expected and observed consequence of massive greenhouse gas emissions. However, meteorological surveys record positive temperature anomalies which are confirmed from year to year compared to the temperatures recorded since the middle of the 19th century. Climatologists point out that the past 30 years have seen the highest temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere for over 1,400 years. Several climatic centres around the world record, synthesize and follow the evolution of temperatures on Earth. Since the beginning of the 20th century (1906-2005), the average temperature at the surface of the globe has increased by 0.74 °C, but this progression has not been continuous since 1976, the increase has clearly accelerated, reaching 0.19 °C per decade according to model predictions. Despite the decline in solar activity, the period 1997-2006 is marked by an average positive anomaly of 0.53 °C in the northern hemisphere and 0.27 °C in the southern hemisphere, still compared to the normal calculated for 1961-1990. The ten hottest years on record are all after 1997. Worse, 14 of the 15 hottest years are in the 21st century, which has barely started. Thus, 2016 is the hottest year, followed closely by 2015, 2014 and 2010. The temperature of tropical waters increased by 1.2 °C during the 20th century (compared to 0.5 °C on average for the oceans), causing coral reefs to bleach in 1997. In 1998, the period of Fort El Niño, the prolonged warming of the water has destroyed half of the coral reefs of the Indian Ocean. In addition, the temperature in the tropics of the five ocean basins, where cyclones form, increased by 0.5 °C from 1970 to 2004, and powerful cyclones appeared in the North Atlantic in 2005, while they were more numerous in other parts of the world. Recently, mountains of studies focused on the possible scenario of climate change and the potential worldwide repercussions including hell temperatures and apocalyptic extreme events10 , 11, 12. Melting of continental glaciers As a direct result of the global warming, melting of continental glaciers has been recently noticed13. There are approximately 198,000 mountain glaciers in the world; they cover an area of approximately 726,000 km2. If they all melted, the sea level would rise by about 40 cm. Since the late 1960s, global snow cover has declined by around 10 to 15%. Winter cold spells in much of the northern half of the northern hemisphere are two weeks shorter than 100 years ago. Glaciers of mountains have been declining all over the world by an average of 50 m per decade for 150 years. However, they are also subject to strong multi-temporal variations which make forecasts on this point difficult according to some specialists. In the Alps, glaciers have been losing 1 meter per year for 30 years. Polar glaciers like those of Spitsbergen (about a hundred km from the North Pole) have been retreating since 1880, releasing large quantities of water. The Arctic has lost about 10% of its permanent ice cover every ten years since 1980. In this region, average temperatures have increased at twice the rate of elsewhere in the world in recent decades. The melting of the Arctic Sea ice has resulted in a loss of 15% of its surface area and 40% of its thickness since 1979. The record for melting arctic sea ice was set in 2017. All models predict the disappearance of the Arctic Sea ice in summer within a few decades, which will not be without consequences for the climate in Europe. The summer melting of arctic sea ice accelerated far beyond climate model predictions. Added to its direct repercussions of coastal regions flooding, melting of continental ice leads to radical climatic modifications in favour of the apocalyptic scenario. Fig.1 Evolution of temperature anomaly from 1880 to 2020: the apocalyptic scenario Sea level rise As a direct result of the melting of continental glaciers, sea level rise has been worldwide recorded14 ,15. The average level of the oceans has risen by 22 cm since 1880 and 2 cm since the year 2000 because of the melting of the glaciers but also with the thermal expansion of the water. In the 20th century, the sea level rose by around 2 mm per year. From 1990 to 2017, it reached the relatively constant rate of just over 3mm per year. Several sources contributed to sea level increase including thermal expansion of water (42%), melting of continental glaciers (21%), melting Greenland glaciers (15%) and melting Antarctic glaciers (8%). Since 2003, there has always been a rapid rise (around 3.3 mm / year) in sea level, but the contribution of thermal expansion has decreased (0.4 mm / year) while the melting of the polar caps and continental glaciers accelerates. Since most of the world’s population is living on coastal regions, sea level rise represents a real threat for the humanity, not excluding the apocalyptic scenario. Multiplication of extreme phenomena and climatic anomalies On a human scale, an average of 200 million people is affected by natural disasters each year and approximately 70,000 perish from them. Indeed, as evidenced by the annual reviews of disasters and climatic anomalies, we are witnessing significant warning signs. It is worth noting that these observations are dependent on meteorological survey systems that exist only in a limited number of countries with statistics that rarely go back beyond a century or a century and a half. In addition, scientists are struggling to represent the climatic variations of the last two thousand years which could serve as a reference in the projections. Therefore, the exceptional nature of this information must be qualified a little. Indeed, it is still difficult to know the return periods of climatic disasters in each region. But over the last century, the climate system has gone wild. Indeed, everything suggests that the climate is racing. Indeed, extreme events and disasters have become more frequent. For instance, less than 50 significant events were recorded per year over the period 1970-1985, while there have been around 120 events recorded since 1995. Drought has long been one of the most worrying environmental issues. But while African countries have been the main affected so far, the whole world is now facing increasingly frequent and prolonged droughts. Chile, India, Australia, United States, France and even Russia are all regions of the world suffering from the acceleration of the global drought. Droughts are slowly evolving natural hazards that can last from a few months to several decades and affect larger or smaller areas, whether they are small watersheds or areas of hundreds of thousands of square kilometres. In addition to their direct effects on water resources, agriculture and ecosystems, droughts can cause fires or heat waves. They also promote the proliferation of invasive species, creating environments with multiple risks, worsening the consequences on ecosystems and societies, and increasing their vulnerability. Although these are natural phenomena, there is a growing understanding of how humans have amplified the severity and impacts of droughts, both on the environment and on people. We influence meteorological droughts through our action on climate change, and we influence hydrological droughts through our management of water circulation and water processes at the local scale, for example by diverting rivers or modifying land use. During the Anthropocene (the present period when humans exert a dominant influence on climate and environment), droughts are closely linked to human activities, cultures, and responses. From this scientific overview, it may be concluded apocalyptic scenario is not only a literature genre inspired from the pure imagination. Instead, many scientific arguments are in favour of this dramatic destiny of hom*o Sapiens Sapiens. Fig.2. Sea level rise from 1880 to 2020: a possible apocalyptic scenario (www.globalchange.gov, 2021) Apocalyptic genre in recent writing As the original landmark of apocalyptic writing, we must place the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 587 BC and the Exile in Babylon. Occasion of a religious and cultural crossing with imprescriptible effects, the Exile brought about a true rebirth, characterized by the maintenance of the essential ethical, even cultural, of a national religion, that of Moses, kept as pure as possible on a foreign land and by the reinterpretation of this fundamental heritage by the archaic return of what was very old, both national traditions and neighbouring cultures. More precisely, it was the place and time for the rehabilitation of cultures and the melting pot for recasting ancient myths. This vast infatuation with Antiquity, remarkable even in the vocabulary used, was not limited to Israel: it even largely reflected a general trend. The long period that preceded throughout the 7th century BC and until 587, like that prior to the edict of Cyrus in 538 BC, was that of restorations and rebirths, of returns to distant sources and cultural crossings. In the biblical literature of this period, one is struck by the almost systematic link between, on the one hand, a very sustained mythical reinvestment even in form and, on the other, the frequent use of biblical archaisms. The example of Shadday, a word firmly rooted in the Semites of the Northwest and epithet of El in the oldest layers of the books of Genesis and Exodus, is most eloquent. This term reappears precisely at the time of the Exile as a designation of the divinity of the Patriarchs and of the God of Israel; Daily, ecological catastrophes now describe the normal state of societies exposed to "risks", in the sense that Ulrich Beck gives to this term: "the risk society is a society of catastrophe. The state of emergency threatens to become a normal state there1”. Now, the "threat" has become clearer, and catastrophic "exceptions" are proliferating as quickly as species are disappearing and climate change is accelerating. The relationship that we have with this worrying reality, to say the least, is twofold: on the one hand, we know very well what is happening to us; on the other hand, we fail to draw the appropriate theoretical and political consequences. This ecological duplicity is at the heart of what has come to be called the “Anthropocene”, a term coined at the dawn of the 21st century by Eugene Stoermer (an environmentalist) and Paul Crutzen (a specialist in the chemistry of the atmosphere) in order to describe an age when humanity would have become a "major geological force" capable of disrupting the climate and changing the terrestrial landscape from top to bottom. If the term “Anthropocene” takes note of human responsibility for climate change, this responsibility is immediately attributed to overpowering: strong as we are, we have “involuntarily” changed the climate for at least two hundred and fifty years. Therefore, let us deliberately change the face of the Earth, if necessary, install a solar shield in space. Recognition and denial fuel the signifying machine of the Anthropocene. And it is precisely what structures eco-apocalyptic cinema that this article aims to study. By "eco-apocalyptic cinema", we first mean a cinematographic sub-genre: eco-apocalyptic and post-eco-apocalyptic films base the possibility (or reality) of the end of the world on environmental grounds and not, for example, on damage caused by the possible collision of planet Earth with a comet. Post-apocalyptic science fiction (sometimes abbreviated as "post-apo" or "post-nuke") is a sub-genre of science fiction that depicts life after a disaster that destroyed civilization: nuclear war, collision with a meteorite, epidemic, economic or energy crisis, pandemic, alien invasion. Conclusion Climate and politics have been linked together since Aristotle. With Montesquieu, Ibn Khaldûn or Watsuji, a certain climatic determinism is attributed to the character of a nation. The break with modernity made the climate an object of scientific knowledge which, in the twentieth century, made it possible to document, despite the controversies, the climatic changes linked to industrialization. Both endanger the survival of human beings and ecosystems. Climate ethics are therefore looking for a new relationship with the biosphere or Gaia. For some, with the absence of political agreements, it is the beginning of inevitable catastrophes. For others, the Anthropocene, which henceforth merges human history with natural history, opens onto technical action. The debate between climate determinism and human freedom is revived. The reference to the biblical Apocalypse was present in the thinking of thinkers like Günther Anders, Karl Jaspers or Hans Jonas: the era of the atomic bomb would mark an entry into the time of the end, a time marked by the unprecedented human possibility of 'total war and annihilation of mankind. The Apocalypse will be very relevant in describing the chaos to come if our societies continue their mad race described as extra-activist, productivist and consumerist. In dialogue with different theologians and philosophers (such as Jacques Ellul), it is possible to unveil some spiritual, ethical, and political resources that the Apocalypse offers for thinking about History and human engagement in the Anthropocene. What can a theology of collapse mean at a time when negative signs and dead ends in the human situation multiply? What then is the place of man and of the cosmos in the Apocalypse according to Saint John? Could the end of history be a collapse? How can we live in the time we have left before the disaster? Answers to such questions remain unknown and no scientist can predict the trajectory of this Great Acceleration taking place at the Late Anthropocene. When science cannot give answers, Man tries to infer his destiny for the legend, religion and the fiction. Climate Fiction is developed into a recording machine containing every kind of fictions that depict environmental condition events and has consequently lost its true significance. Aware of the prospect of ecological collapse additionally as our apparent inability to avert it, we tend to face geology changes of forceful proportions that severely challenge our ability to imagine the implications. Climate fiction ought to be considered an important supplement to climate science, as a result, climate fiction makes visible and conceivable future modes of existence inside worlds not solely deemed seemingly by science, however that area unit scientifically anticipated. Hence, this chapter, as part of the book itself, aims to contribute to studies of ecocriticism, the environmental humanities, and literary and culture studies. References David P.G. Bondand Stephen E. Grasby. "Late Ordovician mass extinction caused by volcanism, warming, and anoxia, not cooling and glaciation: REPLY." Geology 48, no. 8 (Geological Society of America2020): 510. Cyril Langlois.’Vestiges de l'apocalypse: ‘le site de Tanis, Dakota du Nord 2019’. Accessed June, 6, 2021, https://planet-terre.ens-lyon.fr/pdf/Tanis-extinction-K-Pg.pdf NajouaGharsalli,ElhoucineEssefi, Rana Baydoun, and ChokriYaich. ‘The Anthropocene and Great Acceleration as controversial epoch of human-induced activities: case study of the Halk El Menjel wetland, eastern Tunisia’. Applied Ecology and Environmental Research 18(3) (Corvinus University of Budapest 2020): 4137-4166 Elhoucine Essefi, ‘On the Geochemistry and Mineralogy of the Anthropocene’. International Journal of Water and Wastewater Treatment, 6(2). 1-14, (Sci Forschen2020): doi.org/10.16966/2381-5299.168 Elhoucine Essefi. ‘Record of the Anthropocene-Great Acceleration along a core from the coast of Sfax, southeastern Tunisia’. Turkish journal of earth science, (TÜBİTAK,2021). 1-16. Chiara Xausa. ‘Climate Fiction and the Crisis of Imagination: Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria and The Swan Book’. Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal 8(2), (WARWICK 2021): 99-119. Akyol, Özlem. "Climate Change: An Apocalypse for Urban Space? An Ecocritical Reading of “Venice Drowned” and “The Tamarisk Hunter”." Folklor/Edebiyat 26, no. 101 (UluslararasıKıbrısÜniversitesi 2020): 115-126. Boswell, Suzanne F. "The Four Tourists of the Apocalypse: Figures of the Anthropocene in Caribbean Climate Fiction.". Paradoxa 31, (Academia 2020): 359-378. Ayt Ougougdal, Houssam, Mohamed YacoubiKhebiza, Mohammed Messouli, and Asia Lachir. "Assessment of future water demand and supply under IPCC climate change and socio-economic scenarios, using a combination of models in Ourika Watershed, High Atlas, Morocco." Water 12, no. 6 (MPDI 2020): 1751.DOI:10.3390/w12061751. Wu, Jia, Zhenyu Han, Ying Xu, Botao Zhou, and Xuejie Gao. "Changes in extreme climate events in China under 1.5 C–4 C global warming targets: Projections using an ensemble of regional climate model simulations." Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 125, no. 2 (Wiley2020): e2019JD031057.https://doi.org/10.1029/2019JD031057 Khan, Md Jamal Uddin, A. K. M. Islam, Sujit Kumar Bala, and G. M. Islam. "Changes in climateextremes over Bangladesh at 1.5° C, 2° C, and 4° C of global warmingwith high-resolutionregionalclimate modeling." Theoretical&AppliedClimatology 140 (EBSCO2020). Gudoshava, Masilin, Herbert O. Misiani, Zewdu T. Segele, Suman Jain, Jully O. Ouma, George Otieno, Richard Anyah et al. "Projected effects of 1.5 C and 2 C global warming levels on the intra-seasonal rainfall characteristics over the Greater Horn of Africa." Environmental Research Letters 15, no. 3 (IOPscience2020): 34-37. Wang, Lawrence K., Mu-Hao Sung Wang, Nai-Yi Wang, and Josephine O. Wong. "Effect of Global Warming and Climate Change on Glaciers and Salmons." In Integrated Natural Resources Management, ed.Lawrence K. Wang, Mu-Hao Sung Wang, Yung-Tse Hung, Nazih K. Shammas(Springer 2021), 1-36. Merschroth, Simon, Alessio Miatto, Steffi Weyand, Hiroki Tanikawa, and Liselotte Schebek. "Lost Material Stock in Buildings due to Sea Level Rise from Global Warming: The Case of Fiji Islands." Sustainability 12, no. 3 (MDPI 2020): 834.doi:10.3390/su12030834 Hofer, Stefan, Charlotte Lang, Charles Amory, Christoph Kittel, Alison Delhasse, Andrew Tedstone, and Xavier Fettweis. "Greater Greenland Ice Sheet contribution to global sea level rise in CMIP6." Nature communications 11, no. 1 (Nature Publishing Group 2020): 1-11.

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Abstract:

When, beginning on June 22, 1941, German forces sliced through Soviet defenses, Soviet citizens severed their ties with the Stalinist state. In the Western Borderlands, annexed in 1939–1940 as a result of the Hitler-Stalin pact, locals welcomed the invaders with bread and salt as liberators from the Bolshevik yoke. Red Army men hailing from these regions left their posts and went home. Soldiers from the pre-1939 Soviet territories stationed in Ukraine deserted, too, reasoning that the Bolsheviks had “sucked our blood for twenty-five years, enough already!” A group of two hundred soldiers, including an outspoken Siberian, “decided to force our way back, at all cost, toward the Germans.” When army commissars tried to stop them, “[w]e killed them and moved on.” Further East, collective farmers in the pre-1939 territories greeted the German “liberators” in some localities, while displaying a “wait-and-see” attitude in others. One day after the start of the war an inhabitant of Leningrad region reacted to the news of his mobilization by threatening the official bearing the news with a revolver, exclaiming “I will not fight for Soviet Power, I will fight for Hitler!” Urban dwellers rejoiced at the arrival of the long-awaited apocalypse, believing that “the fascists kill Jews and Communists, but don't touch Russians.” As Moscow descended into panic in October 1941, crowds stopped functionaries leaving the city, pulled them out of their cars, assaulted them, and scattered the contents of their luggage on the ground. “Beat the Jews,” yelled the crowd, and protesting their non-Jewishness did not help the victims; to the mob, “Jew” and “functionary” were one and the same. On October 19, workers struck in Ivanovo, an industrial center with a long tradition of militancy. Excited by the spectacle of the advancing Germans and the apparent inability of the Stalinist leadership to stop them, rioters destroyed administrative and Party buildings and beat up state and Party activists, including the first secretary of the region. They demanded “Soviets without communists,” while discussing seriously whether life would be better under Hitler or Stalin. Meanwhile, back at the frontline, where news of the “massive beating up of Jews” in Moscow quickly spread, the state's enforcement agencies arrested soldiers voicing their discontent. They also ensured that both the confused and the hostile would fight. By October 10, People's Commissariat Internal Affairs (NKVD) forces had detained 657,364 soldiers separated from their units. The majority were returned to the front and thrown back into battle; 25,878 were arrested, 10,201 of them shot.

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The main reasons for climate change which are explained in this article are as follows: -Climate pollution by gases with CO2 emission and Greenhouse Effect; Climate contamination of viruses with viruses from nature by animals or glaciers when thawing or produced in Laboratories; Induced Climate Change due to meteorological weapons with high intensity radio waves to produce rains, hurricanes and possible induction of earthquakes; Climate pollution by radiation due wars with irreversible consequences in the climate and Nuclear Winter; Climate Change due the explosion of missiles and atomic weapons in the oceans; Climate Change due the natural cyclical phases of the Earth affected by the cyclical variations of the Earth's magnetic field lines which can be affected by the severe cyclical activity of the sun due storms and sunspot because of the combustion that occurs inside the Sun which is due to the gravitational instabilities produced by the planets of the solar system, asteroids or the Comet Planet; Climate Change due to the invading Comet Planet into the solar system that affects with its gravitational field to the sun with solar storms and the planets with variation of the magnetic field lines affecting the climate, earthquakes and activation of volcanoes and indeed with the entry of many meteors and asteroids to the Earth; Climate change due to the Arm of God Allah explaining all the above reasons being more evident in times of Tribulation. The specific methods and devices of the control and manipulation of the population (inclusive to induce to the concupiscence) in times of new world order (Universal Big Brother Program for the control of human in the Earth) and possible Tribulation are explained in this article: Surveillance programs with all technological devices and networks used by humans systematic methods of persuasive manipulation and indoctrination used by some zombie humans and dark; Through the subjugation of employees and humans (inclusive children teaching them how to manipulate in the same style of the zombies); By enterprises or dark groups so that employees make manipulation games with details (investing work time to play like children) receiving bribes, money or labor benefits or with possible retaliation if they do not obey; Surveillance programs in living and working places with covert technological cameras, coincidence games, activities, plans and events programmed in sequence (inclusive pyrotechnic sounds in sequence); Covert numbers and words (in identification documents, cards, car plates, devices used by humans); Encrypted, hidden codes or small phrases and numbers not visible to the naked eye concealed in objects; Covert words in the speech of zombie humans and from multimedia and channels of traditional technological devices through movies, programs and even newscasts and inclusive to speak in code with the humans who know the surveillance programs and worst using in those channels and programs derogatory words against the Nazarenes (in the style of Nazism with the Jews) in complicity of close acquaintances, zombies and dark who participate profiting from the system for the vile metal; By means of an epidemic and viruses produced in laboratories creating epidemics and chaos in the Earth for the reduction and control of the population; Through strict restrictions and reduction of freedoms; Confinement with subsequent compulsory vaccination to be able to access human rights such as the right to work and the right to travel (with the cover-up of the respective organizations responsibles for it: OIT OMT), without responsibility of the authorities in charge of vaccination worldwide (OMS) for the short or long term counterproductive effects of the vaccinated population due to the risk with the liquid of the vaccines by interfering with the DNA and RNA of the population; Possible marking and elimination of many humans (possibility of control of the pulmonary alveoly or induction controlled of diseases or pain due a virus by means of chips introduced in humans); Control of humans by the introduction of liquid and solid chips in humans (liquid crystals that crystallize in the organism and settle in neurons and receive ultrasonic waves of very low frequency) (possibly inserted from vaccines in global epidemiological programs for population control or invasive medical examination when this is not necessary as a figurative example of review of a patient with a sore in the mouth and introduction of the whole hand in the throat or prostate examination or specific injections to certain objective humans or Nazarenes who have opened the matrix of the darks and the elite that controls the humans in the Earth) in times of epidemic in medical examinations and treatments in hospitals (false medical negligence with breach of the medical oath of the use of Medicine for human good). The possible liquid and solid chips introduced into the human being can be used for mind reading (telepath) and thought induction (double direction: sending and receiving messages in the style of Stephen Hawking and the style of the technology already used in sending probes into space and to the moon) and possible human marking with surveillance program and the possible creation of zombie humans. Humans who have the mind reader chip installed can speak without speaking (the dumb speak playing like the miracles of Jesus Christ). It is possible to detect if the humans who have the mental reading chip installed have psychological alterations without going to a doctor. It is possible to know if humans are good or bad without seeing their actions and without going to a priest. In this way, human beings with the chip installed can be sanctioned before they do somewhat wrong (simply because it is known to be thinking). This can be used to know the fidelity to a political guideline or direction (this is known by the strong rumor in communist countries that already have the technology to detect the fidelity to the political party and possibly this is through this chip installed in the human being and mind reading). The inserted chip can also perform thought induction: this is possibly the apocalyptic mark mentioned in the apocalypse because many humans will perform sins or concupiscence induced and not naturally. Then, this will most probably activate the Wrath of God, the seals, and the trumpets of the apocalypse. It surprises me that actually the OMS wants to bring the vaccination program to Africa when in Africa there are not many dead by the epidemy (possibly for the control and reduction of the population will be in all the Earth). Afterward, the OMS mentioned that wants to insert a manufacturing center of vaccines in many countries and inclusive vigilance programs (possibly for the control and reduction of the population will be effective at the local level). But, what the OMS needs to mention is that it is necessary to eliminate the laboratories of virus creation and not create more vaccine laboratories. Humans do not want more vaccine and injections and laboratories for the creation of vaccines but the elimination of virus laboratories which are most probably used for for the control and reduction of the population: thus, the reason for spreading a virus created in a laboratoy across the Earth is evident: population reduction and control of humanity in preparation for a global elite program (new world order or program 2030 for the control of the dark and of the elite; Connection of covert surveillance cameras (in living and working places) with channels of traditional technological devices through movies, programs and even newscasts (including newscasts that usually make signs of dumb and deaf to those who have already discovered them) used by the dark with the respective programs and in addition, to monitor and tracing to verify the induction to concupiscence through mental reading (chips in humans) and surveillance cameras on line in the best style of James Bond espionage movies (including control of faces, pupils, irises, reflections, details and diseases); Games of judgments of sin against humans and Nazarenes (playing at being gods) and also profiting from the vile metal through the system and contributing to the persecution of the Nazarenes; Fake judgments of sin against humans and Nazarenes because many of these sins have been induced with technology due the possible induction of thoughts by the liquid cristal settle in neurons and have not been natural (dark inducing sin through technology and playing gods to induce evil and destruction of intimacy and privacy even in the mind of the human being); Retaliation to those who report the surveillance and manipulation programs and marking of humans for mind reading (telepathy) and thought induction (making them sick sending to the hospitals or removing them); Digital identification plan and digital money to do digital control and avoid conflict and protests of marked and Nazarenes in surveillance programs who discover that there is no privacy in their documents and inclusive in theirs mind (telepathy: mind reading and thought induction: artificial intelligence): it surprises that EU mention that has a digital plan for europeans for digital control on line. But, before the epidemy, Europe and the world advanced a lot in technology and the data of humans are digitally in hospitals and institutes that humans need. After, the EU mentions artificial intelligence for human beings. Then and in vaccination and epidemy time, it is possible that the digital control is a new digital control with artifitial intelligence and with possible chips installed in the human being (possibly already installed in many human beings); Games of events and coincidences to cause accidents or conflicts in the life of marked, target or Nazarenes (change games of victim to accused by companies that regulate the order with subsequent rectification of the game made by the same companies when the Nazarenes claim); Games of recognition of the identity of human beings (in the style of the movie Unknown) by enterprises and service stations which are necessary for the daily movement of human beings creating conflicts of manipulation and stress in the marked or Nazarenes Salary payment games (payment of wages with dinners and game of check payment) creating manipulation conflicts and stress in the life of marked, target or Nazarenes Programmed plans of theft and scams of enterprises and humans even knowing of the surveillance cameras for the control of the marked, target or Nazarenes. Then, there is severe control of human beings in their daily activities to verify the follow-up of the matrix and darks that plan situations of concupiscence in the human being. Besides, this is occurring in coincidence with an accelerated new world order program and possible tribulation times and possibly already with the installation of the apocalyptic mark (possible chips introduced in the human being for mind reading and thought induction to induce concupiscence) in humans mentioned in the apocalypse for dark control of humans. The global forms of the severe manipulation and population control in times of new world order and Tribulation are explained in this article are as follows: By increasing taxes; Through armed conflicts and wars create discord, wars and chaos between countries (often bordering countries with the same origins and with the same culture: Russia and Ukraine: war motivated by US OTAN EU): To later usurp its resources (oil energy resource: US Iraq Kuwait); To later control them politically and economically (US Iraq Kuwait) and when these power or developed countries cannot control or usurp their resources, they begin to block them economically (Russia in the war between Russia and Ukraine where besides developed countries influence in the war by printing additional money to use for the war causing imbalance and global economic crisis instead of looking for ways to avoid it) in order to cause chaos and economic crisis with the knowledge and complicity of the world organizations responsible (OEA ONU) and make the population believe that the cause of the economic crisis is the government in power. However, some countries have resisted these blockades (Cuba Venezuela Nicaragua Russia China) and managed to show that it is possible to have governments independent of the control of these powers or countries that believe they own the Earth; To put rulers (governing) of interest in the same countries in conflict; To control them using the pretext of placing military bases in the countries in conflict (NATO OTAN: military bases in some European countries, US military bases: in some South American countries and some countries of Europe). In addition, this is preferable to reduce military bases in other countries and reduction of nuclear weapons, and use the financial resources for the reduction of inequity and poverty on the Earth. Thus, the organizations responsible for the proliferation of nuclear weapons (OIEA) have played an ineffective and passive (cover-up) role, which has caused the risk of a third nuclear world war to be imminent); Through the war against terror: however and actually, this is a false speech used to point to countries that oppose the control or directive of the powers and that have a culture or political structure different from that of the powers and later make conflict and war to later control them or usurp their resources (some Arab and Muslim countries, for example, US, Irak, Lybia and blaming an entire country for terrorism and occupying for years (Afganistán)). In this way and actually, some countries have developed nuclear weapons (North Korea, Iran) to protect themselves in some way and thus, the same thing does not happen to them as to the countries mentioned above (Irak, Lybia) and that have been destroyed with the false discourse of the war against terror. In this way, the best thing is to have good relations with all the countries of the Earth which are again summed in the Bible [1] in a message: Love your brother (all human beings) as yourself! (Mt.22-39) (and not to go around the Earth pointing out terrorists to any country that opposes its guidelines). Therefore, it is possible to reduce the economic resources for the war against terror which can be used to reduce poverty and inequity in human beings; Through the war against drugs: there are many other substances and products consumed by humans that can be harmful to health and that are allowed and have not become a vice (when something is forbidden: this increases the interest in obtaining it explained from the beginning of creation in Genesis [1]: an apple from the tree of good and evil in the garden of Eden: Adam and Eve). In addition, many countries have allowed the use of certain types of drugs for medical purposes (Uruguay, Bolivia) where drug use has gone unnoticed in these countries; Through religión: with a structure of religion that tries to control the population through a guideline and speeches that obey the Vatican and the actual governments of each country (which is evident when there are countries such as Nicaragua that do not follow a guideline of the church and the elite and then, the religion surprisingly actively intervenes in politics): the conclusion is reached and to which many humans have reached, that religion is a power most actually used (along with political and economic power); Through political power by means of the false argument used by politicians to reduce inequity and poverty: where a large amount of resources and money have been allocated to the political powers and rulers of many countries for centuries by the respective organizations responsable (FMI BM) without any results and in many countries poverty and inequity have increased. Besides, the bureaucracy is a structure of order and rules of management and administration used within the governments of each country that contribute to the inefficiency and manipulation of the required procedures in human life that ultimately affect the life of each human being when they require formalities that end up being complicated and time-consuming. Then, this power structure in politics, economics, and religion for the control of the population is ineffective and obeys the interests of the dark who control humans on the Earth, and is used ineffectively by the rulers (governing) of the countries who come to power precisely with the false discourse of reducing poverty and inequity; Through the pretext of climate change: severe climate change due to the emission of CO2 and the greenhouse effect is a complete fallacy. The world organizations involved with the climate (ONU) try to make humanity believe that this is the reason for the severe climatic changes that the human being has experienced on the Earth to obtain economic resources and avoid mentioning God in control of the Earth and course the climate and to avoid mentioning the Omnipotence of God [1] in the control of the Earth and the climate: the severe climate change is frequently due to solar storms and variations in the magnetic field lines of the Earth because of gravitational variations in the solar system or due to the entry of an asteroid or Comet Planet what is controlled and all the Universe by God. Therefore, the climate change is controlled by the Eternal God (wich is explained in the Bibles with a lot of examples with Moses, Josue, Hezekiah) and thus, this is better to use the resources and money for so-called climate change to reduce poverty and inequity in the Earth and increase equity in humans: Human Beings must not believe everything said by the organizations and individuals that control the humans in the Earth and that obey the directions imposed within the matrix triangle of control of the Earth; Through the sport by means of the persuasive manipulation of observers or attendees at sporting events through commercials programs, commentators (hidden words and numbers in speech), players participating in the match: with gestures or sequence of plays, numbers, words or details in the players uniform, referees (make decisión of plays in favor of a team purposely: false bad arbitration) or leading organizers committing sports corruption not applying the rules or discriminating players (Serbian, Russian and Belarusian tennis players at tennis competitions due to some tennis organizations) or teams (Russian sports clubs and inclusive the Russian national team due FIFA decision) at convenience. Besides, when there are countries in conflict or war: instead of uniting the countries in conflict by means of the sport, the respective organizations (FIFA UEFA) discriminate and increase the conflict: discriminating and not allowing the participation of tennis players (including top tennis players), Football Countries and Sport Clubs in international competitions for reasons of restrictions due to the epidemic, conflict or war (including countries that organized previous World Cups: Russia) where the interest, quality and love for this sport has increased and that must be used to unite human beings and countries and not to not allow them to participate: which increases the division and conflict between countries or humans: This is important to highlight and value the position of the ATP for deciding that the ATP does not agree that athletes from certain countries (Russia and Belarus) cannot participate in international tournaments stating that this is against the principles of merit and non-discrimination: then, this is tremendously criticizable that the organization responsible of Football (FIFA UEFA) participates in armed conflicts or war with discriminatory decisions in Football, increasing the war by not allowing countries in conflict to participate in World Cup of Football: FIFA slogan of no to racism and some form of discrimination is a complete farce and used for convenience and interest (in the same style of all the other organizations (mainly ONU, OEA, FMI, BM, VATICAN) that control humans and that in 2000 years of the coming of the Envoy of God have not been able to solve iniquity and poverty), discrimination that has been evident in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine: Football is the main sport in the Earth and it is the one that can unite human beings the most and should be used as a source of union and not división; Through education: where this is used by many countries to induce and manipulate their inhabitants in a certain political direction through the dissemination of knowledge and even the textbooks of the students: many underdeveloped countries have increased illiteracy and degradation in education because this favors the politicians of the country's government: having an ignorant people who do not see what they do with the country's money and who cannot criticize them: the greatness of peoples depends on the education that gives the independence of individuals who are the ones that make the country advance; Through world organizations to control countries: ONU, OEA, Vatican, OTAN, UE: many countries have to obey the guidelines of these organizations, which often do not respond to the needs of the citizens of each country: many institutions in the countries must obey the organizations (the Vatican for the religion) in a rigid way, which is often not in accordance with the situation of the country's citizens, who often need new variants or guidelines (some organizations can cause chaos, conflict or war as for example the war of Russia with Ucrania where the possible annexation of Ucrania to the OTAN and UE is one of the reasons for the war between these two countries. Therefore, there would be no war between these two countries where without those organizations); Through world organizations of espionage (CIA, FBI, KGB, Gestapo, SS): employing persuasive interference in the countries and rulers of some undeveloped countries (some South America and Center America countries and some European, Asia and Africa countries) with the objective of the power countries of control, manipulate or destabilize countries and inclusive simple humans (using the personal data of thousands of people around the world). Through the control and intervention of the Creator God Allah which is necessary and essential in times of Tribulation at the time timely (Holy Bible: Apoc. 6 Apoc. 8:6 Apoc. 5 Apoc. 7 Apoc. 21) due to everything mentioned in this scientific research respect to the control and manipulation of the population (regarding the increase of inequity, discord, and evil among humans) which is not following the guideline given by the envoy of God 2000 years ago: Jesus Christ. Keywords: God, Allah, Jesuchrist, Bible, Creator, Education, Climate change, Population Control, Climate Pollution, Gases CO2, Greenhouse Effect, Epidemic, Viruses, Laboratory, Zombies, Dark, Elite, new world order, OMS, ONU, OEA, Vatican, OTAN, UE, FMI, BM, OIT, OMT, Meteorological weapons, Haarp, Sura, Wars, Sport, Religion, Radiation, Nuclear Winter, Sun, Magnetic field lines, Storms, Asteroids, Comet Planet, Volcanoes, Climate Catastrophies, Tribulation, Taxes, Terror, Drugs, Organizations, Inequity, Poverty, Manipulation, Indoctrination, Technological Devices, Covert technological devices, networks, Newscasts, Surveillance programs, Big Brother Program, Digital Identification Plan, Digital Money, Covert numbers and covert words, Encrypted, Hidden codes or small phrases not visible to the naked eye, Covert words in the speech of zombie humans in multimedia and traditional technological devices, Nazism, Jews, Coincidence games, Activities, Plans, Events Programmed in sequence, Pyrotechnic sounds in sequence, Games of events and coincidences to cause accidents or conflicts, Games of judgments of sin against humans and Nazarenes, Games of recognition of the identity of human beings, Unknown, Companies, Service stations, Salary payment games, Programmed plans of theft and scams of companies and enterprises, Retaliation, Marking, Reduction, False medical negligence, Medical oath, Medicine, Liquid and solid chips in humans, Liquid crystals, Neurons, Ultrasonic waves, Vaccines, Global epidemiological programs, Matrix, Dark, Elite, Mind Reading, Telepath, Thought induction, Apocalipse, Wrath of God.

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AbstractThe essay defines two different modes of filmic violence: sublime and drastic pictures of violence. Based on the definitions of the sublime by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, I argue that the sublime has the tendency to detach the viewer from possible affective end empathetic response to pictures of bodies in pain on the screen. By contrast, the drastic mode has potential to evoke empathetic reactions. Both modes are grounded in specific ways of showing violence: the sublime mode diminishes the bodies on the screen, the drastic mode shows us the faces in close-up and tries to immerse the viewer in the violence.Both definitions are informed by phenomenological film theory (especially the works of Vivian Sobchack), which positions the body of the viewer at the centre of film reception. Nevertheless, the somatic experience is not the only scope of film reception. Films not only show us a filmic world but also suggest a more or less specific way of seeing the world outside the cinema.To this effect, both ways of staging violence have ideological implications. The sublime violence allows the viewer to experience himself as strong and invulnerable, while drastic pictures of violence tend to victimize the viewer.These assumptions are tested on two exemplary instances: the helicopter scene in Francis Ford Coppolas war movie Apocalypse Now and the shower scene in Alfred Hitchco*ck’s Psycho.

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This critical reading/dialogue follows a straightforward structure. Firstly, it presents some of the major insights in J.D. Crossan’s book, attending to its inner logic on his critique on the violence which little by little creeps into the biblical texts. Secondly, it engages in a critique of his reading of Revelation, which is Crossan’s starting point for his discussion on violence. He observes here a direct contradiction with the Jesus of history, centre of interpretation for Scripture. This article points to certain lacunae in his reading of Revelation and, finally, moves to a conclusion offering new ways to interpret and question Revelation’s violent imagery within its own literary context.Contribution: This article is a critical dialogue with one of J.D. Crossan’s latest books: How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian: Struggling with Divine Violence From Genesis Through Revelation. This is a vibrant and insightful book about how violence ultimately crept into the canonical texts, tainting even its ‘good news’. Crossan’s concern with this crude violence surfaces as he teaches different groups and he is asked why the Bible ends in Revelation on such a violent note, essentially with ‘a war to end all wars’, somehow buttressing the ‘myth of redemptive violence’. The special focus of this article resides thus on a nuanced reading of Revelation which tries to understand, in context, the function of such violent images.

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What is Love? Is it identifiable? or is it learned by living? It is not as easy as one might think to give a coherent answer to these questions. Scientists, thinkers and artists have defined love in different ways or have tried to explain it. Scientists say that the motive of love begins with birth. This is an important starting point in terms of revealing the source of love. From this point of view, it will contribute to our saying that love begins with the existence of the first human being. At first, people feel lonely and are alone with themselves. Later, as he gets to know the beings and objects outside himself, he enters into some relations with them. If there is no expression of love in these relationships, the person returns to his loneliness again, which creates a feeling of shame in him. This is also a source of guilt and restlessness. As a matter of fact, in the history of humanity, especially in our age, there are millions and billions of people whose needs are not met to love, be loved, adopted. If the conditions continue like this, man can become the preparer and implementer of the great slaughter, that is, the apocalypse. When the biological and trust needs of the person are not met, what can happen when the love and adoption needs are not met, drug addiction, aggression, murder, hippieism, conversion to primitive religions, robbery, war, conflict, etc., in advanced societies such phenomena and events. The reason for such undesirable facts and events is not only lovelessness. There are many economic, political, social and cultural reasons for this. However, one of the important reasons may be that the need to love, be loved and embraced is not met.

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¿LA HISTORIA IN-TERMINABLE? ¿IS THE HISTORY A NEVER END TOPIC? Resumen Esta es la primera parte de tres. Las dos primeras se plantean, aparentemente, independientes. Pareciera que entre Baudrillard y los testimonios de los sobrevivientes de los campos de exterminio no hay relación posible. Sin embargo, la historia y su fin es el hilo conductor de ambas partes. La tercera de ellas se ocupa justamente de la justificación de su relación. Las tres partes aportarán su propia bibliografí­a. La conclusión final asume algunos de los pensamientos que aparecen en todo el trabajo e intenta establecer los principales puntos vertebradores del estudio. Nos bamboleamos entre el pensamiento novedoso, posmoderno y cibernético y el testimonio, la historia y el sufrimiento del ser humano. Lo nuevo y lo de siempre. Lo que deseamos plantear es que ambos extremos no son tan extraños entre sí­ y que si se dieron se pueden volver a repetir. Ojalá este escrito sirva para abrir la conciencia y advertir de lo que está pendiente con los auténticos protagonistas de la historia y de lo que puede volver a ocurrir. Palabras Clave: Fin de la historia, memoria, imagen, medios de comunicación, Apocalipsis. Abstract This is the first part of three. The first two arise, apparently independent. It seems that between Baudrillard and the testimonies of survivors of the camps there is no relationship possible. However, history and so is the thread from both sides. The third one deals with precisely the justification of their relationship. The three parties will contribute their own literature. The final conclusion assumes some of the thoughts that appear in all the work and tries to establish the main pillars of the study. We are torn between the new thinking, postmodern, cybernetic and testimony, history and human suffering. The new and ever. What we want to make is that both ends are not strangers to each other and if they did can be repeated. Hopefully this letter will serve to open awareness and warn of what is pending with the real protagonists of history and what can happen again. Key words: End of history, memory, image, media, Apocalypses.

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Depression memes are a widespread phenomenon across all social media platforms. To get your hit of depression memes, you can go to any number of pages on Facebook, the subreddit “2me4meirl”, where the posts that are “too real” for more mainstream subreddits go, but nevertheless counting over one million subscribers or, on Instagram, and find innumerable accounts dedicated to “sad memes”, many with tens to hundreds of thousands of followers. In a recent study, depression memes were found to be responsible for 35 per cent of the content researchers analysed in the “#depressed” hashtag on Instagram (McCosker and Gerrard). As a subculture, it is one that has truly embraced the polyvocality of memes, allowing many voices to speak at once through their lack of fixed meaning (Milner). In depression memes, polyvocality allows the user to identify with any number of anxieties affectively represented by the memes without being authentically tied to them, under the guise of irony. Therefore, depression memes find themselves being used in a myriad of ways that do not refer to a stable structure of meaning. This allows me to problematise their roles as both masks and intimate texts within an ironic meme culture.Drawing on traditional readings of irony such as Wayne C. Booth but also contemporary approaches to authenticity, mask cultures and meme culture (de Zeeuw; Tuters), this article situates depression memes specifically within neoliberal regimes of feeling, manifested both in online practices of authenticity and the subject of value (Skeggs and Yuill) and in discourses of resilience and accountability surrounding mental health (Fullagar et al.; James; McCosker). It argues that an internet depression culture based on the principles of dissimulation serves both the purpose of protection from recuperation by dominant narratives but paradoxically creates an ambiguity that generates that risk. In this way, I speak to current anxieties surrounding memes, including ambiguity, irony, and identity formation.Internet Depression Culture Intrinsic to their nature as memes, depression memes can be found in a variety of spaces, formats and platforms. The ones below (Figure 1) circulate on mainstream social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram through accounts dedicated to “sadposting” or the sharing of mental illness memes. They refer to overwhelming feelings of anxiety, a lack of will to live and a desire to recover. In their recent study on hashtagging depression on Instagram, McCosker and Gerrard found memes to be responsible for a wide range of content in the “depressed” hashtag on the platform. They argue that the use of the hashtag “depressed” is primarily as a “memetic device, often with a sense of irreverence, subversiveness and pathos, but in an effort to use the connective power of the popular tag to gain attention and Likes” (McCosker & Gerrard 9). Intimacy and memes as identity performance are therefore intimately intertwined, espousing the memetic logic that there is “safety in relatability” (Ask and Abidin 844), which is dependent on “connecting to common anxieties in a pleasurable, noncompromising way” (Kanai 228).Figure 1. Depression Memes. Sources, from left to right. Top row: <https://www.instagram.com/p/Bl5p88Tg8Cw/>; <https://www.facebook.com/mentallythrillmemes/>; <https://twitter.com/animatedtext>. Bottom row: <https://lovenotlogic.tumblr.com/post/168640369069>; <https://disasterlesbian.com/post/158174792381>; <https://www.facebook.com/mentallythrillmemes>.Indeed, meme culture depends both on the notion that certain forms of content can be relied on to “gain attention and likes” and increase a user’s social capital, but can also be interpreted as intimate and private forms of expression. The popularity of depression memes is a testament to this principle, but at the heart of this culture is a usage of irony that remains ambiguous and undefined. Whether these texts can be found to reflect genuine feelings of relatability is complex, but ultimately irrelevant. As Burton remarks on the culture of Kek, “sociologically speaking”, the sharing of these memes still constitutes a cultural engagement. Therefore, what I refer to as internet depression culture must be understood not as an attitude of self-presentation, but an inter-affective network that relies on precarious and overwhelmingly ironic objects whose authenticities as intimate texts are dependent on volatile and unstable structures of meaning.Wayne C. Booth’s A Rhetoric of Irony tells us that for an expression to be understood as ironic, their meaning needs to be reconstructed by the reader and intended by the author. The reader must therefore draw from the cultural and historical context of the expression to reconstruct covert meaning that the author intended. The inferential process draws from the context of the expression to give meaning to irony. Online, the cultural context in which depression memes have risen to popularity is precisely that which gives them their reason for being. To understand this, we need to realise that, for the last decade, the symptoms that depression memes cultivate have been lying dormant under the tyranny of happiness era of social media (Freitas). I tie this notion to the doctrine of authenticity behind the identity imperative of social media platforms like Facebook (Van Dijck), and contrast it to the forms of subjectivisation anonymous or pseudonym-based cultures on platforms like 4chan embody. Within this dialectic, memes have arisen as the logic of the Internet, and irony as their social contract (Tuters; Burton). New forms of sociality that manifest within this culture are necessarily ambiguous and risk-filled ones, and need to be explored.From the Happiness Effect to a New Sensibility In The Happiness Effect, Donna Freitas investigated social media usage in young adults by surveying over 800 college students about the relationship between social media and their emotional well-being. Her results allowed her to coin the term “happiness effect”, when: “young people feel so pressured to post happy things on social media”. She writes: “most of what everyone sees on social media from their peers are happy things; as a result, they often feel inferior because they aren’t actually happy all of the time” (14). Feelings of inadequacy result when users interpret what other users post to be authentically felt, despite themselves feeling “pressured” to post a certain type of content, one they do not resonate with but fabricate for the purpose of posting. Indeed, the authenticity imperative behind identity-based social media is what defines our relationship to it.Identity-based platforms like Facebook rely on allowing the user to create an identity on their site, but demand from users that the platform be used for “‘expressing who they are’, implying that users do not “perform” their identity on Facebook; they are the selves they portray on Facebook” (Kant 34). As always, this must be situated within the commercial logic behind the seemingly “free” and “public” service the platform offers. Multiplicity and having “multiple identities” (van Dijck) does not cooperate with Facebook’s platform logic because it does not produce valuable legible data which conforms to “normative, regulatory and commercially viable frameworks” (Kant 35). As Skeggs and Yuill note, the contemporary neo-liberal imperative to perform and authorize one’s value in public is more likely to produce a curated persona rather than the “authentic” self demanded by Facebook (380). The happiness effect manifests this. Despite not being legitimate, an identity must be curated to fit in with the other performed personas on the platforms, which are taken as authentic.To many, the irony that makes depression memes such as those in Figure 1 work is in their subversion of the happiness effect and the authenticity imperative. The meaning to be reconstructed in a depression meme consists in peeling back the layer that demands from us to act as the best, happiest, version of ourselves online. Simply put, it unmasks the actual authentic self behind the curated one. Therefore, the self made visible by partaking, sharing or liking depression memes is not necessarily the best one, but, fundamentally, it is a more authentic one. Indeed, it seemed that, in the early phase of its life, users were enamoured with depression memes because it released them from the burden of identity management. What emerged in this phase of the depression memes movement was the perception of a new sensibility based on a more authentic intimacy than had ever been associated with memes. Press coverage of the topic continued to celebrate the emancipatory potential of depression memes, citing the movement as reflective of a new, more sentimental public made possible by the internet (Roffman).As has been argued before by McCosker, the forms of digital intimacy that render personalised distress visible are ones entrenched in visibility and authenticity, pillars of the face culture of Facebook. Comments on memes or reviews of depression meme pages continuously cited relatability and visibility as their reason for identification with the page. Users felt that these memes allowed them to be seen online, with their mental illness, and feel intimately connected to other viewers; “it feels good to know that other people go through the same thing as me” (Figure 2). Though it is a form of public performance, the intimacy generated here feels inherently private because it relies on unravelling certain structures of meaning. This is a skill that, users imply, can only be attained by having experienced the feelings evoked in the depression memes. In these comments, intimacy is a form of identity performance, and a discourse of accountability underpins one of authenticity. Irony, though present, is quickly reconstructed and explained away into more stable structures of meaning through these discourses.Figure 2. Reviewers of “Mentally thrill memes” on Facebook. Irony and Masked PracticesHowever, the tension produced within the user’s psyche by years of subjectivisation and the “curated self” has taken its toll. The social contract of irony in digital culture has come just in time to recuperate authenticity from the burden of management it was placing on its subjects. I’ve spoken to the use of irony as generative of new forms on intimacy, but here I turn to how irony can simultaneously be adopted for the purposes of evading that stifling regime of the self and doctrine of authenticity. In terms of platform moderation in the case of sensitive or problematic issues, subversion through irony allows an alternative discursive economy to exist by evading censorship. When it rejects models through which the self can be turned into data by turning its back on commensurable ways of displaying public emotion, it is a commentary on the authenticity culture of social media. In this, it reflects practices of dissimulation.Ideologically, anonymity and multiplicity in the “deep vernacular web” stands in antithesis to the doctrine of authenticity. Anonymised imageboard cultures such as those found on 4chan have moulded themselves as the Other to the straightforward intentionality of profile based social media (de Zeeuw, Between). Their truth is in their collectivistic rejection of authenticity, constituting an anti-personal, faceless and authorless mass, infamous for their subversion through trolling. They obey an Internet logic that can be summarised as follows; “the internet is not serious business, and anyone who thinks otherwise should be corrected and is, essentially, undeserving of pity” (Tuters). In this, the logic of dissimulation operates as their reason for being. Dissimulation entails a play with identity, one not interested in stability but more in the constant deferral of meaning and self. This negotiation is based on evading the notion of the self in order to gain further freedom through collective play. For these anonymised and anti-personal cultures, the value of dissimulation is to mediate their relationship to society at large.Indeed, as Daniel de Zeeuw notes, mask cultures’ play with identity is not simply a reactionary movement against the subjectivisation of social media but can be understood as part of a rich carnivalesque tradition which revels in the potential of the mask. In this case, the collective culture gathers around the picture of the mask as a symbol of the “dialectic between the masked mass and the authorial, personal self” (de Zeeuw, Immunity 276). The notion that a more authentic, truer self lies under a series of masks is also one taken up by psychoanalysis and various schools of thought. In this way, irony has often been compared to “peering behind a mask” (Booth 33), leading to its valorisation as an act of dissimulation by these cultures. Taking as gospel that “there is no true Self, only an endless series of interchangeable masks” (Lovink 40), for these cultures the mask “is the work of art that best exemplifies the detachment achieved through irony” (Trilling 120). However, irony “risks disaster more aggressively than any other device” (Booth 41). The potential that mask cultures value irony for also creates risk because it trains readers to expect something but never tells us when to stop interpreting its irony. The emancipatory capacity of irony then, is a tension-filled one.Ironic Depression MemesDepression memes I addressed before peel back the layers of the happiness effect and social media cultures by legitimising themselves through authenticity. I turn now to ironic memes about depression memes and their tie to the principles of dissimulation as influenced by mask cultures. Meme culture’s existence across social media platforms, and structural nature as logic of ironic undermining means that, once depression memes were praised in earnest as the new sensibility of the Internet, the next step for the depression memes movement was to be deeply disingenuous and self-aware about the promise of authenticity they were offering. Memes about depression memes are meta memes that are self-reflective about the depression meme movement, referencing using memes to combat loneliness, sadness or overthinking in an ironic way.Figure 3. Ironic memes referencing the use of depression humour. Sources, from left to right. Top row: <https://www.instagram.com/p/B3aH9cmIr1L>; <https://www.reddit.com/r/MemeEconomy/comments/8wotcn/invest/>; <https://jennyhoelzer-deactivated2016120.tumblr.com/post/153443805168/>. Bottom row: <https://twitter.com/animatedtext>; <https://www.instagram.com/p/B0ZsQAMHiAU>; <https://www.reddit.com/r/2meirl4meirl/comments/8se3l5/2meirl4meirl/>.Ironic depression memes can be found on the same platforms other depression memes circulate in, existing as a parallel discourse to, and meta-commentary on, the celebratory, cathartic engagement in depression memes as seen on Facebook. They acknowledge the use of the mask, drawing attention to the divide between one’s chosen digital self-presentation and offline identity. Through this, they re-edify boundaries that depression memes were praised as obliterating. In the ironic memes above, presenting yourself as depressed online is okay, but actually being depressed is no laughing matter (actual suicide = no), and therefore should not be memed about. Memes are a mask that depressed millennials offer to other depressed millennials, to be used against depression, sadness, and overthinking, but mostly to hide that, though the memes are “ironic”, the depression is still very much “chronic”.Ironic depression memes shed the burden of cultures of authenticity and accountability when they disavow the notion of a fixed self. The use of the meme as a mask evokes a privacy and anonymity found within irony that rejects the contemporary mediation of mental ill health through a set of discourses based in neoliberal personhood (Fullagar et al.; McCosker). The bonds being made here are supposedly private, revelling in the facelessness of collective irony, but both weak and risky. The value of the meme is defined by the acknowledgement of the usage of the mask to hide emotions still too taboo or painful to publicly gesture too. Though depression memes undermine that authenticity and accountability should be the pillars of mental health discourse, their use of irony creates unstable ground for a new structure of feeling to emanate from these memes. Irony is about expecting something to mean something else, therefore valuing one set of meaning over another (Booth 33). If the new set of meaning fundamentally cannot be identified, which is key in dissimulation and mask-cultural practices, then this new culture opens up ambiguity which can be recuperated by dominant narratives. In this way, I argue that dissimulation serves the purposes of protection from the mediation of depression through individualising discourse, but paradoxically creates an opening to do so. Wholesome Memes and Resilience I turn now to how “wholesome memes” provide non-ironic commentary on the irony of memes. I argue that, even in a logic removed from the authenticity imperative of face media, and therefore from a notion of identity and profile based interaction, narratives of accountability still recuperate the subversion of depression memes. In the case of depression memes, discourses of resilience and overcoming are promoted as the “correcting” set of values, preferential to the ambiguous multiplicity of dissimulation. Figure 4. “Fixedyourmeme” wholesome memes making use of editing and re-writing.The “wholesome memes” movement aims to edit and correct depression memes, such as examples from a Tumblr page entitled “fixed your meme”. These memes take on popular meme formats that are either neutral and open to remixing, or are known in popular meme culture to be predetermined. On the right, “My memes are ironic, my depression is [chronic]” is a popular motif whose grammar is predetermined (seen in Figure 3) but also an easily deciphered subtext, even if written over, if one is well-versed in meme culture and the mechanisms through which it replicates itself. The explicit editing and re-writing, crossing out the “toxic” message to make apparent the re-writing of the narrative, is purposeful here. The relation to resilience is built as much inside and outside the text. It serves to exemplify the overcoming of the mental illness and the move towards a radical attitude of self-love and recovery. Wholesomeness, positivity, wellness and self-care are the keywords. In these texts, the wellness industry serves as a counter-narrative, preaching a discourse that dictates: “it is within an individual’s power and even a moral obligation to be happy” (Garde-Hansenand Gorton 104).When I refer to resilience, I refer to a specific kind of discourse as coined by Robin James that follows the logic of acknowledging and overcoming damage in order to be “rewarded with increased human capital, status, and other forms of recognition and recompense” (19). Overcoming brings added human capital because it demonstrates resilience which boosts society’s resilience. When depression memes render embodied suffering visible and publicly intelligible, they perform resilience through a therapeutic narrative. In these types of narratives, we see what Fullagar et al. describe as “affective work and action which is required in efforts to be ‘happy’ and achieve ‘normality’” that “commonly evokes a particular form of introspection and surveillance” (10). In this way, wholesome memes can be thought of as an affective assemblage that recuperates narratives of subversion as embodied by ironic memes and mask cultures, thereby “re-ordering flows through capitalist relations that exploit the connection between desire and lack” (Holland 68). Conclusion Internet depression culture operates at the crux of meme culture and neoliberal subjectivisation by both enacting and overcoming mental health regimes of care through irony. The irony within depression memes to be reconstructed is dependent on two structures of meaning. The first is the one within which the memes are being read and interpreted, namely an online meme culture and its collective irony imperative, which I argue is also a parallel discursive area of the neoliberal subjectivisation of value on social media. The second is a product of years of increasing individualisation of mental health discourse, one that emphasises resilience and overcoming in line with values of authenticity and accountability. In different Internet cultures, the intersection of these two contexts manifests differently. Online, irony and polysemy are both tools of subversion and privacy. However, cultures of play are constantly challenged by social media and places where dominant narratives are ones of authenticity and accountability. Depression memes demonstrate that irony can be mobilised into authentic flows of intimacy in the context of certain dominant discourses.Figure 5. “I thought it was just memes”. Source: <https://thisiselliz.com/post/152882025410>.ReferencesAsk, Kristine, and Crystal Abidin. “My Life Is a Mess: Self-Deprecating Relatability and Collective Identities in the Memification of Student Issues.” Information, Communication & Society 21.6 (2018): 834-850.Booth, Wayne C. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974.Burton, Tara. “Apocalypse Whatever.” Real Life 13 Dec. 2016. <https://reallifemag.com/apocalypse-whatever/>.De Zeeuw, Daniël. "Immunity from the Image: The Right to Privacy as an Antidote to Anonymous Modernity." Ephemera 17.2 (2017): 259-281.———. Between Mass and Mask: The Profane Media Logic of Anonymous Imageboard Culture. PhD Dissertation. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, 2019. <https://hdl.handle.net/11245.1/c0c21e79-4842-40ef-9690-4d578cca414b>.Fullagar, Simone, Emma Rich, Jessica Francombe-Webb, Jessica and Antonia Maturo. “Digital Ecologies of Youth Mental Health: Apps, Therapeutic Publics and Pedagogy as Affective Arrangements” Soc. Sci. 6.135 (2017): 1-14.Freitas, Donna. The Happiness Effect: How Social Media Is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost. New York: Oxford UP, 2017.Garde-Hansen, Joanne, and Kristyn Gorton. Emotion Online: Theorizing Affect on the Internet. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.Holland, Kate. “Biocommunicability and the Politics of Mental Health: An Analysis of Responses to the ABC’s ‘Mental As’ Media Campaign.” Communication Research and Practice 3 (2017): 176-93.James, Robin. Resilience & Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism. John Hunt Publishing, 2015.Kanai, Akane. “On Not Taking the Self Seriously: Resilience, Relatability and Humour in Young Women’s Tumblr Blogs.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 22.1 (2019): 60-77.Kant, Tanya. "‘Spotify Has Added an Event to Your Past’: (Re)writing the Self through Facebook’s Autoposting Apps." Fibreculture Journal 25 (2015): 30-61.Lovink, Geert. Networks without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media. Cambridge: Polity, 2011.McCosker, Anthony, and Ysabel Gerrard. “Hashtagging Depression on Instagram: Towards a More Inclusive Mental Health Research Methodology.” New Media & Society (2020). <https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820921349>.McCosker, Anthony. "Digital Mental Health and Visibility: Tagging Depression." In Digital Media: Transformations in Human Communication. Eds. Paul Messaris and Lee Humphreys. New York: Peter Lang, 2017.Milner, Ryan M. “Pop Polyvocality: Internet Memes, Public Participation, and the Occupy Wall Street Movement.” International Journal of Communication 7 (2013): 2357-2390.Rottenberg, Jonathan. “Ending Stigma by All Memes Necessary.” Huffington Post, 10 Apr. 2014. <https://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-rottenberg/depression-stigma_b_5108140.html>.Skeggs, Beverley, and Simon Yuill. “Capital Experimentation with Person/a Formation: How Facebook's Monetization Refigures the Relationship between Property, Personhood and Protest.” Information, Communication & Society, 19.3 (2016): 380-396.Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, [1974] 2009.Tuters, Marc. "LARPing & Liberal Tears: Irony, Belief and Idiocy in the Deep Vernacular Web." In Post-Digital Cultures of the Far Right. Eds. Maik Fielitz and Nick Thurston. Wetzlar: Transcript, 2019. 37-48.Van Dijck, José. "‘You Have One Identity’: Performing the Self on Facebook and LinkedIn." Media, Culture & Society 35.2 (2013): 199-215.

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IntroductionOn 4 December 2016, a man entered a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor armed with an AR-15 assault rifle in an attempt to save the victims of an alleged satanic pedophilia ring run by prominent members of the Democratic Party. While the story had already been discredited (LaCapria), at the time of the incident, nearly half of Trump voters were found to give a measure of credence to the same rumors that had apparently inspired the gunman (Frankovic). Was we will discuss here, the bizarre conspiracy theory known as "Pizzagate" had in fact originated a month earlier on 4chan/pol/, a message forum whose very raison d’être is to protest against “political correctness” of the liberal establishment, and which had recently become a hub for “loose coordination” amongst members the insurgent US ‘alt-right’ movement (Hawley 48). Over a period of 25 hours beginning on 3 November 2016, contributors to the /pol/ forum combed through a cache of private e-mails belonging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta, obtained by Russian hackers (Franceschi-Bicchierai) and leaked by Julian Assange (Wikileaks). In this short time period contributors to the forum thus constructed the basic elements of a narrative that would be amplified by a newly formed “right-wing media network”, in which the “repetition, variation, and circulation” of “repeated falsehoods” may be understood as an “important driver towards a ‘post-truth’ world” (Benkler et al). Heavily promoted by a new class of right-wing pundits on Twitter (Wendling), the case of Pizzagate prompts us to reconsider the presumed progressive valence of social media protest (Zuckerman).While there is literature, both popular and academic, on earlier protest movements associated with 4chan (Stryker; Olson; Coleman; Phillips), there is still a relative paucity of empirical research into the newer forms of alt-right collective action that have emerged from 4chan. And while there have been journalistic exposés tracing the dissemination of the Pizzagate rumors across social media as well as deconstructing its bizarre narrative (Fisher et al.; Aisch; Robb), as of yet there has been no rigorous analysis of the provenance of this particular story. This article thus provides an empirical study of how the Pizzagate conspiracy theory developed out of a particular set of collective action techniques that were in turn shaped by the material affordances of 4chan’s most active message board, the notorious and highly offensive /pol/.Grammatised Collective ActionOur empirical approach is partially inspired by the limited data-scientific literature of 4chan (Bernstein et al.; Hine et al.; Zannettou et al.), and combines close and distant reading techniques to study how the technical design of 4chan ‘grammatises’ new forms of collective action. Our coinage of grammatised collective action is based on the notion of “grammars of action” from the field of critical information studies, which posits the radical idea that innovations in computational systems can also be understood as “ontological advances” (Agre 749), insofar as computation tends to break the flux of human activity into discrete elements. By introducing this concept our intent is not to minimise individual agency, but rather to emphasise the ways in which computational systems can be conceptualised in terms of an individ­ual-milieu dyad where the “individual carries with it a certain inheritance […] animated by all the potentials that characterise [...] the structure of a physical system” (Simondon 306). Our argument is that grammatisation may be thought to create new kinds of niches, or affordances, for new forms of sociality and, crucially, new forms of collective action — in the case of 4chan/pol/, how anonymity and ephemerality may be thought to afford a kind of post-truth protest.Affordance was initially proposed as a means by which to overcome the dualistic tendency, inherited from phenomenology, to bracket the subject from its environment. Thus, affordance is a relational concept “equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behaviour” (Gibson 129). While, in the strictly materialist sense affordances are “always there” (Gibson 132), their capacity to shape action depends upon their discovery and exploitation by particular forms of life that are capable of perceiving them. It is axiomatic within ethology that forms of life can be understood to thrive in their own dynamic, yet in some real sense ontologically distinct, lifeworlds (von Uexküll). Departing from this axiom, affordances can thus be defined, somewhat confusingly but accurately, as an “invariant combination of variables” (Gibson 134). In the case of new media, the same technological object may afford different actions for specific users — for instance, the uses of an online platform appears differently from the perspective of the individual users, businesses, or a developer (Gillespie). Recent literature within the field of new media has sought to engage with this concept of affordance as the methodological basis for attending to “the specificity of platforms” (Bucher and Helmond 242), for example by focussing on how a platform’s affordances may be used as a "mechanism of governance" (Crawford and Gillespie 411), how they may "foster democratic deliberation" (Halpern and Gibbs 1159), and be implicated in the "production of normativity" (Stanfill 1061).As an anonymous and essentially ephemeral peer-produced image-board, 4chan has a quite simple technical design when compared with the dominant social media platforms discussed in the new media literature on affordances. Paradoxically however in the simplicity of their design 4chan boards may be understood to afford rather complex forms of self-expression and of coordinated action amongst their dedicated users, whom refer to themselves as "anons". It has been noted, for example, that the production of provocative Internet memes on 4chan’s /b/ board — the birthplace of Rickrolling — could be understood as a type of "contested cultural capital", whose “media literate” usage allows anons to demonstrate their in-group status in the absence of any persistent reputational capital (Nissenbaum and Shiffman). In order to appreciate how 4chan grammatises action it is thus useful to study its characteristic affordances, the most notable of which is its renowned anonymity. We should thus begin by noting how the design of the site allows anyone to post anything virtually anonymously so long as comments remain on topic for the given board. Indeed, it was this particular affordance that informed the emergence of the collective identity of the hacktivist group “Anonymous”, some ten years before 4chan became publicly associated with the rise of the alt-right.In addition to anonymity the other affordance that makes 4chan particularly unique is ephemerality. As stated, the design of 4chan is quite straightforward. Anons post comments to ongoing threaded discussions, which start with an original post. Threads with the most recent comments appear first in order at the top of a given board, which result in the previous threads getting pushed down the page. Even in the case of the most popular threads 4chan boards only allow a finite number of comments before threads must be purged. As a result of this design, no matter how popular a discussion might be, once having reached the bump-limit threads expire, moving down the front page onto the second and third page either to be temporarily catalogued or else to disappear from the site altogether (see Image 1 for how popular threads on /pol/, represented in red, are purged after reaching the bump-limit).Image 1: 55 minutes of all 4chan/pol/ threads and their positions, sampled every 2 minutes (Hagen)Adding to this ephemerality, general discussion on 4chan is also governed by moderators — this in spite of 4chan’s anarchic reputation — who are uniquely empowered with the ability to effectively kill a thread, or a series of threads. Autosaging, one of the possible techniques available to moderators, is usually only exerted in instances when the discussion is deemed as being off-topic or inappropriate. As a result of the combined affordances, discussions can be extremely rapid and intense — in the case of the creation of Pizzagate, this process took 25 hours (see Tokmetzis for an account based on our research).The combination of 4chan’s unique affordances of anonymity and ephemerality brings us to a third factor that is crucial in order to understand how it is that 4chan anons cooked-up the Pizzagate story: the general thread. This process involves anons combing through previous discussion threads in order to create a new thread that compiles all the salient details on a given topic often archiving this data with services like Pastebin — an online content hosting service usually used to share snippets of code — or Google Docs since the latter tend to be less ephemeral than 4chan.In addition to keeping a conversation alive after a thread has been purged, in the case of Pizzagate we noticed that general threads were crucial to the process of framing those discussions going forward. While multiple general threads might emerge on a given topic, only one will consolidate the ongoing conversation thereby affording significant authority to a single author (as opposed to the anonymous mass) in terms of deciding on which parts of a prior thread to include or exclude. While general threads occur relatively commonly in 4chan, in the case of Pizzagate, this process seemed to take on the form of a real-time collective research effort that we will refer to as bullsh*t accumulation.The analytic philosopher Harry Frankfurt argues that bullsh*t is form of knowledge-production that appears unconcerned with objective truth, and as such can be distinguished from misinformation. Frankfurt sees bullsh*t as “more ambitious” than misinformation defining it as “panoramic rather than particular” since it is also prepared to “fake the context”, which in his estimation makes bullsh*t a “greater enemy of the truth” than lies (62, 52). Through an investigation into the origins of Pizzagate on /pol/, we thus are able to understand how grammatised collective action assists in the accumulation of bullsh*t in the service of a kind of post-truth political protest.Bullsh*t Accumulation4chan has a pragmatic and paradoxical relationship with belief that has be characterised in terms of kind of quasi-religious ironic collectivism (Burton). Because of this "weaponizing [of] irony" (Wilson) it is difficult to objectively determine to what extent anons actually believed that Pizzagate was real, and in a sense it is beside the point. In combination then with the site’s aforementioned affordances, it is this peculiar relationship with the truth which thus makes /pol/ so uniquely productive of bullsh*t. Image 2: Original pizzagate post on 4chan/pol/When #Pizzagate started trending on Twitter on 4 November 2017, it became clear that much of the narrative, and in particular the ‘pizza connection’, was based on arcane (if not simply ridiculous) interpretations of a cache of e-mails belonging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta released by Wikileaks during the final weeks of the campaign. While many of the subsequent journalistic exposé would claim that Pizzagate began on 4chan, they did not explore its origins, perhaps because of the fact that 4chan does not consistently archive its threads. Our analysis overcame this obstacle by using a third party archive, Archive4plebs, which allowed us to pinpoint the first instance of a thread (/pol/) that discussed a connection between the keyword “pizza” and the leaked e-mails (Image 2).Image 3: 4chan/pol/ Pizzagate general threadsStarting with the timestamp of the first thread, we identified a total of 18 additional general threads related to the topic of Pizzagate (see Image 3). This establishes a 25-hour timeframe in which the Pizzagate narrative was formed (from Wednesday 2 November 2016, 22:17:20, until Thursday 3 November 2016, 23:24:01). We developed a timeline (Image 4) identifying 13 key moments in the development of the Pizzagate story such as the first attempts at disseminating the narrative to other platforms such as the Reddit forum r/The_Donald a popular forum whose reactionary politics had arguably set the broader tone for the Trump campaign (Heikkila).Image 4: timeline of the birth of Pizzagate. Design by Elena Aversa, information design student at Density Design Lab.The association between the Clinton campaign and pedophilia came from another narrative on 4chan known as ‘Orgy Island’, which alleged the Clintons flew to a secret island for sex tourism aboard a private jet called "Lolita Express" owned by Jeffrey Epstein, an American financier who had served 13 months in prison for soliciting an underage prostitute. As with the Pizzagate story, this narrative also appears to have developed through the shared infrastructure of Pastebin links included in general posts (Pastebin) often alongside Wikileaks links.Image 5: Clues about “pizza” being investigatedOrgy Island and other stories were thus combined together with ‘clues’, many of which were found in the leaked Podesta e-mails, in order to imagine the connections between pedophila and pizza. It was noticed that several of Podesta’s e-mails, for example, mentioned the phrase ‘cheese pizza’ (see Image 5), which on 4chan had long been used as a code word for ‘child p*rnography’ , the latter which is banned from the site.Image 6: leaked Podesta e-mail from Marina AbramovicIn another leaked e-mail, for example, sent to Podesta from the renowned performance artist Marina Abramovich (see Image 6), a reference to one of her art projects, entitled ‘Spirit Cooking’ — an oblique reference to the mid-century English occultist Aleister Crowley — was interpreted as evidence of Clinton’s involvement in satanic rituals (see Image 7). In the course of this one-day period then, many if not most of the coordinates for the Pizzagate narrative were thus put into place subsequently to be amplified by a new breed of populist social media activists in protest against a corrupt Democratic establishment.Image 7: /pol/ anon’s reaction to the e-mail in Image 6During its initial inception on /pol/, there was the apparent need for visualisations in order make sense of all the data. Quite early on in the process, for example, one anon posted:my brain is exploding trying to organize the connections. Anyone have diagrams of these connections?In response, anons produced numerous conspiratorial visualisations, such as a map featuring all the child-related businesses in the neighbourhood of the D.C. pizza parlor — owned by the boyfriend of the prominent Democratic strategist David Brock — which seemed to have logos of the same general shape as the symbols apparently used by pedophiles, and whose locations seems furthermore to line up in the shape of a satanic pentagram (see Image 8). Such visualisations appear to have served three purposes: they helped anons to identify connections, they helped them circumvent 4chan’s purging process — indeed they were often hosted on third-party sites such as Imgur — and finally they helped anons to ultimately communicate the Pizzagate narrative to a broader audience.Image 8. Anonymously authored Pizzagate map revealing a secret pedophilia network in D.C.By using an inductive approach to categorise the comments in the general threads a set of non-exclusive codes emerged, which can be grouped into five overarching categories: researching, interpreting, soliciting, archiving and publishing. As visualised in Image 9, the techniques used by anons in the genesis of Pizzagate appears as a kind of vernacular rendition of many of the same “digital methods” that we use as Internet researchers. An analysis of these techniques thus helps us to understanding how a grammatised form of collective action arises out of anons’ negotiations with the affordances of 4chan — most notably the constant purging of threads — and how, in special circ*mstances, this can lead to bullsh*t accumulation.Image 9: vernacular digital methods on /pol/ ConclusionWhat this analysis ultimately reveals is how 4chan/pol/’s ephemerality affordance contributed to an environment that is remarkably productive of bullsh*t. As a type of knowledge-accumulation, bullsh*t confirms preconceived biases through appealing to emotion — this at the expense of the broader shared epistemic principles, an objective notion of “truth” that arguably forms the foundation for public reason in large and complex liberal societies (Lynch). In this sense, the bullsh*t of Pizzagate resonates with Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarian discourse which nurtures a conspiratorial redefining of emotional truth as “whatever respectable society had hypocritically passed over, or covered with corruption" (49).As right-wing populism establishes itself evermore firmly in many countries in which technocratic liberalism had formerly held sway, the demand for emotionally satisfying post-truth, will surely keep the new online bullsh*t factories like /pol/ in business. Yet, while the same figures who initially assiduously sought to promote Pizzagate have subsequently tried to distance themselves from the story (Doubeck; Colbourn), Pizzagate continues to live on in certain ‘alternative facts’ communities (Voat).If we conceptualise the notion of a ‘public’ as a local and transient entity that is, above all, defined by its active engagement with a given ‘issue’ (Marres), then perhaps we should consider Pizzagate as representing a new post-truth species of issue-public. Indeed, one could go so far as to argue that, in the era of post-truth, the very ‘reality’ of contemporary issues-publics are increasingly becoming a function of their what communities want to believe. Such a neopragmatist theory might even be used to support the post-truth claim — as produced by the grammatised collective actions of 4chan anons in the course of a single day — that Pizzagate is real!References Agre, Phillip E. “Surveillance and Capture.” The New Media Reader. Eds. 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Obscured in contemporary climate change discourse is the fact that under even the most serious mitigation scenarios being envisaged it will be virtually impossible to avoid runaway ecosystem collapse; so great is the momentum of global greenhouse build-up (Anderson and Bows). And under even the best-case scenario, two-degree warming, the ecological, social, and economic costs are proving to be much deeper than first thought. The greenhouse genie is out of the bottle, but the best that appears to be on offer is a gradual transition to the pro-growth, pro-consumption discourse of “ecological modernisation” (EM); anything more seems politically unpalatable (Barry, Ecological Modernisation; Adger et al.). Here, I aim to account for how cheaply EM has managed to allay ecology. To do so, I detail the operations of the co-optive, definitional strategy which I call the “high-ground” strategy, waged by a historic bloc of actors, discourses, and institutions with a common interest in resisting radical social and ecological critique. This is not an argument about climate laggards like the United States and Australia where sceptic views remain near the centre of public debate. It is a critique of climate leaders such as the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands—nations at the forefront of the adoption of EM policies and discourses. With its antecedent in sustainable development discourse, by emphasising technological innovation, eco-efficiency, and markets, EM purports to transcend the familiar dichotomy between the economy and the environment (Hajer; Barry, ‘Towards’). It rebuts the 1970s “limits to growth” perspective and affirms that “the only possible way out of the ecological crisis is by going further into the process of modernisation” (Mol qtd. in York and Rosa 272, emphasis in original). Its narrative is one in which the “dirty and ugly industrial caterpillar transforms into an ecological butterfly” (Huber, qtd. in Spaargaren and Mol). How is it that a discourse notoriously quiet on endless growth, consumer culture, and the offshoring of dirty production could become the cutting edge of environmental policy? To answer this question we need to examine the discursive and ideological effects of EM discourse. In particular, we must analyse the strategies that work to continually naturalise dominant institutions and create the appearance that they are fit to respond to climate change. Co-opting Environmental Discourse Two features characterise state environmental discourse in EM nations: an almost universal recognition of the problem, and the reassurance that present institutions are capable of addressing it. The key organs of neoliberal capitalism—markets and states—have “gone green”. In boardrooms, in advertising and public relations, in governments, and in international fora, climate change is near the top of the agenda. While EM is the latest form of this discourse, early hints can be seen in President Nixon’s embrace of the environment and Margaret Thatcher’s late-1980s green rhetoric. More recently, David Cameron led a successful Conservative Party “detoxification” program with an ostentatious rhetorical strategy featuring the electoral slogan, “Vote blue, go green” (Carter). We can explain this transformation with reference to a key shift in the discursive history of environmental politics. The birth of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s and 70s brought a new symbolic field, a new discourse, into the public sphere. Yet by the 1990s the movement was no longer the sole proprietor of its discourse (Eder 203). It had lost control of its symbols. Politicians, corporations, and media outlets had assumed a dominant role in efforts to define “what climate change was and what it meant for the world” (Carvalho and Burgess 1464). I contend that the dramatic rise to prominence of environmental issues in party-political discourse is not purely due to short-term tactical vote-winning strategy. Nor is it the case that governments are finally, reluctantly waking up to the scientific reality of ecological degradation. Instead, they are engaged in a proactive attempt to redefine the contours of green critique so as to take the discourse onto territory in which established interests already control the high ground. The result is the defusing of the oppositional element of political ecology (Dryzek et al. 665–6), as well as social critique in general: what I term the gentrification of climate change. If we view environmentalism as, at least partially, a cultural politics in which contested definitions of problem is the key political battleground, we can trace how dominant interests have redefined the contours of climate change discourse. We can reveal the extent to which environmentalism, rather than being integrated into capitalism, has been co-opted. The key feature of this strategy is to present climate change as a mere aberration against a background of business-as-usual. The solutions that are presented are overwhelmingly extensions of existing institutions: bringing CO2 into the market, the optimistic development of new techno-scientific solutions to climate problems, extending regulatory regimes into hitherto overlooked domains. The agent of this co-optive strategy is not the state, industry, capital, or any other manifest actor, but a “historic bloc” cutting across divisions between society, politics, and economy (Laclau and Mouffe 42). The agent is an abstract coalition that is definable only to the extent that its strategic interests momentarily intersect at one point or another. The state acts as a locus, but the bloc is itself not reducible to the state. We might also think of the agent as an assemblage of conditions of social reproduction, in which dominant social, political, and economic interests have a stake. The bloc has learned the lesson that to be a player in a definitional battle one must recognise what is being fought over. Thus, exhortations to address climate change and build a green economy represent the first stage of the definitional battle for climate change: an attempt to enter the contest. In practical terms, this has manifest as the marking out of a self-serving division between action and inaction. Articulated through a binary modality climate change becomes something we either address/act on/tackle—or not. Under such a grammar even the most meagre efforts can be presented as “tackling climate change.” Thus Kevin Rudd was elected in 2007 on a platform of “action on climate change”, and he frequently implored that Australia would “do its bit” on climate change during his term. Tony Blair is able to declare that “tackling climate change… need not limit greater economic opportunity” and mean it in all sincerity (Barry, ‘Towards’ 112). So deployed, this binary logic minimises climate change to a level at which existing institutions are validated as capable of addressing the “problem,” and the government legitimised for its moral, green stand. The Hegemonic Articulation of Climate Change The historic bloc’s main task in the high-ground strategy is to re-articulate the threat in terms of its own hegemonic discourse: market economics. The widely publicised and highly influential Stern Review, commissioned by the British Government, is the standard-bearer of how to think about climate change from an economic perspective. It follows a supremely EM logic: economy and ecology have been reconciled. The Review presents climate change, famously, as “the greatest market failure the world has ever seen” (Stern et al. viii). The structuring horizon of the Stern Review is the correction of this failure, the overcoming of what is perceived to be not a systemic problem requiring a reappraisal of social institutions, but an issue of carbon pricing, technology policy, and measures aimed at “reducing barriers to behavioural change”. Stern insists that “we can be ‘green’ and grow. Indeed, if we are not ‘green’, we will eventually undermine growth, however measured” (iv). He reassures us that “tackling climate change is the pro-growth strategy for the longer term, and it can be done in a way that does not cap the aspirations for growth of rich or poor countries” (viii). Yet Stern’s seemingly miraculous reconciliation of growth with climate change mitigation in fact implies a severe degree of warming. The Stern Review aims to stabilise carbon dioxide equivalent concentrations at 550ppm, which would correspond to an increase of global temperature of 3-4 degrees Celsius. As Foster et al. note, this scenario, from an orthodox economist who is perceived as being pro-environment, is ecologically unsustainable and is viewed as catastrophic by many scientists (Foster, Clark, and York 1087–88). The reason Stern gives for not attempting deeper cuts is that they “are unlikely to be economically viable” (Stern et al. 231). In other words, the economy-ecology articulation is not a meeting of equals. Central to the policy prescriptions of EM is the marketising of environmental “bads” like carbon emissions. Carbon trading schemes, held in high esteem by moderate environmentalists and market economists alike, are the favoured instruments for such a task. Yet, in practice, these schemes can do more harm than good. When Prime Minister Kevin Rudd tried to legislate the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme as a way of addressing the “greatest moral challenge of our generation” it represented Australia’s “initial foray into ecological modernisation” (Curran 211). Denounced for its weak targets and massive polluter provisions, the Scheme was opposed by environmental groups, the CSIRO, and even the government’s own climate change advisor (Taylor; Wilkinson). While the Scheme’s defenders claimed it was as a step in the right direction, these opponents believed it would hurt more than help the environment. A key strategy in enshrining a particular hegemonic articulation is the repetition and reinforcement of key articulations in a way which is not overtly ideological. As Spash notes of the Stern Review, while it does connect to climate change such issues as distributive justice, value and ethical conflicts, intergenerational issues, this amounts to nothing but lip service given the analysis comes pre-formed in an orthodox economics mould. The complex of interconnected issues raised by climate change is reduced to the impact of carbon control on consumption growth (see also Swyngedouw and While, Jonas, and Gibbs). It is as if the system of relations we call global capitalism—relations between state and industry, science and technology, society and nature, labour and capital, North and South—are irrelevant to climate change, which is nothing but an unfortunate over-concentration of certain gases. In redrawing the discursive boundaries in this way it appears that climate change is a temporary blip on the path to a greener prosperity—as if markets and capitalism merely required minor tinkering to put them on the green-growth path. Markets are constituted as legitimate tools for managing climate change, in concert with regulation internalised within neoliberal state competition (While, Jonas, and Gibbs 81). The ecology-economy articulation both marketises “green,” and “greens” markets. Consonant with the capitalism-environment articulation is the prominence of the sovereign individual. Both the state and the media work to reproduce subjects largely as consumers (of products and politics) rather than citizens, framing environmental responsibility as the responsibility to consume “wisely” (Carvalho). Of course, what is obscured in this “self-greening” discourse is the culpability of consumption itself, and of a capitalist economy based on endless consumption growth, exploitation of resources, and the pursuit of new markets. Greening Technology EM also “greens” technology. Central to its pro-growth ethos is the tapering off of ecosystem impacts through green technologies like solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal. While green technologies are preferable to dependence upon resource-intensive technologies of oil and coal, that they may actually deliver on such promises has been shown to be contingent upon efficiency outstripping economic growth, a prospect that is dubious at best, especially considering the EM settlement is one in which any change to consumption practices is off the agenda. As Barry and Paterson put it, “all current experience suggests that, in most areas, efficiency gains per unit of consumption are usually outstripped by overall increases in consumption” (770). The characteristic ideological manoeuvre of foregrounding non-representative examples is evident here: green technologies comprise a tiny fraction of all large-scale deployed technologies, yet command the bulk of attention and work to cast technology generally in a green light. It is also false to assume that green technologies do not put their own demands on material resources. Deploying renewables on the scale that is required to address climate change demands enormous quantities of concrete, steel, glass and rare earth minerals, and vast programs of land-clearing to house solar and wind plants (Charlton 40). Further, claims that economic growth can become detached from ecological disturbance are premised on a limited basket of ecological indicators. Corporate marketing strategies are driving this green-technology articulation. While a single advertisem*nt represents an appeal to consume an individual commodity, taken collectively advertising institutes a culture of consumption. Individually, “greenwash” is the effort to spin one company’s environmental programs out of proportion while minimising the systemic degradation that production entails. But as a burgeoning social institution, greenwash constitutes an ideological apparatus constructing industry as fundamentally working in the interests of ecology. In turn, each corporate image of pristine blue skies, flourishing ecosystems, wind farms, and solar panels constitutes a harmonious fantasy of green industry. As David Mackay, chief scientific advisor to the UK Government has pointed out, the political rhetoric of green technology lulls people into a false sense of security (qtd. in Charlton 38). Again, a binary logic works to portray greener technologies—such as gas, “clean coal”, and biomass combustion—as green. Rescuing Legitimacy There are essentially two critical forces that are defused in the high-ground strategy’s definitional project. The first is the scientific discourse which maintains that the measures proposed by leading governments are well below what is required to reign in dangerous climate change. This seems to be invisible not so much because it is radical but because it is obscured by the uncertainties in which climate science is couched, and by EM’s noble-sounding rhetoric. The second is the radical critique which argues that climate change is a classic symptom of an internal contradiction of a capitalist economy seeking endless growth in a finite world. The historic bloc’s successful redefinition strategy appears to jam the frequency of serious, scientifically credible climate discourse, yet at the level of hegemonic struggle its effects range wider. In redefining climate change and other key signifiers of green critique – “environment”, “ecology”, “green”, “planet”—it expropriates key properties of its antagonist. Were it not that climate change is now defined on the cheery, reassuring ground of EM discourse, the gravity of the alarming—rather than alarmist (Risbey)—scientific discourse may just have offered radical critique the ammunition it needed to provoke society into serious deliberations over its socioeconomic path. Radical green critique is not in itself the chief enemy of the historic bloc. But it is a privileged element within antagonistic discourse and reinforces the critical element of the feminist, civil rights, and student movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In this way ecology has tended to act as a nodal point binding general social critique: all of the other demands began to be inscribed with the green critique, just as the green critique became a metaphor for all of the others (Laclau). The metaphorical value of the green critique not only relates to the size and vibrancy of the movement—the immediate visibility of ecological destruction stood as a powerful symbol of the kernel of antagonistic politics: a sense that society had fundamentally gone awry. While green critique demands that progress should be conditional upon ecology, EM professes that progress is already green (Eder 217n). Thus the great win achieved by the high-ground strategy is not over radical green critique per se but over the shifting coalition that threatens its legitimacy. As Stavrakakis observes, what is novel about green discourse is nothing essential to the signifiers it deploys, but the way that a common signifier comes to stand in and structure the field as a whole – to serve as a nodal point. It has a number of signifiers: environmental sustainability, social justice, grassroots democracy, and peace and non-violence, all of which are “quilted” around the master-signifiers of “ecology”, “green”, or “planet”. While these master-signifiers are not unique to green ideology, what is unique is that they stand at the centre. But the crucial point to note about the green signifier at the heart of political ecology is that its value is accorded, in large part, through its negation of the dominant ideology. That is to say, it is not that green ideology stands as merely another way of mapping the social; rather, the master-signifier "green" contains an implicit refutation of the dominant social order. That “green” is now almost wholly evacuated of its radical connotations speaks to the effectiveness of the redefinitional effort.The historic bloc is aided in its efforts by the complexity of climate change. Such opacity is characteristic of contemporary risks, whose threats are mostly “a type of virtual reality, real virtuality” (Beck 213). The political struggle then takes place at the level of meaning, and power is played out in a contest to fix the definitions of key risks such as climate change. When relations of (risk) definition replace relations of production as the site of the effects of power, a double mystification ensues and shifts in the ground on which the struggle takes place may go unnoticed. Conclusion By articulating ecology with markets and technology, EM transforms the threat of climate change into an opportunity, a new motor of neoliberal legitimacy. The historic bloc has co-opted environmentalist discourse to promote a gentrified climate change which present institutions are capable of managing: “We are at the fork in the road between order and catastrophe. Stick with us. 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