Why Fascists Have Adopted A Suicidal Penguin as a Mascot

caption read, embrace the Penguin. The flags look like poorly photoshopped stock images, while the rest of the image appears to be generated by AI. Immediately, this post sparked ridicule across various online platforms based on the fact that there aren't any penguins in Greenland. Erm Penguins don't live in the Northern Hemisphere save Zoos and the Glapcos Islands of Ecuador. So haha, the foolish Trump has been bested once again

in the arena of facts and logic. Except this White House penguin post was actually in reference to a TikTok meme that was currently going super viral in mid January. Remixed footage from Werner Herzog's Arctic documentary Encounters at the End of the World, featuring a lone penguin breaking off from the flock and marching towards some icy mountains, started spreading around. TikTok synced to an organ cover of Lemour Tejoure, a song which has been adopted by far right anti

immigration groups in Europe the past few years. This combination of music and footage soon spread to other short form video platforms like Instagram reels, with the featherless subject being dubbed the Lonely Penguin. On January twentieth, a more explicitly political version went kind of viral with over twenty thousand likes with the addition of a Frederick Nietzsche quote, I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and impossible unquote, with the caption save

Europe hashtag remigration. That same day, an edit with thirty six thousand likes by the TikTok account epic History thirty two, captioned do the Hard Thing played the documentary footage with herz Aug generation overlaid with images of historical figures and pop culture characters like Alexander the Great, Caesar, Joan of Arc, King Richard First King Baldwin Fourth, Genghis Khan Aragorn, John

snow Luke, Skywalker, and Spider Man. An op ed and Fox News by the daughter of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy referred to these as quote unquote Western heroes. To quote this op ed, in the film, Herzog shows a lone penguin peeling away from the safety of its colony and heading inland towards certain death according to Herzog, but the online right saw something else. Users, mostly male, saw the

penguin as a powerful rebuke of secular modernity. They interpreted the penguin not as lost, but as a free thinker. To them, he was rejecting the colony. In today's terms, that means rejecting secular postmodern orthodoxy and marching toward a

greater purpose. So though Herzog in this documentary refers to this penguin as deranged as a meme, users identified with the penguin as a symbol of masculine rebellion against what they view as mainstream culture and the solitary trek up the mountains as a metaphor for the struggle of individual greatness.

Clips of men on outdoor adventures and climbing mountains Zarathustra style with the caption be the Penguin spread wildly online, the most popular reaching four point two million likes, and oother penguin themed videos getting hundreds of thousands of likes. The Herzog penguin meme piggybacked and partially merged with an older right wing penguin based meme video from two years ago of a drag queen asking a kid about boys

wearing makeup. The kid responds that boys can't wear makeup, So the drag queen asks the kid who told him that, and this confused child looks around and sees a cartoon penguin on the wall, points to it and says that penguin over there. Six hundred and eighteen thousand likes.

the healthier path. The Health and Human Services government account quote tweeted this video with the caption locking in after watching that penguin edit unquote, soy occupied Government, an anti immigration advocacy account, created a viral aiimage of a large, evidently prosperous colony of penguins gathered under the banner of multiculturalism. It reads that as a giant banner, juxtaposed to a lone penguin facing the mountains and a sign reading remigration

now across the pond. The London mayor candidate for the far right Reform Party in the UK, Lila Cunningham, copied Trump's version of the penguin meme with an artificial image of her holding hands with a penguin walking towards some snowy mountains surrounding the Tower Bridge in London. The caption reads, choose a new path for London before it's too late. The last penguin post will consider is a video edit

from the Department of Homeland Security. It starts, like many of the viral TikTok and reels videos with footage and narration from Herzog's documentary, which I will finally play here.

the herd and forging your own path. Those who don't understand Trump's desire to control Greenland at the risk of further damaging our geopolitical standing just suffer from heard mentality and will never be strong enough to take the kind of risks that are core to the existence of this country. On January twenty fourth, the White House posted the penguin does not concern himself with the opinions of those who

cannot comprehend. For Trump, Venezuela Greenland imperial expansion is an existential mission to achieve some mythic frontier greatness, and only true Americans can understand why the Fox News penguin op ed by Christian nationalist Sean Duffy's daughter, Wow, that's a nightmare sentence reads quote for Trump, the penguin is an apt symbol for the President's decade long fight against the radical left. Everything Trump does is opposed by the global

power brokers. Even the President's pushed to obtain Greenland has been fanatically opposed by hysterical European elites. America was built by penguins, and by that I mean pilgrims, frontier men and women, conquistadors and cowboys. We are a nation founded by risk takers who left the colony for the mountains. We are descended from men who suffered and died to

carve civilization out of wilderness. It is our inheritance unquote. Now, what this DHS penguin video doesn't include, but has already been alluded to by some of the other videos I've played, is the actual context of this lone bird's journey and its sad fate. We will return to discuss penguin insanity after this ad break. We're back, though. The twenty twenty six version of the penguin meme was dubbed the Lonely Penguin. Earlier meme videos of this documentary foot from years past

carried the titles deranged penguin or nihilist Penguin. Before the footage of this lone Penguin plays in the documentary, Herzog asks a penguin expert if they can experience insanity?

The Trump administration's embrace of this suicidal penguin as a that's literally me figure is a shockingly open display of fascism's relation to the death drive. It's just so naked to make your mascot a symbol of suicidal defiance against perceived cultural norms. They're doing a first as tragedy twice as farce for fascist death emblems. The Nazis get the skull, we get a fucking penguin. But the penguin is not

the first modern American suicidal folk hero. The Kildozer rampage of public destruction, which ended in the suicide of the perpetrator, has been a mascot for the libertarian right for over two decades, and in twenty eighteen, a twenty eight year old airport ground service a named Richard Russell hijacked in empty plane at SeaTac to fly over Mount Rainier before killing himself by purposely crashing the plane. Very similar to

Herzog's deranged penguin. Russell left behind a wife of six years, but became a sort of nihilistic folk hero to overly online young men, especially among the online far right on places like four Chan and Telegram, where he was dubbed

sky King. Last August, a Congressional Republican from Georgia Mike Collins, who serves on the Republican Transportation Committee, posted a glowing, multi paragraph memorial for Richard Russell on the anniversary of his suicide, signing off the message with rest in peace, Sky King, but the direct identification of the Trump administration

with a suicidal penguin is a step farther. The fascist appetite for death is well understood, but the death drive represents a usually subconscious desire to not only harm or kill others, but ultimately yourself, an attempt to ease the tensions driving social life by returning to a prior, in organic state. This desire can be channeled through the politics of fascism, which allow for violent, paranoid manifestations of repressed

internal contradictions which attempt to be resolved through death. But fascism itself is a contradiction between a primitive war machine and a stable state apparatus, and the way that tension is released is also self destruction. In the second volume of Capitalism at Schizophrenia A Thousand Plateaus by philosopher Jills to Lose and psychoanalyst Felix Squatterri, they discuss the ways

in which fascism and toutlitarianism differ. They write that totalitarianism is a state affair made up of of material components that over manage society. Quote. Even in the case of a military dictatorship, it is a state army, not a war machine that takes power and elevates the state to the totalitarian stage. Totalitarianism is quot essentially conservative. Fascism, on

the other hand, involves a war machine. When fascism builds itself a totalitarian state, it is not in the sense of a state army taking power, but of a war machine taking over the state unquote. This analysis from Deluze and Guatairie is building off of an essay by the French writer Paul Verilio called The Suicidal State, where Virilio argues that in fascism, the state is far less to

talitarian than it is suicidal. An evolution of this state that quote no longer pretends to be guided internally by reason and progress, but rather non progress and terror, founded on the repulsion and fear of all development in this civil domain. This repulsion and fear were manifested in the accelerated destruction of state institutions during the first few months of Trump's second term and Doge's scorched earth approach to

slashing government agencies. Verilio writes that during the disappearance of public service quote, infrastructures of service are reduced as the wire taps of the Hmacht are restored colonial geometry of decolonialization, so as the federal government rescinds public services, the everyday presence of the federal government is reduced to masked armed agents in the streets, disappearing our neighbors and shooting civilians, while the president fights in court for the ability to

deploy the military against American citizens within our own territory. During the tension of total war or total peace, Rilio says, the system expands and reproduces itself, a material process without an end, but no longer without limits. To quote the Brazilian philosopher of Vladimir's Foughtley, the suicide state quote, is not just a manager of death. It is rather the ongoing agent of its own catastrophe, the maker of its

own explosion. To be more precise, This new state mixes the death management of entire sectors of its own population with an ongoing and risky flirtation with its own self destruction unquote. Rilio's idea of the suicidal state emerges as this new mode of governing to solve the crisis of post war liberalism in Germany after World War One, as well as risked by the United States after each of

our many wars. Quote. One of the keys to the present situation is, on one side, the overly informed status of experts of the system, and on the other the underinformed status of all those who are supposedly thinking outside of it.

for very long on its own. Soverareali proposes the new emergence of a third category of people who make use of information for an end, the ultimate end the directors of the suicidal state, while the outsiders, ideologues and artists simply try to simulate Catharsis. Quote. By contrast, the third category, the suicidal state it self produces a feeling for the real better it aims to retain the exclusivity of its production.

This feeling is a contempt for and hatred of the every day Unquote, to paraphrase Virilio, the fascist project exploits man's alienation from his environment through pollution, economic insecurity, emotional insecurity, desocialization, and seeks to replace any legitimate grievance he has with society with a more repulsive and expressive force, the fear of society, which is superimposed on a new military schema of total war and internal invasion, all towards a nihilistic

end of dropping the bomb on ourselves. The oscillation of external and internal destruction epitomized by the death Drive is mirrored by the imperial boomerang, where the violence of colonial expansion is forced to return to its homeland. Once home, the drive remains, resulting in a war on society directly or through other means. But this is a war on

its own people. Whereas Trump would say the enemy within, to quote a paragraph from a Thousand Plateaus, so called total war seems less a state undertaking than an undertaking of a war machine that appropriates the state and channels it into a flow of absolute war whose only possible outcome is the suicide of this state itself. There is in fascism a realized nihilism, unlike the ttalitarian state, which does its utmost to seal all possible lines of escape.

Fascism is constructed on an intense line of escape, which it transforms into a line of pure destruction and abolition. It is curious that from the very beginning the Nazis announced to Germany what they were bringing at once, wedding bells and death, including their own deaths and the death of the Germans. They thought they would perish, but that their undertaking would be resumed all across Europe, all over

the world, throughout the Solar system. And the people cheered, not because they did not understand, but because they wanted that death through the death of others, like a will to wager everything you have every hand to stake your own death against the death of others. Unquote in a Thousand Plateaus, De Luze and Guatai quote an excerpt from Klaus Man's nineteen thirty six novel Mefisto, which contains fascist

speeches and ordinary conversations from Nazi Germany. The quote they include is eerily similar to the visuals of Trump as the suicidal penguin quote. Heroism was something that was being ruled out of our lives. In reality, we are not marching forward. We are reeling, staggering. Our beloved fear is dragging us toward the shades of darkness and everlasting nothingness. How can we poets who have a special affinity for

darkness and lower depths not admire him unquote. Delus in Guatrie then write, suicide is presented not as a punishment, but as the crowning glory of the death of others. The insufficiency of economic and political definitions of fascism does not simply imply a need to tack on vague so called ideological determinations. We prefer to inquiry into the precise formation of Nazi statements, which are just as much in evidence in politics and economics as in the most absurd

of conversations. They always contain the stupid and repugnant cry long live death. Even at the economic level, where the arms expansion replaces growth in consumption, and where investment veers from the means of production toward the means of pure

destruction unquote. Verilio calls this a psychosis which governs its entire politics of production, and he writes that the replacement of the American industries of the automobile and the cinema with the military industrial complex quote does not involve a rational, functional, or useful choice, but rather entirely psychological, or rather psychopathological. It stems from contempt for an abandonment of productive rapport with the million you every investment is made to escape

from it unquote. For contemporary reference, go check out the stock price of Pallanteer. And on the larger economic and international level, Trump's tariffs, his trade wars, and the self destruction of the United States geopolitical standing are all expressions

of this suicidal state in action. Filio claims the state of total war, where the economy of war has become the economy of peace, is facilitated by a transformation in the American sense of freedom, where quote unquote, the free as a subject as in the Land of the Free quote is no longer properly spoken of as a citizen. He has an anonymous organism, without culture, without society, and without memory. This figure has no historical precedent. Assistance has

become survival non assistance, a condemned to death. All liberation henceforth has for him invariably the appearance of death of the end suicide or murder unquote. This sort of freedom from social services, freedom from this state, freedom from assistance as a movement of the death drive also provides insight into people's willingness to and even desire to vote against their own material interests, especially when their political struggle has

turned against society itself. Only in transformation of ordinary social life into the horrific in the minds of the populace can the fascist quote find their surest means of governing. The legitimization of his politics and military strategies, and right up to the end, far from weakening the repulsive nature of his powers, the ruins, the hoarders, the crimes, the chaos of total war will generally own only increase in scope. In Hitler's nineteen forty five telegram seventy one, he writes,

if the war is lost, may the nation perish. Here Hitler decides to join forces with his enemies in order to complete the destruction of his own people by obliterating the last remaining sources of its life support system civil reserves of every kind, put up a water fuel provisions. This is the normal outcome of the politics of dialectical retreat from the man who had written the idea of protection,

haunts and fulfills life. Fascism hijacks the mechanism of evolutionary and revolutionary escape and reverts it into a mechanism of destruction. Instead of resolving crises, it produces constant crisis for it to feed off of forming, as del and Guatris say, a war machine instead of resonating in a state apparatus, A war machine that no longer had anything but war as its object and would rather annihilate its own servants

than stop the destruction. To quote a thousand plateaus, this is war not for conquest or revolution, but war as its own end. The hollowing out of public institutions and social services, the divestment from the milieu of life, leads people to turn towards the suicidal state as the only force of movement, resting on, as Filio says, quote, the advanced exploitation of our instincts for death. A new totalitarian state defined by the constant ascent of statistics toward planetary death.

Crime and madness will no longer be the defects. The madman and the assassin are the legitimate children engendered and recognized by the suicidal state unquote. And what phenomenon has risen in the United States the past few years the Conspiracy, Theorist and the Assassin. The embrace of total war and the campaign of civil fear necessitates a break from sanity and the bizarre strangeness of means that inevitably result in a self destructive end. Vrillio claims there is an insanity

at the heart of the fascist project. The imaginary potential of the fascist state arises quote from a finished world where insanity has become the goal of order, the very product of organization. Unquote. There's a quote from Goebels to one of his aides, Prince Frederick Christian. The world in which Hitler moves is a world of absolute fate, a world in which even success makes nos sense. It's not a mistake that the White House has cast itself as

a lost penguin marching to its own death. They know the absurdity of their replies. They know the world looks upon them as insane. They know that they'll never reach the make America Great Again mountain. The self destruction ice, the tariffs, the broken treaties are not for any greater purpose. The means are the end. This is total war, the psychological purpose of which is terror, which for the fascist

is synonymous with peace. But let's not forget how Hitler and Goebbels finally resolved their contradictions.