iteratedextras:

blog: ‘Glory is great,’ ‘life has no inherent value,’ ‘the lesser yields to the greater,’ ‘we should abandon the atavistic mammalian moral atrocity of K-selection [having fewer really expensive children] towards r-selection [having lots of cheap expendable children],’ and if I’m remembering correctly there’s something in there about how human meaning comes from existential conflict…

…does @kontextmaschine wish he were an officer that died in battle during World War I? 🤔

It is well established that my WWI icon is Gabriele d'Annunzio, the Italian poet, early aviator, and arguably biggest pre-war celebrity who urged Italy into the war

(Incl. with a blasphemous parody of the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed be those who, having opposed the event [the war], will accept in silence the supreme necessity and will want to be, not the last, but the first ones [to sacrifice themselves]. Blessed be the youths who hunger and thirst for glory, for they will be sated. Blessed be the merciful ones, for they will cleanse a luminous blood and bind a shining grief.”)

Then enlisted at age 52, essentially invented strategic bombing (he had also been predicting modern naval warfare for decades) and pulled strings to get sent to the front as an infantryman, where his most treasured memory was watching his friend die slowly in pain, killed in the course of a tactically brilliant, strategically pointless attack of his own planning.

Then when Italy (as in WWII, the Comedy Option of the war) didn’t receive its hoped-for territorial gains (given instead to the ex-Austro-Hungarian nations) pushed for further war, personally led a ragtag army to conquer the Adriatic port of Fiume and there ruled a pirate utopia (this is what a lot of Porco Rosso is lifted from), intentionally weakening his army’s discipline, fueling it by capturing cargo ships at sea, and inventing the hallmarks of fascist pageantry like the balcony speech and blood-sanctified flag.

After that “failed”, in that Italy took it over like he originally wanted, he returned home and in retrospect if he knew it wasn’t over yet could have beat Mussolini to the punch (the Duce was wary of Il Poeta and moved up the March on Rome [a rip-off of the column into Fiume] to preempt him, in turn d'Annunzio built a waiting room in his hillside mansion-museum [the one with a warship mounted on the hill and a painting of him as a leper above the master bed] to specifically annoy Benito)