As if the world needed another half-witted white guy chiming in on things that I should probably keep my mouth shut about and stay out of, here goes anyway. Excuse me while I frizz up my eyebrows and let my inner Andy Rooney out to pontificate on world events for a moment.
The slaughter of innocent people has been going on for over one hundred days now and shows no signs of stopping. There is an occupying government telling millions of indigenous people to fuck off into the desert or die so said government can explore for fossil fuels and build their version of the Atlantic City boardwalk over the graves of the dead. Well, I shouldn’t say over the graves of the dead because those are being uprooted as well.
I gave up on Western media’s coverage of this slaughter the moment I heard that these media outlets have their footage reviewed by the occupying government before their SD cards are allowed to leave the territory. Since that’s the case, I’m not sure of the current state of the media’s framing but a few weeks into the whole thing I about had my fill of the white liberal/MSNBC talking points.
There were a few people that tried to goad me into conversations from this perspective and there was no way that I was going to be able to do that without hurting some feelings so I did my best to keep my mouth shut and not engage. I don’t have the patience to educate people and to help remove the wool from over their eyes. That is a thick bubble of misinformation to burst and I don’t have time for it.
The perspective that I’m talking about is the “vote blue no matter who” crowd that brought us pussy hats in January of 2017 but was suddenly squeamish in the summer of 2020 when the windows of their favorite stores were broken. The white liberal that mistakes a protest for a parade and gets offended when traffic gets fucked up for a few minutes to make a point about people being murdered by the police. They still confuse order for freedom and fail to understand that sometimes freedom is messy. Especially when it goes up against imperialism and capitalism. These are the people that have never read The Wretched Of The Earth by Frantz Fanon and boy howdy does their ignorance of decolonization come screaming through loud and clear.
I have ceased being surprised by how susceptible people are to propaganda even though the same playbook is used every single time. A government does some shit and then clearly lies about that shit and everyone accepts the lie at face value. No one challenges the lie or notices that it’s been disproven weeks later because that government is in the middle of lying about some other shit. And round and round we go. The truth can barely keep up, if at all.
This is colonialism in its final throes. It is the oppressed versus the oppressor. This is not a conflict that’s been going on for centuries. It’s been going on since 1948 and of course the British have their fingerprints all over the situation prior to that year. Any argument that tries to say it’s more complicated than that is trying to create noise and confusion to cover their asses and their support for human rights abuses.
What did everyone expect to happen when people whose bloodlines have been on that land for centuries were told to get out or be forcibly removed? Were they expected to gladly say, “Well, alright then,” and accept watching their homes being bulldozed? They resisted and suddenly fell into the category of “terrorist” because they wouldn’t go quietly into that good night without a fight. Politely asking a genocidal power structure to relinquish any amount of their power, and maybe not be so murderous while they’re at it, has never worked. Power does not cede ground willingly and always requires a fight to loosen its death grip.
There is an occupying government using the most sophisticated weaponry ever developed to target journalists, artists, poets and their families with airstrikes to silence them. I will always stand on the side of the artists because more often than not they are correct. I can hear the counter arguments of “What about…?” and whatever those arguments are they are moot at this point. I have seen way too many pictures of people carrying the remains of their family members in shopping bags to give a shit about any supposed justifications. If this was about hostages maybe the occupying government shouldn’t be dropping bombs on the areas where the hostages are being held. Blowing up the hostages while supposedly negotiating for them would probably be a bad move and seems counterproductive to me.
Trying to paint any opposition to this bullshit as hate speech is laughable. It is possible to stand at a vigil after a white-christian-nationalist attacked a synagogue in my town and to pay respects to the victims while also being against the erasure of a people and their culture by a government that uses religion and the events of World War II as coverage in their commission of ethnic cleansing.
It’s not my fault that the majority of people in this country are too dumb to see through the ruse and have their ignorance taken advantage of by those who will profit from a mass death event. Standing up against deranged bullies should not be a controversial position to take but here we are. The chickens are coming home to roost from creating a culture of absolutism and treating everything as if it were a sporting event. People don’t know how to think and they revel in the “us versus them” mentality that they are happily spoon fed by media conglomerates that exchanged their ethics for advertising dollars.
Our elected officials have put on display how much they truly are pigfuckers through and through. The US senator that cosplays as a working man can fuck right off to his parents’ basement in York, PA. Especially after his recent behavior toward his constituents. Who does he think voted for him in his last election? The voters got him where he wanted to go but once he got a taste of that status, and the lobbyist money, his common man mask came right off. He has forever lost my support which he barely had to begin with. I only voted for him to prevent the fake TV doctor from winning a vanity campaign.
In the run up to the 2020 presidential election, we were all told to vote for the doddering old man because he would somehow be held accountable. Accountable how? Abortion rights are gone. Student loan forgiveness didn’t happen as broadly as it should have. The police are still killing people at will and have become an even more entrenched occupying force across the country. And Leonard Peltier is still in a federal penitentiary. The president even sold out his beloved railroad workers by siding with the bosses in a labor dispute.
Now he’s given a blank check to an apartheid government so they can buy enough weapons to blow the hell out of people that he refuses to see as human. And if that wasn’t enough he’s even started his own bombing campaign against one of the most impoverished countries on the planet. This jackass even said out loud that attacking Yemen was having no effect on the Houthi’s blockade of the Red Sea but the airstrikes will continue nonetheless. The only people benefiting from any of this are the weapons manufacturers, as if they were hard up for cash to begin with. Look how easy it is to say “Fuck the poor” when shareholder value needs to be enriched to keep our made up economy growing.
Trying to stay on top of all of this is exhausting. And that’s the point. To wear down the few opposing voices and to make us all feel hopeless. To make us question our own sanity and what we are witnessing with our own eyes and ears. To tire us all out so we become docile and get in line to buy whatever shiny bullshit is mass marketed toward us.
I see no solutions in this other than acting in solidarity with the ever shrinking amount of people that give a shit. To show up and support each other however we can regardless of whatever angle someone else’s liberation struggle is coming from. We’re all trying to get there so if we can work to get there together we might have a better chance of making it in one piece. Satan knows the bastards are certainly going to try to keep us down.
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