The Woke Contrarian

I don't think I'm one of them either. I'm one of mine.

Category: Doing Woke Wrong (Page 2 of 3)

You can capitalise “Nazi,” but not “Russian”?

2023-11-25 / / 0 Comments

A Ukrainian fact-checking website has failed to notice that writing “Nazi” with a capital N, but using a lowercase R for “Russian,” makes them look as though they have more respect for the Nazis than the Russians. Considering Ukraine’s track record with Nazis and Nazi collaborators (Stepan Bandera, Roman Shukhevych, Symon Petliura…) and their apologists (especially Volodymyr Viatrovych), and the Russians’ false claims that Ukraine is a “Nazi regime,” this is an especially bad look. It’s the kind of thing Russian propagandists would seize on: “Look, those Ukrainians love Nazis so much that they lowercase ‘Russian’ and capitalise ‘Nazi’!”

But this case isn’t unique; it’s part of a pattern of petty and juvenile behaviour from certain Ukraine supporters. I’ve seen one Ukrainian software company get rid of the Russian localisation of its app and replace it with a Ukrainian one. Before that, they had only Russian and not Ukrainian. Why not both? Russian is spoken in multiple countries—why punish other Russian-speakers because Putin is a shithead?

And some Ukrainian news sites will write “Russia,” “Putin,” “Belarus,” “Russian,” and other words connected with Russia (and sometimes Belarus) with lowercase letters, which sounds as though a twelve-year-old dreamed it up. I also saw one quoting someone using “Kiev” (rather than the government-approved “Kyiv”) and writing it with a lowercase K… presumably because it’s “russian.” Even Russian propaganda doesn’t lowercase “Ukraine.” (They just refer to it as the “Kiev regime,” the “Nazi Ukrainian regime,” or “the Zelensky regime” in every other article.)

Most Ukrainians or overseas supporters do not do this, but there are enough of these people to piss me off. I don’t remember the Allies writing “Hitler,” “Himmler,” “Japan,” “Germany,” “Italy,” “Mussolini,” “Tokyo,” and “Nazi Party” with lowercase letters. I saw people writing “Trump” with a lowercase T on forums and social media, but no news site or paper, no matter how left-wing they were, would print “trump” instead of “Trump.” I’m fine with the flags and “Support Ukraine” fundraisers. But this crap?

My horse, my horse, my kingdom for a horse…

2023-11-25 / / 0 Comments

…I mean, a left movement that manages to avoid the following things:

  • Praising Hamas or other theocratic terrorist organisations (eg, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, Palestinian Islamic Jihad or Hezbollah)
  • Writing in a way that’s inaccessible to the people they claim to stand for (usually the working class, and sometimes disabled people if it’s disability-studies scholars who sound no different from their non-disabled counterparts in all the worst ways)
  • Politicising identity to the point that people turn into two-dimensional “oppressor” and “oppressed” classes (usually based on ethnicity, race, or gender) without nuance or distinction
  • Thinking that YELLING LOUDLY WITHOUT CLARIFYING YOUR POSITION is a GOOD WAY TO MAKE A POINT IN AN ARGUMENT. Extra points if you use the clapping đź‘Ź hand đź‘Ź emoji đź‘Ź or repeat your sentence three times, first time in regular type, then italicised, then boldfaced
  • Promoting ideas that are impossible to implement on a large scale unless there’s a transitional period between the current and ideal states
  • Claiming that state propaganda organs like RT (Russia), Sputnik (Russia), TASS (Russia), the Korean Central News Agency (North Korea), Xinhua (China), Press TV (Iran), Global Times (China), TeleSUR (Venezuela), Prensa Latina (Cuba), Al Mayadeen (Lebanon), or Orinoco Tribune (Venezuela) are real “anti-imperialist news”
  • In contrast, relying solely or primarily on Western state media like Radio Liberty/Radio Free Asia (USA), BBC (UK), Deutsche Welle (Germany), or France 24, though this is more of a centre-left phenomenon. Although these sources are much more reliable than their Russian, Chinese, or Iranian equivalents, they tend to gloss over the faults of pro-Western regimes like Ukraine, South Korea, Japan, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia
  • Using only pro-government sources (there are sites that criticise the government without defending Russia) about the Ukrainian conflict, including Kyiv Independent, Kyiv Post, Ukraine Crisis Media Centre, Euromaidan Press, and Ukrainska Pravda. Ukrainian propaganda is less likely to make shit up than Russian propaganda, but it often treats Kiev’s repression and ethnocentric nationalism as a good thing
  • Using conspiracy-theory-laden websites like The Greyzone, MintPress News, Donbass Insider, and Moon of Alabama as reliable sources about China, Russia, or Syria
  • Spreading conspiracy theories in the name of “anti-imperialism,” including debunked claims about Syria’s gas killings and Ukraine’s purported biolabs
  • Treating activism like the Oppression Olympics, even though that’s a game nobody actually wants to win
  • Creating new political parties instead of trying to push existing ones further to the left (yes, I’m kind of an entryist; deal with it)
  • Related to the last point, running presidential or other candidates that have no chance of winning—why run anyone for office if you know damn well that a candidate from the People’s Socialist Party of Freedom, Equality and Liberation has zero chance of winning against the Democrat or Republican (or mainstream equivalents in other countries, like the Tories and Labour in the UK, or the German Christian Democrats and Social Democrats)
  • Refusing to build coalitions across the left because purity politics makes it impossible, thereby allowing the right to split us up and indirectly help leaders like Donald Trump, Geert Wilders and Jair Bolsonaro come to power
  • Expressing essentialist ideas about genders, races or cultures (“Russian culture exists to oppress Ukrainians,” “Indigenous Americans are noble sages,” “men are all rapists,” “‘real’ women are delicate flowers who need ‘sex-based rights’ to protect them from evil trans women”)
  • Calling anyone who disagrees with them “reactionary” or “pseudo-left” (Trotskyists do this a lot)
  • Focusing more on style than substance (“trans women” versus “transwoman”, #KyivNotKiev)
  • Venerating past and present tyrannical dictators like Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, “respected comrade” Kim Jong Un and the rest of his family, Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin (who isn’t even a leftist, much less a communist), Xi Jinping, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Nicolas Maduro, Daniel Ortega, ad nauseam
  • Focusing on foreign policy to the exclusion of domestic policy
  • Focusing on domestic policy to the exclusion of foreign policy
  • Treating Volodymyr Zelensky (and by extension the bumbling Ukrainian central government) as though the were the second coming of Winston Churchill
  • Throwing around jargon like “anti-imperialist,” “settler colonial,” “decolonise,” “bourgeois,” “proletarian,” “imperialist,” “neoliberal,” and “geopolitical economy” without being clear about what they mean
  • Reducing all relationships of dominance and oppression to the control of the means of production or the lack thereof (which is silly, since racism, all sexisms and xenophobia can occur under any economic system, including socialism)
  • Supporting right-wing authoritarian states because they’re opposed to US policy (mostly Russia and Iran)
  • Supporting authoritarian communist or socialist states because they’re opposed to US policy (mostly China, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Syria)
  • Treating politics like a sports game
  • Spouting ableist views—including fat-shaming—because their concept of class or identity organising completely ignores the idea that disability is political
  • Treating the writings of Marx and Engels (or sometimes Lenin, Stalin, and Mao) as holy writ
  • Siding with anti-Western states because they’re “anti-imperialist” (as though China and Russia weren’t expansionist empires, which is the analogue of Japanese, Ukrainian or Taiwanese boosting of Western imperialisms because they’re against China and Russia)
  • Supporting reactionary, xenophobic movements like Brexit (a common view among some British communists, as well as the perennial candidate and professional fruitcake and anti-vaxxer Jill Stein) because they’re against the EU’s neoliberalism
  • Dismissing reports of sexual abuse because they’re a “distraction” from the class struggle
  • Denying genocidal actions of anti-US regimes (China in particular)
  • Claiming that their movement, whether Trotskyism, orthodox Marxism–Leninism, anarchism, or any other tendency, is the only way to solve society’s problems
  • Uncritically defending Ukraine or other pro-Western countries with deeply problematic policies (more common in North American and Western European mainstream media, though views like this sometimes appear among social democrats and other more moderate leftists)
  • Dismissing, defending or promoting racism, misogyny, homophobia or transphobia on the grounds that feminism, pro-LGBTQ activism and antiracism distract from the class struggle
  • Constantly putting political one-upmanship over the real lives, concerns and feelings of actual human beings

Unfortunately, this seems impossible to find, at least for now. I know I can’t agree with everything I find, but the lacuna between my views and theirs is staggering. (But mainstream centre-left politics leaves me unsatisfied, too, and anything on the right is obviously out of the question.)

People who reduce all human relationships between “oppressor” and “oppressed” ethnicities…

2023-11-24 / / 0 Comments

…are the race-reductionist equivalent of vulgar Marxists who view everything through the lens of the eternal struggle of the bourgeoisie and proletariat. All they’re doing is taking a crude interpretation of Marxist theory and using race instead of class. Even the Marxists recognise that that the class struggle changes over time—that’s why it’s called dialectical materialism, not static materialism.

Honestly, I’m more willing to buy that a transactional relationship, such as the worker–owner dichotomy in conventional labour structures, or the dichotomy between political leaders and constituents, is more likely to be the source of systemic oppression, rather than the relationship between, say, Japanese and Koreans. But some inequitable balances of power, such as sexism, undoubtedly predated societies that were able to develop complex transactional relationships. (Also, all these relationships—yes, even culture—are mutable. People marry into different cultures, start companies, lose all their money while gambling in Vegas. The perceived value of different relationships can change over time as well, even if the traits of a group have not—for example, the Germans are viewed differently from how they were in the early 20th century.)

On the cynical use of “open dialogue”

2023-11-20 / / 0 Comments

… why is it that “enlightened centrists” who want “open dialogue” just want an excuse to be racist, sexist (especially transphobic, but also homophobic or misogynistic), xenophobic, ableist, classist, or otherwise prejudicial?

It’s to the point that I distrust anyone who calls for “open dialogue,” because I know that people who want me dead or miserable are going to be brought onto the stage. I don’t mean talking to a dominant or privileged group—as I have said repeatedly, I do not see people as being The Oppressor just because of their skin colour, ancestry, gender, or any other characteristic other than their actions. I am talking about people who actively argue for sex-based restrictions on religious fundamentalist or “feminist” grounds, claim to be “race realists,” or raise the question of severe disabilities to strip all disabled people of their agency.

I don’t like a lot of the woke movement either, but it’s time to distinguish vulnerable minorities from our ostensible spokespeople. (I’ll write more about that later.) I am sick to death of feeling that I have to choose between woke assholes who defend Hamas as a decolonial movement or just shout slogans instead of explaining their position, or chauvinistic majoritarians who cast themselves as iconoclastic (Look, I’m straight and white and that’s not allowed any more!) even though they’re just like everybody else.

What not to do if you actually want people to support Palestinians

2023-11-14 / / 0 Comments

It’s spouting reductive, jargon-packed, essentialist bullshit (and, in the case of the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, pogrom-inciting antisemitism) that will convince nobody outside your narrow academic circle of identitarian leftists. “Settler-colonial” (or just “settler”) is the identitarian-leftist equivalent of the Marxist “bourgeois”—or the right-wing “degenerates” or “groomers.” It’s a way to throw people into a bin and label them. I am sick to death of political movements that are predicated on just trying to wipe out the other guy. You keep doing that and we’re not going to have anyone left. Unless that’s what you want.

There is no one “Zionism” or “anti-Zionism”

2023-11-07 / / 0 Comments

Despite what the media and loudmouthed activists on both sides would have you think, there are multiple kinds of Zionism and anti-Zionism. Some are worse than others. This isn’t a scientific study; it’s based on my observations as an armchair (though not amateur—I went to grad school for public policy) analyst of the situation. I’ll order them from one extreme (eliminationist Zionism) to the other (eliminationist anti-Zionism).

Zionists

Some Zionists want to wipe out all Palestinian Arabs from Israeli territory and ensure that the entire Land of Israel is reserved for Israeli Jews. Prime Minister Netanyahu and his coalition clearly fall into this category. This kind of genocidal Zionism is to be condemned. It is these Zionists who exemplify settler colonialism, since it is their goal to displace all Palestinians, who are merely an obstacle to their version of Manifest Destiny. They are typically Islamophobic and associate Muslims with terrorism, even though most Muslims are peace-loving, just like anybody else. They have forgotten, like their extremist anti-Zionist counterparts, that both Jews and Arabs are native to this part of the Middle East. Rightists with identitarian politics (those who treat certain races, genders, religions or nationalities as virtuous or damned, no in-between) often hold these views—well, except for neo-Nazis and other antisemites, unless they want to deport all diaspora Jews to their own Bantustan.

Other Zionists will allow Palestinians to live, but only in squalid apartheid conditions. This was the status quo in Gaza for several years, even after the Israeli government claimed it would disengage from Gaza in 2005. This kind of Zionism is also to be condemned. These people typically want Judaism to be the state religion. Like the genocidal Zionists, segregationists are Islamophobes and think that keeping people in an open-air prison for 16 years is an acceptable way to fight terrorists—even though a large portion of the Gazan population is children and adolescents. They typically support the West Bank settlements.

And other Zionists are against the apartheid system and Netanyahu’s genocide, but they still prefer to maintain a single Jewish state in which Palestinians are not afforded the same rights. They may or may not support the West Bank settlements. This kind of Zionism is also to be condemned, since it is a mirror image of Middle Eastern Jews’ experiences as dhimmis (a protected but subordinate group) under Islamic rule. These Zionists are probably worth having a dialogue with, since they are opposed to the obvious crimes against humanity committed by the Israeli state.

Some Zionists support the existence of the state of Israel, but they are open to a two-state solution or something else based on the wishes of both Israelis and Palestinians. They generally want to end the occupation of the West Bank and the apartheid regime in Gaza. Like the single-state Zionists, two-state Zionists are worth having a dialogue with. Most western governments fall into this category. The problem arises is when two-state Zionists try to appease the more extreme factions, which some of them do.

Anti-Zionists

Some anti-Zionists want to end the West Bank occupation and apartheid system and want a single secular state that includes both Jews and Arabs. Zionists are often opposed to this solution because it would create a Palestinian majority and dilute the Jewishness of Israel—and possibly open its residents to the antisemitism they escaped in Europe and in the Arab states before the establishment of the Israeli state. (This can probably be circumvented with laws explicitly protecting Jews from antisemitism and honouring the history of the Israeli state, even if it is now secular, as well as quotas for Jewish and Arab representation.) This group of anti-Zionists is usually worth talking to. This flavour of anti-Zionism is common among some leftists, typically Marxists. A variant of this view is anarchists’ anti-Zionism, which opposes both Israeli and Palestinian nationalism—and the existence of any states, regardless of the ethnicity or religion associated with them. Some of these anti-Zionists may support the uprising in general (and show a disturbing lack of regard for Israeli civilian deaths), though they usually disapprove of Hamas’s theocratic beliefs and desire to wipe out all Jews in the area.

Other anti-Zionists want a single state whose official religion is Islam, though they will allow Israeli Jews to remain on the territory. This would be a return to the dhimmi status to which Jews were subjected before the creation of the Israeli state. These anti-Zionists are possibly worth talking to, though their desire for a theocracy means that they are less likely to be reasonable than supporters of a secular state.

And finally, there are anti-Zionists who want to dismantle the state of Israel and kill or deport all the Jewish residents to establish an Islamist Arab ethnostate. This is the view held by Hamas, Hezbollah and some other Islamist groups, as well as some “decolonial” supporters who (wrongly) liken Hamas’s terrorist acts to those by Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress and other resistance fighters. (The currently jailed Marwan Barghouti is a better analogue to Mandela.) Unfortunately, this group of anti-Zionists tends to dominate the conversation, and they really shouldn’t. Leftists with identitarian politics (the lefty version of right-wing fascism or religious fundamentalism) can fall into this category. I find this group the most offensive since they claim to speak in the name of social justice and fairness, but they’re advocating wanton violence and defending terrorists who slaughter civilians instead. I expect right-wing Zionists to be heartless, but not people who are supposedly on “my side.” The sad thing is some tankies—yes, the ones who stuff their articles with quotes from Stalin and praise North Kor—I mean, the “DPRK,” as many times as they can—have been more reasonable than the identitarians. Tankies at the very least usually reject Islamism, even if they frequently fail to condemn Hamas’s killing of civilians. Identitarians don’t give a shit about theocracy if it’s not Jewish or Christian. The idea that a religious or ethnic group can be an oppressed minority in the West and an oppressive majority in the Middle East has not occurred to them. They also tend to see Jews, regardless of race, as white settlers who have displaced native Arabs, even though a plurality of Israeli Jews have ancestors from the Mediterranean or Middle East. They outnumber Ashkenazi Jews, though in Western countries, Jews are typically associated with Ashkenazim because of 19th- and 20th-century immigration patterns. (I spend more time criticising this group than any other because I am surrounded by identitarian leftists who spout this antisemitic genocidal bullshit. I don’t know any Zionists who are calling for a genocide, just progressive Zionists who want equality for both Israelis and Palestinians, as well as the other ethnic groups living in Israel/Palestine.)

The Woke Contrarian’s Views

I lean toward the (preferable) two-state solution or (less ideal) a single secular state. Either is better than the current situation or anything else Jewish or Islamic theocratic nationalists are proposing. Unfortunately, the Israeli regime and Hamas are pushing the worst possible solutions—singular, monoethnic, theocratic states with no room for compromise or coexistence.

Yes, your tone matters.

2023-11-05 / / 0 Comments

I don’t think it’s necessary or required to be nice and polite all the time. There’s no such thing as a polite revolution, even if there should be. But the idea that tone does not, or should not, matter when you’re defending a cause is 100% bullshit. In rhetoric, tone matters. It’s not just what you say—it’s how you say it.

Shouting “Trans women are women” won’t convince people who aren’t familiar with how gender identity works—and it definitely won’t convince people who are right-leaning or centrist but are open to listening to either side. Yelling at them will send them into the arms of transphobes like TERFs and fundamentalist Christians, who reinforce their preconceived notions about gender and sexuality. Your average person is extremely unlikely to be trans, and they are also unlikely to know a trans person, so treating these arguments as truisms does not help this just cause.

Shrieking to a pacifist or soft Zionist, or even your average person who doesn’t know much about the relationship between Israel and Palestine, that Israel is a settler-colonialist imperialist project will merely shut them down. They don’t know what the hell settler colonialism is, and they may not even think that “colonial” is a bad thing—after all, brand names like “Colonial Window Company” and “Imperial Margarine” are common in the US. “Settler colonialism” is an academic talking point. If you say that you don’t care about Israeli civilian casualties or hostages, you’re not going to bring a single person to your side. You just look like a heartless supporter of terrorists (which you are—ironically, you sound a lot like the hard Zionists who will happily bomb the shit out of regular Palestinians to get Hamas). If you call Hamas a bunch of freedom fighters when the news says they’re terrorists over and over again, then they’re not going to listen to you. They’re going to look at you as though you’ve grown two heads. There is a reason why the mainstream media has no time or reason to listen to anti-Zionists: it’s because you keep undermining a good cause (ending the Israeli apartheid regime and stopping Netanyahu’s barbarous attacks on Gaza) by demonstrating a lack of empathy, consideration, patience or basic decency. I am furious at most of the anti-Zionists I’ve spoken to because they’re being heartless assholes. I despise Netanyahu. He’s a genocidal creep. I think Israel’s actions toward Palestinians have been abominable. But Hamas is not the answer. They’re slaughtering civilians. Through their indiscriminate violence they have undermined their own goddamn fucking cause.

I am against all sexisms, including transphobia. I am not a Zionist. If I didn’t already agree with these causes, either in whole or in part, I wouldn’t be convinced. In fact, I would probably double down because I was tired of being scolded over and over again. You cannot make your case by pouncing on people and yelling at them every time they fuck up, every time they merely repeat what the news has pelted them with for the past decade, every time that they ask questions and want to learn more. If you don’t have the energy to argue politely, find people who do. (There are some topics I can debate, like geopolitics, but I can’t debate LGBTQ+ rights, for example.) There is more than one way to organise. I can’t engage with homophobes and transphobes, so I refuse to debate them. There are other queer people who can do that. I used to in the past.

This is why you keep hearing right-wingers and centrists talking about “woke scolds,” even though these people are far from representative. (The worst scolds are on the right.) A jerk for a good cause is still a jerk—and most people will respond accordingly.

Inverse oppression is not liberation.

2023-11-01 / / 0 Comments

Inverse oppression is not liberation.

Calling to commit genocide against a dominant ethnic group is still wrong. It still implies that there are groups of people who don’t deserve to live, not because of what they have individually done, but because of the cruel actions of their government. Targeting your own citizens because they speak the “oppressor’s language” isn’t going to free you from domination; it’s merely going to tear your country apart because your blinkered nationalism has caused you to forget who is also on your side.

I don’t mean this to be a saccharine “why can’t we just get along” plea. I don’t mean that we have to suck up to people who don’t value our lives. Fuck them. But I won’t endorse essentialist claims about how, for example, Russians exist solely to oppress Ukrainians and must be destroyed. This is toxic garbage. Nobody exists solely to oppress anyone else. When you claim that someone’s very existence is oppressive, you sound like a fucking fascist.

Most social justice activists aren’t like this. Most want to find a place for themselves within a pluralist society. But they are drowned out by a loud minority that calls for blood at the earliest opportunity.

Turning misogyny around and claiming that men are all domineering brutes who want to subjugate women doesn’t lead to women’s liberation—it just causes misogynists to double down and act worse because “women hate us anyway.” And “reverse misogynists” are often the ones who end up becoming TERFs, since they believe in sexual determinism. If you’re born with this bodily configuration, you’re virtuous; if you’ve got the other kind, you’re damned.

Certain “woke” academics and students think that antiracism means dehumanising white people, straight people, or cis people—and those white, straight, and cis people will turn around and escalate their racist, homophobic, and transphobic claims because they think that non-white and LGBTQ+ people are out to get them. They think they’re going to be oppressed, too. When they talk about being “decolonial,” they want to become the new colonisers instead, wiping out history and rewriting it to fit a new “liberated” agenda. (And some are perfectly fine with some colonisers like the Chinese.) They conflate cultural exchange—a near-universal in all human societies—with crude cultural appropriation, like white people wearing stupid fake Native American headdresses at Coachella.

Real liberation occurs when societies can reckon with historical inequities and find ways to live alongside each other. We must not tolerate racism, sexism or any other prejudice. But this demand must be separated from retributive, eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth “morality.” There is a difference between fighting for one’s rights—even with violence—and wanting to eliminate the other side. For example, I don’t want white Americans to be wiped out. I want them to start seeing their non-white counterparts as full members of society.

I am tired of hearing that calling for reconciliation and kindness, rather than calling for blood, means “siding with the oppressor.” Unfortunately, a lot of oppressed people think that liberation means doing what the other guys did to them. The oppressed can become oppressors. One cursory look at a history book will show this to be true. The Russians were oppressed by the Mongols. Later, they turned around and oppressed Mongolic groups like the Buryats. Jews were and are oppressed in Western societies and the Arab world. But now the Israeli state (not Jews as a whole, just the Israeli state) is oppressing Palestinian Arabs, and those Arabs, as well as their Iranian allies, are now calling for the oppression of Jews as a whole. Both Jews and Muslims are marginalised religious and ethnic minorities in the West, and this complicates politics among Israel’s allies. Anti-Zionism is shot through with antisemitism, and Zionism is shot through with Islamophobia. And there are people who are both oppressor and oppressed—for example, non-white Americans may serve in the army and still struggle with racism at home. I side-eye anyone who talks about “The Oppressor” as though this is a permanent category, an indelible mark of evil.

I do not believe in tit-for-tat morality and I will never endorse it, even if it is masked as “liberation.” I’m not against the use of violence to send a message (though it should occur only after non-violent options have been exhausted), but it has to be targeted—and it should not be directed at civilians or private citizens. I’m sick of this Manichaean bullshit, and I hate that social justice movements have been infected with it.

If you are obsessed with eliminating groups of people, you aren’t freeing anyone from literal or figurative bondage. You just want to be the new master.

I am sick to death…

2023-10-30 / / 0 Comments

… of having support for Hamas or Israel shoved down my throat. Fuck them both. I care about Israeli and Palestinian civilians, but I don’t particularly care whether Israel or Hamas wins. Both sides want to commit genocide against each other. I value Israelis and Palestinians equally, as everyone should. (Zionists and anti-Zionists don’t seem to agree with me, though.) I’m not going to pick Far-Right Racist Group A over Far-Right Racist Group B just because Far-Right Racist Group A has less power right now. I’m not going to call an indigenous population “settler colonialists,” as though we were dealing with Christopher Columbus. Both Jews and Arabs have the right to live in Israel/Palestine, but Zionists and anti-Zionists cannot get that through their thick fucking skulls. Jews were EXPELLED from Palestine by antisemitic Christian and Muslim governments. Don’t fucking tell me that it’s the same as the British colonising India or something.

But I’m not going to excuse the Jewish-supremacist, far-right Netanyahu government’s genocidal behaviour against the people of Gaza because of Jews’ suffering in the Holocaust. Jews are indigenous to Palestine. They aren’t just a bunch of random white settlers and I want to fucking strangle anyone who tries to push that narrative on me. But being indigenous doesn’t let you off for being shitty to your neighbours. Arabs have a right to live freely and have equal rights. No more apartheid, no more segregation. They have every right to rebel, but Hamas is not the flag to rally around. Jews have every fucking right to be afraid of pogroms led by an Islamist terrorist group, apartheid regime notwithstanding. (I’ve said this before, but Hamas isn’t Nelson Mandela. Stop trying to whitewash this national-chauvinist terrorist group just because they want to free themselves from Israeli occupation. Are you going to call Al-Qaeda freedom fighters for challenging American imperialism by flying a plane into the fucking Twin Towers next? Are ISIS now freedom fighters because they’re a thorn in the side for Western imperialist powers because they want to maintain hegemony over the Middle East—and everywhere else?) Being oppressed doesn’t get you a get-out-of-basic-human-decency card. Claiming otherwise is a recipe for disaster, as we are now witnessing every day in Gaza.

And Zionists and anti-Zionists tend to treat their sides like their favourite sports team. They don’t trivialise deaths on their own side, but they show a remarkable amount of callousness towards the deaths of the other side’s civilians. And if you challenge them, they double down and start shouting about how Palestinians are all a bunch of terrorists or all Israelis are Kosher Nazis. Come the fuck on. People are fucking killing each other, spouting nationalist slogans and swearing they’ll wipe the other side off the map.

As soon as the Middle East is involved, everyone becomes unhinged, I swear.

Fuck Netanyahu. Fuck Hamas. I hope both governments fail and are replaced by something better for everyone living in the area. It feels as the only sane voices about all this are from anarchists and certain communists, who rightly see through the pro-nationalist bullshit that is spewing from both Zionists and anti-Zionists.

(I am infinitely relieved to have this anonymous blog, because I think if I showed certain people, I think they’d shun me because I refuse to be on Team Israel or Palestine. It’s like asking me to choose between arsenic and strychnine.)

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