#resistance to occupation and colonization is always justified

[northern-passage]

Reblogging something about celebrating terrorist groups murdering and kidnapping people.....I just hope that anyone who enjoys seeing such things will *never* have the experience of having their loved ones disappear one morning.

I hope they never have to see the faces of theirs relatives, friends, classmates, colleagues and neighbors on palestinian tv being beaten and dragged to gaza by terrorist.

Could you imagine seeing your friend who was missing the whole day on palestinian tiktok being kidnapped while people are happy about it? While entire streets are closed inside their homes because armed terrorist raid your city? Breaking into homes to kidnap people?

No matter what side theyre on i hope no one ever has to experience that kind of horror.

the Palestinian people have had to watch their children and brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers be murdered violently in the streets of Gaza for decades because of the violent occupation of Palestine.

you get to call the colonizers "relatives, friends, classmates, colleagues and neighbors" but the Palestinian people are only ever "terrorists." when the Israeli police drag Palestinians out of mosques and kill them in streets-- more than 200 Palestinians have been killed this year alone, plus the 161 that have already been killed in retaliation-- are you going to call them terrorists, too? as Israel continues their retaliation and kills 30 Palestinians for every single Israeli soldier, is it "terrorism" or will you find a way to justify it, then? will you care about the "relatives, friends, classmates, colleagues and neighbors" then?

"No matter what side theyre on i hope no one ever has to experience that kind of horror." again, Palestinians have been living this for decades. and what we're witnessing now is the inevitable response to those decades of oppression & occupation.

as for your "friends, classmates, colleagues and neighbors" -- they are living on occupied land. land that was taken by force through ethnic cleansing. they can leave at any time-- most of them have already, fleeing back to their home countries with their dual citizenships, or theyre safely sitting in hotels waiting for it to be over. they are settlers. they are part of the settler colony that is actively oppressing, dispossessing, and murdering Palestinians. and to be clear, that post you're talking about is not "celebrating civilian deaths," you are just purposefully misrepresenting it here to further dehumanize Palestinians and depict them as "terrorists." of course i do not want civilians to die. no one wants that. i feel for the Israeli people, the children & the ones who cannot leave. but at least they are allowed to be people, they are allowed to be friends, classmates, colleagues, neighbors. Palestinians have never been granted that, and you are proving it here in my inbox.

these "terrorists" you decry are oppressed people taking up arms-- scavenged from the weapons Israeli soldiers and police have been using against them for years-- to decolonize and take back their home. decolonization is a violent process. we absolutely cannot tolerate a double standard. there is no "both sides."

Myth: Israel is defending itself | Decolonize Palestine

Myth: Israel is not an Apartheid state | Decolonize Palestine

Myth: Israel has always sought peace | Decolonize Palestine

Myth: The Palestinian Authority subsidizes "terrorism" (pay to slay) | Decolonize Palestine

Myth: Israel (or any other state) has a right to exist | Decolonize Palestine

all of my support to the Palestinian resistance, from the river to the sea Palestine will be free.

[belle-keys]

My Hogwarts House book recs

Okay, ever since some of my favorite booktubers made posts like these many a year ago, I always wanted to make a book rec list like this because I still genuinely do like the Hogwarts Houses. Enjoy!

Gryffindor

Graceling by Kristen Cashore - she walked so these new fantasy girlies could run, fantasy kingdom with assassin main character, the original ya high fantasy killer girlboss imo

A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin - all of the sympathetic leads are classic heroes (dany, jon, arya), adventure and politics and battle and dragons, nuanced outlooks on honor

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah - ww2 novel, deals with the french resistance during the occupation, hit every spot in my cold black heart, emphasis on sisterhood and endurance

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen - what is bravery if not a broke woman telling a rich man to get a grip, og strong female lead overcoming many challenges, criticisms of polite society

Hufflepuff

Crave by Tracy Wolff - big on found family, paranormal romance shenanigans in a boarding school, somewhat satire, unserious and just very wholesome, steeped in nostalgia uwu

All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir - unapologetically written to heal and explore trauma, cathartic, wholesome and pure relationships, emphasis on self-growth and overcoming abuse and pain

The Stationery Shop by Marjan Kamali - historical, about the value of relationships in war and hardship, themes of growth and acceptance and promises, beautiful story

The Foxhole Court by Nora Sakavic - what happens when you let a bunch of mentally ill kids play a made up sport, angsty but feels like a big hug, contemporary fiction, just genius ok

Ravenclaw

The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake - very slytherclaw, philosophy and physics as the basis, dark academia urban fantasy, character-driven, multiple POVs, morally grey academics

Babel by RF Kuang - this book has been likened to a history textbook, by a nerd girlie for the nerd girlies, linguistics and languages, super well-researched, condemns colonization

Disorientation by Elain Hsieh Chou - witty and sharp narration and dialogue, set in academia and deals with east asian literature, satire and black comedy, explores racial fetishization

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov - only a ravenclaw could appreciation its complexity, so many literary references, stylistically immaculate, lots of room to debate its message and themes

Slytherin

Vicious by VE Schwab - perfect moral quandaries demonstrated here, everyone is morally dark grey, supervillains, very angsty and also profound at times, dark academia

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde - my man makes a deal with the devil for eternal youth and beauty, everyone here is morally dubious, murder and orgies and philosophy

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn - exhausted woman does what she needs to do, female rage book, does some interesting things with pov, justified evil, amy dunne is insane and it's great

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao - tired chinese woman does what she needs to do and kills men, very unhinged queen behavior, ambition and god complexes, pacific rim but in china

[the-world-annealing]

Communism, Anti-Colonialism, and Palestine

The state of Israel is deeply unjust for denying millions of people basic rights, ranging from democratic representation to energy to food and water. Violent resistance against this domination is justified insofar it helps these people throw off their shackles.

I consider the above incredibly straightforward, and it's genuinely worrying for me to see people come up with justifications for why it's best if the occupation continues indefinitely in its current form. I genuinely don't get why someone who views all human life as valuable could even believe this.

But at the same time please consider what 'there is no two-state solution, it's all Palestine' would imply if you tried to like, actually implement it. The region contains fifteen million people, who are about 50/50 split Israeli/Palestinian, clearly your solution isn't to set up a representative government and let democracy save the day, so do you just want to ship seven million people off to wherever their grandmothers were born?

"I mean, it worked for the pied-noirs..." the pied-noirs totaled less than a million, made up only 10% of Algeria's total population, and had an imperial metropole eager to take them back. Do you know what situation is actually analoguous to the pied-noirs'? Returning only those Israelis who settled across the 1967 borders.

"Dang I guess we just can't let them be full citizens then", look, if your definition of 'anti-imperialist action' is to replace one legally enshrined ethnic underclass with another then I think you've gone and replaced any concern for human wellbeing with crude geopolitics.

"Oh no those poor colonizers lmao" look, even if you think every single Israeli currently alive is complicit enough in the crime of occupation to lose fundamental rights (what's your thoughts on people complicit in more traditional crimes btw? just curious), what's your plan for all the ones born after them?

The presence of the Israelis is not inherently a problem; the problem is the gross economical and political disparity between them and the Palestinians (which really is the root cause of all the sectarian conflict; look up the timeline on the Jewish National Fund and 1936 revolt and suddenly things make a lot more sense).

(the above is also my response to any right-winger trying to suggest multiculturalism is doomed so either side should hurry up and genocide the other already - you are mistaking economical conflicts for ethnic ones as you literally always do, but this started as an economical conflict and it can be solved by economical means)

Any kind of just resolution to the conflict would involve enormous redistribution of capital, and in any moral one-state solution that state would be very unlike Israel, but guess what? Fixing wealth disparities and unjust political structures is the mandate of communism already, and if those inequalities exist along racial lines then that's a symptom but does not require an exceptional new treatment.

tldr: It would be incredibly difficult for a variety of reasons to create an Arab-only state where Israel currently exists, fortunately attaining economic and political justice does not actually require demographic change, so maybe make that clear somewhere and stop giving ammunition to the people who're accusing you of clamoring for genocide.

[techmomma]

Spotting Zionism in Media

So when I recently realized a particular piece of young adult animation was pretty heavily leaning into Zionist ideology, it got me thinking: how does one spot it? I've started to recognize some patterns, but this is an open forum: if you are learned in this or have found ways to spot zionism in stories or zionist dogwhistles, I encourage you to add them onto here.

So here are some things to look out for, WITH A HUGE CAVEAT: individually, these may not necessarily indicate a zionist story or an author who is sympathetic toward zionism, but together with other elements, could indicate the intent of the author to create sympathy for Isn*reall. In fact, I would really encourage you to look for more than one of the items on this list. We're looking for patterns, not individual instances. That being said.

Exile of a people from their homeland many generations prior. We're not talking like the grandparents of the current adult generation, we're talking like hundreds if not thousands of years prior. Not necessarily Zionist itself, but may come with themes like, "why were they kicked out? because the other native population kicked them out. why? because I don't know, they're mean or are hoarding resources or whatever," or themes like "the other indigenous population was there just as long if not longer but exiling the other population was cruel and unecessary." Themes like, "The exiled population has to constantly fight for their own survival, sometimes ESPECIALLY against that other native population." Themes like, "the homeland is a verdant paradise that the Other will not share with its rightful inheritors." Liberal zionist reads may offer a more sympathetic few of the ones who kicked out the exilees, but the end result is the same: "this is our homeland too, so everyone should share." Which, you know, on a surface read sounds innocent enough, but is twisting the actual, real history of the Levantine area and its indigenous peoples, and does not understand actual concepts of indigeneity. And also y'know. Completely glosses over the whole "britain and america had colonies in the levantine area and basically chopped it up without the permission of the people living there to shove colonists in to control the area." And then continued to massacre the people already living there.

Appropriation of Holocaust and genocide imagery. Zionists looove to pull the whole, "these people endured an unimaginable genocide or massacre of their people" which again sounds innocent enough, but zionist narrative often then go on to use this cataclysm to justify further violence enacted by the main people (it's always going to be the group the protagonists are made of) for the sake of "survival."

Related to this is often a theme of villainizing rebel or resistance groups. More liberal reads may even offer sympathy toward these groups in kind of "well the rebels do have a point but both sides have hurt and been hurt" philosophy, but inevitably, the resistance or rebels are framed as "going too far." The rebels may mean well in the kindest zionist portrayals but are just too violent and that will be their downfall, while the real protagonists will try to foster peace by saying "all violence bad." Many times the original cause of the violence between the two groups is like swept under the rug or written off as "its just always been this way" or even "no one can even remember why they hurt each other anymore." Which again, sounds innocent enough. But that is the insidousness of zionism, which is that it uses these surface readings that sound good or things most people would agree with, in order to erase the context what happened and happens in Palestine--which is that of a brutal colonizer attempting to subjugate and erase an indigenous people. It also attempts to erase or delegitimize the idea that armed resistance is absolutely necessary to occupation

Related, there are often themes of the two opposing factions being on relatively equal footing (the protags will always been at least a little bit of an underdog tho for the sake of garnering sympathy) which is again an attempt to delegitimize the idea of palestine being occupied by a brutal aggressor. Instead being, again, painted as "two fairly equal warring factions fighting for survival," which also serves as an attempt to legitimize their own brutality and violence enacted on palestinians.

This theme is probably the MOST highly contextual, so I would very much not jump on calling a work zionist just because you see this, but look at it in context of other themes. If you see any of the above themes, then this one is probably being used in conjunction, but is not any kind of smoking gun by itself. That is a theme of sympathy towards morally objectionable actions done for the sake of protecting others. MANY STORIES HAVE THIS ELEMENT which is why I urge caution if you see it!! Please, god, don't show that you are chronically on the piss on the poor website and instead use a little reading comprehension. But in the context of zionist stories, this element is used to help justify the idea of "well it's okay to burn a village with everyone trapped inside their buildings because there were people there who would kill my family." It's sometimes framed as a "I had no other choice," again to legitimize zionist violence, and perpetuate this idea of the Other (usually middle eastern) always being out to kill them. It's the tactic used to justify the idea of "well to insure my people's survival I need to use this thermobaric bomb against a civilian population :( "

Speaking of, there will often be light to heavy racism against middle easterners and muslims. Even if put in a sympathetic light, the middle eastern stand in will, inevitably, be an antagonist or even an outright villain. Liberal zionists are even starting to use poc as protagonists to help sell this idea that zionism isn't deeply rooted in racism because "look! we have black people on our team! this isn't about brown people!" (you will often find, however, that most of the story still centers around the lily-skinned characters no matter how much they laud their poc). Related to this, there may be themes of Good Minorities who become part of the protagonist team because they have started to embrace the protagonist culture.

Going back to the villanization of rebels, you will often find those rebels, especially the ones being framed as bad, to be religious fanatics/extremists or heavily believe in martydom. They may even go so far as to say things like, "well you can't reason with them, they're fanatics!" I do not need to explain how this is a racist caricature. Bonus points for "racist caricature" if the rebels usually operate in small strike teams causing massive damage to civilian populations. something something terrorism is usually mentioned.

Those rebels may even be portrayed as racist themselves! Because they do not like the protagonist (zionist) culture, and will be xenophobic toward the culture of the protagonist.

Not all zionist media likely has this but heavy sympathy for cops, soldiers, and autocrats (or analogs for each) is usually present.

And the last and most unfortunate one, appropriation of jewish culture. THIS IS NOT AN INDICATOR BY ITSELF because we need jewish representation! We need jewish names and themes and ideas, but the problem is when you see these OTHER themes first, and then you see a bunch of jewish names? That probably is going to lean a story toward zionist propaganda. And that is… so, so incredibly infuriating and sad. PLEASE FUCKING USE CAUTION WITH THIS THOUGH.

Think of it this way: having a bunch of german names and ideas in a story does not make it a nazi story! No nazi themes, then it's just a fuckin german story. However! If a story has a bunch of nazi themes? Then all of the german names and ideas are probably going to be a nail in the coffin as to the question of "is this a nazi story." It'll take you from "95% sure it's a nazi story" to "99% sure it's a nazi story," if that makes sense. God I hope it does. CONTEXT.

I really do hope this helps you all spot zionist propoganda! I cannot emphasize enough that you CANNOT take any one of these individually as proof of a zionist story. Even the racist points don't necessarily mean a story is zionist; could just be good ol' fashioned racism! However, finding patterns or finding multiple themes that fit the zionist bill can usually tell you whether or not the author, or authors, have zionist sympathies. And hopefully all of this can help you look critically at the media we watch, because one you see it, it's real hard not to see it in like. a lot of places. If you want really good words on zionism in games, this article is a fantastic dive into the zionism of the Last of Us II.

I'm not making this rebloggable for now because… oh my fucking god. But maybe if you all play nice I'll let you. :) I encourage comments with your own observations or any zionist themes you think I might have missed! I do suspect I missed a couple, so feel free to comment with any you think I missed.

Eugh, this is sounding like a youtuber outro. Get out of here. Use your knowledge for good and also to fuck up a zionist's day.

[abla-soso]

So I have seen your Israel vs Palestine posts. I don't know much about the conflict so I have been doing some research on the history and watching some news coverage.

I admit that I am slightly biased for Israel but there is so much information that it is hard to tell truth from lies. Israel says they want to eliminate Hamas but I don't understand how bombing Palestine is supposed to do this. I mean I don't think the Nazis were defeated by just bombing German towns. That makes no sense.

I want your take on this:

What is your ideal solution to this conflict?

After the attacks on Israel, how you would have preferred Israel to respond?

What is your opinion on Hamas and how they got elected into power?

How would you respond to people who disapprove of Palestinians on the news not condemning Hamas' attacks?

@fanfic-lover-girl

Hello. Sorry it took me so long to answer, but I've been mentally and emotionally drained by what's happening in Gaza. I'm glad you're willing to learn the truth and I hope you commit to it no matter how difficult it is to unlearn years of propaganda. The fact that you're open-minded and decent enough to admit your ignorance and your biases is a positive sign for growth.

I hope you've read my latest Palestine posts because they pretty much answered all of your questions, but I will try to summarize them as best as I can:

This genocide was never about Hamas. It was always about ethnically cleansing the land from Palestinians and turning the legally recognized Palestinian territories into Israeli ones. Israeli officials have publically stated this. There is no Hamas in the West Bank, yet the Palestinians there are still been bombed. Israel has been slaughtering and ethnically cleansing the Palestinians since 1948. That's 40 years before Hamas ever existed. Hamas existed as a response to Israel's state terrorism. Israel is using "fighting Hamas" as an excuse to justify its war crimes.

The ideal solution is justice. Peace can not happen without justice. The apartheid of Israel must end. The brutal occupation and military dictatorship must end. The genocidally racist government and ethnostate of Israel must be dismantled. Palestinians should get back their basic human rights. Zionists - whether they were Jews or Arabs - must be kicked out, because the defeated colonizers can NOT peacefully co-exist with the newly freed population and they'll always be a danger. Non-zionist Jews are welcome to stay as full citizens and they're allowed to call freed Palestine their home.

Hamas - like any freedom fighters group aiming for liberation from brutal tyranny - is certainly flawed and some of its methods can be problematic. But it's not a religiously extremist group. It's not a terrorist group. They're not aiming to kill all Jews or whatever bullshit Israeli propaganda spews. Their only enemy is the armed zionists. Do they care about Israeli citizens? No, not really. Hamas as a group does not systematically aim to kill or torture Israeli civilians (their humane treatment of the Israeli hostages should be clear proof of that), but they don't care if some Hamas members lash out on their own. They don't view Israeli citizens as innocent civilians, and I can't blame them. Not when ALL of these "civilians" have worked in the Israeli military (because military service is mandatory in Israel) and are actively and directly supporting the genocide of Palestinians. Most of Hamas members are deeply traumatized orphans who suffer from unimaginable oppression every single day. I can't condemn them when they lash out. Just as I can't condemn Nelson Mendiola (who was labeled a terrorist for using armed resistance). Just as I can't condemn the Native Americans who raged many wars against their colonizers. Just as I can't condemn the freed slaves in Haiti who massacred their white slavers during the slave revolution. I can objectively find some of their actions unjustifiable (mainly if they deliberately targeted children) but no one has any right to condemn them.

I'd tell them it's pretty fucking shitty to focus on the oppressed when they lash out at their oppressors, and it's even more shitty to condemn them for not being passive victims. I'd ask them: Why is no pro-Israel person being asked to condemn Israel's war crimes on the news? Why are they equating the violence done by the oppressive colonizers with the violence done by the colonized who are trying to be free?

[ketrindoll]

Russian imperialism and colonisation as a twin to Western colonial culture

Translated from the original post written by Ukrainian historian Yevhenya Havrishenko. [While mainly focusing on Ukraine, it applies to all countries formerly occupied by Russian Empire, USSR, or Russian Federation.] It’s a long text, but worth the read if you’re interested in colonization and examples of it beyond Western states.

So there is this post-colonial theory. It is a theory that has been developed by scholars in post-colonial countries who are trying to revise the established cultural attitudes about their occupants. For a long time, this discourse was confined to a reassessment of the position of the former colonies of Western Europe, but guess what happened? A little spoiler. The research concluded and proved the colonial nature of Russia (RI, USSR, and RF are just different names for the same empire).

In this post, I will try to briefly outline the main colonial narratives that the metropolises imposed on their colonies in order to: a) justify predatory exploitation and b) keep the colonies docile by convincing them that this is the way it should be. This was when the "sharovar" stereotypes began to form, and these ideas spread. Transculturation (the replacement of an enslaved culture with an alien one) was perceived by Ukrainians as a transformation of themselves and increasingly used as a representation of themselves. The acceptance of a surrogate culture as one's own is rooted in stigma - if the stigmatized (in our case, those discriminated against on the basis of ethnicity) see that resistance is impossible, they try to gain secondary benefits and start playing along with the stereotype.

1. Exoticizing colonized space The colonizer traditionally depicts the colony as something exotic, fantastic, highly romantic, and even erotic. Everything that happens there is exalted and overly emotional and fun. The purpose of colonized culture is to entertain the white master with a safari helmet, and therefore, it should not be overloaded with content. Bright, unpretentious, and silly "so as not to disturb the authorities with its sophistication," and, God forbid, if it leads to complexity. In our case, a striking example of this is, unfortunately, Gogol's "<...>Little Russia", where Ukraine is portrayed as a place full of idyllic or fantastic adventures, jokes, and artificial villages. Because of their exotic nature, the stories were popular in St Petersburg's high society circles. The same can be said of the welcoming of delegations dressed in national costumes, with songs and soldiers. Many of the former colonies have something similar - local exoticism.

2. Objectification All colonialists describe the enslaved as a community that is not only non-subjective, i.e., lacking a will, but has never had one, and therefore needs the firm hand of a master and the supervision of a "truer nation." If you portray the indigenous as infantile and helpless, then it is easier to explain the need for colonialism, whereby the 'master' supposedly brings order and civilization and helps the immature to manage themselves. In Russian historiography, in whose paradigm we have been living up to now, there is a gaping hole between Ruthenia and the time of the Khmelnytsky uprising because it is striking to some people that we have had a wonderful life without the advice of the Big Brother. The stereotypical Ukrainian is either an apolitical villager who cares about his own backyard or a narrow-minded nationalist (in the sense of aggressive, not determined, liberation). And Russians, in the same Soviet cinema, have always been assigned the role of committee chairman, militiaman, and teacher. Because he is a representative of the government, who looks at a broader context, thinks more globally, and is a representative of the "statist" and "mature" people, who are paternally concerned about the interests of the whole empire.

[The same was done to Lithuania. Lithuanian Grand Duchy achieved statehood earlier than Russia, went through Renaissance with all of its ideals, unlike Russia, and was a large and powerful central Europe nation. However, during the Empiric and Soviet occupations, Russia tried to erase that history. Present Lithuania’s past as flawed and corrupt, or inherently Polish and thus not national at all.]

3. Cruelty, chaos, and reservoir of the colonizer's fears The general tendency of colonizers when describing the indigenous population is to attribute savagery and cruelty along with infantilism. If the former is always well-adjusted, highly educated, rational, and truthful, the enslaved is the embodiment of the local devils, who are frightening, elemental, irrational, dark, superstitious, villainous, hostile, cunning, and lustful. Despite the generally accepted canon of witty, good Ukrainians who will eat dumplings and sing a song, Russian propaganda has always been full of horror stories about Petlirovtsy/Banderovtsy/Azovtsy, who is a threat to the civilian population that must be 'saved' from everyone. Gogol's evil spirit also comes under this heading because the colony is a 'demonic' place that can only be cleansed by the 'blessing' of the emperor's boot.

[During Soviet occupation, national resistance to occupation and guerrilla warfare in Lithuania was depicted as a vile bandit movement, who assaulted civilians and only wanted money. That belief was so strong, a lot of people born between 1940 and 1980 still believe in it. There is proof that NKVD - later renamed KGB - officers and local collaborators would dress up as guerrilla fighters to terrorise rural populace in order to extinguish support.]

4. Primitivity Of course, the culture of a colony must be more primitive than that of a colonist, and it doesn't matter if this is true. This thesis is the basis for the many prohibitions against modernising Ukrainian culture on its own ethnic basis. By introducing various rules and orders and by artificially preserving it in an archaic, censored, castrated folklorism on a social-domestic level. As a result, the best representatives of science, art and culture have been repressed for centuries, and simulacra have been created in the form of various unions and collectives which were supposed to control the development of culture, preventing it from overstepping the set boundaries. Is it really worth wondering at the vast amount of literary works about serfs, the obsession of theatre, choral and dance groups with domestic and rural themes, as this was all that was allowed, and anything that was created that was different remained outside the law? The Ukrainian was to be portrayed as something parochial, rustic, without glamour, manners and high culture, which only opened up through the mediation of the elder brother and the master. Slavist Eva Thompson refers to the terminological appropriation of one culture (the colony) by another (the colonist) as a distinct feature of Russian colonialism - a stabilization method that consists in the regular, systematic, and purposeful incorporation of the "25th frame" into mass culture. That is to say, by inserting hidden narratives that Russians are civilizationally superior to the people of the national republics of the empire and that they are capable of doing everything better. These were unobtrusive messages, allusions, and comparisons, often deliberately distorted and completely false, disseminated through films, television programs, magazines, textbooks, fiction, and the like, where Russia, Russians, and Russian culture were elevated, and local culture was presented as inferior, provincial and backward.

[Despite Lithuania having theatres, operas, and Universities centuries before Russia did, Soviet occupiers tried to present themselves as givers of high art and culture. As a teacher of all that is culturally superior. To this day, we are reminded, sometimes by fellow Lithuanians who grew up with this propaganda, that they built us hospitals and schools - regardless of the fact that we had those before they came and many they destroyed while annexing us. Even earlier, during the Empire’s occupation, Russians closed our University, which was one of the beacons of Enlightenment in Europe - the Metric system originated in Vilnius. During the 50-year era of Soviet occupation, the idea that Lithuanian national identity was kept alive purely by serfs and farmers got planted into the national psyche, with many folklore festivals and museums originating specifically during this period of time. So many of our writers and scientists were denied submissions for Nobel awards as well.]

5. Deprivation of ownership rights to national history As in the case of Orientalism as described by Said, the Russians have not given up trying to prove that the local ancient culture, which, as in the case of the Eastern Europe and Ukraine, is older and more pronounced than the culture of the colonizer, is more likely to be the cradle of their own culture than that of the Ukrainian. The local population is not allowed to identify itself, and in films, cartoons and fiction, medieval Ruthenia is portrayed only as Russian. Ancient artefacts are plundered to appropriate and represent their own culture, while Ukrainian history is uprooted all the way back to the Enlightenment and presented as lacking a serious tradition of statehood, aristocracy and politics.

[Lithuanian royal palace and Vilnius Museum of Antiquities had a large collection of artwork by history’s most renowned artists, as well as archeological artifacts. Lithuanian nobleman Tyshkevich had the largest collection of Ancient Egyptian artifacts - all collected decades before Carter and with official permits from the local officials - which he donated both to local Museums, the Louvre, and other notable places. All that was in Lithuania disappeared during WWII - stolen by both Nazis and Soviets alike, likely taken to Russia, never to be returned or sold by looters.]

Russia's national policy in Crimea was similar but with some differences. For several centuries, the indigenous population of the peninsula has been orientalized and humiliated, discriminated based on their religion, Islam. Most of the indigenous population were exiled from their homeland or forced to emigrate to save their lives, even during the Empire era. After the Bolshevik occupation and annexation by the USSR, despite a brief period of so-called "indigenization," Soviet policy reverted back to what D. Brandenberger calls "Russocentrism". The Crimean Tatars were expelled from Crimea and replaced by Russians and later by loyal Ukrainians, who finally established the peninsula as a colony. Crimea was turned into a cauldron of nationalities in which absolute supremacy was given to the Russians and Russian culture, from which a new type of identity was to be born: the Soviet man. As a result, the descendants of the settlers developed a separate local identity and, through the mediation of birthright, could already claim this territory. As you can see, the indigenous peoples of Crimea were not even left with the option of a kitsch culture but were simply wiped off the face of the earth.

[USSR did the same to the Baltic states, replacing whole families exiled to the Siberian wilderness to die with the Russian population, most moving into the houses of exiled people, with their belongings still left there. Russian Federation is doing this to Ukrainians nowadays, where locals are replaced by Russians who then participate in “referendums.”]

Whatever name it picks over the years, Russia has always been a colonizer. An Empire of Evil that plagues its neighboring states. Equally genocidal, equally cruel as its Western counterparts. And while many Western states are now moving towards a reevaluation of their history, presenting it in a negative light, Russia never did. Russia invaded Ukraine on that same false pretense that Ukraine is “theirs.” You cannot support Russia or its culture without also being pro-colonialism and pro-Imperialism.

[pumpacti0n]

I plan on replying in full to that one response to my post about the seizing of state power and why anarchists reject it. but for now I can take the opportunity to use current events as an example to illustrate why this conflation of authority with self defense is awful and hazardous.

from the very beginning of the isareli settler occupation until now, every pro-israel entity has framed the ongoing genocide of palestinians as "self defense". so, according to them, there's no hypocrisy in condemning "political violence" because their attacks are portrayed as justified and reasonable responses to the october 7 attacks. this way, all of the collateral damage can be blamed on the alleged "instigators" indefinitely.

a similar framing is often used to protect cops against any consequences for killing someone while attempting to chase or arrest another target, or killing a target they believe (or claim to believe,) present a threat to them. this is what happened with the black panther party and COINTELPRO, for example, during the assassination plot against Fred Hampton and a number of other influential radical figures.

that, combined with the "guilty until proven innocent" bias when it comes to the colonized masses, is what helps give politicians the confidence to say things like "political violence is unacceptable" that are blatantly false.

the slaves, the colonized, the cult leader's followers, the party, must fall in line or die at the whims of their masters, because their use of power over others is made into law, thus considered legitimate and necessary.

the "spin" is critical tactic for any political project that relies on centralized and hierarchical power structures. it allows those at the top of any given hierarchy to avoid criticism and flip the script, a textbook maneuver for individual abusers that can scale all the way up to the level of a state's ruling class.

when the ruling class have access to the means of sustaining life itself as well as the means to inflict harm in order to restrict them, dishonesty is hardly off the table as a tactic to ensure their power goes unchallenged. in fact, it is required.

this is all the more reason to demand specificity and transparency around what constitutes self-defense and what amounts to authorities seeking to preserve the power structures that force the masses into submission. this is not to be taken lightly, because the results are always the same: power structures preserving themselves for an exclusive minority of individuals at the expense of those at the very bottom.

if everything from a slave revolt and free breakfast programs to the bombing of a school or hospital can be labelled "authoritarian", then the word truly has no value and this mystification only helps maintain the status quo, not its necessary destruction.

states, by their very nature, resist bottom-up organization. it can't be any other way. no state has ever created itself without the wholesale destruction of the society existing prior to it, nor can exist independently of the social stratification and resource hoarding necessary to ransom the captive population into obedience or entice them into positions as middle-managers and overseers. whether we call this a vanguard or not changes jack shit about the power dynamics at play.

the price of statehood is always passed along somewhere, to some group or another, someone must be the beast of burden whose labor is used to plow the field while the politicians and capitalists feast on the fruit it grows and sells it back at a profit.

and if these beasts rise up, not to find some poor soul to take their places, but to do away with this relationship in its entirety, to liken them to their former masters and claim that they are using similar means for similar ends is a total farce, and you don't have to call yourself an anarchist to recognize that, just someone who can tell the difference between a bullied person suffering and a bully getting his ass kicked.

[dreamlandsystem]

It’s always “respect our existence or expect our resistance” unless it’s Palestinians who are resisting, huh?

The violent resistance of Palestinians (and yes, this includes Hamas) is justified! Violent resistance is not only necessary, but is often an occupied people’s only means of gaining personal autonomy and the rights to live their own lives.

FYI, Hamas does NOT advocate for the death of all Jews. You can check out their official charter, which we’ll link below. In fact, their charter states that their struggle is not against Jews, but the Zionist establishment that threatens Palestinian life and culture.

Hamas is a resistance movement. Hamas fighters are freedom fighters. We know there’s nuance, and we know nothing is black and white. But Hamas is not the villainous terrorist organization that many people seem to believe that it is.

Please, if you haven’t yet, please check out the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ page documenting Palestinian and Israeli casualties. The differences are STARK and heart-wrenching (not to mention that, due to Israel destroying much of Palestine’s abilities to accurately record-keep, the numbers of Palestinian deaths may be much much more).

As far as we are aware, casualties caused by Hamas are listed among Israeli deaths and injuries.

Remember, the IOF, not Hamas, has murdered tens of thousands of civilians, committed mass rapes, and destroyed most of the vital infrastructure that made Palestine livable. The IOF has been known to poison wells, detain and torture non-combatants, and shoot children with sniper rifles, not Hamas.

Again, violent resistance is often the only way for an oppressed, colonized people to achieve freedom and justice.

If the knowledge of these facts bothers you, or if it is something you’d like to refuse to believe, unfollow us right now. It is not antisemitic to point out the real, tangible harm that Israel has committed. And it is not antisemitic to support the Palestinian resistance movement which is pushing actively for a free Palestine.

Finally, we’ll link to the page for Israelism, a Jewish-made documentary covering the horrors of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. It’s not available for streaming yet (we saw it when it was briefly available back in December), but it looks like it will be soon.

Okay, I think that’s all we have to say about this at this time.

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!!! We will not stop fighting until there is a liberated Palestine, which we will see in our future! 🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸

[goopgirlie813]

For some encouragement, I used to be pro-Palestine and have now changed my opinion. Of course I still believe that the people there just trying to live their lives deserve peace, but I no longer deny that Hamas is in the wrong.

I've spoken on my blog in the past about how exactly I was persuaded to change my perspective (being shown an undeniable example of one of my stances being hypocritical), but another thing that helped me be more open to admitting that hamas was indeed bad was reading their own manifesto (I don't remember the exact title. Someone sent me a link.) I was still in major cognitive dissonance and denial mode at the time, but even when my first instinct was to make excuses it was clear that this was not a group that aligned with the values we were supposedly standing for.

Hard lesson here that I had to learn; good intentions can lead to bad actions. I took up that stance because I wanted people to be free from violence and I had been presented an image of the world in which supporting Hamas was the way to do that in that region. Propaganda can turn love and care into weapons for hate. It can take your empathy and desire to help and twist it into actions that cause harm.

Some warning signs that this are happening are:

Groups, particularly those who have been historically marginalized, saying that you are hurting them. [See: Jewish people repeatedly saying that your (anti-zionist) stance is antisemitic]

The issue in question has (what appears to be) a clear and undeniable Good vs. Evil dynamic in which one side is always justified in their actions (even the bad ones) and the other is never justified. [See: "yeah hamas may have killed people but they're resisting occupation so what else where they supposed to do?" vs "yeah the israeli soldiers were defending themselves but they shouldn't have been there in the first place because they're colonizers."]

You find yourself finding excuses to avoid engaging with information that contradicts your stance. [See: "this is probably just propaganda anyway"] or when you do engage you downplay any information that contradicts your stance.

Semi-regular reminder that Hamas is a terrorist organization with a long, long history of using human shields and that any news coming from "Palestine" is coming through a Hamas mouthpiece and that Hamas's stated goals in their manifesto is to kill all Jews ("But Gayle," someone once said to me, "They only say Zionists!" I swear to fuck, I will hit you with the clown hammer until your clown makeup comes off).

And while I have you here, the Houthis are literally Nazis and it's fucking wild the number of people I saw a year ago saying "punch all Nazis" who suddenly got very upset when Israel bombed the fucking Nazis.

Palestine deserves to be at peace. Yemen deserves to be at peace. Israel deserves to be at peace. Palestine and Yemen are run by terrorist groups who do not want peace because they are so mad Jews exist, they are willing to cause pain, suffering, and unending fuckery to civilians in order to meet their stated goals of killing all Jews.

If you think Israel is the enemy in all of this, you're the fucking antisemitic problem.

[pocketseizure]

The History of Light and Shadow

At the end of Twilight Princess, Ganondorf delivers one of his most memorable lines, “The history of light and shadow will be written in blood.” He is not wrong. As the player has witnessed over the course of Link’s adventure, Hyrule is haunted by ruins and ghost towns, a mere shadow of what it once was. The landscape is filled with numerous sites of past violence and empty spaces visibly marked by decay and wasted potential.

When Zelda tells Link and Midna that “these dark times are the result of our deeds,” she is referring to specific historical acts of imperialistic aggression. Hyrule established hegemony over its outlying territories by crushing the rebellions against its advances, but the kingdom has suffered from cultural stagnation as a result. Without the dynamic diversity symbolized by Ganondorf, Hyrule finds itself in economic and political decline, isolated from any contact with the world beyond its shrinking borders.

As a representative of a marginalized group of people who have been attacked and driven from their homes, Ganondorf is a tangible manifestation of the horrors of imperialism. He must be defeated, but doing so does not address the underlying problems that have resulted in Hyrule’s decline. I therefore want to argue that Twilight Princess uses Ganondorf to deliver a subtle yet poignant protest against the discourses of empire reflected by the dualistic “light and shadow” rhetoric of heroism that has resulted in tragedy and regret.

In the era immediately preceding Ocarina of Time, the kingdom of Hyrule united multiple geographically proximate groups of people at the end of a devastating civil war. Ganondorf was the leader of the Gerudo, an ethnic minority that resisted Hyrule. After several years of fighting, Ganondorf was eventually captured and imprisoned. The Sages of Hyrule were unable to execute him, so they sealed him away by casting him into the Twilight Realm, a world of shadows that exists alongside Hyrule. The events of Twilight Princess are triggered an indefinite period of time later when Ganondorf manages to persuade Zant, a prince of the Twilight Realm, to stage an uprising against Midna, its legitimate ruler.

Guided by Midna, the player takes on role of the teenage hero Link in order to defeat Zant and Ganondorf and thereby save Hyrule with the aid of its crown princess, Zelda. Many (if not the majority) of players will be influenced by the broad archetypes reproduced in this heroic narrative to understand Link as “good” and Ganondorf as “evil.”

Throughout most of Twilight Princess, Ganondorf is characterized as a ruthless tribal warlord who attacked Hyrule because of his lust for power. As indicated by his monologues and gradual humanization over the course of the final battle, however, Ganondorf represents much more than simply an evil to be defeated. He is introduced to the player as a foolish man who became evil incarnate, and he does little more than scream in rage and pain when the player first sees him in a flashback. When he is allowed to speak for himself, however, he reveals himself to be highly intelligent with motivations that are not unsympathetic.

When Link finally confronts Ganondorf in the throne room of Hyrule Castle, he is sitting alone. The world he once knew is long gone, and all that remains to him is the intense emotion he has directed toward Hyrule, whose wealth and security he simultaneously covets and resents. Ganondorf has succeeded in conquering the kingdom, but his victory no longer has meaning, as his people have been killed, driven away, or assimilated.

As established in Ocarina of Time, the Gerudo historically maintained uneasy relations with the majority ethnicity of Hyrule. The views once espoused by the people in Hyrule concerning the Gerudo are reminiscent of Orientalist stylizations, in which the peoples of certain “non-Western” and therefore “uncivilized” nations are characterized as being either unintelligent animals incapable of governing themselves or decadent and weak and thus a prime target for colonization.

The villainization of Ganondorf and the Gerudo as deceitful and lawless thieves within Hyrule echoes contemporary postcolonial discourse, in which former colonial powers exhibit a longing for “the good old days” of expansive imperial hegemony. The British sociologist Paul Gilroy has termed this fabricated nostalgia “postcolonial melancholy,” a tonal atmosphere characterizing stories that are often haunted by the gothic figure of the postcolonial ghost. Ganondorf is a textbook example of a postcolonial ghost – a menacing supernatural figure who represents the frightening native traditions of the past that the supposedly enlightened colonizers attempted to “correct” but were prevented from eradicating completely.

In order for culturally odorless global capitalism to move forward, the ghosts of the colonial past must be laid to rest, regardless of whether they are symbolic narratives or actual human beings. Such narratives are not uncommon in the political discourse and popular narratives of Japan, which is still struggling to come to terms with its history of imperial violence on the Asian mainland. In essence, the demonization of Ganondorf reflects the historical and contemporary villainization of both specific and broadly defined groups in the real world, including entire nations of people who have been discursively positioned as “enemies.” 

As a medium, video games require challenges for the player to overcome. Story-based games such as those in the Legend of Zelda series tend to be relentless in their construction of enemies whose unequivocally evil deeds propel the hero to action. In Twilight Princess, there are two primary categories of characters with whom the player can interact: NPCs who offer material assistance and advice on how the hero can proceed through the quest, and monsters who must be attacked and generally yield tangible rewards when defeated.

In other words, the fundamental elements of gameplay reflect a worldview built on the foundation of a battle of “us” versus “them,” which is given literal expression in the dichotomy between who cannot be attacked and who must be attacked in order to advance. Many players take it for granted that a game will present a class or race or species that deserves to be destroyed, and the lack of alternative options for interaction suggests that it is still somewhat radical to suggest that perhaps the player-character is not entirely justified in the demonization of people who don’t look or think like them.

Video games are adept at engendering a sense of subjectivity, meaning that one of their functions is to give the player a feeling of controlling their movement through the game while enacting their will via the actions of their character. At the end of Twilight Princess, however, Link must fight and defeat Ganondorf, no matter how much sympathy the player may feel for him.

The gameplay elements of Twilight Princess therefore perform abjection, the process by which we demarcate the boundaries of the whole and wholesome “self” by setting up a contrast against a fragmented and unclean “other.” As individuals, we employ this process to construct monsters that violate the sanctity of our bodies; and, as cultures, we employ this process to construct enemies that violate our sense of belonging to a shared identity.

The dualism of “the pure” and “the abject” functions to further erase the nuances and possibilities denied by the artificial designation of the characters in Twilight Princess as either “good” or “evil.” Ganondorf’s cultural barrier-crossing, his shifting physical form, his open physical and emotional wounds, and his occupation of the liminal spaces between one world and another place him squarely in the realm of the impure and abject. Both the story of Twilight Princess and the narrative functions of its gameplay demand that the abject ghosts of the empire be purified and expelled by cleansing Hyrule of the pollution of Ganondorf’s lingering malice.

By humanizing Ganondorf but then forcing the player to fight him anyway, Twilight Princess employs various tropes relating to the figure of the postcolonial ghost not to invoke unironic postcolonial melancholy, but rather to force the player to experience the violence of these tropes in a subjective and visceral way. Twilight Princess is therefore not so much a heroic legend of triumph over “darkness” as it is an elegiac legend of regret concerning past atrocities.

Link’s victory is bittersweet, and it is not presented as a triumph for him or for Hyrule. At the end of Twilight Princess, Princess Zelda barely looks at the young man who supposedly rescued her. Midna, whose people were once banished to the Twilight Realm for opposing Zelda’s ancestors, takes her leave of Link, shattering the gate between their worlds after she departs. Midna explains her decision by saying, “Light and shadow can’t mix, as we all know.”

As Link and Midna’s friendship throughout the game has demonstrated, light and shadow can indeed coexist. Midna does not explain why she would choose to destroy the Mirror of Twilight that connects the Twilight Realm to Hyrule, but it is significant that this occurs immediately after she has witnessed the fight between Link and Ganondorf. Perhaps the prolonged spectacle of Ganondorf’s death has convinced Midna that there is no room for “monsters” in Hyrule, and it may be that she fears that she and her people will always be seen as abject outsiders, just as Ganondorf and his people once were.

It’s not clear to whom the title of Twilight Princess refers, and it could easily designate Midna, who emerges from and returns to the shadowy Twilight Realm. The title could also apply to Princess Zelda, however, as the victory over the forces of evil at the end of the game does not necessarily reverse or alleviate her kingdom’s slow decline. Before the end credits roll, Zelda sends the hero back to his village and returns alone to her empty castle.

Despite the narrative arc of Link’s progressive competence as an adventurer, this element of sorrow has been present from the outset of the game. Unlike the other games in the Legend of Zelda series, Twilight Princess begins not with Link waking up in the morning, but with him returning home in the evening. The opening scene is suffused with the golden light of the setting sun, and the game’s first spoken line is delivered by Link’s mentor Rusl, who asks, “Tell me… Do you ever feel a strange sadness as dusk falls?” The player’s first few minutes with Twilight Princess thereby establish melancholy and lament as two of the major themes of the game. The people of Hyrule are entering the twilight of their civilization under the rule of an ineffectual monarchy that has not allowed its people to be revitalized by change and diversity.

The slow apocalypse suggested by the environment of Twilight Princess, such as eroded ruins and decaying ghost towns, is not presented with an opportunity for renewal along with Ganondorf’s defeat. The potential for energetic dynamism represented by Ganondorf has been violently denied in favor of cultural purity, and the severity of this loss is reflected in the somber tone of the game’s closing scenes. If Ganondorf cannot exist in Hyrule, neither can Midna – and perhaps neither can Link himself.

When Ganondorf speaks of a history written in blood, he is referring to the history that has been lost to Hyrule along with the bodies and voices of the people who have fallen in its imperialistic conflicts. Twilight Princess thereby uses the menacing yet tragic figure of Ganondorf to suggest that, if the lifeblood of the kingdom is to remain vital, its history must be able to accommodate more than a reductive dualism between “light” and “shadow.”

[uni-tierra-califas]

[Unitierracalifas] UT Califas Demo Ateneo, 5-26-18, 2.00-5.00 p.m.

Compañerxs: We will convene the Universidad de la Tierra Democracy Ateneo this coming Saturday, May 26, 2018 in San Jose at Casa de Vicky (792 E. Julian St., San Jose) from 2.00-5.00 p.m. to resume our regularly scheduled reflection and action space and to explore some of the questions and struggles mentioned below that are raised by the current conjuncture in which we find ourselves. 

Ghada Karmi informs us that "between 30 March and 11 May Israeli forces shot dead more than 40 unarmed Palestinians and wounded over 2,000 during the Great March of Return series of protests in Gaza. On 14 May alone, in protests coinciding with the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem, Israeli soldiers killed a further 58 Palestinians and wounded nearly 2,800." (see, G. Karmi, "At 70 Israel is a Bellicose Giant.") She also highlights how Israel continues its bullying attacks against other sovereign nations including calling for the assassination of leaders in the region. This, of course, is only possible through the backing of the U.S. and other western nations. The relationship between the U.S. and Israel is more than simply an alliance between two sovereign powers. Israel's connection with the U.S. is such that the one nation can orchestrate a falsehood that can then become the dominant story repeated by the the other, circulated by the U.S. political class, pundits, and mainstream media supported by think tanks, lobby groups, and media manipulators, such as pollsters and communication strategists, and, increasingly, by universities and academic institutions that have marginalized pro-Palestinian faculty. In this instance, the orchestrated falsehood is that the rebellion organized in conjunction with the recognition of the Nakba of 1948 is nothing more than attacks by Hamas. More than one critical media analyst recognizes this as nothing less than propaganda, the propaganda common to fascism. The resistance of the people is framed as terrorist violence. Yet not everyone was so ready to buy the well orchestrated lies as solidarity actions and resistances erupted across the globe in support of Palestine —Tel Aviv, South Africa, Brussels, New York. In San Francisco, chants of Palestine will be free! rose up from the streets as people marched from the Israeli Consulate in the city's Financial District to Federal Building in Civic Center (See, Sarah Ruiz-Grossman, "Hundreds in Israel and Beyond Protest Killings of Palestinians on Gaza Border.") The following day also in San Francisco, the disruption of a planned book talk by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak resulted in eighteen arrests as those present interrupted and drowned out Barak's talk repeatedly, condemned him as a war criminal (see, Palestine Action Network, "Eighteen Arrested as Activists Shout Down Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in San Francisco for War Crimes.")

We are reminded of Aimee Cesaire's observation when examining the brutality of colonization, and that in the context of discussions about the rise of fascism and the Second World War. According to Cesaire: "They [the atrocities of colonization] prove that colonization, I repeat, dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this result, this boomerang effect of colonization that I wanted to point out." (see, A. Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, p.41) Israel's settler colonialism project has reached its apex, that is, the level of barbarity that is the natural evolution of colonial occupation. The colonizer loses his or her humanity and is capable of all manner of atrocities blinded by their own righteousness. And it is no wonder that Israel basks in the support of the U.S. Americans, if they are even aware of the violence may be momentarily appalled by the atrocities they witnessed these past few weeks in Gaza. Yet, they, "the respectable bourgeois," nonetheless maintain a system where the state apparatus, all of the elements of it, become an echo chamber for Israel's justification of a genocidal project they have been executing with impunity for seventy years, building on a settler colonial logic and program stretching back to the First Zionist Conference and the Basel Program of August 1897. Colonial and imperial powers, including the U.S. in the post World War II era, continue to rely on Israel for their purposes, that is for their own geopolitical designs for the region. And it is this moment, the moment that W.E.B Du Bois named democratic despotism that is the fundamental cause of all wars. It is the bargain the white working class makes with capital. The bargain is based on the quid pro quo that capital gets a compliant workforce and white labor enjoys a somewhat slightly higher wage, safer working conditions, more leisure time, and the few toys and trinkets of a bourgeois lifestyle, and all of that at the expense of Black and Brown labor and lives at home and abroad. In other words, the bargain can only be fulfilled through, according to Du Bois, colonialism which is to say war. (see, Du Bois, "African Roots of War.") The ethnic Mexican community shares an awareness of the nature of democratic despotism and its ties to war. We have resisted the imposition of the "Mexican wage" as well as fought for access and inclusion in all of America's dominant institutions since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 that articulated the expanded borders of the settler colony. Rather than marking the end of the war, the treaty also articulated the promise of a continuous social war organized around the criminalization of resistance. This has been our plight as Chicanxs and Latinxs in the U.S. —to confront successive strategies of criminalization intertwined with militarization. It is a long standing process that has its most recent articulation in the attack on the immigrant community orchestrated through the elimination of TSP (Temporary Protected Status), DACA, and the deliberately orchestrated home, work, and street invasions and sweeps conducted by ICE, INS, and the Border Patrol, working in conjunction with local law enforcement and private prisons. All of this occurs against the backdrop of increased levels of border militarization that continue to produce numbers of deaths despite the drop in immigration as a whole. And, of course, the violence on one side of the border is linked to the violence on the other side —a violence of kidnappings, assassinations, disappearances, feminicides, and massacres. The colonist's disdain for the ethnic Mexican community of Greater Mexico was on display this week when New York Attorney Aaron Schlossberg excoriated patrons and staff at a Midtown Fresh Kitchen for speaking Spanish and a barrista at a Starbucks in La Cañada Flintridge on the outskirts of Los Angeles wrote "beaner" on the coffee cup of an order placed by a cook only identified as Pedro. (see, Y. Simón, "After Racist Lawyer Goes Viral" and A. Cataño, California Starbucks Employee Writes Racial Slur") Both moments may seem trivial compared to the levels of violence throughout Mexico, across the border, and in the neighborhood, but each also reflects a level of dehumanization common to racial capitalism, settler colonial states, and the fascism that defines them. What connects these locuses of violence besides the trajectories of settler colonialism outlined by Cesaire? It's war. "War, money, and the State are constitutive or constituent forces, in other words the ontological forces of capitalism," explain Éric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato. To this they add, "the critique of political economy is insufficient to the extent that the economy does not replace war but continues it by other means, ones that go necessarily through the State: monetary regulation and the legitimate monopoly on force for internal and external wars. To produce the genealogy of capitalism and reconstruct its 'development,' we must always engage and articulate together the critique of political economy, critique of war, and critique of the State." (see, E. Alliez and M. Lazzarato, Wars and Capital, p. 15.) It’s total war. But, the total war is not new. It’s colonial war directed everywhere, no longer confined to the colony. Alliez and Lazzarato reclaim primitive accumulation to advance the analysis by not limiting it to a specific historical moment but rather, recognizing it as an ongoing process. It is worth quoting them at length: "It is therefore not surprising that the authors associated with research on the world-economy are completing and enriching analysis of the transformations of war and the ways it is waged in direct relationship with nascent capitalism and the colonies. And in fact, 'primitive accumulation' provides the crucible for all the functions that war would later develop: establishment of disciplinary apparatuses (dispositifs) of power, rationalization and acceleration of production, terrain for testing and perfecting new technologies, and biopolitical management of productive force itself. Most of all, war plays a leading role in the 'governmentality' of the multiplicity of modes of production, social formations, and apparatuses of power that coexist in capitalism at the global scale. It is not limited to being the continuation on the strategic level of the (foreign) policy of states. It contributes to producing and holding together the differentials that define the divisions of labor, sexes, and races without which capitalism could not feed on the inequalities it unleashes." (see, E. Alliez and M. Lazzarato, Wars and Capital, p. 76) 

Thus, it’s war that is based on controlling populations. In specific circumstances, that is when it is applied to “troubled areas,” it is organized as low intensity war, warfare that is not about taking of territory but a complex strategy of military and paramilitary violence, targeted aid, and specific policing powers all designed to disrupt the cohesion of a community so that specific populations can be more easily controlled. It is the Fourth World War as the Zapatistas have warned us, but it's also the longstanding, ongoing war of racial capitalism. The argument made in theorizations of racial capitalism is that race is not simply surplus but constitutive. Racial animus, organized through various strategies of criminalization and dehumanization that make possible dispossession, displacement, and dislocation, escalates with capitalism's collapse. Racial capitalism, as many have come to believe about capitalism in general, is both a mode of production and a mode of destruction. Race and racial belonging become the markers to determine what bodies must be controlled and therefore can be produced as disposable. Our resistances are critical to decolonial practice. Aimed at the architecture of control that checkpoints and borders represent, these are at the same time resistances against dehumanization.

New projects and a vision for research moving forward that begin to articulate new theorizations about the current race situation must take seriously how combined research efforts can contribute significantly to the de-criminalization of our communities, especially confronting the socially, politically, and economically constructed disposability associated with black wage-less life, illegal immigrant labor, third world “narco-terrorists,” and Indigenous autonomous communities. It must also engage in the de-militarization of our communities by exposing how capitalist extractivist strategies advance practices and strategies of dispossessing by de-humanizing, displacing by criminalizing, and dislocating through policing, especially pre-emptive policing executed by combined forces of police, military, and increasingly state bureaucracies once designed to administer a social wage. Successful research can be mapped out in cartographies of struggle confronting the spread of low intensity war and its manifestation in various moments of state and state manufactured violences across communities. These maps can include a variety of systems of information generated from the local, situated, and poetic knowledges that can shift the dominant frames of an increasingly complex media landscape and tell a different story about social justice. Such an effort can, for example, map fierce care, a category of struggle, or convivial tool, that emerged out of and was articulated through the efforts of mothers who re-directed their grief and rage at the injustice dealt them and their family into strategic moments of care to consciously reclaim community spaces while also raising awareness about the specific injustice suffered by often targeted families and the community as a whole. The collective construction of convivial tools emerges organically and is articulated in performances and practices that address inequality, especially the violences produced as capitalism reaches its internal and external limits as a result of the exhaustion of “cheap nature,” contradictions of commodity fetishism, and the advances of grassroots struggle. It is therefore a research that must approach the topic genealogically, that is to say, by uncovering how our present has come to be defined by racial inequality and a persistent racial animus organized through successive modes of criminalization, including the epistemological dimensions of settler colonial dominance. That is to say we must map out how knowledge is produced in such a way as to legitimize the criminalization of certain groups, i.e. those targeted for “premature death.” 

South Bay and North Bay crew

[queernuck]

Irish-American Rifles: The Historiography of Irish-American Experience and its Hegemonic Articulation

When Levinas discusses historiography as separated from history, he touches upon an important distinction regarding the infinitude of expanse that constitutes time under capitalist hegemony, the means by which a specific structuralism must be ascribed to the ideology of capitalist thought: the inevitable ontology of capitalist advancement, of imperial control, of a specific imperial prerequisite for recognizability and sublimation into the self (as well as the refusal of the Other through violence) is important to discourses about the structure of neocolonial control, of colonial memories, of how sublimation functions as an act of capitalist violence.

When Levinas describes violence as “graspable but escaping every hold” in relation to the act of war, one can understand both the resistance to empire that is constituted in singular acts of violence, and the means by which Levinas is creating a sort of hermeneutics of war. Levinas requires that there be a meeting of sides such that the war may be conducted: thus, one generates the apparent meeting of forces in Iraq to the American military that was generated by the American media apparatus. Rather than conducting a war with an Other, the American war machine was able to grasp itself, was able to effectively create a hyperreality upon which it could meet itself, inflict violence upon an OpFor, a created enemy fabricated upon bombed territories, a reterritorialization seen again in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. However, as holds are too escaped, the presence of the military was indeed met with resistance, with a sort of warfare that the United States was ill prepared for: the immense investment of resources necessary to maintain the war machine consumed itself far faster than was sustainable. The M1A1 Abrams tank operates with a jet engine, and is among the most advanced tanks in the world even years after its design; however, in operation it requires an enormous logistical supply chain, an arboreal realization of a military umbilical cord. While the Abrams could largely survive well in the event of an attack by insurgents, or when faced with a roadside bomb, after this singular act of survival came the repairs, the reliance upon an arboreal chain of supply, that began to wear on the military’s massive funding. Another example is found in the LWMMG project; a machine gun developed to respond to particular difficulties found in Afghanistan. Soldiers often found themselves at a disadvantage to forces using PKM Machine guns from relative long range and higher ground. The PKM and its derivatives are Soviet in origin, very reliable, and chambered in a full-size rifle round that predates World War I. Heavy machine guns like the M2 could meet the power in question, but are not easily used by infantry. Conversely, while the approximate range could be covered by medium machine guns like the M240, when firing that far and from low ground the 7.62x51 cartridge was found lacking. Thus, the LWMMG (Light-Weight Medium Machine Gun) was engineered, inspired by the FN MAG/M240′s design but firing the .300 Norma Magnum, a round fielded for sniping purposes by the US Military. The LWMMG bridges a supposed gap, a constructed lack, between the heavy and medium machine guns, such that it creates a capacity to overmatch opposing forces. Additionally, it incorporates recoil mitigation technology as well as lightweight construction in order to allow it to engage in long-distance, aimed suppressing fire. The PKM lacks these technologies, even in updated variants, with limited ability to mount accessories such as the optics that a LWMMG would use. It shares the 7.62x54R round with rifles such as the Dragunov, a precursor to the modern Designated Marksman Rifle, a conceptual designation of rifles intended to be issued within small units to provide aimed fire along with the suppressing fire assault rifles are usually used for. 

The expanded acquisition of another round and an entirely new weapon (as well as training on the weapon, its maintenance, and training of those who will in turn train others) in order to reterritorialize this moment of meeting seen in combat is indicative of how the knowledges of imperialism are unable to meaningfully adapt to the particularities of war and occupation, that there is a specific means by which they will always find violence ungraspable. While I admit that my discussion of these two weapons gets mired in particularity to a certain degree, it is vital to emphasize a certain means by which the imperial meets its own resistance: it is in producing-production, in the creation of a continual ideology of the productive, the innovative, that sustains a conceptual Western self as individual, a self as a single entry in a culture and moreover as necessary to the artifice of the cultural. One must be individual, be a self, in order to engage with culture. One will be a grenadier, or a marksman, or a machine gunner but moreover will be part of an expression of individuality even within the hegemony of empire. The empire retains its individuality in order to structure its hegemony, as shown by the emphasis within postmodern weapon design on modularity and customization. There is a weapon for every niche, an attachment for any situation, a new round to chamber the AR in no matter what the reason. Whether 5.56, .300 Blackout, 6.8 SPC, 7.62x51, 7.62x39, or yet another cartridge, it can be adapted. Of course, it frequently raises the question of exactly what niche is to be filled, whether there is in fact a presence without a meaningful absence, a sort of created absence only sensible in presence. Any advantage reached will simply lead to a restructuring of tactics that creates a new problem, a new gun to design, a new question of how to fight.

With the continual creation of new terrorist assemblages, it is unsurprising that two dominant forces in the ideology of imperialism eventually found their way to a singular investment in the same. The creation of a “narcoterrorist” enemy in the modern parlance as a specific development in the linking of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror as semiotics of violence relies on a historiographical maneuver by empire to ignore that, from the 60s to the 80s, some of the largest drug trafficking networks were in fact either tacitly approved or directly supported by imperial interests as a means of structuring anticommunism and anticommunist resistance. In late capitalism there has been an increasing trend toward drug trafficking creating pseudostates, state bodies that are by nature non-state structures, state bodies outside of the recognizable state structure, a coupling of state support and black market control seen in the producing-production of the Sinola Cartel, or the Taliban’s influence on European heroin markets, insofar as their own structuring is against, or at least not directly supporting, the interests of American imperialism. This does not on its own warrant ideological support, although recognizing that the means by which these near-states gain entry into the stashes of drug dealers are structured by imperialist violence is necessary to discussing them. By creating a producing-production, a means of both producing markets and producing the production and distribution of drugs. Once in the United States, the drugs could then be reproduced as a means of justifying police control, of creating yet another enemy with which to meet, the War on Drugs illusory in the same sense as the War on Terror. That this drug war specifically targeted black communities, communities carrying massive intergenerational trauma, defined by that very trauma, is not accidental, it is an active realization of that trauma in order to continue its infliction, to ensure that there is no means of escape from this traumatic structure.

Conversely, the historiography of Irish-American life, where a sublimation into whiteness, into coloniality, has been fully realized there has been an ideological shift in the means by which trauma is structured and moreover continued. Irish immigrants were an enormous part of the culture of American bootlegging, and are still an appreciable part of the culture around American alcoholism as well as where it crosses over into communities such as heroin users. While New York and New Jersey are the nexuses of heroin on the East Coast, the large Irish-American population of Long Island in part drives it. The strength of cultural ties to Catholicism is also an enormously important part of Irish-American culture: apart from how it provides an affinity between Irish and Italian populations in America, its prominence in Irish-American communities is part of the colonial apparatus being restructured in an American context. In Ireland, the hegemony of British colonization made it such that adherence to Catholicism was often found alongside the brunt of colonial violence, and as a result part of the Catholic culture of Irish immigrants was this resistance. Similarly, the means by which Liberation Theology has come out of specific critiques of hegemony and arboreality within both the Church and its missionary past, the ignorance of the colonial and imperial violence that Catholicism has inflicted, an ignorance that characterizes modern Catholicism as well as how Catholicism continues to be an apparatus of intergenerational traumatization through its comprehensive and endemic protection of pedophiles and abusers. In an American context, the realization of this has been met with a performative shock, as if the Catholic Church’s place as a structure of imperial dominance was surprising, was not in fact vital to the history of the Church. 

Irish-American subjectivities relied upon a specific historiography of the American Immigrant figure: an immigrant comes to the United States and finds that one may only create oneself under these conditions, that the specific process of articulating oneself is only possible through the means of transcendence realized in American capitalist advancement. Irish immigrants become laborers or became cops, and either way frequently became addicts and alcoholics. However, much like the containment of abuse within Catholic families, there was an unspoken means by which this inflicting of trauma could be repeated and moreover was an identity, was a means of staying within the dominance of whiteness. When comparing themselves to other impoverished communities, the poor Irish were able to claim that they had succeeded in overcoming their previous traumas, rather than sublimating them as a means of structuring their molecularity within whiteness. There was still that trauma; by necessity, Oedipus lies in the inflicting of trauma. However, that this trauma was specifically part of growing within American colonialism, was concieved of as a success of the self rather than a restructuring of trauma allowed by imperial control and directed by that same  imperial impetus in order to restructure the violence of whiteness and coloniality is part of ignoring the means by which one inflicts trauma. Whereas previously drug use had been used in order to enact trauma along lines of antiblackness, when Irish-American communities reached a threshold of an apparent “opiate epidemic” there was an enormous change in how drug abuse was approached on a wide-reaching scale. 

The creation of an “opiate epidemic” is a means of yet again renaming the trauma inflicted by capitalism, the way in which capitalism inflicts trauma upon itself in order to create an internality of the self, a continually renewed structure of violence that prevents the realization of colonial origins of trauma. The manner in which Irish-American identity in part implies a success of the apparatus of capture that constitutes whiteness as a becoming (rather than a particular maneuver of imperial structure) relies upon a historiography of forgetfulness, a specific memory of survival that ignores the manner in which Irish-American culture was founded on fleeing genocide, on the specific violence of British colonial rule and how that same violence is the structural impetus that directs American anti-blackness, or American imperial violence as a generality. When an Irish-American claims that they have moved on from the trauma of colonial control, the question should not be how to replicate that feat, but why it is not understood as part of the trauma that influences late capitalist identity and affinity. While one can resort to a structuralism of the transcendent as apprehended in the structural Church, it does not account for the transcendence that theologism and relating to the Church allows, nor to the means by which experiences in Irish-American culture are often articulatory of deep, intergenerational trauma. 

Irish-American history has been told by survivors, but in a manner that disrespects the dead, that soothes the masters and buries their victims, and Irish-Americans have benefited greatly from that. In order to realize any sort of affinity with Irish socialism, Irish radicalism, and the greater articulation of this particular colonial struggle as part of a people’s war, as part of a global war against capital as a structure, one must begin to critique the historiographical act as it currently is participated in.  

[fierceawakening]

And now that I’ve clarified that I want to return to my actual point, just so it doesn’t get lost.

Which is just that a whole lot of things get labeled “decolonization,” and some of them make a lot of sense and some of them don’t.

A personal project to reconnect with your culture of origin is very different from “because the Palestinians are colonized, slaughter of civilians should be looked at as ‘a little bit messy’ but not as ‘morally wrong.’ If you think it’s morally wrong, you are pearl clutching about whether a colonized people resist occupation with appropriate manners.”

When… someone who mentions that the rules of war are very influenced by Europe is right, but someone who says that because of this, slaughtering whole families is justified for reasons of “decolonization” is… deciding that standards of just war are wrong because of who came up with them, not because of a flaw in them that needs to be rethought.

Europeans can have a horrifying history of violence and conquest that we should always consider when evaluating something they made, but still be right about something once in a while.

Said some things the other day I regret now.

I was reading posts about Hamas destroying the border fences and that sounded like an act of war that likely killed many, but one that would make some sense if you believe (rightly or wrongly, not adjudicating that here) that you’re living in an apartheid state and should have freedom of movement.

Those posts did not mention the hostages, or the slaughter of children.

Destroying a border wall is something I can see as a symbolic act. Slaughtering kids and taking civilians hostage is not.

There is no one I see who is not being terrible here.

[sophiayacoub-blog]

Violent Resistance to Violent Oppression: Frantz Fanon and the Zapatista movement

“The need for this change exists in a raw, repressed, and reckless state in the lives and consciousness of colonized men and women. But the eventuality of such a change is also experienced as a terrifying future in the consciousness of another "species" of men and women: the colons, the colonists.” (Fanon 2004: 1)

In this essay I intend to explore the ways in which violent resistance to colonial oppression materialises by interpreting Frantz Fanon’s (2004) understanding of revolutionary violence as always a greater violence. I will argue that revolutionary violence should be read as colonial violence turning back on its source – as the current reaching its limit with the uprising of the oppressed. Further to this, I argue that the struggle does not end with national liberation but rather that the fight against the violence of capitalism, which is born in the hands of colonialism, and continues after national liberation. I will be looking at the Zapatista movement as an example of armed resistance - in this instance to neoliberalism and neocolonialism.

Background - Violent resistance in the colonies Fanon conceives of decolonization as the rupturing of the whole hegemonic imperial order, as an entire social structure being changed from the bottom up, implying “the urgent need to thoroughly challenge the colonial system” (Fanon 2004: 2) His background in working in psychoanalysis in French occupied Algeria allowed for the study of the mind of the oppressed. He saw in the colonized the immediate need for radical change for survival. (C. Alessandrini 2005) Homi Bhabha (1994) writes that Fanon’s “demand for a psychoanalytic explanation emerges from the perverse reflections of civil virtue in the alienating acts of colonial governance” (Bhabha 1994: 94) In the imperialist colonial context civil virtue is portrayed as having to be brought to the colonized who due to their biological inferiority lacks morals. For example, the civilizing mission was done trough an exportation of Christianity in the Latin American context, thus the conquistadors gained the blessings of the church for their exploitative project. Many indigenous people resisted the Christianizing missions and were thus accused of being cannibals or devil worshippers. This was a technique used by the colonial powers to silence opposition, in a similar vein to the silencing of women peasants who fought for the commons and against enclosures in early capitalism in Europe, thus being accused of witchcraft and devil worshipping. (Federici 2004) Fanon writes:

[W]e should place DDT, which destroys parasites, carriers of disease, on the same level as Christianity, which roots out heresy, natural impulses, and evil. […] [T]riumphant reports by the missions in fact tell us how deep the seeds of alienation have been sown among the colonized. […] The Church in the colonies is a white man's Church, a foreigners' Church. It does not call the colonized to the ways of God, but to the ways of the white man, to the ways of the master, the ways of the oppressor. And as we know, in this story many are called but few are chosen. (Fanon, 2004, p.7)

The violence with which the settlers impose themselves is justified because the colonized is depicted as savage. The colonized society “is not only portrayed as a society lacking values, the "native" is declared impervious to ethics, representing not only the absence of values but also the negation of values.” (Fanon 2004: 6). The upholding of rationality and of universal values stems from the enlightenment as a self-congratulatory project of the white European male bourgeoisie. The rejection of violence should thus be understood as an attempt at concealing the fact that the colonial system (and the whole of modernity) is at its core a deeply violent system. As Achille Mbembe puts it:

Colonies are the location par excellence where the controls and guarantees of judicial order can be suspended—the zone where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the service of “civilization. (Mbembe 2003: 24) The settler’s intentions are for the negation of any validity of revolutionary violence. By constructing a society based on racial biology - division and hierarchy, violence is justified when it is directed towards those deemed biologically inferior. Sartre writes in the preface to The Wretched Of The Earth that because the colonizers saw it as immoral to kill and enslave other (white) human beings, they lay down the principle that the non-white was de facto not human. This was justified through claims to scientific reason. (Fanon 2004)

Fanon understands decolonization as a violent process, and as the meeting of two forces opposed to each other by their very essence. He emphasises that the colonial system is a system sustained by institutionalized violence, which is always resisted by the native populations; the colonial world being “a world cut in
two”. This cutting in two brings the colonized to a point where resistance becomes cathartic, and the only possible resort. The colonial settler understands that only by violence and intimidation can the system of oppression be upheld:

In the colonial countries, the policemen and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native and advise him by rifle-butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of pure force (Fanon 2004: 4)

Fanon emphasizes that the violence the colonized experiences often manifests in mental disorders, which he sees as violence and pain that is self-inflicted or directed inwards. Or else, in forms of violence among the colonized, including “the muscular tension of the colonized periodically [erupting] into bloody fighting between tribes, clans, and individuals.” (Fanon 2004: 7) The national liberation struggle, then, is for Fanon a kind of training of the body to redirect violence outward, back where it came from, against the colonizer.

So for Fanon, the colonial ecology is always inherently violent, with the body of the colonized being subject to the appropriation of the pain and violence of their colonization. This occurs in such a way that violent resistance becomes the manifestation of the oppression inherent to the colonial structure, turning the force of the settlers back on themselves. Here the reading of pain as inherent to colonization is fundamental for a thorough understanding of the phenomenon of violent resistance. The pain caused by colonial oppression is the source and the drive for national liberation. “To live under […] occupation is to experience a permanent condition of “being in pain”: fortified structures, military posts, and roadblocks everywhere.” (Mbembe 2003: 8) This pain is eventually directed back at its source, at the colonizer, as the structure is filled to the brim with a violence that eventually flows over.

At the foundation of Fanon’s reading of the violence inherent to the colonial world is the logic of spatial compartmentalization. Fanon shows that the dividing line between coloniser and colonized is upheld by domination and violence; that the frontiers between the two spheres are frontiers of force that “are shown by the barracks and police stations. […] It is the policeman and the soldier who are the official, […] the spokesmen of the settler and his rule of oppression.” (Fanon 2004: 3) The police force and army is read here as the epitome of institutionalised violence in its most material form. The diving line between in the settler nation is a “color line” (Du Bois 2007); this division is of the categories of race and expresses itself in terms of economic inequality upheld by force, further entrenching the racial hierarchy and apartheid. The colonial society is completely uneven, the justification for this unevenness being again the racialization of colonial subjects, manifesting through poverty, as well as lack of self-determination and freedom. Fanon highlights that in the colonial context, base and superstructure are one and the same, and therefore: “what divides this world is first and foremost what species, what race one belongs to. […] You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.” (Fanon 2004) Fanon understood that even when colonial powers have left the colonies, the economic inequalities inherent to capitalism continues:

When a colonialist country, embarrassed by a colony's demand for independence, proclaims with the nationalist leaders in mind: "If you want independence, take it and return to the Dark Ages," the newly independent people nod their approval and take up the challenge. And what we actually see is the colonizer withdrawing his capital and technicians and encircling the young nation with an apparatus of economic pressure. (Fanon 2004: 53)

And the former colonies are still under vast economic pressure today. Fanon shows that the reason for this global inequality is the colonial history; the reason for underdevelopment in the former colonies should be directly attributed to the development in the empires. Here the myth of modernity as constructed in the ‘enlightened’ west/north and then exported to the colonies is deconstructed. Modernity should be understood as taking place in both hemispheres at once, with the depletion of material resources and labour in the colonies for the development of the empire. European cosmopolitanism and the civilised self-image that Europe has constructed for itself is established on the basis of “refraining from killing other white Europeans, but does not take into account the millions of people killed in the execution of the European project who were not white” (Bhambra 2015: 152) Further to advocating for national liberation, Fanon realizes the importance of a radical redistribution of material wealth (of reparations) for global oppression and inequality to end. This means that for him, the struggle does not end once national independence is achieved. The abundance of European (and US) wealth is a “scandal for it was built on the backs of slaves, it fed on the blood of slaves, and owes its very existence to the soil and subsoil of the underdeveloped world.” (Fanon 2004: 53) In fact, the underdevelopment and draining of the post-colonial world is not over yet but continues; as Arundhati Roy (2015) highlights by looking at the Indian context in Capitalism A Ghost Story, capitalism was born in the hands of settler colonialism and continues under neoliberalism. Here capitalism is intrinsically linked with colonialism. When positing colonialism as a project for capital expansion of the European upper classes, neoliberalism can clearly be seen as a new era of capital expansion, and should be read as a form of neocolonialism. The fight for national independence means the right to self-determination and the right to the organizing against capital, but it does not mean the end to capital. Capitalism is merely upheld by the colonial government on behalf of the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie; the economic oppression is waged by the capitalists of the global economic system for capital accumulation and continues once the colonial governments are replaced by national governments. (Fanon 2004)

NAFTA and the Zapatista uprising Commenting on the concept of underdevelopment in Latin America as hinging on colonialism, Eduardo Galeno (1997) writes in The Open Veins of Latin America:

The strength of the imperialist system as a whole rests on the necessary inequality of its pares, and this inequality assumes ever more dramatic dimensions […] The capitalist "head office" can allow itself the luxury of creating and believing its own myths of opulence, but the poor countries on the capitalist periphery know that myths cannot be eaten (Galeno 1997: 24)

In December 1993 agreements were made for the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Mexico, The US and Canadian governments, initiating a new era of economic liberalization, allowing for capital to be accumulated freely in North America: the agreement begun a new era of privatizations and corporatization of all common lands and goods. In this context, neoliberalism should be understood as a new form of primitive accumulation, which involves confiscating all that which is communally owned and free to everyone, turning common resources into private property with the use of force through expropriation. (Federici 2004; Hardt and Negri 2004) Since 1982, the WTO’s structural adjustment programs (including deregulation of markets, privatization of state enterprises, and trade liberalization) has forced farmers in the Mexican countryside away from their lands by undermining domestic maize prices, impoverishing farmers and forcing many indigenous peasants to move either to the United States to take up low paid undocumented work, or to slums around metropolitan cities in Mexico, and into factories in border towns along the US-Mexico border.

The indigenous Zapatista farmers in Chiapas who came together to take up arms against the Mexican government understood that the neoliberal trade agreements meant the destruction of the ecologies, cultures and communities of the indigenous people and of small-scale farmers. On 1 January 1994 the Zapatistas launched their uprising with the words ‘Ya Basta!’ - The same night that NAFTA became law in Mexico. The Zapatistas rose up because they understood the implications of the trade agreement: it would be allowing for capital to take hold of all things necessary for their independent, self-governing existence. The Zapatistas declared a ‘war on oblivion’: against the Mexican federal government, the army, and importantly, against oppression, mistreatment, genocide and exploitation, remembering the 500 yearlong history of colonialism, imperialism and exploitation of Latin America. (Prashad 2012) The Mexican government responded with the force of their armies and only did the fighting stop and the demands of the Zapatistas heard when Mexican citizens took to the streets in protest. (Khasnabish 2010) In the “sixth declaration of the selva lacandona” (2005) The Zapatistas (EZLN) state: The people from the cities went out into the streets and began shouting for an end to the war. And then we stopped our war, and we listened to those brothers and sisters from the city who were telling us to try to reach an arrangement or an accord with the bad governments, so that the problem could be resolved without a massacre. And so we paid attention to them, because they were what we call “the people,” or the Mexican people. And so we set aside the fire and took up the word. (EZLN 2005)

The ongoing Zapatista insurrection provides an account of how indigenous peoples have defied the oppression of colonial state violence and capitalist expropriation as well as racialised and gendered violence (Gahman 2016). Many of the Zapatista rebels are women farmers who are concerned for their land and their indigenous traditions. They are resisting the threat of the neglect of indigenous knowledge with the introduction of monocultures and a destruction of biodiversity as well as expulsion of people from their lands. This happens through the restructuring of farming land, but it also takes place with the conservation projects of the rainforests, expelling inhabitants and creating natural reserves and enclosures for tourism. (Vandana Shiva 2014)

Fanon understood the decolonization process as always initiated by the peasants. He writes that, unlike the intellectuals, the peasantry “has nothing to lose and everything to gain. The underprivileged and starving peasant is the exploited who very soon discovers that only violence pays.” (Fanon 2004: 23) The EZLN emerged as, and still continues to operate as, an armed insurrectionary force mainly made up of indigenous farmer.

Further to Fanons analysis of the immediate need of violent resistance of the peasantry is the idea that the intellectual has accepted the universalizing values of the colonizer thus being convinced that that the colonist and colonized can live in peace in a new world. What Fanon sees as lacking in the intellectual’s understanding is that the colonial settler is there for the sole purpose of exploiting those indigenous to the land for their accumulation of capital. He writes that the colonist is no longer interested in staying on and coexisting once the colonial context has disappeared. Thus the neoliberal agenda, which ironically sells capitalism as freedom, does not fit together with indigenous autonomy. (Fanon 2004)

Once national independence has been achieved, the nation as well any attachment to national identity become obstacles to be overcome, in order for further revolutionary action against the capitalist system to take place. Thus the world proletariat must unite as such. However, under the banner of revolutionary nationalism, colonial subjects are able to self-assert their own power and this is where identity politics becomes important. Without self-determination and autonomy of the natives in the global south, there can be no mutual organizing against capital power.

References

Bhabha, H. (1994). The location of culture. London: Routledge. Bhambra, G. (2014). Connected sociologies. London: Bloomsbury. Du Bois, W. (2007). The souls of Black folk. Oxford [England]: Oxford University Press. Fanon, F. (2004). The Wretched of The Earth. New York: Grove Press. Gahman, L. (2016). Zapatismo versus the Neoliberal University: Towards a Pedagogy against Oblivion. In: S. Springer, M. Lopez de Souza and R. J. White, ed., The Radicalization of Pedagogy, 1st ed. Galeano, E. (1997). Open veins of Latin America. New York: Monthly Review Press. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2009). Commonwealth. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Khasnabish, Alex. (2010 ) Zapatistas. Halifax: Fernwood Pub., . Print. Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1), pp.11-40. Prashad, V. (2012). The poorer nations. London: Verso. Roy, Arundhati. (2015) Capitalism: A Love Story. Tcfhe/Anchor Bay/Starz. Print. Shiva, V. and Mies, M. (2014). Ecofeminism. 2nd ed. New York: Zed