by achrilock
united states
It’s not a joke, tho, is it? It’s not funny. Every empire built upon exploitation, and violence to enforce it, exhibits this behavior. A troupe of fools that distract from the iron fist in the velvet glove. Things go bad for them, the velvet comes off. Things go worse and you find out that the iron is just a brittle covering over an ooey-gooey squishy privileged center, that will run and run whichever way gravity pushes it.
That’s what the use of violence to control large numbers of folks is about. You tempt them with what you have. If they find out they can’t have it too, you threaten them. If threats don’t work, you hurt them. If they become immune to the pain you lock them away or kill them. If you reach the end of that flowchart and things are still going badly, you run away. ‘Us’ and ‘we’ then becomes yourself and your little tribe, same as it has always been, in reality, when the showmanship is stripped away.
I’ve stepped away from things a few times over the years, sure, but then I wasn’t elected or appointed to be responsible for the safety of hundreds of millions, no, in fact, billions, of people. And the only fear about it was the fear that me continuing to open my mouth was doing more harm than good. But to flee and forsake real responsibility to those to whom I owed it? I’d die of shame first, before any enemy ever got to me.
Zelenskyy didn’t run. Heather Heyer didn’t run. Tortuguita didn’t run. The students didn’t run. The Black Lives Matter protesters didn’t run. Antifascists didn’t run. The women of Iran didn’t run. Ain’t nobody contemplating escape except those who least deserve it, those who made it necessary in the first place. Y’all made this bed for all of us. You can fuckin’ sleep in it too. There is no escape. The whole planet is the same prison that you all have made for everyone.
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/05/us/politics/trump-biden-election-dc.html |
Let me break it down for you, make it real simple. America itself is one giant prison, and the key to the lock is that bubble of ‘civility,’ of ‘civil society’ that Biden talks about, that the oligarchs and their politician pets, from the president down to the university administrator, use to dignify what is, at its core, an extremely exploitative and violent system. That’s what holds it together for them, and what allows them to commit so many crimes for which there are no enforceable laws.
And it is the same system, here or in Gaza, using the same command and control nodes and intelligence networks and financing and propaganda. Even now, the same mechanisms of the state, corporate and federal, that were used under Trump to attempt to crush the 2020 BLM and antifascist protests are being used to analyze, categorize, and disrupt opposition to the state and what the state chooses to do with your tax money. Right now, they’re taking names, infiltrating, mapping.
So there aren’t really political or legal solutions to this problem because both parties serve the same masters, and the system itself is a victim of its design. It will always be what it is, a machine that uses violence and intimidation to turn suffering into capital, here or abroad. What is needed is not to hide in bubbles of your own, but to expand. General strikes, non-payment strikes, everyone in the streets, every day, until their bubbles collapse to the size of a green zone in every city.
You, not genocidal old rich people, say what goes. If one climbs up onto a pedestal and starts threatening you or telling you what’s what, and you don’t like it, pull that person off the pedestal, and do it to the next one, and the next, and the next, and to any underlings they would send against you. When nobody’s brave enough to climb up there, destroy the pedestal. That’s what victory looks like. That’s what freedom looks like. Only then can you even start to imagine justice.
It was (very) orderly, up until a few days ago, and for the most part lawful. The students were going out of their way to run a ‘clean’ protest movement, and many of the so-called “outside agitators” (myself included) were supporting their decision, precisely to avoid a situation like 2020, because the students didn’t need that. They had much to lose. But it was making the Israeli government look bad, and they didn’t like it, so their American proxies allowed the police to riot.
Because the Israeli government thinks that the tactics used in Gaza or the West Bank, or even increasingly at home in Israel, are the way to deal with even the slightest, most polite dissent. And now it’s a shitshow, because this ain’t Gaza, but it sure as hell can be if you keep brutalizing people. We won’t put up with it, here. It will be like 2020 again, all summer long. And I’ll say it again, they will hate you forever, now, their whole lives. And you ain’t winning this election.