If you are expecting to read my usual Left Coast column, I tell you now that you will be disappointed. I write, today, from a place of horror—about the massacre unleashed against civilians in Israel this past week, and about the morally cretinous bloodlust reaction some who fashion themselves as being on the “left” seem to have experienced in its aftermath, but also in despair at the ghastly collective punishments being unleashed from the air on Gaza residents by Netanyahu’s far-right government and the Israeli military.
in all my years on this site and leftist subreddits and discords and irl meetups, through all of the disagreements and struggle sessions we have I think unironically the one single issue that most determines which users I feel affinity with is the divide of:
vs
And the biggest divide I see is between the people who genuinely want the world to be better and the people who are using political radicalism as their excuse to voice their murder fantasies, who dream about standing in an angry mob as 8-year-olds get sent to the gallows for the crime of being born from a royal vagina.
Spare me your melodrama, children and babies are not your fucking oppressors. If you seriously want to tell me that calling for babies to be beheaded and every Israeli being burned alive is “desperate revenge against oppressors”, then I guess Netanyahu really is doing self defense right now.
I see that divide too. Too many self-described leftists don’t really care about society improving somewhat as much as they want to be knee-jerk contrarians against the status quo and also think violence is fun instead of sometimes necessary.
If you genuinely want the world to be better, you have to pick a side. You can’t just rest in your armchair in your ivory tower and condemn the material reality on the ground on all sides.
I am picking a side you dingdong. That doesn’t mean I want the side I’m rooting for to ethnically cleanse the other, holy fuck.
Not an idealistic side you made up in your head, a side that actually materially exists in the real world.
Israel and its goals or Hamas and its goals.
Pick one.
Hamas does not have a policy of completely exterminating of all Israelis. You are, despite nominally supporting Hamas, implicitly promoting anti-Hamas Zionist lies.
As far as I’m concerned, unless we in the crackerverse take up arms against our settler governments we are complicit. I include all of the settler-colonial project in this, so I’m guilty too because I’m posting instead of dedicating my life to opposing this evil project in all its forms.
Am I supposed to not be held accountable just because I merely create wealth for my ruling class and pay into the imperial death machine?
You completely dodged his point to talk about some other shit.
From the Hamas Political Document
“Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine.”
Now, what does this mean? One interpretation could be that they only struggle against Zionist jingoists.
The taking of hostages tells us something deeper. Were they all IDF reservists and veterans? I doubt it.
So, what is a Zionist? I posit that it’s all of us who live and serve in the imperial core. Every single one of us that feeds into this death machine and our ruling class. So I’m a communist, what the fuck does that matter? I haven’t done anything. I’m paying off loans for my trailer, I’m selling my labor for wages, I’m consuming the same treats as everyone else, and I pay my taxes. Am I not a Zionist, simply because of that?
Are you actually on the side of Palestinians? You seem more like a bog standard online leftist that has done the bare minimum of recognizing a genocide for what it is and has taken that to mean they can just say whatever edgy nonsense pops into their head and pretend that’s anticolonialism. “Oh, you can’t criticize me for saying shit that Zionists pretend are the actual stakes of the conflict because I have right opinions.”
You are not special here. You are not more outraged than anyone else. You are valuing the clout of appearing more “extreme” to a handful of internet leftists over the damage of giving Zionists screenshots of Palestine supporters actually wanting to commit genocide. If you’re worried about what side people are on, first worry whether you’re even helping the one you pretend to care about.
Clout? I’m anonymous.
Posting isn’t politics. We can’t help anyone here. If I was worth anything I wouldn’t be wasting my time arguing on an underwater basket weaving forum, I’d be doing something that actually matters. We’re complicit. If I were killed for it, I’d understand.
Excuse me? Do you think I was implying I’m pro-Israel or…?
You sure sound anti-Hamas, therefore:
Go fuck yourself. If you wanna smugly tell me that I have to be in favor of Israeli genocide to be on the side of Palestine, you can go die in a fucking cave. Call me idealistic if you want, you fucking maniac.
You’re the one that wants to smugly denounce both sides as bad while upholding your imaginary side of the conflict as the solution. There are only two material sides in this conflict: Hamas and Israel. That’s it. If you don’t support the only material force fighting for Gaza:
falling into genocidal antisemitic tropes in response to the israeli state being ghouls is not hopeless desperation. these are not palestinians posting after having their homes bombed and their loved ones lynched. this site is still mostly westerners living in much more comfort, lots of white westerners with no real connection to the conflict. most people here have no fucking excuse to be posting like that, other than putting on the costumes of the actually oppressed to vicariously play out their outrage.
it is adventurist nonsense. no, you actually can manage your anger enough to not call for murdering babies, if you lack the discipline to not even help but at least not produce propaganda for zionist liberals - and they do in fact watch this place for shit takes like this - then you are worse than useless.
if you’re mad, at least focus on presenting the IDF as monsters instead of presenting their victims’ perspective as wanting to kill babies. you can recognize that the actual victims are not going to respond well to being genocided without stepping in to say awful shit on their behalf.
what, the original commenter said their family lost everything in the nakba, and they were the one unhingeposting not me
if you take away the wildly inappropriate conflation of israelis and jews, your argument seems basically the same as that of people grimacing at “death to america” and trying to sanitize it as only referring to america as a political formation or something bc it’s so important apparently to observe proper optics to win the sympathy of libs. idc what libs think about anything and I’m not expecting posts on hex bear dot net to have any bearing at all on world events. but im drawn to ppl who lowkey feel
stuff literally sometimes bc that electric sense of helpless outrage resonates with me a lot, and even when I don’t agree with someone like the removed poster there’s a sense of safety in knowing for sure where they stand
While I stand by the statement that calling for babies to be killed as an act of genocide has an extremely antisemetic connotation and I would normally assume someone saying that is doing some antisemetic entryism, I did miss that the bit about the Nakba which better explains their post as coming from actual harm rather than just grandstanding.
However, shit like “death to America” is its own problem, as there isn’t actually any relevant desire to ethnically cleanse white people and so it can be understood as either a joke or indeed just about the nation state, as obviously even if you did actually mean to genocide white people for whatever reason there are a lot of people who are not white here or who are literally indigenous, so an unironic “nuke the US” take would be nonsense even before getting to the fact that whiteness is a social construct that can be destroyed without literally killing all white people. And then there’s the common criticism of leftists using the imagery of people.in the Middle East as violent terrorists to larp as such, along with using terms like inshallah while wishing for violence.