Monday, June 3: A World Cut in Two
Fanon said it best; in this world there's the colonizer and the colonized
It’s kinda starting to feel like we’re circling the drain here folks.
Last week, Donny Trump was found guilty of all 34 charges relating to his hush money payments to a pornstar he had an extramarital affair with. This gives him the unenviable distinction of being the first convicted felon among a long lineup of presidents who were slavers, mass murderers, rapists, and thieves (to be clear, Trump is also almost certainly a rapist and a thief, but that’s not what he was charged with this time). You might be wondering, “Will any of these 34 felonies be enough to keep millions of Americans from supporting this clown to be the next president?” Of course not you silly sausage, we’re in the midst of imperial decline!
Trump’s opponent, Joey Biden, the useless collection of feeble bone and saggy flesh, unveiled a proposal last week to end the genocide in Gaza, claiming it was actually the idea of the apartheid state. Unfortunately for Joseph, the corner he seems to have painted himself into requires pretending that Hamas is unwilling to negotiate for peace while the apartheid state is ready and willing to stop dropping bombs, which they are quite evidently not. So now Biden has to pretend israel is amenable to a ceasefire but the pesky Hamas leaders are refusing to come to the table. In reality, israeli leaders were quick to reject any negotiations for even a temporary ceasefire, as it would get in the way of their obvious goal of destroying Gaza and ethnically cleansing Palestine of Palestinians. Anyone with two functioning brain cells can see that the apartheid state has no interest in peace, as evidenced by the past 240 days.
All the while, western media continues to be complicit in sanitizing mass murder by conducting linguistic gymnastics that would make Simone Biles jealous. The New York Times describes Palestinian land as "land long used by Palestinians", further justifying the apartheid state’s illegal and violent occupation. The Associated Press refers to literal concentration camps as “shadowy hospitals”, in an article so rife with cognitive dissonance it’ll make your head spin. Even Barack Obama celebrated pride month by coming out of his hibernation to conduct some PR for the apartheid state.
Thousands of dead Palestinian children couldn’t stop ol’ Barry O from weighing in and providing cover for their murderers. In his pointless statement, Obama shamelessly claims that while israeli’s have been “butchered by Hamas”, Palestinian families have simply been “shattered by the subsequent war”, making no mention of who exactly is doing the shattering. It’s yet another example of how specificity of language matters and exactly how hopeless it is to beg for sympathy from a world beyond cruelty. Our only recourse is to organize, rise up and resist in every way we can.
The author Andreas Malm continues to make a case for being my favorite Swede, as he argues in this article about the need to support Palestinian resistance in any form, including and especially violent resistance. It is our responsibility to encourage the resistance against apartheid and occupation and oppression, even if the methods are beyond our comprehension.
“When we speak of resistance against murderous oppression and the fight for survival and freedom, do we only bother about the past? Are we happy with it when it is so comfortably distant as to be amenable to kitsch? Is revolutionary politics a posturing about the past, or about real struggles that happen as we speak? On what grounds do we admire the heroes from millennia of subaltern endeavours at self-emancipation, but not the Palestinian fighters who run all the way up to the tanks and deliver their bombs with their hands and dash off?”
Side Items
Atlanta Water Shortage: A large area of Atlanta, including the city’s downtown and nearby residential neighborhoods have been without water or have been experiencing incredibly low water pressure over the weekend following a series of water mains breaking near Vine City. The city is a perfect microcosm of the absurd prioritization of the US. Atlanta can and will spend over $100 million constructing a playground for cops to practice oppressing poor people, but somehow they can’t afford to invest in the basic infrastructure necessary to keep citizens hydrated
Same Skit, Different Day: Spanish giants Real Madrid won their record 15th Champions League title over the weekend, beating German challengers Borussia Dortmund 2-0 to become European champions once again. At this point their dominance is almost boring, seemingly inevitable, and especially annoying considering the team will be adding one of the two best goal scorers on the planet, Kylian Mbappe, for free this summer. I was honestly supporting the German underdogs until it was announced that they’d recently signed a 3 year sponsorship deal with German weapons manufacturer Rheinmetall. It was bad enough when football clubs decided to allow sleazy online gambling sites and sketchy cryptocurrency to become sponsors, but having the name of genocide-supporting arms dealers on your jersey is a new low for the sport. The game is well and truly gone
Mexico’s New HBIC: The former mayor of Mexico City, Claudia Sheinbaum, is set to become the next president of our beloved southern neighbors. Sheinbaum is already something of an enigma, as the first woman president not just in Mexico’s history, but in all of North American history. She’s a pro-Palestinian Jewish environmentalist whose grandparents fled Hitler's armies. She now faces the tall task of building her own image, as many are curious how she’ll outdo her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador aka AMLO. The closest equivalent to AMLO I can think of is if Bernie Sanders was actually politically successful and also not a centrist masquerading as a progressive. Congrats to Sheinbaum though, here’s hoping she can be part of the solution