AntiNote: On 10 July 2024, an anonymous group of internationalist activists “connected across the Asian diaspora” launched a counterinformation website featuring educational artwork and an extensive resource list that together comprise a manifesto of sorts, an initiative from the periphery demanding an end to the disinformation and imposed division that has so long plagued people “resisting genocide, settler colonialism, and state violence.”
With their kind permission and in a gesture of solidarity, we present here the slides and descriptions from the site, which they also shared on Instagram as the first of a series of such salvos.
The last time we republished a similar intervention, we had this to say, and it applies now, again and always:
“From the heart of Turtle Island, in a nation-state founded on multiple genocides that are ongoing, we understand that the denial is part of the genocide, and is as much a part of the violence as the killing itself. With all our energy, we resist this kind of brutal, oppressive denialism in all its forms and everywhere it appears.”
People, Not States
by anonymous activists “who have lost community after pushing against genocide denialism on the ‘Left'”
10 July 2024 (original post)
Rematriate Indigenous lands!
End All Genocides! From Tigray to Gaza to ‘Xinjiang!’
Solidarity with uncontacted peoples in voluntary isolation!
Solidarity with People, Not States
We are alarmed by the increased platforming of figures who deny, minimize, or justify genocides committed by non-western states. These figures gaslight our comrades, insisting that we dispose of them in favor of the unjust and unsound position that ‘Leftists’ should only be concerned with US and other select imperialisms. This erasure and violence cannot be tolerated.
Normalize calling out genocide denialism. We bear witness to survivors of genocide and empire who are marginalized, threatened, or shut out of liberatory spaces by genocide deniers who spread racist propaganda and disinformation. Collective liberation is not found in the erasing of ‘inconvenient’ genocides or in the disposal of any oppressed people.
As people resisting empire, settler colonialism, and state violence, our liberation is entwined, whether we are resisting western or non-western regimes. We reject false narratives that suppress the possibilities of solidarity, whether by replicating colonial violence within our movement spaces or using our own pain as fuel for oppressing other marginalized people.
Our collective liberation exists within the multitudes of relationships between our experiences, voices and resistances. We uplift the urgent need to transform our movement spaces where possible, and to build new ones when necessary.
What can you do?
- Stop reposting/giving platforms to genocide deniers.
- Learn more about ongoing genocides and anti-imperialist perspectives directly from impacted people – check out resources here.
- If you resonate with this post, share it on your socials and discuss its contents with your friends and comrades.
- Reach out to people and organizations and ask them to take a public position against genocide denialism.
Solidarity with the peoples of:
Abya Yala / Turtle Island, Armenia, Assyria, Balochistan, Congo (DRC), ‘Xinjiang’ (Dzungarstan & Altishahr / East Turkistan), Haiti, Kenya, Hong Kong, Iran, Kanaky, Kashmir, Kurdistan, Kūhistoni-Badakshon, Myanmar, Palestine, Sahel, Sudan, Syria, Taiwan, Tibet, Tigray, Ukraine, West Papua…
…and all peoples targeted by genocide, colonialism, and state violence.
EDIT: This post was updated to include a second set of slides and text, created as a follow-up response to comments dismissing the peoples’ resistances referred to in the original post as “U.S. imperialist projects.” In response, the People Not States organizers amplified a slightly edited version of another user’s reply (@doctenzin) with permission.
Anti-Imperialism as in Against All Imperialisms
by People Not States
17 July 2024 (original post)
Every oppressed community has aspirations and creative energy. Every one of them has histories that have been purposely buried or twisted by states seeking to exploit them for their own gain. They/We are never centered in our own story. Instead we’re peripheralized and our struggles are rarely named in liberatory spaces due to harassment & strategic silencing.
People are the center of their own experiences. But many are treated as objects by imperialist powers. Some Leftists advance this imperialist violence by only speaking of people in relation to the West.
What makes someone so afraid that they would rather suppress colonized and genocided people than risk their voices being heard in movement spaces? This is what some “Leftist” individuals and organizations are doing and have been doing for decades. This needs to be acknowledged before it can be healed. It mimics the violence that we see from liberals and the right wing, and it hugely diminishes our revolutionary possibilities.
Stop centering the narratives of states. States can speak up for the rights of a marginalized group somewhere while committing atrocities against another elsewhere. This doesn’t negate the truth of the genocides or wrongdoings they selectively speak up about. Neither does the fact that some were once colonized let them off the hook for the horrors they perpetrate now. We are fighting white supremacy as well as the human capacity for cruelty and lies, which no land or ideology is immune from.
None of us have all the answers. We certainly don’t have them for other marginalized communities we don’t even belong to. But we don’t need to have these answers. We need to be present, look toward and listen to each other and resist the urge to align ourselves with rigid systems.
Governments and nation-states do not equal people.
Nation-states homogenize diverse groups of people and secure both Capitalist domination and imperialism, weaponizing nationalistic mythos to gather foot soldiers for the maintenance of domestic hierarchy and foreign entraction in the global, ruling-class struggle for dominance.
Those who rule over poor and working-class people globally have partitioned the world as a means to manipulate and maintain control. The rigid and artificial borders that billions live and die by globally are merely squares on a chessboard. But not all of us choose to be pawns.
What can you do?
- Stop reposting/giving platforms to genocide deniers.
- Learn more about ongoing genocides and anti-imperialist perspectives directly from impacted people – check out resources here.
- If you resonate with this post, share it on your socials and discuss its contents with your friends and comrades.
- Reach out to people and organizations and ask them to take a public position against genocide denialism.
All images: People Not States
Slides 6, 7, and 8 of the 17 July addendum post feature images credited to @blacksocialists .
