Our Mirror Worlds
a zine based on The Fire These Times #182
by @Lizar_tistry
7 February 2025 (read | print)
Amid crisis and shock, we feel disoriented and powerless.
We look for explanations of what happened and begin to see that the system is rigged by those at the top.
If we don’t have guiding ethics and principles and worldview, then we’re completely at sea and just choosing teams.
Each of these teams want their turn at the top of the system – to do it better. Without uprooting systems of extraction and exploitation, this “Our Turn Now” approach to justice creates a replication.
A Mirror World.
* * *
It’s a very difficult thing to de-center oneself, and one’s imagined community and nation.
The Mirror World requires a myth of exceptionality—the violence to which it is responding must be singular in order to justify its response. Recognizing how violence intrinsically within capitalism and state power begins to expose the cracks of the Mirror World.
Israel is not fighting antisemitism. It is another genocidal project.
The liberation of Palestine is not reducible to, or achievable solely through, fighting US imperialism. Palestine is necessarily tied to resistance against ALL state power and ethno-nationalism.
* * *
Doppelganger
When someone enters the Mirror World, they become a doppelgänger of someone else—their former selves, or someone they could have been. Someone like Trump is so horrible, so Other, I can say, “That’s Them.” I can put Them in a box and reach for the moral high ground.
But the doppelgänger bears the uncanny – the chill of the familiar – reminding us of the lives we might have led, the people we might have been.
I see my own doppelgänger as a mirror that’s shown me some things I don’t like about myself.
* * *
The Fruit of the Uncanny and Abolition
Abolition of policing and prisons forces you to confront the worst parts of not just your country or the world you live in, but the scariest parts of your community, the scariest parts of yourself.
Seeing ourselves as an oppressor in a different context is a powerful exercise that gives us a pathway for imagining how we want to structure our movements and society in order to constrain that corruption of ourselves, too.
It’s uncomfortable, but for any kind of future-minded politics, we need to be able to have that empathy. Not empathy for people’s crimes, but empathy for some basic starting points.
* * *
The Mirror Dance: Once something is an issue to “Them,” the left just takes the opposite position.
Lack of engagement with this intersection has led to “You either support the end of the genocide or you care about the Israeli hostages.” Anyone feeling grief gets a cold shoulder from the left, saying, “You’re not allowed to grieve!”
But emotions are unruly, people are going to grieve, and this pushed some people to the right who might not have been.
* * *
The Mask Becomes the Face
In the middle of a genocide, it doesn’t feel like the right time to air our disagreements. And we fall into a habit of silence. The loudest voices become the left. When people talk in a certain way for a year and that’s the dominant way, that becomes what the left is.
If there isn’t a clear alternative, then people begin to think, “Okay, I guess this is how you oppose genocide. I guess these are the rules.”
Standing on the side of life, in the context of genocide and ecocide and the normalization of mass death on pretty much every front—I don’t believe that’s moderate. I don’t believe it’s liberal. I believe it’s radical, transformational. There’s a posture of radicalism that actually defends these institutions, defends massive states with massive armies. I don’t want to cede the definition of what is radical to those self-styled “radicals.”
* * *
The Periphery is the Center.
Some answers lie not with us here, but in the peripheries.
No matter what we say or do, Palestinian children are going to keep being born today, tomorrow, in five years, and in ten years. Their parents are going to take care of them, sing to them, tell them stories, and find ways to build resilience for them.
Maybe it’s not our job to figure out how to comfort Palestinian children, because the truth is, we just can’t. I can’t pick up a child that’s not my own and ever give them the comfort that his mother or grandmother or even his neighbor could.
It feels like the American left, liberals, whoever it was, ignored the screaming periphery who were showing them where this was all headed. And of course that’s where it ended up.
But what I can do, and what I think is our job to do, is to see different structures of resistance and caretaking that have been created under these circumstances of occupation and oppression and ask ourselves, how do we genuinely tie them to each other in a world that actively seeks to disaggregate them?
* * *
The time for biting one’s tongue is over.
And it is going to be hard.
It’s going to hurt to argue in the middle of a genocide.
We can’t predict what the next shock will be.
But we can prepare.
What are our guiding principles?
How do we make our worldview legible?
This zine is based on episode #182 of the podcast The Fire These Times, an affiliate of the From The Periphery media collective (Antidote Zine is also an FTP affiliate). It was designed by @Lizar-tistry. Support From The Periphery on Patreon.
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