Idols & Mass Deceptions
Articles observing and analyzing the basic mode of domination relying on control through charisma: lies, conspiracy theories, false consciousness, false binaries, historical revisionism, hero worship, scapegoating, dehumanization, and media manipulation.
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For Generations: Genocide and Information Warfare in Ukraine
The same energy is there today in Russia. There’s a pride in imperialistic, genocidal ambitions, and there is casual, proud use of genocidal language, cheering on the Russian bombs killing civilians and leveling towns. Continue reading
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Why White Nationalists Love Assad
The Assad regime’s open genocidal policies against its own people are enviable to people on the far right. For people whose politics come from identification with the state, this completely unrestrained killing is the highest form of freedom. Continue reading
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Against Multipolar Imperialism
The idea of multipolarity needs to be understood & critiqued. The left cannot abandon anti-authoritarianism and internationalism. Continue reading
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Voices in the Wilderness
Today, near my building, I saw that my neighbors had painted the “Z” symbol on their cars, this new swastika that marks the Russian military equipment going to attack Ukraine. They’re all in favor of the hellishness, the blood and death, the war. It’s so scary. Continue reading
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Addressing Russian Propaganda
The default anti-military position is that when two imperial powers fight each other, you don’t take a side. This position is convenient but it’s not the situation that’s happening. There aren’t two imperialisms here, there’s just one imperialism against the people. Continue reading
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Winston Smith and the Narrative War in Minneapolis
We had a political dissident in Winston Smith. He was an influencer on social media, getting the message out about different tactics than nonviolent protest. You can’t have millions of people getting ideas like that, you know what I’m saying? Continue reading
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Sectarianization Is a Sickness
The sectarian narrative is often completely false; this messaging of fear is designed to preserve authoritarian regimes in the face of popular protest movements that have nothing to do with sect. Continue reading
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Abolish the Entire Settler Colony
Police and prisons are not the end-all and be-all of white supremacist power. Before the prison was established, before the official uniformed constables were in existence, there was still totalitarian control over blackness. Abolition must encompass critique of the entire settler colony. Continue reading
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And the End Result Is Hanau
No passport, no job title, no class position, no achievement will protect us from constantly being seen as outsiders, as those who do not belong. I don’t have to frequent hookah bars to understand the message of the Hanau terrorist and those who stoked his hatred. Continue reading
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The World at the Fucked Moment
All the analysis of the violence in the world seems to occur with the complete removal of human activity. It seems to exist purely as a form of speaking over people, a game of chess with no pieces, a world with nobody in it but foreign policy experts and talking heads. Continue reading
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The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere
It’s always a real struggle for the left to successfully tackle oppression within its own ranks. But when we do it, our movements gain, every time, from the deeper understandings that emerge. Continue reading
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Dark Money and Disinformation in the Rural United States
Rural voters are being stoked to feel anger and outrage at a mythical coastal elite exploiting them and enforcing federal regulations on them. They’re being told by rightwing media that this is all some kind of conspiracy. Continue reading
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Four Hundred Years of Wampanoag Dispossession
The Thanksgiving myth makes light of Indigenous people’s very real historical traumas. It depicts the only authentic Indians as frozen in time at the moment of contact. It blinds Americans to the existence of Native people in modern times and to the ways Native people have resisted the colonial apocalypse for centuries. Continue reading
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Russiagate, Syria, and the Left
It is critical to understand that the “Russiagate” hoax narrative is Trump’s narrative. By insisting for over two years that Russian interference was overblown, “left” skeptics have been defending the worst president in US history. Continue reading
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The Balkans in Rightwing Mythology
The ideas that became socially acceptable with the rise of Serbian nationalism in the 1980s soon found their concrete political implementation. What emerged was an ideological cocktail of racism, demographic panic, conspiratorial paranoia, and revanchism that ultimately proposed an urgent need for action against an allegedly existential threat. Continue reading
MANIFESTO
The Antidote Writers Collective seeks to resist and counteract the poisons that course through the veins of our politics, our cultures, our movements, our relationships, ourselves.
We believe that a strong collective immune system is built through knowledge and understanding and that the struggle against division and repression requires building a new culture of discussion that goes beyond flat definitions, brittle ideologies, stubborn dogmas, idle preconceptions, and petty rivalries.
We will share knowledge with each other, aiming to build empathy, and in turn enable the emergence of genuine solidarity—one which does not demand uniformity across contexts, one which does not “include” you, but in which you include yourself.
In this spirit, we will provide a platform for a diverse set of voices, especially for those otherwise silenced or ignored in “mainstream” discussions. We want to hear from people engaged in radical struggles all over the world. We seek neither agreement nor conflict, but rather to identify issues at their roots, and to consider different radical approaches to their resolution. And though we at the Antidote Writers Collective have voices—and we will use them—we will not presume to speak for anybody.
On the contrary, we invite you to offer us new ways of thinking, new ways of seeing. It’s not about establishing a space for comfy ideological self-indulgence, but for questions, for a true diversity of voices and viewpoints, and for turning all of this into action.
One World. One Struggle.
TOPICS & VOICES
Alternative Structures Anarchism Anti-capitalism Autonomy Bureaucracy Climate Change Colonialism Corruption Countermedia Culture of Resistance Deutsch Ecocide Ecodefense Ed Sutton Education Empathy Greece Housing Justice Insurrection Islamophobia Kurdistan LeftEast Minneapolis Mutual Aid Neoliberalism No One Is Illegal No Pasarán! One World One Struggle Palaces & Vaults Philosophy Police & Prisons Political Prisoners Post-Socialism Propaganda & Disinformation Que Se Vayan Todos Racism Russia Russian Reader Self Defense & Non/Violence Smash the Patriarchy Solidarity Squats & Occupations States & Borders Street Movements Switzerland Syria This is Hell! Transcripts Translations Turkey Ukraine United States of America War & Empire Work & Wage
ARCHIVES
“… in the midst of putative peace, you could, like me, be unfortunate enough to stumble on a silent war. The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.” – Arundhati Roy
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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