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.
The idea of multipolarity needs to be understood & critiqued. The left cannot abandon anti-authoritarianism and internationalism.
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.
There are people who come into the police department who already hold these views, and there are people who are influenced. Certainly openly racist police officers can have a continuing influence.
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.
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.
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.
Does your society say you only owe good behavior to people who are part of the same racial category as you? Or the same gender or sexual category as you? Or only people who are citizens of your country and everybody else be damned? Focus on enlarging that circle to humanity itself.
We have been alerted, we have been warned: three significant outbursts of indignation and information from an overlooked flashpoint in Fortress Europe’s worsening border crisis: the Bosnian-Croatian border.
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.
