The authoritarian Western left has, in light of the tragedy in Syria, lost both its credibility as well as its right to speak on the matter. If they cannot, given time, begin to address this, they are well on the way to complete irrelevance.
We don’t have to wait until things collapse to build the world we want to live in. There are people, everywhere, experimenting with and living these ideals out. It’s already happening.
The violence is there, it’s in the news: here are the numbers dead, here are the potential war crimes, the hospitals bombed, the markets bombed. We’ve become desensitized to this, globally. And yet there is so much that people are doing on the ground, and a lot of creative actions.
Amplifying the voices of those who are in the middle of the fight, those who have suffered; asking people what life they want to live and then helping them to build it: this is what we need to be doing together.
I am pleased that refugees from Ukraine are being helped. Refugees from Ukraine are seen as people, but refugees like me from Africa and middle eastern countries are not such ‘good’ humans. We are insulted!
Encampment evictions are happening in the midst of multiple outbreaks, and alongside record high numbers of overdose deaths. These evictions and health crises disproportionately affect Indigenous people and people of color, and we cannot pretend that these crises are separate or minimize their magnitude.
“Neither Washington nor Beijing” doesn’t simply signal that both states are equally bad, but it recognizes that imperialism is a world system not limited to the boundaries of nation-states.
Politicians have articulated the absolute expendibility of most humans beings on the planet. That’s creating new forms of solidarity in the streets right now, and all over the world, as people struggle.
If we don’t start addressing the connection between capitalism—or capitalist realism, as the late Mark Fisher called it—and the psychopathology of depression, then we won’t get very far in treating the phenomenon.
There is the potential to create an international solidarity network based on basic principles that most people believe in. But you have to listen and not be dicks.
