"I'm not supporting Israel, I just condemn all violence!"
"I'm not supporting Israel, I just condemn all violence!"
No you don't. You know why? Because the status quo is intensely violent, and at best it's both lazy as fuck and pointless to talk about violence in terms that aren't relative to that. At worst, it's deliberately laundering genocide apologia
The good news is that if you're not trying to carry water for a genocidal project, then I can tell you why you denounce anti-imperial violence but never even think of imperial violence: Because it's comfortable. Imperial media allows you to ignore all violence but that which threatens it, and you happily accept that ignorance
You, who are so liberal and so humane, who have such an exaggerated adoration of culture that it verges on affectation, you pretend to forget that you own colonies and that in them men are massacred in your name.
There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
~ Mark Twain
the status quo isn't politicalhistory ended 30 years ago
Oh shit, I've been looking for that quote but not finding it because I thought it was another Sartre banger