any time I get involved in a conversation about the scary authoritarian hOrDeS it seems to get derailed when I lay into the other person about the number of bombs we drop, the portion of our population we cage, the way we have established procedures for destroying all shelter for the many people we force to sleep outside, the fact that we've done one or more federal operations titled Operation [racial slur], and on, and on
In my experience, this doesn’t seem to matter much to people, offline or online. I feel like I’ll never pinpoint it, but for some reason carpet bombing random people across the world (even non-defensively) is nothing compared to being mean to people who have an incalculable amount of wealth and who gets to eat/decide whether life will continue on this planet. I’m really not even sure how people argue against this. We have full knowledge that this hasn’t always been how the world has operated, how people have reacted with force and it’s like it’s mythical or something. It’s truly maddening.
I've been pretty fascinated by that too. I'm not a big theory reader outside of a little Marx and shit, but I heard enough interesting stuff about Frantz Fanon's writing to draw me to his book Wretched of the Earth, and had this to say in his preface for European readers:
But, you will say, we live in the mother country, and we disapprove of her excesses. It is true, you are not settlers, but you are no better. For the pioneers belonged to you; you sent them overseas, and it was you they enriched. You warned them that if they shed too much blood you would disown them, or say you did, in something of the same way as any state maintains abroad a mob of agitators, agents provocateurs and spies whom it disowns when they are caught. 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. Fanon reveals to his comrades above all to some of them who are rather too Westernized — the solidarity of the people of the mother country and of their representatives in the colonies.
In my experience, this doesn’t seem to matter much to people, offline or online. I feel like I’ll never pinpoint it, but for some reason carpet bombing random people across the world (even non-defensively) is nothing compared to being mean to people who have an incalculable amount of wealth and who gets to eat/decide whether life will continue on this planet. I’m really not even sure how people argue against this. We have full knowledge that this hasn’t always been how the world has operated, how people have reacted with force and it’s like it’s mythical or something. It’s truly maddening.
I've been pretty fascinated by that too. I'm not a big theory reader outside of a little Marx and shit, but I heard enough interesting stuff about Frantz Fanon's writing to draw me to his book Wretched of the Earth, and
had this to say in his preface for European readers: