Kulturkampf

[HeavenIsAPlaceOnEarth]

[HaughtyFrank]

[benji]

This guy is great:

When I read the letter, I felt the gut-punch of a comrade turning their weapon on the wrong enemy.
This is not solidarity. This is moral bankruptcy dressed in academic robes, is well-meaning, liberal-humanist drivel. And it hurts precisely because it comes from you.

1. The Genocide Is the Elephant in the Room – And You Ignored It.  Israhell is currently committing a documented, legally-defined genocide against the Palestinian people. Over 40,000 martyrs – mostly women and children. Hospitals flattened. Universities turned to dust....

2. A deliberate starvation campaign and you – in your infinite moral symmetry – chose to place the Islamic Republic of Iran on the same political plane as this genocidal machine?

3. You wrote: "You face the aggression and violence of the very imperialist and Zionist forces the Islamic Republic purports to stand against"  You reduce genocide to a "blade of the scissors" – equal to a theocratic regime's local brutality

4. The Iranian state, for all its reactionary horrors, is a peripheral nation fighting for survival against the core of global white supremacy. Israel is the settler-colonial spearhead of that core, actively exterminating a captive population with US tax dollars...

5. To equate the two is to tell a drowning man that his gasping is just as annoying as the person holding him underwater.

6.  You speak of prisoners caught between "two blades." The *real* Manichaeism is between the colonizer (US/Israel) and the colonized (the entire Arab and Muslim world, including Iran)...

7. The Islamic Republic is a contaminated, bourgeois-nationalist expression of the colonized's struggle. It is ugly. It is violent. It crushes leftists. But it is structurally opposed to the imperial project that seeks to balkanize the entire Middle East for Israeli expansion.

8. When you flatten this contradiction, you give the Zionist project the clean moral alibi it craves. Netanyahu and Blinken will read your letter and say: "Even the anti-imperialists admit Iran is as bad as us."

9. Your letter demands the Islamic Republic stop executions – correctly. It demands the US and Israel stop their wars – meekly, in the passive voice, in the final paragraph, as an afterthought.

10. You spent 70% of your text detailing Iranian state repression. You spent 10% on the global imperial carceral system. And you spent a down sentence on the actual genocide unfolding in real time.

11.  The US and Israel are not "a blade." They are the entire scissor factory. They are the financiers, the intelligence providers, the diplomatic shields, and the weapons dealers for a state that has killed more journalists, medics, and children than any other conflict.

12. US/NATO/Israeli imperialism is the global organizer of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. It seeks total domination of the Global South's resources and populations.

13. The Islamic Republic, while reactionary and oppressive, is a national bourgeois state that exists in resistance.

14. The liberations of the prisoners in Iran is materially tied to the defeat of US sanctions. Sanctions are a slow-acting genocide that kill more Iranians than the prisons ever will.

15. Israhell's genocide is not a "blade" in a bilateral struggle. It is the template for future imperial wars. If Israel wins, every Black, Indigenous, and Arab body on this planet is less safe. You must condemn it, unequivocally, unconditionally, in the first line – not the last

16. Retract this letter. All of you. Write a new one that begins with: "We condemn the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the West Bank, perpetrated by the settler-colonial state of Israel with full US complicity...

We declare this the primary emergency of our time. We stand with Iranian political prisoners as we stand against the US-Israeli axis that fuels the repression of the entire region. We demand an immediate end to all sanctions, all military aid to Israel, and all diplomatic cover

18. Anything less is complicity and treason to the colonized. I am not asking for perfection. I am asking for your revolutionary soul. You need to place the US-Israeli axis as the global headquarters of anti-human violence

[Alpacx]

Least effective starvation campaign in history. Why are Jews so bad at starving and genociding people?

Meanwhile,

   

[Uncle]

I actually ran into someone claiming that the other day about rowling, and was like "wait what" and I had searched it and got a sense that it was bullshit

as expected, it's that she wanted to correct the record surrounding a minor detail about the holocaust, and those disputing that detail characterized it as "denial," which reasonable people would assume is rhetoric that means "the holocaust never happened" rather than "you're wrong that they targeted trans people first and here's evidence supporting that claim"

   

[Besticus Maximus]

One thing that stupid people really struggle with is the timeline of ideas. Like it makes absolute sense that ideas develop and new paradigms emerge as technology advances and human behaviour changes. But the absolute insistence of some primordial spirit in the human body makes it hard for people to understand when ideas start. So that's why you get things like imperialist colonialism in the columbian exchange, or capitalism being a driver for imperialism, when these ideas are self evidently and demonstrably anachronistic. So it is with Gender. Did you know that the idea of Gender is from the mid 20th century? It literally didn't exist until then, because gender is a social construct.

However, like the mormons, the lie is sustained by claiming a spurious history. Which is why they try and claim that the nazis started the holocaust with trans people, when the guys organising the holocaust were made up of cross dressing homosexuals. I can say that knowing that not all gay people are nazis, but also, I am cognisant of the fact that actually many of the worst and most brutal genociders in history were queer and being queer appears, over the long run, to have absolutely fuck all consequence on left v right opinions.

[HaughtyFrank]

Cambridge on a roll