duderium

This is increasingly a genre of youtube videos in itself, but I watched an interesting one last night that I wanted to discuss here. I'll summarize the video: an Arab Jewish guy who says he lived in israel all his life (I think he lives in Mexico now?) and that he has experience with every aspect of israeli society (religious, secular, rich, working class) basically says that israel is finished. They're going to attack Iran again (not much of a surprise to anyone here), probably within a few weeks or months (this is my own prediction, the USA is already preparing for this by abandoning Ukraine), and this time Iran is going to hit them with enough heavy missiles to make it impossible to live in Israel. The IDF will become non-functional and Palestinians in the West Bank and outside of Tel Aviv will rise up and (with the help of Hezbollah, which will invade from the north, and maybe even Hamas in Gaza) end Israel. He said that Jews are only really a majority in and around Tel Aviv; outside of Tel Aviv Jews and Palestinians are roughly 50-50. I think hexbear also knows about the political situation in israel, how society there is in crisis (the liberals can't form a majority while the center-right (Netanyahu) and the far-right (Ben Gvir) can't do anything except start wars). This makes another war inevitable, it's just a question of when.

For Iran, the trick is to end israel without getting nuked. The video guy thinks that israel won't nuke Iran (because israel can't be certain that Iran or Pakistan won't retaliate with nukes of their own), but my opinion is that this is wishful thinking. Backed into a corner, I think there is a good chance that israel will use nuclear weapons, even if it means they themselves will get nuked or that the fallout will affect their own population (or that the fallout will drift over Europe or China). The Samson option is a thing. It's completely insane, but israel is also completely insane. They will not go quietly. They will not just throw up their hands and say, oh well, you win. (This is what I suspect Justin Podur would say.)

The guy in the video also had some interesting things to say about israeli society that I didn't know: that Palestinian parties make up about 20% of the knesset but that the Jewish parties refuse to form coalitions with them due to racism, and also that the mood in israeli right now is ecstatic, everyone there is apparently happy, and the government is constantly saying that everything is amazing and going really well. It sounds insane because it is insane. I've heard other israelis say that people are currently like zombies in israel, maybe they're just ecstatic zombies. This is my impression of white americans in general too.

I saw some other discussion on hexbear about people asking why the USA loves israel so much. What does israel do for the USA? It basically keeps the middle east under control. It reduces countries as far away as Morocco to the status of Native American reservations, except Morocco has almost forty million people. The stock market also depends on genociding Palestinians; we are currently in a genocide bubble. Yet the USA wasn't always so devoted to israel. Its main proxies in the Middle East were Iran and Saudi Arabia until the Iranian Revolution—that's when I think the real American devotion to israel began. And if israel does actually fall, I suspect that Palestine will be blockaded like Cuba (unless the new government there can somehow lib out like post-Apartheid South Africa but that seems extremely unlikely to me even though there will probably still be many Jews living in post-israel Palestine), and that the USA will shift even more of its support to its client states (Egypt and Saudi especially) to maintain control of Middle Eastern oil and also the geo-strategic crossroads of three continents. But who knows? Once israel is gone, I think there will be so many changes, the nothing ever happens crew is really going to be upset. We'll be lucky if these changes take place without nuclear weapons being involved.

Just posting this here for hexbear to comment.

Yes I know there is a huge open desert and shitloads of hostile forces in the way (including nukes), but can it be done?

I went to my town’s memorial day parade entirely to support my kid, who was playing an instrument in the parade. It was a beautiful day and a really pure distillation of America there. Cops, fire department, a handful of veterans (some of them looking young enough to be volksturm), boomers driving ancient convertibles, lots of kids playing terrible music, and loads of fascists and liberals having a good time. A little girl asked if I wanted a flag, and I said “no thanks.” That was about as radical as I got. I thought they would all kill me if I whipped out my Palestinian flag.

Today is the day that George Floyd was lynched by police in 2020, sparking the largest protests in American history. I can't recall seeing a Marxist analysis of this, so I thought I would say something. Anyone should feel free to critique me or add their thoughts.

I actually still haven't seen the entire video of his death and have no intention of ever watching it. At the time I was still reeling from the total defeat and capitulation of Bernie's second presidential campaign; I had donated hundreds of dollars as well as many hours of volunteer time in the belief that a Bernie presidency would save lives via universal health care. I attended in person the caucus in my area that decided which candidate would receive which state delegates; Bernie won a slim majority of votes but Biden received the majority of delegates. I knew many of the people at the caucus and was shocked (but of course should not have been) at their behavior. A third supported Biden, a third supported Warren (who had already thrown in the towel), and the rest supported Bernie. The Biden supporters in particular appeared to be especially embarrassed and would not make eye contact with me, though I had known some of them since childhood. I already considered myself a Marxist at this time, but witnessing the theft of state delegates with my own eyes finally convinced me that participation in bourgeois elections in the USA was totally pointless, at least within the Democratic Party. It was an extremely depressing time.

George Floyd's death was horrifying, but the huge protests that followed and the many violent actions taken against the police and both the petite and haute bourgeoisie, the solidarity among Americans of all races (especially younger Americans and especially the proletariat and labor aristocracy) was truly shocking, even if many liberals soon joined the protests in order to sabotage them (by reporting violent protestors to the police, for instance, or by protecting businesses from violence). Until 2020 happened, I really hadn't been sure that Americans were capable of such an upheaval, although as history has repeatedly taught us: it can happen here. Burning down the Minneapolis police precinct and imprisoning George Floyd's murderers were the greatest achievements of this period, but I can recall seeing a video of a guy somewhere in upstate New York driving a pickup truck at high speed into a crowd of police, and scattering their bodies like bowling pins. I haven't been able to find this video anywhere of course and I know nothing about who that guy was. I participated in many protests, all of them totally peaceful, and was surprised by the large number of people involved (I live in a rich, white, liberal area), but also by the large presence of the police and the way they all essentially seemed to be dangerous buffoons (though they are never depicted as such in corporate media).

We have to ask: why did this happen and why did the protests peter out? Police murder about three people in the USA every day; these murders are often caught on camera and are often impossible to justify even by the staunchest defenders of the police. Yet for some reason, George Floyd's especially heinous death sparked what might have become a revolution. It's obvious to say that the pandemic played a major role here: it was an uncertain time for everyone, the economy was collapsing, and many people had lost their jobs and were stressed far more than usual. I've always thought that the suspension of sports—obviously a symptom of the pandemic—also played a massive role. Sports function as one of society's biggest distractions, one of the acceptable ways for frustrated people to funnel their energy, and without sports, that energy still needed somewhere to go, and the protests provided an outlet for that energy. The general lack of slop on TV must have been a significant factor.

Why did the protests fail to turn into a revolution? Without a revolutionary party, there can be no revolution. Now as then, there is no party I am aware of in the USA that is organizing toward violent revolution. (The PSL does not have an underground terrorist or guerrilla force that I know of.) The BPP is the last party that attempted this, and the police destroyed them a long time ago. The protests petered out because no one had the organization necessary to move them in the direction of revolution: no one was advocating that we should raid police stations (or the homes of reactionaries who own fifty guns and thousands of rounds of ammo) in order to arm ourselves. No one was advocating for us to take and hold territory, to seize control of water, power, and telecommunications, and drive out the police and military and their hangers-on. No one was ready.

Because of our failure, I think we can all agree that everything is even worse than it was in 2020. The vast majority of the population believes that covid magically ended a long time ago; the reactionaries have been gleefully murdering incredible numbers of children in Palestine for fifteen months. All of this could have been prevented, and much more, if we had succeeded. But we weren't ready. As I said, I hadn't even known that such a huge uprising could happen in the USA, and when it happened, I had no idea where it would go. But as Marx and Engels wrote, it can take many years, sometimes decades of struggle before a society is ready for revolution. America is also a settler-colonial empire—a bigger and far more successful "israel"—and huge numbers of Americans (at least 70%) have been bought off by the spoils of empire and have no interest in sacrificing their quality of life for a world that works for everyone rather than just a few.

All this being said, there will be another crisis—or a confluence of crises—that makes doing things in the old way impossible for both the ruling and subordinate classes. Another huge uprising will eventually take place in the USA—maybe this summer, maybe ten years from now. The question is: will we learn from our mistakes and be ready when it occurs?

We all complain about the terrible shit we constantly hear from the people around us. When was the last time you heard someone say something cool in person, and what did they say?

About a week ago Gerald Horne mentioned on his youtube channel a book called Teaching White Supremacy. I thought it sounded interesting but that it would be a pretty standard and possibly boring "America Bad" sort of book, but I found myself really enjoying it and learning a lot, and it's just like, are there any white people in 19th century America aside from John Brown who weren't completely fucking insane? Walt Whitman, a poet I really enjoyed when I was a teenager, who was on the right side of the Civil War—fucking racist piece of shit. Emerson, a philosopher who never interested me in the slightest, but who was still mentioned in our high school history classes—fucking profound disgusting racist, freely saying and writing the most appalling shit you can imagine. And of course their wikipedia articles are like "it was normal at the time." It's still normal now, it doesn't mean it's okay!

I haven't looked at Whitman in twenty years but I will still say that maybe he's a good poet, but fucking Emerson? Did that guy write a single word that is genuinely beautiful, interesting, or helpful? My guess is that he's just part of the canon because America needs someone to prove to the world that we're not all just a bunch of mindless barbarians. But Emerson is just basically a nineteenth century hippy. And Thoreau was like "wouldn't it be cool if I lived alone in a house in the woods." Wow, so deep!

Maybe Herman Melville is another exception, like a literary John Brown. (Someone prove me wrong.) Moby Dick truly is a classic and Typee is honestly fucking awesome too. It's no surprise he died in obscurity. Poe is also brilliant but he was a fucking piece of shit as a person (with a very tragic life of course). I don't know anything about his political views but I imagine that they weren't very good.

I'm a white cissie, so this country was built for me, and I'm guessing its shittiness doesn't come as much of a surprise for people reading this who aren't white cissies, but still, even if you spend just a few minutes a day reading almost anything about the USA, you are bound to get depressed. For a book I'm working on I was just researching age of consent laws and child marriage in the USA and holy fucking shit, the line "minors are not accepted in shelters" just left me unable to continue. I had to stop after researching for five minutes. So utterly fucking profoundly bleak.

No I will not elaborate

I’m not talking about fancy movies you mention to impress people with. I’m talking about movies you have seen many times and genuinely feel are really fun, even if their politics might be imperfect. The ones I have in mind are The Fifth Element, Robocop, Starship Troopers, and Independence Day.

I posted here a few days ago about thinking of yelling at an elderly white woman who was doing a one-person protest about Trump's attack on the post office, and was criticized for this by several people here, who said that I should have tried to interact with her politely and basically push her left. I didn't actually interact with her at all because I had my work uniform and would have been risking my job for mentioning things like Palestine or communism, politely or not.

Yesterday I found myself in a different town with nothing to do for about forty minutes and saw yet another white boomer woman who was protesting Trump by herself. This different person had a sign about respecting the constitution. Since I didn't have my work uniform on, I decided to try the approach advocated by Hexbear, and spoke with her as politely as possible. I ended up speaking with her and several other white boomer women (who joined us) for pretty much the whole time I was there. It was an amicable discussion, and one of the women there really talked with me and listened to me for awhile, but in retrospect I still have some doubts. It reminds me of talking with my parents (who are white liberals), how I could get my dad to agree that we basically live in the Confederacy or even Nazi Germany one day, for him to seemingly completely forget this discussion the next day and rant about how Trump is destroying the country and we need to support Biden because at least he's not Trump. On the other hand, I'm not sure my parents (who are both Bernie voters) have ever attended a protest for anything. I told the first woman that the constitution is what got us here, it was written by genocidal slave-owners, etc., and she actually turned her sign around, which advocated for saving social security, which I of course support.

I asked the women there if they would be voting for the Democrats in the next elections, and they said they would be. This was after I had been talking about Palestine for awhile, so I was actually kind of thinking of abandoning them at that point, but I kept going. I advocated for withholding votes from our Democratic congressman, who never interacts with his constituents and who votes with Trump like 90% of the time (and who always wins elections by pretty thin margins), and got nothing from them. I of course talked a lot about Palestine, but this issue just doesn't seem to be on their radar at all, since it makes the Democrats look like Nazis. I think one woman said something about how it was too bad—I can't remember her exact words, but I said something like: if those kids in Gaza were your kids, would you feel a little more strongly about it? Nothing. The woman I talked with the most said that Trump was destroying the country, and I started saying that it wasn't exactly a bad thing, since this country is so terrible, but I wasn't able to finish my point. She listened a lot more when I told her that the local police work with ICE (which is true, of course). I told her that she should attend local town meetings and ask about it, but I think I should have told her to go to the local police station (within walking distance of us) and ask the cops if they work with ICE. The cops are such fucking assholes that they will proudly admit to working with ICE every single time you ask them.

The woman I talked with the most said, as politely as could be said, that I should probably leave the country. I told her that I would have left if it wasn't so expensive. She said that she herself had been thinking of moving to Mexico. She mentioned that in Russia, people have no rights. I was like—they have the right to universal health care! I brought up how the modern Russian Federation is basically a creation of the USA, which destroyed the USSR, etc. And then I asked about what rights we have in America, when I will lose my job if I put a Free Palestine sticker on my work vehicle? (A coworker of mine has three Ukraine flags on his vehicle.) I talked a lot about how the Democrats will never support universal health care because they're controlled by private insurance companies. Another lady there told us that she had been appalled that none of her caregivers, during a recent visit to the hospital, had been masked. I had gone to a cafe for a few minutes before all of this to get something to eat (I was starving after a long run and hadn't properly prepared for my time in town) and found myself interacting with a weird cafe owner who had posters for the Poor People's Campaign on his cafe walls and who bragged about being fully vaccinated but who wasn't masked and for some reason decided to talk about my mask. He said that covid wasn't going anywhere, I said that's because nobody masks, and he said he agreed—as I walked out. The cafe was packed with unmasked people and I was really uncomfortable there. But the muffin I got was amazing lol (I ate it outside of course).

Is this a good use of my time? I don't know, I felt good doing it? A Tesla driver drove by us and honked his support. I told him to sell his car. He said "check my bumper sticker." I said: I don't care about your bumper sticker, sell your car! And he just shook his head and drove off. The bumper sticker was, of course, about how "I bought this before I knew Elon was crazy." Okay dude, time to rectify that mistake with more than a bumper sticker. I talked about Elon with the white ladies and said that he just makes the mistake of saying what all billionaires think.

Bla bla bla, etc., etc., etc. Doing this is probably better than screaming into the void, but not by much. I'll probably end up in a similar situation next week, so I'll probably try to bring a Palestinian flag with me to see what happens.

I should note that I've been reading Marxist theory for years, I ran in elections and won but resigned after I felt like the police were really going to kill me for voting against their budget, I write Marxist novels, I've done my best to organize in my area, I've participated in many different protests here, I give almost my entire salary to people in Palestine—because some people in the other post were saying that I'm not good enough to be a Marxist or that I'm just an armchair Marxist or something. I'm posting this here for critiques, of course, because I'm probably going to be in a similar situation again and could use hexbear's advice, but I just feel like this should be noted.

I was dressed for work (in a uniform that would have allowed her to complain to my employers if I had started arguing with her) and I stood just a few feet away from her while I was looking for the place I was supposed to work at. I pretended to ignore her. Almost nobody was around in town, and the few people who were driving by almost certainly live here and either support her or don't care. She had a big cardboard sign and was just walking around the sidewalk looking serious. Of course I wanted to ask where she was during the protests for Palestine. Why isn't she protesting Trump murdering hundreds of babies just a few days ago? We're all on the same team now, right, libs? But even when they have nothing to lose, even when they can use Palestine as a way to attack Trump, they still stay silent. Oh man oh man, how I wanted to argue with this woman, even though she was like 75. It wouldn't have looked good. I could have asked why Biden didn't fire Trump's postmaster general.

Still have to respect her, in a way, for doing something. She was probably watching MSNBC, got pissed off, felt like she needed to do something, and decided to go out and protest for a bit. How nice to be able to do that with no fear of losing your job or getting your ass beaten or arrested by the police!

There was actually a handsome dude walking around with a camera filming local businesses for some reason, and he spoke to her in a very friendly way for a moment. I suspected that he was working for the local news? I overheard her mention that she would be in a different location the following day. Liberals are asleep and don't want to wake up.

A friend trapped in Gaza has proposed a grift: saying they need an expensive surgery or something, but not saying that they're Palestinian. I'm afraid to do this myself. Hexbear has also discussed grifting righting fools by claiming to be teachers who got fired for saluting the American flag or something. If anyone is willing to do something like this...

Of course, our homeless comrades here should be included.