There’s this red sails article that pops up every once in a while. Don’t get me wrong it’s a fine article, but there’s a bit that goes “something something don’t think people are brainwashed and just need to be exposed to uncomfortable truths.”
And like, I get it. But…that’s exactly what happened to me. I mean, I’m not going to say it was exactly one thing that caused it. However, genuinely when i learned about the Iraq War in detail*, that was basically what flipped the switch in my head. Obviously I wasn’t as theoretically developed as I am today, but thats what made me genuinely want to read Marx, Lenin, Mao, etc. It was exactly that process of being exposed to information like that that made me want to be a communist, and want to fight for it.
This isn’t some debunking thing. I think what I’m trying to explain is that my story seems to be very different from other people’s, and applying my own experiences might not really work if it’s not how things commonly work.
And, as much as it is important, I do want something more in depth than just “organize and educate.” Don’t get me wrong, that’s good advice. What I’m trying to ask moreso is, what is the actually psychology going on behind these decisions here? Obviously there’s no cookie cutter/one size fits all strategy here, but some direction would be helpful in actually attempting to convince people.
*To elaborate, I always heard of Iraq as just “the war.” Kinda like how Vietnam was. But no one ever explained to me what it was and school didn’t really neither. So when I learned it was basically the US invading Iraq almost explicitly for oil and no one got punished for it and basically everyone got rich off of it besides normal people while hundreds of thousands Iraqis died, it really shook me.
Yes, they are. There’s a reason people here tend to say Occupied Korea rather than South Korea. You need to learn about Korea’s history evidently. They faced enormous violence and repression, first under colonial Japan and then under US occupation, and the US occupation continues to this day. The whole designation of North and South Korea was literally drawn up by the US military.
Japan’s situation is a bit more complicated because of their part in colonialism and imperialism prior to and during WWII. But it would still be racist and reductionist to imply that Japanese people are a monolithic entity deserving of suffering because of their governance.
Black people absolutely can be citizens of the US. They still face systemic racism on top of that. The Civil Rights Act was more of a diffusion of revolutionary energy than it was a solution to problems of racism, but it did further the rights of black people in the US and normalize them more so into the US culture as other regular people. If you’re thinking of what’s going on right now with ICE and all, that’s more of a broader violence of white supremacy and the institution of whiteness, and it’s not as simple as “everyone is going along with it” or something.
With indigenous people, it’s complicated by the fact that they wouldn’t necessarily want to be a citizen of the US. There are still indigenous nations who want their sovereignty respected. I can’t speak to the exact details of it, but I feel confident in saying that they are not generally interested in assimilation into the US project that genocided their ancestors and continues to treat them as less than.
That said, I’m not entirely sure what this has to do with excusing a lack of empathy. Regional barbarism, as I said before, is not a controlled implosion. And as we can see with what’s going on in the US right now, the mask off stuff with ICE is primarily hurting historically marginalized groups, not those who people would tend to be most disgusted with and have a harder time feeling any empathy for. I don’t think the liberal mask is really “better”, but I also don’t think accelerationism tends to hurt the people you think it will. The contradictions are what they are and we have to deal with them as they are, not turn up our noses because we don’t personally love everyone around us. You don’t have to be burbling with love to do a good strategic analysis, but if you aren’t motivated by compassion, it leaves one to wonder what you are motivated by. If there is one thing I take away from successful AES projects, it’s that they tend to have a great love for the people and a great interest in serving their needs. This desire alone does not make them successful, but it sure is a helpful motivator.