These “people” are so off-the-wall genocidal that even calling them liberals feels somehow misleading. I know that liberalism is the moderate wing of fascism, but it feels as though there is no moderate wing left. I know this is not so much a departure from there normal mode of thinking as a particularly ugly contextual manifestation of the white supremacy they hold so dear. But my God, things are rapidly getting out of hand.
Best case scenario, I see them frame the conflict in Palestine as a conflict between religious extremists. How far up your own ass do you have to be to make such a claim? Pushing back on this idea, insisting instead that the operative identities here are colonizer and colonized, oppressor and oppressed, and that the conflict will only end when the oppression ends, someone was more than happy to call me a “terrorist sympathizer” (lol) and told me that I should be gassed.
“Israel’s right to exist” is a thinly veiled dogwhistle for genocide apologia. “Terrorist” is functionally a racial slur, now more than ever. “It’s a complex situation” is a lazy yet effective strategy for muddying the waters long enough for their Final Solution to be enacted yet again. Shaking liberals awake causes them to lash out violently and retreat into the dark crevices of racism and profound ignorance. It feels so hopeless.
I feel like I am in some kind of nightmare, where all of these people I previously thought could be reached have gone fully mask off and revealed themselves to be monsters with scarcely a soul to share. They are subhuman, blood-sucking fiends who need to be eradicated like one might eradicate cancer.
The worst thing, as I’ve already revealed, is that it makes me into the worse fucking person imaginable. I genuinely wish all these people would be shot. I find myself regularly thinking that the population needs to be culled, decimated until these psychopaths no longer disgust me with their breathing. Surely, if we just get rid of the bad people, everything will improve! Now look who’s Hitler.
I just don’t know what to do anymore.
It’s just settler hegemony. They didn’t enter a vacuum sealed logic chamber one day and come out bloodthirsty freaks. Most of them just internalize and repeat whatever they think most of the people around them believe and say to prevent being alienated. The societies that they live in are colonial societies built on stolen land, and those societies have a interest in perpetuating the cycle of colonial extraction. As long as liberals don’t have to see the bloodletting, it’s easy for them to believe whatever allows them to go about their day not thinking about the fact that they live on the death star. When they can’t ignore it, the simplest solution for them cope with cognitive dissonance is to adopt whatever hastily cobbled together pretext is handed to them that justifies the imperial bloodletting – even makes it noble. That lets them go about their day with their worldview intact, because the alternative would be extremely disruptive to their sense of identity and community.
When you try to persuade libs about this stuff, you’re not just trying to convince them of a set of facts: you’re implicitly telling them that their entire society is evil, and that they should be traitors to the interests of that society. Whether it’s productive to try to personally convince individual Euro-Americans liberals about that is a question I can’t answer for you. When you get frustrated about why it’s so difficult to get these people to accept an obvious truth and how quickly, easily, and desperately they’ll cling to a lie, consider true size of the pill they’d have to swallow in order to accept what you’re saying.