i really wish there was a way to stress that these politicians you love, even if they may have otherwise perfect politics (even if they have personally saved your life) making it seem as though the genocide in gaza is a regrettable but acceptable hiccup happening in the world is a fatal flaw. its a very very big alarm blaring.
it's not because the world hasn't seen massacre before. it's seen genocide before, and it has seen horror before. we took measures to stop them from happening again, and what we're seeing now isn't that these measures aren't being applied—it's that these measures are being undone altogether. yes they've been undermined for as long as they've been instituted, but right now their very existence is being questioned. rather than the cursory 'we made some mistakes and we failed to save human lives' what is happening now, politically, is 'we're making no mistakes and some lives are not worth saving.' a lot of terrible things have happened over the past half-century, and it's becoming clearer that the lessons learned were not how to stop them from happening, but rather how to get away with it.
what's happening right now is that every political avenue to prevent genocide is being systemically and calmly blocked. every non-violent avenue to prevent genocide is being systemically and calmly blocked. i am saying this to those of you who are liberal, rational and concerned about democracy—what would you do differently right now? if you were invested in stopping this genocide, what would you do?
the answer is there is nothing you can do. there is literally nothing. the best solution a liberal can come up with right now is simply "i would not be in this position in the first place." and if you are a white person of the first world, you probably would not. but that's a futile answer right now, isnt it? it shows the limit of your understanding of this situation, and only reaffirms the lack of political solutions.
if you are invested in stopping this genocide with us, if you've been trying to for the past five months, then you know exactly what i'm saying. people are discovering the hard limits of empire today. they're getting a front-row seat to three genocides at once—one in the name of capitalist exploitation, one in the name of anti-blackness and proxy wars, and one in the name of settler colonialism. they are seeing the value of human life degrade and the people we pay and elect to stop that from happening just accelerate this further. what would you do if you were palestinian? what would you do if you were congolese? what would you do if you were sudanese? you would be doing exactly what people are already doing. i promise you whatever you come up with is already being done.
and it is being done to little to no avail. the progress being made is slower than rate at which hard-won human rights are regressing. people care more than ever but governments are being less beholden to their people than they have been in a long time. UN agencies are being defunded and dismantled. no recourse for congo, less aid is getting to sudan, and aid is actively killing palestinians. are you paying attention to this kind of thing? it's indicative of how disposable people are. and in the future, those people won't always be far away.
what would you do differently? what solutions are there? the problems we have right now can only be solved politically at a rate slower than people are dying. this makes the political solutions a hindrance rather than a help. what should've been a path to stopping genocide becomes complicity in genocide. red tape around shrouds.
if all avenues for non-violent solutions are blocked, the only avenue left is violence. for the past half-century or so our world politics at least implied that violence is a regrettable last resort and political solutions are preferred. but what's happening now is political solutions are discarded altogether and violence is becoming the first, last and only resort. what is most significant is that this is not merely happening between nations: it is happening between leaders and their people. new limits of impunity are tested every day. i promise you this is a lesson everyone around the world is internalizing quite quickly.





















