Anti Oppression Quotes

Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility.

It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion--its message becomes meaningless.

The feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy....Self-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness.

The "norm" for humanity is love. Brutality is an aberration. We are not sinners by nature. We learn to be bad. We are taught to stray from our good paths. We are made to be crazy by other people who are also crazy and who draw for us a map of the world which is ugly, negative, fearful, and crazy.

At first glance it seems strange that the attitude of the anti-Semite can be equated with that of the negrophobe. It was my philosophy teacher from the Antilles who reminded me one day: “When you hear someone insulting the Jews pay attention; he is talking about you.” And I believed at the time he was universally right, meaning that I was responsible in my body and my soul for the fate reserved for my brother. Since then, I have understood that what he meant quite simply was the anti-Semite is inevitably a negrophobe.

Holocaust survivors and their descendants are supposed to hate those who oppressed and killed them and their people. Black people are not. This is how anti-blackness works.

What then may we expect if the new constitution be adopted as it now stands? The great will struggle for power, honor and wealth; the poor become a prey to avarice, insolence and oppression. And while some are studying to supplant their neighbors, and others striving to keep their stations, one villain will wink at the oppression of another, the people be fleeced, and the public business neglected. From despotism and tyranny good Lord deliver us.

To those who suspect that intellect is a subversive force in society, it will not do to reply that intellect is really a safe, bland, and emollient thing. In a certain sense, the suspicious Tories and militant philistines are right: intellect is dangerous. Left free, there is nothing it will not reconsider, analyze, throw into question. "Let us admit the case of the conservative," John Dewey once wrote. "If we once start thinking no one can guarantee what will be the outcome, except that many objects, ends and institutions will be surely doomed. Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril, and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place." Further, there is no way of guaranteeing that an intellectual class will be discreet and restrained in the use of its influence; the only assurance that can be given to any community is that it will be far worse off if it denies the free uses of the power of intellect than if it permits them. To be sure, intellectuals, contrary to the fantasies of cultural vigilantes, are hardly ever subversive of a society as a whole. But intellect is always on the move against something: some oppression, fraud, illusion, dogma, or interest is constantly falling under the scrutiny of the intellectual class and becoming the object of exposure, indignation, or ridicule.

Compulsive or treacherous measures to establish any government whatever, will always excite jealousy among a free people: better remain single and alone, than blindly adopt whatever a few individuals shall demand, be they ever so wise. I had rather be a free citizen of the small republic of Massachusetts, than an oppressed subject of the great American empire.

Labelling is no longer a liberating political act but a necessity in order to gain entrance into the academic industrial complex and other discussions and spaces. For example, if so called “radical” or “progressive” people don’t hear enough “buzz” words (like feminist, anti-oppression, anti-racist, social justice, etc.) in your introduction, then you are deemed unworthy and not knowledgeable enough to speak with authority on issues that you have lived experience with. The criteria for identifying as a feminist by academic institutions, peer reviewed journals, national bodies, conferences, and other knowledge gatekeepers is very exclusive. It is based on academic theory instead of based on lived experiences or values. Name-dropping is so elitist! You're not a "real" feminist unless you can quote, or have read the following white women: (insert Women's Studies 101 readings).

All human authority, however organized, must have confined limits, or insolence and oppression will prove the offspring of its grandeur, and the difficulty or rather impossibility of escape prevents resistance.

Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the same thing, as I failed at first to see) had been 'sold' to me as an essentially secular and democratic one. The idea was a haven for the persecuted and the survivors, a democracy in a region where the idea was poorly understood, and a place where—as Philip Roth had put it in a one-handed novel that I read when I was about nineteen—even the traffic cops and soldiers were Jews. This, like the other emphases of that novel, I could grasp. Indeed, my first visit was sponsored by a group in London called the Friends of Israel. They offered to pay my expenses, that is, if on my return I would come and speak to one of their meetings. I still haven't submitted that expenses claim. The misgivings I had were of two types, both of them ineradicable. The first and the simplest was the encounter with everyday injustice: by all means the traffic cops were Jews but so, it turned out, were the colonists and ethnic cleansers and even the torturers. It was Jewish leftist friends who insisted that I go and see towns and villages under occupation, and sit down with Palestinian Arabs who were living under house arrest—if they were lucky—or who were squatting in the ruins of their demolished homes if they were less fortunate. In Ramallah I spent the day with the beguiling Raimonda Tawil, confined to her home for committing no known crime save that of expressing her opinions. (For some reason, what I most remember is a sudden exclamation from her very restrained and respectable husband, a manager of the local bank: 'I would prefer living under a Bedouin muktar to another day of Israeli rule!' He had obviously spent some time thinking about the most revolting possible Arab alternative.) In Jerusalem I visited the Tutungi family, who could produce title deeds going back generations but who were being evicted from their apartment in the old city to make way for an expansion of the Jewish quarter. Jerusalem: that place of blood since remote antiquity. Jerusalem, over which the British and French and Russians had fought a foul war in the Crimea, and in the mid-nineteenth century, on the matter of which Christian Church could command the keys to some 'holy sepulcher.' Jerusalem, where the anti-Semite Balfour had tried to bribe the Jews with the territory of another people in order to seduce them from Bolshevism and continue the diplomacy of the Great War. Jerusalem: that pest-house in whose environs all zealots hope that an even greater and final war can be provoked. It certainly made a warped appeal to my sense of history.

Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn't I better end my "Notes" here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I've been writing this story; so it's hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are all divorced from life, we are all cripples, every one of us, more or less. We are so divorced from it that we feel at once a sort of loathing for real life, and so cannot bear to be reminded of it. Why, we have come almost to looking upon real life as an effort, almost as hard work, and we are all privately agreed that it is better in books. And why do we fuss and fume sometimes? Why are we perverse and ask for something else? We don't know what ourselves. It would be the worse for us if our petulant prayers were answered. Come, try, give any one of us, for instance, a little more independence, untie our hands, widen the spheres of our activity, relax the control and we ... yes, I assure you ... we should be begging to be under control again at once. I know that you will very likely be angry with me for that, and will begin shouting and stamping. Speak for yourself, you will say, and for your miseries in your underground holes, and don't dare to say all of us-- excuse me, gentlemen, I am not justifying myself with that "all of us." As for what concerns me in particular I have only in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and what's more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have found comfort in deceiving yourselves. So that perhaps, after all, there is more life in me than in you. Look into it more carefully! Why, we don't even know what living means now, what it is, and what it is called? Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once. We shall not know what to join on to, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. We are oppressed at being men--men with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalised man. We are stillborn, and for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and that suits us better and better. We are developing a taste for it. Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow from an idea. But enough; I don't want to write more from "Underground." [The notes of this paradoxalist do not end here, however. He could not refrain from going on with them, but it seems to us that we may stop here.]

Animal' is a category that we shove certain bodies into when we want to justify violence against them, which is why animal liberation should concern all who are minoritized. As long as animals are oppressed, as long as 'animal' means something degrading, we will never be set free.

Everybody feels oppressed during a Wagner performance. That is part of the appeal.

We whitewash MLK - how fittingly absurd. I mean, we white-wash everything. We have to stop revering MLK for the wrong reasons, sanitized, domesticated, like Santa Claus and Jesus Christ. He was vehemently anti-racism, anti-oppression, anti-war, anti-materialism, pro-union, pro-social-services, anti-capitalism. Yes. MLK believed capitalism had outlived its usefulness and advocated democratic socialism.

The central question is not: what is force and what is freedom? That is a good question, but in the realm of human cruelty - the realm of history - it is utterly abstract. The central question is: why is force never acknowledged as such when used against the racially or sexually despised? Nazi terror used against the Jews is not in dispute. Still, there is an almost universal - and intrinsically anti-Semitic - conviction that the Jews went voluntarily to the ovens. Rational discourse on how the Jews were terrorized does not displace or transform this irrational conviction. And similarly, no matter what force is used against women as a class or as individuals, the universal conviction is that women want (either seek out or assent to) whatever happens to them, however awful, dangerous, destructive, painful, or humiliating. A statement is made about the nature of the Jew, the nature of the woman. The nature of each and both is to be a victim. A metaphysical victim is never forced, only actualized.

Being radical is a choice, and it takes work. A person with a marginalized identity can engage in conservative, oppressive political work, and activists, organizers, and intellectuals living under capitalism, colonialism, anti-Black racism, and patriarchy require years of unlearning or decolonization.

The struggle against racism must be an ongoing theme of the anti-rape movement, which must not only defend women of color, but the many victims of the racist manipulation of the rape charge as well. The crisis dimensions of sexual violence constitute one of the facets of a deep and ongoing crisis of capitalism. As the violent face of sexism, the threat of rape will continue to exist as long as the overall oppression of women remains an essential crutch for capitalism.

As a black woman interested in feminist movement, I am often asked whether being black is more important than being a woman; whether feminist struggle to end sexist oppression is more important than the struggle to racism or vice versa. All such questions are rooted in competitive either/or thinking, the belief that the self is formed in opposition to an other...Most people are socialized to think in terms of opposition rather than compatibility. Rather than seeing anti-racist work as totally compatible with working to end sexist oppression, they often see them as two movements competing for first place.

When you disrupt the existing conditions and refuse to accept anything less than what you know you are worth, you start making those who oppress you so uncomfortable that they will try anything to discredit you.

The central insight of intersectionality is that any liberation movement—feminism, anti-racism, the labor movement—that focuses only on what all members of the relevant group (women, people of color, the working class) have in common is a movement that will best serve those members of the group who are least oppressed.

The most powerful anti-Christian movement is the one that takes over and "radicalizes" the concern for victims in order to paganize it. The powers and principalities want to be “revolutionary” now, and they reproach Christianity for not defending victims with enough ardor. In Christian history they see nothing but persecutions, acts of oppression, inquisitions. This other totalitarianism presents itself as the liberator of humanity. In trying to usurp the place of Christ, the powers imitate him in the way a mimetic rival imitates his model in order to defeat him. They denounce the Christian concern for victims as hypocritical and a pale imitation of the authentic crusade against oppression and persecution for which they would carry the banner themselves. In the symbolic language of the New Testament, we would say that in our world Satan, trying to make a new start and gain new triumphs, borrows the language of victims. ... The Antichrist boasts of bringing to human beings the peace and tolerance that Christianity promised but has failed to deliver. Actually, what the radicalization of contemporary victimology produces is a return to all sorts of pagan practices: abortion, euthanasia, sexual undifferentiation, Roman circus games galore but without real victims, etc. Neo-paganism would like to turn the Ten Commandments and all of Judeo-Christian morality into some alleged intolerable violence, and indeed its primary objective is their complete abolition. Faithful observance of the moral law is perceived as complicity with the forces of persecution that are essentially religious... Neo-paganism locates happiness in the unlimited satisfaction of desires, which means the suppression of all prohibitions. This idea acquires a semblance of credibility in the limited domain of consumer goods, whose prodigious multiplication, thanks to technological progress, weakens certain mimetic rivalries. The weakening of mimetic rivalries confers an appearance of plausibility, but only that, on the stance that turns the moral law into an instrument of repression and persecution.

The Anti-Stereotype Sonnet Black is not evil. White is not trash. Brown is not illegal. Muslims don’t crash. Women ain't weak. Jews ain't greedy. Men ain't playboys. Queer ain't sickly. Hijab is not oppression. Hourglass ain't beauty. Faith is not delusion. Atheists don't lack morality. Assumptions only reveal shallowness. Beyond stereotypes lies humaneness.

From time to time our national history has been marred by forgetfulness of the Jeffersonian principle that restraint is at the heart of liberty. In 1789 the Federalists adopted Alien and Sedition Acts in a shabby political effort to isolate the Republic from the world and to punish political criticism as seditious libel. In 1865 the Radical Republicans sought to snare private conscience in a web of oaths and affirmations of loyalty. Spokesmen for the South did service for the Nation in resisting the petty tyranny of distrustful vengeance. In the 1920's the Attorney General of the United States degraded his office by hunting political radicals as if they were Salem witches. The Nation's only gain from his efforts were the classic dissents of Holmes and Brandeis. In our own times, the old blunt instruments have again been put to work. The States have followed in the footsteps of the Federalists and have put Alien and Sedition Acts upon their statute books. An epidemic of loyalty oaths has spread across the Nation until no town or village seems to feel secure until its servants have purged themselves of all suspicion of non-conformity by swearing to their political cleanliness. Those who love the twilight speak as if public education must be training in conformity, and government support of science be public aid of caution. We have also seen a sharpening and refinement of abusive power. The legislative investigation, designed and often exercised for the achievement of high ends, has too frequently been used by the Nation and the States as a means for effecting the disgrace and degradation of private persons. Unscrupulous demagogues have used the power to investigate as tyrants of an earlier day used the bill of attainder. The architects of fear have converted a wholesome law against conspiracy into an instrument for making association a crime. Pretending to fear government they have asked government to outlaw private protest. They glorify "togetherness" when it is theirs, and call it conspiracy when it is that of others. In listing these abuses I do not mean to condemn our central effort to protect the Nation's security. The dangers that surround us have been very great, and many of our measures of vigilance have ample justification. Yet there are few among us who do not share a portion of the blame for not recognizing soon enough the dark tendency towards excess of caution.

Women’s marches are a clever progressive divide and conquer strategy that not only turns women against men, but also turns women against each other in the guise of peace and solidarity. It is a brilliant tactic to employ media propaganda to make privileged women feel oppressed and then program them to think that vulgarity, exhibitionism and emasculation is empowering.

First principle: any explanation is better than none. Because it is at bottom only a question of wanting to get rid of oppressive ideas, one is not exactly particular about what means one uses to get rid of them: the first idea which explains that the unknown is in fact the known does so much good that one ‘holds it for true’. Proof by pleasure (‘by potency’) as criterion of truth.

. . . [A]ny history that deals with the efforts of the populace to defend itself from the abuses of wealth and tyranny is people's history . . . A people's history should be not only an account of popular struggle against oppression but an exposé of the anti-people's history that has prevailed among generations of mainstream historians. It should be a critical history about a people's oppressors, those who propagated an elitist ideology and a loathing of the common people that distorts the historical record down to this day.

-instances of the people losing their liberty by their own carelessness and the ambition of a few. We are cautioned . . . against faction and turbulence. I acknowledge that licentiousness is dangerous, and that it ought to be provided against. I acknowledge, also, the new form of government may effectually prevent it. Yet there is another thing it will as effectually do- -it will oppress and ruin the people. Patrick Henry

Diagnoses of the malaise of the humanities rightly point to anti-intellectual trends in our culture and to the commercialization of universities. But an honest appraisal would have to acknowledge that some of the damage is self-inflicted. The humanities have yet to recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, self-refuting relativism, and suffocating political correctness. Many of its luminaries—Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, the Critical Theorists—are morose cultural pessimists who declare that modernity is odious, all statements are paradoxical, works of art are tools of oppression, liberal democracy is the same as fascism, and Western civilization is circling the drain.54

The scariest thing for non-Jewish Americans in talking about Palestinian self-determination is the fear of being or sounding anti-Semitic. The people of Israel are suffering, and Jewish people have a long history of oppression. We still have some responsibility for that, but I think it’s important to draw a firm distinction between the policies of Israel, as a state, and Jewish people. That's kind of a no-brainer, but there is very strong pressure to conflate the two.

If we care about knowledge, freedom, and peace, then we need to stake a strong claim: anyone can believe anything, but liberal science—open-ended, depersonalized checking by an error-seeking social network—is the only legitimate validator of knowledge, at least in the reality-based community. Other communities, of course, can do all kinds of other things. But they cannot make social decisions about objective reality. That is a very bold, very broad, very tough claim, and it goes down very badly with lots of people and communities who feel ignored or oppressed by the Constitution of Knowledge: creationists, Christian Scientists, homeopaths, astrologists, flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, birthers, 9/11 truthers, postmodern professors, political partisans, QAnon followers, and adherents of any number of other belief systems and religions.

The doppelganger nature of the country’s identity is embedded in the dualistic language used to describe it, in which everything is double and never singular: Israel-Palestine, Arab and Jew, Two States, The Conflict. Based on a fantasy of symmetrical power, this suturing together of two peoples implies conjoined twins in a state of unending struggle, an irresolvable sibling rivalry between the two peoples, both descended from Abraham. For Rooney, Israel as doppelganger exists on two levels. First, it is a doppelganger of the forms of chauvinistic European nationalisms that turned Jews into pariahs on the continent since well before the Inquisition. That was Zionism’s win-win pitch to anti-Semitic European powers: you get rid of your “Jewish problem” (i.e., Jews, who will leave your countries and migrate to Palestine), and Jews get a state of their own to mimic/twin the very forms of militant nationalism that had oppressed them for centuries. (This is why Zionism was so fiercely opposed by the members of the Bund, who believed that nationalism itself was their enemy and the wellspring of race hatred.) Israel also became a doppelganger of the colonial project, specifically settler colonialism. Many of Zionism’s basic rationales were thinly veiled Judaizations of core Christian colonial conceptions: Terra Nullius, the claim that continents like Australia were effectively empty because their Indigenous inhabitants were categorized as less than fully human, became “A land without a people for a people without a land”—a phrase adopted by many Zionists and that originated with nineteenth-century Christians. Manifest Destiny became “land bequeathed to the Jews by divine right.” “Taming the wild frontier” became “making the desert bloom.

She no longer followed fashion; she had created a fashion all her own.

Nurturing your self compassion is anti-oppression work within yourself.

The last question "What do humanizing practices look like in and outside of the classroom?" is also essential, because it speaks to those "social justice" educators who leave the school and don't live in anti-racist, anti-sexist, and other anti-oppressive ways in their daily lives. This is why we must not just be non-racist or non-oppressive but also work with passion and diligence to actively disrupt oppression in and outside of the classroom. Simple good intentions aren't enough. The intentions must be deliberately connected to actions.

I felt drained and frustrated (not to mention flat-out dirty) operating within a framework that positioned the criminal legal system as the primary remedy for sexual violence. The prison-industrial complex, to which the mainstream rape crisis movement is intimately and often unquestioningly linked, is an embodiment of nonconsent used to reinforce race and class inequality. Prisons take away the rights of people, primarily poor people of color, to control their own lives and bodies. This is glaringly apparent when one sits in a courtroom and observes the ways in which race, class, and power intersect in this space. How, then, do we as a movement whose fundamental principle is consent see this as an appropriate solution? A successful anti-rape movement will focus not only on how rape upholds male supremacy, but also on how it serves as a tool to maintain white supremacy and myriad other oppressive systems. When this is done, the importance of creating alternative ways to address violence becomes more apparent, and the state-sponsored systems that reproduce inequality seem less viable options for true transformative change.

It is a miracle, with no logical explanation, that even amid the fierce anti-Semitism of Hitler’s oppression, there were Germans who believed with all their hearts in the crucified Jew as their Savior.

Perhaps the least understandable aspect of ally politics to me is the overwhelming tendency for people, who otherwise seem to aspire to relationships free of domination, to try to exert control over others. Is it because when we feel like we occupy the most legitimate or objectively most justified position (often according to a strangely quantitative evaluation of those who are most wronged by social oppressions), it is easy to inflate our sense of righteousness? Or is it that when we feel like we have the most information--or most connections to other "important" groups--we can make decisions for others better than they can make for themselves?

Scholars in South Asian Studies departments and liberal think-tanks see India through a secular lens based on Western ideas of human rights. They deploy subaltern studies and postmodern theories to deconstruct the Indian state as a catastrophe constructed artificially by colonialism, and to show its very nature as oppressive, undemocratic, inherently anti-minority, anti-women and anti-Dalit. They export these models to their Indian counterparts, forming a self-sustaining system. They also feed these visions into media and government hearings. Thus, these two supposedly opposing intellectual streams converge to provide an image of India as a frontier necessitating Western intervention.

By the end of her first year at the Academy, Eris also realizes the Fun Fact of the Day, which is that the degree of a shithead you are, and the degree of anti-oppression you think you foster, create a positive exponential function.

This has been particularly difficult because many on the "left" uphold the mythology that since we work against "The evils of the world," we are somehow free of racism, sexism, classism, anti-Semitism, ableism and adultism (the institutional power adults have to oppress and silence young people). After years of antioppression training and organizing work, however, I now know that many "progressive" people and organizations are just as invested in either/ or dichotomous thinking and in perpetuating oppression in the world.

Now in speaking like this, it doesn’t mean that we’re anti-white, but it does mean we’re anti-exploitation, we’re anti-degradation, we’re anti-oppression. And if the white man doesn’t want us to be anti-him, let him stop oppressing and exploiting and degrading us.

One of the outstanding sources of resistance to imperial power in the Muslim world came from Sufi groups. While Sufi brotherhoods are generally known for a more quietist and mystic approach to Islam, they traditionally rank among the best organized and most coherent groupings in society. They constitute ready-made organizations - social-based NGOs, if you will - for maintaining Islamic culture and practices under periods of extreme oppression and for fomenting resistance and guerrilla warfare against foreign occupation. The history of Sufi participation in dozens of liberation struggles is long and widespread across Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Sufi groups were prominent in the anti-Soviet resistance, and later against the American in Afghanistan and against US occupation forces in Iraq.

There was no tenure committee or central committee, however, to lift Oprah out of the societal mud-to say, for example, to Phil Donahue, "Move over Phil, we need a person of color to put in prime time for diversity's sake." The power Oprah Winfrey has been able to accumulate refutes every cliché of the political left. Her psychological power over her mainly white audience has made her the first individual in history able to create a best-seller by fiat and the millions in revenues that go with it. She is a film-making industry in herself. She has shown that the barriers of race, class, and gender are not insuperable obstacles to advancement in America any more than residual anti-Semitism or prejudice against the Irish create impenetrable "hierarchies" of oppression to bar those groups' ascent.

The slavery debate alerts us to self-justifying tendencies at work in how we use the Bible. Whenever our interpretation leads to injustice, oppression, or structural violence, then the very heart of the Bible is repudiated. Such views are anti-biblical, no matter what texts they cite.

Evolution by natural selection is the explanation for why we exist. It is not something to guide our lives in our own society. If we were to be guided by the evolution principle, then we would be living in a kind of ultra-Thatcherite, Reaganite society.” “Study your Darwinism for two reasons,” he implored, “because it explains why you’re here, and the second reason is, study your Darwinism in order to learn what to avoid in setting up society. What we need is a truly anti-Darwinian society. Anti-Darwinian in the sense that we don’t wish to live in a society where the weakest go to the wall, where the strongest suppress the weak, and even kill the weak. We — I, at least — do not wish to live in that kind of society. I want to live in the sort of society where we take care of the sick, where we take care of the weak, take care of the oppressed, which is a very anti-Darwinian society.

Progressive thought is blind when it suggests that there can be no anti-white racism or an anti-semitism among the formerly oppressed or the young people in the projects because they themselves have suffered from this evil. They are the victims; they are exempt from the prejudices that affect the majority of the population. But the reverse is true: racism is multiplying at exponential rates among groups and communities, taboos are collapsing, and everything is explained in terms of physical characteristics, identity, purity, and difference. and this is a racism that is all the more certain that it is right because it is regarded as a legitimate reaction on the part of the persecuted. now we see the obsession with the pedigree and the old distinctions derived from slavery being revived, and prejudices accumulating in the name of racism. This is the end of the concept of humanity as union in diversity and the triumph of human species incompatible with each other.

Most sick and disabled people I know approach healing wanting specific things—less pain, less anxiety, more flexibility—but not usually to become able-bodied. And many of us don’t feel automatically comfortable going to healing spaces at all because of our histories of being seen as freaks, scrutinized, infantilized, patronized with “What happened?” prayed over, and asked, “Have you tried acupuncture?” and a million other “miracle cures.” Able-bodied practitioners without an anti-ableist analysis—including Reiki providers and anti-oppression therapists—often see us as objects of disgust, fascination, and/or inspiration porn. Mostly, these practitioners dismiss our lived expertise about our bodyminds and their needs, or on the flip side, they tell us we’re “not really disabled!” when we insist on the realities of our lives. This carries over into organizing, where, even in HJ spaces, often when the crips aren’t there, there’s no access info and no accessibility.

This desperate act was inevitable. This act is a direct result of the oppression, both political and economic, imposed by our government. You crush hope. Yes, you! You destroy opportunity. You eradicate dignity. You do all that so you may maintain your filthy bigoted anti-democratic society. You leave the rest of us no choice. We are not allowed to protest.

When the first news of the Nazi camps was published in 1945, there were those who thought the facts might be exaggerated either by Allied war propaganda or by the human tendency to relish 'atrocity stories.' In his column in the London magazine Tribune, George Orwell wrote that, though this might be so, the speculation was not exactly occurring in a vacuum. If you remember what the Nazis did to the Jews before the war, he said, it isn't that difficult to imagine what they might do to them during one. In one sense, the argument over 'Holocaust denial' ends right there. The National Socialist Party seized power in 1933, proclaiming as its theoretical and organising principle the proposition that the Jews were responsible for all the world's ills, from capitalist profiteering to subversive Bolshevism. By means of oppressive legislation, they began to make all of Germany Judenrein, or 'Jew-free.' Jewish businesses were first boycotted and then confiscated. Jewish places of worship were first vandalised and then closed. Wherever Nazi power could be extended—to the Rhineland, to Austria and to Sudeten Czechoslovakia—this pattern of cruelty and bigotry was repeated. (And, noticed by few, the state killing of the mentally and physically 'unfit,' whether Jewish or 'Aryan,' was tentatively inaugurated.) After the war broke out, Hitler was able to install puppet governments or occupation regimes in numerous countries, each of which was compelled to pass its own version of the anti-Semitic 'Nuremberg Laws.' Most ominous of all—and this in plain sight and on camera, and in full view of the neighbours—Jewish populations as distant as Salonika were rounded up and put on trains, to be deported to the eastern provinces of conquered Poland. None of this is, even in the remotest sense of the word, 'deniable.

We shall denounce political trials, whether they are held in Washington or Warsaw. When a government puts a man in jail for his political opinions, we do not ask the nationality of that government. We are always on the side of the victim of State tyranny. We hate war and have consistently fought against and for that reason we fight State oppression wherever it occurs.

History may be a nightmare—an endless cycle of violence and oppression. Old victims of domination soon became new perpetrators of domination. We have seen this cycle over and over again: American revolutionaries dominating Indigenous peoples and defending slavery, anti-colonial heroes becoming dictators, anti-racists supporting patriarchy and homophobia, liberals crusading for imperial invasion and occupation. Such a nightmare radically calls into question the power of radical love in human history. For King, if we accept such a nightmare, then only self-destruction awaits us. To dream is to hold death at arm’s length. To love is to really be alive in history. Without radical love, nihilism triumphs—“power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.”1

While professional women and ‘middleclass’ women in general run the risk of becoming isolated from the needs, concerns, and consciousness of working-class and nonprofessional women, the latter run the risk of falling into an anti-intellectualism that contributes to their oppression because it stands in the way of their attaining a clear analysis of their situation. Pursuing endless theoretical refinements that are never translated into dialogue and practical action is as ineffective as engaging in endless talks about personal problems and feelings without ever looking at them as social problems. These problems are social, not only in the sense of being shared by many women, but more importantly because they are socially determined and are the product of concrete and historically specific class, legal, and political relations and forms of consciousness

Individual happiness seems hollow unless all human beings are free of oppression, poverty, and violence — as well as free to speak and act in the public sphere. This doesn’t mean we have to be miserable in the meantime. We can’t help each other if we don’t help ourselves. But we have to go further than the smiley face rhetoric of commoditized mindfulness. Dissatisfaction and unhappiness are not impediments to revolution; they are its fuel.

Here are a few tips (from A Critique of Ally Politics): Slow down: Don't try to fix it. Don't rush to find an answer or act out of your guilt. Remember that many of your comrades have been doing this work for a long time and experience the kind of oppression you're learning about more acutely than you. It didn't start with you and isn't going to end with you. Keep it internal: Don't take up too much space with your thoughts and emotions. Be sensitive to the fact that folks are in a variety of places in relation to what you're working through; don't force conversations on others, especially through the guise of public organizing. Write about it: Give yourself the unedited space to feel all the things you need to, but know that it may hurt others if you share your feelings unthinkingly. Read about it: Look for resources from people of a variety of political ideologies and experiences of identity to challenge yourself and get the widest range of input. Listen to older people: Listening to stories from your eighty-year-old African American neighbor when you're working through questions around racism will likely be though provoking, regardless of their political ideology or your life experience. Don't underestimate what a little perspective can do for you. Don't make your process the problem of your comrades: Be careful not to centralize yourself, your stake in fixing the problem, or your ego. Work it out on your own and with close friends and mentors.

Critics assert that Black Lives Matter is an anti-White terrorist group; the counterargument, "All Lives Matter," is little more than a racist dog whistle that attempts to both delegitimize centuries of claims of global anti-Black oppression and position those who exhibit tremendous pride in their Blackness as enemies of the state. Well, we are enemies of any racist, sexist, classist, xenophobic state that sanctions brutality and murder against marginalized people who deserve to live as free people.

Anti-Noble morality is the product of ressentiment. The Anti-Noble man feels trapped. He believes that his happiness and fulfillment have been thwarted by others. He resents them for having better opportunities, for having greater wealth, for having more power, for using that power to coerce or oppress him. The Noble man views people, actions and circumstances as either being positive or negative, “good” or “un-good” in relationship to his own interests, subjectively. Instead of recognizing the tragic and unfair nature of human existence, the Anti-Noble man constructs a system of morality that he convinces himself is objective, rather than subjective — as it truly is.

When I say my wound became political in the years that followed, I don't mean that my involvement in the anti-war movement was somehow insincere or that I have any regrets about my activism. As a champion of the downtrodden, the disenfranchised, the poor, and the oppressed, I found a new outlet for the somewhat irrational but nevertheless strong sense I had of being an outsider in a group - uncomfortable, awkward, and quick to feel a slight. Political feeling can't exist without identification, and mine inevitably went to people without power, In contrast, right-wing ideologies often appeal to those who want to link themselves to authority, people for whom the sight of military parades or soldiers marching off to war is aggrandizing, not painful. Inevitably, there is sublimation in politics, too. It becomes an avenue for suppressed aggression and anger, and I was no exception. And so it was that armed with passion and gorged on political history, I became a firebrand at fourteen. For three years, I read and argued and demonstrated. I marched against the Vietnam War, helped print strike T-shirts at Carleton College after the deaths of four students at Kent State, attended rallies, raised money for war-torn Mozambique, signed petitions, licked envelopes for the American Indian Movement, and turned into a feminist. But even then, I didn't believe all the rhetoric.

Many unlearning racism workshops focus on helping white individuals to see that they too are wounded by racism and as a consequence have something to gain from participating in anti-racist struggle. While in some ways true, a construction of political solidarity that is rooted in a narrative of shared victimization not only acts to recenter whites, it risks obscuring the particular ways racist domination impacts on the lives of marginalized groups. Implicit in the assumption that even those who are privileged via racist hierarchy suffer is the notion that it is only when those in power get in touch with how they too are victimized will they rebel against structures of domination. The truth is that many folks benefit greatly from dominating others and are not suffering a wound that is in any way similar to the condition of the exploited and oppressed. Anti-racist work that tries to get these individuals to see themselves as "victimized" by racism in the hopes that this will act as an intervention is a misguided strategy. And indeed we must be willing to acknowledge that individuals of great privilege who are in no way victimized are capable, via their political choices, of working on behalf of the oppressed. Such solidarity does not need to be rooted in shared experience. It can be based on one's political and ethical understanding of racism and one's rejection of domination.

Because of how rarely our privilege is examined, even our social justice movements will tend to focus on the most privileged and most well represented people within those groups. Anti-racism groups will often tend to prioritize the needs of straight men of color, feminist groups will tend to prioritize the needs of white women, LGBTQ groups will tend to prioritize the needs of white gay cisgender men, disability rights groups will tend to prioritize the needs of disabled white men...Because the needs of the most privileged are usually the ones prioritized, they are often the only ones considered when discussing solutions to oppression and inequality. These solutions, not surprisingly, often leave the underprivileged populations in our movements behind.

We were stuck thinking along the lines of men and women being "different," and distracted by questions of whether those differences are innatte or not. So we were stuck making a false choice between various gendered ideas of how to change the status quo. We can now move away from all the gender-based choices. We can move away from pseudo-feminism or "leaning in", in which women are exhorted to become more like men in order to be successful. We can also move away from the opposite, in which men are asked to become more like women. We can move away from "reverse sexism," in which women are deliberately favored to make up for past oppression, and away from anti-feminism, in which women are told they simply biologically don't have the characteristics to be successful.

Not long before my heart was shredded by “Ryan,” I saw the superb, painful, and infuriating documentary God Loves Uganda, a film by the astounding Roger Ross Williams. The doc examined the role of American evangelicalism in Uganda, its ties to a recently introduced bill, the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Act—which then suggested the death penalty for LGBTQ+ people—as it gained serious momentum. It follows missionaries, evangelical leaders, and the LGBTQ+ people of Uganda who fight for their right to exist. These activists were standing up against vicious oppression, rhetoric, and ideas originally introduced and continuously perpetuated by the West. Concealed in “good deeds,” American missionaries created infrastructure for access to indoctrinate the populace, which fueled anti-LGBTQ+ violence and hate.

Moshe Dayan’s closing remarks to the students in Haifa in 1969 echo what Ehud Barak told his audience in 2010. Forty years ago, Dayan – the man who, I was told as a teenager, was “the one-eyed Dajaal,” or Antichrist – uttered words of wisdom that have gone unheeded. “We have to supply the people [Palestinians] with employment and services, give them civil rights, and not treat them as enemies. The question is: What are we aiming for? Shall we be an occupying power, keeping the Arabs as an oppressed population of second- and third-class citizens and tell them: ‘You won’t do this, you won’t do that, you won’t study at the university, and if you protest, we shall impose curfew?’ Or should we aim at a common life, with Jews learning to live together with Arabs? If so, we have to be neighbours, and not conquerors.”16

We cannot pick and choose whom among the oppressed it is convenient to support. We must stand with all the oppressed or none of the oppressed. This is a global fight for life against corporate tyranny. We will win only when we see the struggle of working people in Greece, Spain, and Egypt as our own struggle. This will mean a huge reordering of our world, one that turns away from the primacy of profit to full employment and unionized workplaces, inexpensive and modernized mass transit, especially in impoverished communities, universal single-payer health care and a banning of for-profit health care corporations. The minimum wage must be at least $15 an hour and a weekly income of $500 provided to the unemployed, the disabled, stay-at-home parents, the elderly, and those unable to work. Anti-union laws, like the Taft-Hartley Act, and trade agreements such as NAFTA, will be abolished. All Americans will be granted a pension in old age. A parent will receive two years of paid maternity leave, as well as shorter work weeks with no loss in pay and benefits. The Patriot Act and Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, which permits the military to be used to crush domestic unrest, as well as government spying on citizens, will end. Mass incarceration will be dismantled. Global warming will become a national and global emergency. We will divert our energy and resources to saving the planet through public investment in renewable energy and end our reliance on fossil fuels. Public utilities, including the railroads, energy companies, the arms industry, and banks, will be nationalized. Government funding for the arts, education, and public broadcasting will create places where creativity, self-expression, and voices of dissent can be heard and seen. We will terminate our nuclear weapons programs and build a nuclear-free world. We will demilitarize our police, meaning that police will no longer carry weapons when they patrol our streets but instead, as in Great Britain, rely on specialized armed units that have to be authorized case by case to use lethal force. There will be training and rehabilitation programs for the poor and those in our prisons, along with the abolition of the death penalty. We will grant full citizenship to undocumented workers. There will be a moratorium on foreclosures and bank repossessions. Education will be free from day care to university. All student debt will be forgiven. Mental health care, especially for those now caged in our prisons, will be available. Our empire will be dismantled. Our soldiers and marines will come home.

Evolution by natural selection is the explanation for why we exist. It is not something to guide our lives in our own society. If we were to be guided by the evolution principle, then we would be living in a kind of ultra-Thatcherite, Reaganite society. Study your Darwinism for two reasons - because it explains why you’re here, and the second reason is, study your Darwinism in order to learn what to avoid in setting up society. What we need is a truly anti-Darwinian society. Anti-Darwinian in the sense that we don’t wish to live in a society where the weakest go to the wall, where the strongest suppress the weak, and even kill the weak. We — I, at least — do not wish to live in that kind of society. I want to live in the sort of society where we take care of the sick, where we take care of the weak, take care of the oppressed, which is a very anti-Darwinian society.

The Arab world has done nothing to help the Palestinian refugees they created when they attacked Israel in 1948. It’s called the ‘Palestinian refugee problem.’ This is one of the best tricks that the Arabs have played on the world, and they have used it to their great advantage when fighting Israel in the forum of public opinion. This lie was pulled off masterfully, and everyone has been falling for it ever since. First you tell people to leave their homes and villages because you are going to come in and kick out the Jews the day after the UN grants Israel its nationhood. You fail in your military objective, the Jews are still alive and have more land now than before, and you have thousands of upset, displaced refugees living in your country because they believed in you. So you and the UN build refugee camps that are designed to last only five years and crowd the people in, instead of integrating them into your society and giving them citizenship. After a few years of overcrowding and deteriorating living conditions, you get the media to visit and publish a lot of pictures of these poor people living in the hopeless, wretched squalor you have left them in. In 1967 you get all your cronies together with their guns and tanks and planes and start beating the war drums. Again the same old story: you really are going to kill all the Jews this time or drive them into the sea, and everyone will be able to go back home, take over what the Jews have developed, and live in a Jew-free Middle East. Again you fail and now there are even more refugees living in your countries, and Israel is even larger, with Jerusalem as its capital. Time for more pictures of more camps and suffering children. What is to be done about these poor refugees (that not even the Arabs want)? Then start Middle Eastern student organizations on U.S. college campuses and find some young, idealistic American college kids who have no idea of what has been described here so far, and have them take up the cause. Now enter some power-hungry type like Yasser Arafat who begins to blackmail you and your Arab friends, who created the mess, for guns and bombs and money to fight the Israelis. Then Arafat creates hell for the world starting in the 1970s with his terrorism, and the “Palestinian refugee problem” becomes a worldwide issue and galvanizes all your citizens and the world against Israel. Along come the suicide bombers, so to keep the pot boiling you finance the show by paying every bomber’s family twenty-five thousand dollars. This encourages more crazies to go blow themselves up, killing civilians and children riding buses to school. Saudi Arabia held telethons to raise thousands of dollars to the families of suicide bombers. What a perfect way to turn years of military failure into a public-opinion-campaign success. The perpetuation of lies and uncritical thinking, combined with repetitious anti-Jewish and anti-American diatribes, has produced a generation of Arab youth incapable of thinking in a civilized manner. This government-nurtured rage toward the West and the infidels continues today, perpetuating their economic failure and deflecting frustration away from the dictators and regimes that oppress them. This refusal by the Arab regimes to take an honest look at themselves has created a culture of scapegoating that blames western civilization for misery and failure in every aspect of Arab life. So far it seems that Arab leaders don’t mind their people lagging behind, save for King Abdullah’s recent evidence of concern. (The depth of his sincerity remains to be seen.)

In liberation theology—that form of religious thought proclaiming that God has a “preferential option for the poor” and seeking to put biblical pronouncement in service to political and economic ends—Jesus is the pedagogue of the oppressed, the redeemer of the underclass, the hero of the masses. The problem is not the use of Jesus for political ends; the biblical material has always been (and should continue to be) used to promote a more just society. The problem is that the language of liberation all too often veers off into anti-Jewish rants. Jesus becomes the Palestinian martyr crucified once again by the Jews; he is the one killed by the “patriarchal god of Judaism”; he breaks down the barriers “Judaism” erects between Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, male and female, slave and free and so can liberate all today. The intent is well meaning, but the history is dreadful, and the impression given of Judaism is obscene.

The theory of the ally in this sense examines and expands upon issues relating to the role of men with respect to feminist struggle, white people with respect to anti-racist struggle, etc. Much of the discussion and debate within this discourse turns on the question of the "good" ally, of how a person of privilege committed to ally work must acknowledge and reflect upon their privileges and do the intellectual and practical work to divest themselves of the illegitimate power such privilege affords. These discussions may be directed at a generalized concept of, e.g., the white anti-racist ally as well as questions of what it means to develop specific and personal relations of trust between individuals and groups involved in anti-oppression work. This conception of the ally calls to attention the place of power within relationships, structures, practices and processes, not simply the content of particular demands or objectives.

We see here that Plato recognizes only one ultimate standard, the interest of the state. Everything that furthers it is good and virtuous and just; everything that threatens it is bad and wicked and unjust. Actions that serve it are moral; actions that endanger it, immoral. In other words, Plato’s moral code is strictly utilitarian; it is a code of collectivist or political utilitarianism. The criterion of morality is the interest of the state. Morality is nothing but political hygiene. This is the collectivist, the tribal, the totalitarian theory of morality: ‘Good is what is in the interest of my group; or my tribe; or my state.’ It is easy to see what this morality implied for international relations: that the state itself can never be wrong in any of its actions, as long as it is strong; that the state has the right, not only to do violence to its citizens, should that lead to an increase of strength, but also to attack other states, provided it does so without weakening itself. (This inference, the explicit recognition of the amorality of the state, and consequently the defence of moral nihilism in international relations, was drawn by Hegel.)

Cultivating an ethic of responsibility begins with nonnatives understanding ourselves as beneficiaries of the illegal settlement of indigenous people's land, and unjust appropriation of indigenous peoples' resources and jurisdiction. When faced with this truth, it is common for activists to get stuck in their feelings of guilt, which I would argue is a state of self-absorption that actually upholds privilege. While guilt is often representative of much-needed shift in consciousness, in itself it does nothing to motivate the responsibility necessary to actively dismantle entrenched systems of oppression. In a movement-building round table, longtime Montreal activist Jaggi Singh expressed that "the only way to escape complicity with settlement is active opposition to it. That only happens in the context of on-the-ground, day-to-day organizing, and creating and cultivating the spaces where we can begin dialogues and discussions as natives an nonnatives." Original blog post: Unsettling America: Decolonization in Theory and Practice. Quoted In: Decolonize Together: Moving beyond a Politics of Solidarity toward a Practice of Decolonization. Taking Sides.

If elimination of the native population is not a likely outcome in Palestine, then what of dismantling the supremacy of the colonizer in order to make possible a true reconciliation? The advantage that Israel has enjoyed in continuing its project rests on the fact that the basically colonial nature of the encounter in Palestine has not been visible to most Americans and many Europeans. Israel appears to them to be a normal, natural nation-state like any other, faced by the irrational hostility of intransigent and often anti-Semitic Muslims (which is how Palestinians, even the Christians among them, are seen by many). The propagation of this image is one of the greatest achievements of Zionism and is vital to its survival. As Edward Said put it, Zionism triumphed in part because it “won the political battle for Palestine in the international world in which ideas, representation, rhetoric and images were at issue.”5 This is still largely true today. Dismantling this fallacy and making the true nature of the conflict evident is a necessary step if Palestinians and Israelis are to transition to a postcolonial future in which one people does not use external support to oppress and supplant the other.

...[E]xcept the flying fish, there was no race existing on the earth, in the air, or the waters, who were the object of such an intermitting, general, and relentless persecution as the Jews of this period. Upon the slightest and most unreasonable pretences, as well as upon accusations the most absurd and groundless, their persons and property were exposed to every turn of popular fury... Yet the passive courage inspired by the love of gain induced the Jews to dare the various evils to which they were subjected, in consideration of the immense profits which they were enabled to realise in a country naturally so wealthy as England. In spite of every kind of discouragement, and even of the special court of taxations already mentioned, called the Jews' Exchequer, erected for the very purpose of despoiling and distressing them, the Jews increased, multiplied, and accumulated huge sums, which they transferred from one hand to another by means of bills of exchange-an invention for which commerce is said to be indebted to them, and which enabled them to transfer their wealth from land to land, that, when threatened with oppression in one country, their treasure might be secured in another. The obstinacy and avarice of the Jews being thus in a measure placed in opposition to the fanaticism and tyranny of those under whom they lived, seemed to increase in proportion to the persecution with which they were visited...

The charity and ally models, on the other hand, are so strongly rooted in the ideas of 'I' and 'the other' that they force people to fit into distinct groups with preordained relationships to one another. According to ally politics, the only way to undermine one's own privilege is to give up one's role as an individual political agent, and follow the lead of those more or differently oppressed. White allies, for instance, are taught explicitly to not seek praise for their ally work--especially from people of color--yet there is often a distinctly self-congraulatory air to the work of allyship, as if the act of their humility is exaggerated to receive the praise they can't ask for. Many white allies do their support work in a way that recentralizes themselves as the only individuals willing to come in and do the hard work of fighting racism for people of color. Where ally politics suggest that in shifting your role from actor to ally you can diminish your culpability, a liberator or anarchist approach presumes that each person retains their own agency, insisting that the only way you can be accountable is by acting for your own desires while learning to understand and respond to the desires of other groups. Unraveling our socialized individualization until we can feel how our survival/liberation is infinitely linked to the survival/liberation of others fosters independence, and enables us to take responsibility for our choices, with no boss or guidance counselor to blame for our decisions. Original Zine: Ain't no PC Gonna Fix it, Baby. 2013. Featured in: A Critique of Ally Politics. Taking Sides.

This excerpt from When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories, edited by Bernestine Singley, appeared in 2002 as part of Harvard Magazine’s coverage of recent books by Harvard affiliates. The excerpt concerns author Noel Ignatiev’s role in launching a journal “to chronicle and analyze the making, remaking, and unmaking of whiteness.” … The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists. Of course, we expected bewilderment from people who still think of race as biology. We frequently get letters accusing us of being "racists," just like the KKK, and have even been called a "hate group." ... Our standard response is to draw an analogy with anti-royalism: to oppose monarchy does not mean killing the king; it means getting rid of crowns, thrones, royal titles, etc.... Every group within white America has at one time or another advanced its particular and narrowly defined interests at the expense of black people as a race. That applies to labor unionists, ethnic groups, college students, schoolteachers, taxpayers, and white women. Race Traitor will not abandon its focus on whiteness, no matter how vehement the pleas and how virtuously oppressed those doing the pleading. The editors meant it when they replied to a reader, "Make no mistake about it: we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as 'the white race' is destroyed—not 'deconstructed' but destroyed.

The anti-technological hysteria that holds broad sections of the Western world in its grip is a product of metaphysics’ decay: it is betrayed by the fact that it clings to false classifications of beings in order to revolt against processes in which the overcoming of these classifications has already been carried out. It is reactionary in the essential sense of the word, because it expresses the ressentiment of obsolete bivalence against a polyvalence that it does not understand. That holds above all for the habits of the critique of power, which are always still unconsciously motivated by metaphysics. Under the old metaphysical schema the division of beings into subject and object is mirrored in the descending grade between master and slave and between worker and material. Within this disposition the critique of power can only be articulated as the resistance of the oppressed object-slave-material side to the subject-master-worker side. But ever since the statement ‘There is information,’ alias ‘There are systems,’ has been in power this opposition has lost its meaning and develops more and more into a playground for pseudo-conflicts. In fact, the hysteria amounts to searching for a master so as to be able to rise up against him. One cannot rule out the possibility that the effect, i.e., the master, has long been on the verge of dissolving and for the most part remains alive as a postulate of the slave fixated on rebellion—as a historicized Left and as a museum humanism. In contrast, a living leftist principle would have to prove itself anew by a creative dissidence, just as the thinking of homo humanus asserts itself in the poetic resistance to the metaphysical and technocratic reflexes of humanolatry.

Anarchists and antiauthoritarians clearly differentiate between charity and solidarity--especially thanks to working with indigenous solidarity movements and other international solidarity movements--based on the principles of affinity and mutual aid. Affinity is just what it sounds like: that you can work most easily with people who share your goals, and that your work will be strongest when your relationships are based on trust, friendship, and love. Mutual aid is the idea that we all have a stake in one another's liberation, and that when we can act from that interdependence, we can share with one another as equals. Charity, however, is something that is given not only because it feels like there is an excess to share but also because it is based in a framework that implies that others inherently need the help--that they are unable to take care of themselves and that they would suffer without it. Charity is patronizing and selfish. It establishes some people as those who assist and others as those who need assistance, stabilizing oppressive paradigms by solidifying people's positions in them. Autonomy and self-determination are essential to making this distinction as well. Recognizing the autonomy and self-determination of individuals and groups acknowledges their capability. It's an understanding of that group as having something of worth to be gained through interactions with them, whether that thing is a material good or something less tangible, like perspective, joy, or inspiration. The solidarity model dispels the idea of one inside and one outside, foregrounding how individuals belong to multiple groups and how groups overlap with one another, while simultaneously demanding respect for the identity of self-sufficientcy of each of those groups. Original Zine: Ain't no PC Gonna Fix it, Baby. 2013. Featured in: A Critique of Ally Politics. Taking Sides.

All of a sudden (in 1938 I think), in order to extend its autarchy to the domain of cinema, Italy decreed an embargo on American films. It wasn’t a question of censorship: as usual the censors granted or denied permission to individual films, and nobody saw the ones that didn’t get it and that was it. In spite of the awkward anti-Hollywood propaganda campaign that accompanied the measure (right around that time the regime began to conform to Hitler’s racism), the true reason for the embargo was supposed to be commercial protectionism, in order to make room in the market for Italian (and German) productions. For this reason the four largest American production and distribution companies—Metro, Fox, Paramount, Warner—(I’m still relying on memory, trusting the accuracy of the registration of my trauma), whereas films by other American companies like RKO, Columbia, Universal, United Artists (which had also been distributed before then by Italian companies) continued to arrive until 1941, that is until Italy found itself at war with the United States. I was still granted some sporadic satisfaction (in fact, one of the greatest: Stagecoach [John Ford, 1939]) but my collector’s voracity suffered a fatal blow. Compared to all of the prohibitions and obligations that fascism had imposed on us, and to the even more severe ones that it continued to enforce in those years before and then during the war, the veto on American films was certainly a minor or small loss, and I wasn’t foolish enough not to know it. Yet it was the first to affect me directly, and I hadn’t known any years other than those of fascism nor had I felt any needs other than those that the environment in which I lived could suggest and satisfy. It was the first time a right I enjoyed had been taken from me: more than a right, a dimension, a world, a space in my mind; and I felt this loss as cruel oppression which embodied all the forms of oppression that I’d heard about or seen other people suffer. If I can still talk about it today like a lost privilege it’s because something disappeared like that from my life, never to return again. So many things had changed after the war was over: I’d changed, cinema had become something else, something different in itself and in relation to me. My biography as a spectator resumed, but it was that of another spectator who wasn’t just a spectator anymore.

In the real world, however, the claim that censorship or enforced orthodoxy protects minorities and the marginalized has been comprehensively disproved, again and again and again. “Censorship has always been on the side of authoritarianism, conformity, ignorance, and the status quo,” write Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman in their book Free Speech on Campus, “and advocates for free speech have always been on the side of making societies more democratic, more diverse, more tolerant, more educated, and more open to progress.”30 They and former American Civil Liberties Union president Nadine Strossen, in her powerful book Hate: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship, list the horrors and oppressions which have befallen minorities in the name of making society safe from dangerous ideas. “Laws censoring ‘hate speech’ have predictably been enforced against those who lack political power,” writes Strossen.31 In America, under the Alien and Sedition Acts, authorities censored and imprisoned sympathizers of the opposition party (including members of Congress) and shut down opposition newspapers; under the Comstock laws, they censored works by Aristophanes, Balzac, Oscar Wilde, and James Joyce (among others); under the World War I anti-sedition laws, they convicted more than a thousand peace activists, including the Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, who ran for president in 1920 from a prison cell.32 In more recent times, when the University of Michigan adopted one of the first college speech codes in 1988, the code was seized upon to charge Blacks with racist speech at least twenty times.33 When the United Kingdom passed a hate-speech law, the first person to be convicted was a Black man who cursed a white police officer.34 When Canadian courts agreed with feminists that pornography could be legally restricted, authorities in Toronto promptly charged Canada’s oldest gay bookstore with obscenity and seized copies of the lesbian magazine Bad Attitude.35 All around the world, authorities quite uncoincidentally find that “hateful” and “unsafe” speech is speech which is critical of them—not least in the United States, where, in 1954, the U.S. Postal Service used obscenity laws to censor ONE, a gay magazine whose cover article (“You Can’t Print It!”) just happened to criticize the censorship policies of the U.S. Postal Service.

There was an original purpose to the Second Amendment, but it wasn’t to keep people safe. It was to preserve white supremacy and slavery. The Second Amendment is in the Constitution because Patrick Henry (Virginia’s governor at the time that the Constitution was being debated) and George Mason (the intellectual leader of the movement against the Constitution, the “anti-federalists”) won a debate against James Madison (the guy who wrote most of the Constitution and its original ten amendments). Henry and Mason wanted the Second Amendment in there to guard against slave revolts. Although, overall, white Southerners outnumbered their enslaved populations, that numerical advantage did not hold in every region. In parts of Virginia, for instance, enslaved Black people outnumbered whites. Predictably, whites were worried about slave revolts because, you know, holding people in bondage against their will is not all that easy to do without numerical and military superiority. The principal way of quelling slave revolts was (wait for it): armed militias of white people. Gangs of white people roving around, imposing white supremacy, is nothing new. But the slavers worried that the new Constitution put the power of raising militias with the federal government and not with the individual states. That would mean that the federal government, dominated by Northerners, could choose to not help the South should their population of oppressed humans demand freedom. In a May 2018 New York Times article, Professor Carl Bogus of Roger Williams University School of Law explained the argument like this: During the debate in Richmond, Mason and Henry suggested that the new Constitution gave Congress the power to subvert the slave system by disarming the militias. “Slavery is detested,” Henry reminded the audience. “The majority of Congress is to the North, and the slaves are to the South.” Henry and Mason argued that because the Constitution gave the federal government the power to arm the militias, only the federal government could do so: “If they neglect or refuse to discipline or arm our militia, they will be useless: the states can do neither—this power being exclusively given to Congress.” Why would the federal government “neglect” a Southern militia? Henry and Mason feared the Northerners who “detested” slavery would refuse to help the South in the event of a slave uprising. Madison eventually gave in to the forces of slavery and included the Second Amendment, along with his larger Bill of Rights.

Late in the nineteenth century came the first signs of a “Politics in a New Key”: the creation of the first popular movements dedicated to reasserting the priority of the nation against all forms of internationalism or cosmopolitanism. The decade of the 1880s—with its simultaneous economic depression and broadened democratic practice—was a crucial threshold. That decade confronted Europe and the world with nothing less than the first globalization crisis. In the 1880s new steamships made it possible to bring cheap wheat and meat to Europe, bankrupting family farms and aristocratic estates and sending a flood of rural refugees into the cities. At the same time, railroads knocked the bottom out of what was left of skilled artisanal labor by delivering cheap manufactured goods to every city. At the same ill-chosen moment, unprecedented numbers of immigrants arrived in western Europe—not only the familiar workers from Spain and Italy, but also culturally exotic Jews fleeing oppression in eastern Europe. These shocks form the backdrop to some developments in the 1880s that we can now perceive as the first gropings toward fascism. The conservative French and German experiments with a manipulated manhood suffrage that I alluded to earlier were extended in the 1880s. The third British Reform Bill of 1884 nearly doubled the electorate to include almost all adult males. In all these countries, political elites found themselves in the 1880s forced to adapt to a shift in political culture that weakened the social deference that had long produced the almost automatic election of upper-class representatives to parliament, thereby opening the way to the entry of more modest social strata into politics: shopkeepers, country doctors and pharmacists, small-town lawyers—the “new layers” (nouvelles couches) famously summoned forth in 1874 by Léon Gambetta, soon to be himself, the son of an immigrant Italian grocer, the first French prime minister of modest origins. Lacking personal fortunes, this new type of elected representative lived on their parliamentarians’ salary and became the first professional politicians. Lacking the hereditary name recognition of the “notables” who had dominated European parliaments up to then, the new politicians had to invent new kinds of support networks and new kinds of appeal. Some of them built political machines based upon middle-class social clubs, such as Freemasonry (as Gambetta’s Radical Party did in France); others, in both Germany and France, discovered the drawing power of anti-Semitism and nationalism. Rising nationalism penetrated at the end of the nineteenth century even into the ranks of organized labor. I referred earlier in this chapter to the hostility between German-speaking and Czech-speaking wage earners in Bohemia, in what was then the Habsburg empire. By 1914 it was going to be possible to use nationalist sentiment to mobilize parts of the working class against other parts of it, and even more so after World War I. For all these reasons, the economic crisis of the 1880s, as the first major depression to occur in the era of mass politics, rewarded demagoguery. Henceforth a decline in the standard of living would translate quickly into electoral defeats for incumbents and victories for political outsiders ready to appeal with summary slogans to angry voters.

In addition, a rise in bullying is evident in the largely radical collectivistic-influenced public school system. Last, but not least, an essential key to it all is a steady increase in suicide rates. However, in this new age, these obvious signs of suppression—clearly evident in all totalitarian-collective societies—are kept in balance by suppressants, through a steady increase of anti-anxiety medications and antidepressants (i.e., happy pills). Society becomes more and more deprived (in lack of ambition) and grows reliant upon the perfectly steady increase in entitlement benefits solidified through learned helplessness, successfully blinding society to the rapidly increasing collective oppression. This precise process of ambient socialism has taken place in the United States during the end of the twentieth century and continues to transpire ever more rapidly in the twenty-first century.

Then as now, the Christian Right turned anti-discrimination arguments on their heads: instead of African Americans being discriminated against by segregated Christian universities, the universities were being discriminated against by not being allowed to exclude them; instead of public prayers oppressing religious minorities, Christians are being oppressed by not being able to offer them.

(Everyone, I guess, sees their position as the neutral one and everyone else's position as biassed. I wonder why 177 minutes of the Today programme is completely secular; you feel horribly excluded by 3 minutes of Thought for Today. I see a sinister anti-religious bias when David Attenborough goes through a whole series without ever once aying "On the other hand maybe God made it all"; you feel that 30 minutes of hymn singing on Sunday evening amounts to theocratic oppression.)

For instance, if a Black person is watching tv, instead of being bombarded by anti-Black images and messages hour after hour, they should be able to relax and be at peace in the knowledge that Black people control the media.  When their children go off to school in the morning, Black parents and other members of their community who provide love and support for their children, should be able to know that the teachers won’t be anti-Black and won’t fill their children’s heads with ideas that make them hate themselves or feel less worthy and less valuable.  The Black community should be confident that their children are being taught their history, their ideas (Black Thought), and are being told they are beautiful and good.  There shouldn’t be any worries about schoolmates of another race making their children feel inferior.  When they grow up and go to college, Black students should be confident that Black administrators and Black professors have created an environment and curriculum which encourages their entire educational development, not only providing skills for the workplace but nurturing their minds and their sense of community.  And when these students go out into the workplace, they should be confident that Black-controlled industries will be hiring them with Black managers in charge.  Racism will become a non-factor. Most significantly, when Black people have control over their community and have Black citizenship they won’t be forced to go through every day under the constant terror of being harassed, brutalized and killed by the police.  The psychological weight that would be lifted from them would be historic.  A new sense of energy and security could be channeled into self-affirmation and community-building.  I have little doubt that such a moment in history would lead to unprecedented strong race relations between citizens of this Black nation and whites in the current nation.  It’s almost impossible to have truly strong or positive race relations when one group is constantly required to bear the burden of oppression, and the other group feels the need to ignore or deny the existence of this oppression while also enforcing it.  The levels of tension and dishonesty are an enormous drain on everyone involved.  What a sweet and beautiful day it would be when Black people would simply not have to think about whites anymore.  In the same way that amerikans spend so little of our time thinking about Lithuanians or Norwegians.  And when you aren’t forced to think about someone, or forced to live the way they tell you to live, it’s a pleasure to get together and visit voluntarily.  Black people and Europeans on this continent (amerikans) would still talk to one another.  We might even still live in the same neighborhoods.  But the difference is that Black people would be their own people.  They would no longer be surrounded by the circle of whiteness.  The black dot on the white page: the exception to the rule.  White rule.  Black people would be a nation.  An entity unto themselves.  They would not be required to imagine themselves within the context of whiteness.  Their minds would be freed from the perpetual interpretation of every action and word (it seems even every thought) through whiteness.  Africans (Black people) would simply be Africans.  A people defined by their own terms, their identity neither within nor without the boundaries of whiteness.

Conservatives are fond of employing foreign examples of the cruelty and terror that governments may inflict on a people that has been systematically deprived of its weaponry. Among them are the Third Reich’s exclusion of Jews from the ranks of the armed, Joseph Stalin’s anti-gun edicts of 1929, and the prohibitive firearms rules that the Communist party introduced into China between 1933 and 1949. To varying degrees, these do help to make the case. And yet, ugly as all of these developments were, there is in fact no need for our augurs of oppression to roam so far afield for their illustrations of tyranny. Instead, they might look to their own history. 'Do you really think that it could happen here?' remains a favorite refrain of the modern gun-control movement. Alas, the answer should be a resounding 'Yes.' For most of America’s story, an entire class of people was, as a matter of course, enslaved, beaten, lynched, subjected to the most egregious miscarriages of justice, and excluded either explicitly or practically from the body politic. We prefer today to reserve the word 'tyranny' for its original target, King George III, or to apply it to foreign despots. But what other characterization can be reasonably applied to the governments that, ignoring the words of the Declaration of Independence, enacted and enforced the Fugitive Slave Act? How else can we see the men who crushed Reconstruction? How might we view the recalcitrant American South in the early 20th century? 'It' did 'happen here.' And 'it' was achieved — in part, at least — because its victims were denied the very right to self-protection that during the Revolution had been recognized as the unalienable prerogative of 'all men.

Year after year, bill after bill, Wilberforce spent his entire career introducing an endless series of legislative proposals to his colleagues in the British Parliament in his efforts to end slavery, only to have them defeated, one after the other. From 1788 to 1806, he introduced a new anti-slavery motion and watched it fail every single year, for eighteen years in a row. Finally the water wore down the rock: three days before Wilberforce’s death in 1833, Parliament passed a bill to abolish slavery not only in England but also throughout its colonies. Three decades later, a similar bill passed in the United States, spearheaded by another man of conscience who had also spent much of his life failing, a patient Illinois lawyer named Abraham. Deus ex machina? Far from it. These weren’t solutions that dropped out of the blue sky. They were the “sudden” result of long patient years of tireless repeated effort. There was no fictional deus ex machina happening here; these were human problems, and they had human solutions. But the only access to them was through the slight edge. Of course Wilberforce and Lincoln were not the sole figures in this heroic struggle, and even after their bills were passed into law on both sides of the Atlantic, the evils of slavery and racism were far from over. Rome wasn’t rehabilitated in a day, or even a century. But their efforts—like Mother Teresa’s efforts to end poverty, Gandhi’s to end colonial oppression, or Martin Luther King’s and Nelson Mandela’s to end racism—are classic examples of what “breakthrough” looks like in the real world. All of these real-life heroes understood the slight edge. None of them were hypnotized by the allure of the “big break.” If they had been, they would never have continued taking the actions they took—and what would the world look like today?

Furthermore, it is natural for caring people to sympathize with and support those who resist being oppressed. However, when the white anti-imperialists do get involved in the resistance and are placed in prison, a racist government can discourage other whites from aligning themselves with Blacks in struggle by the severe, at times cruel, treatment it inflicts on anti-imperialists.

In my travels from Mauritania to Saudi Arabia, Pakistan to Indonesia, extremist Muslims have shared with me their own deeply held false narratives of America as an oppressive state controlled by Zionists and determined to crush Islam. That’s an absurd caricature, and we should be wary ourselves of caricaturing a religion as diverse as Islam. So let’s avoid religious profiling. The average Christian had nothing to apologize for when Christian fanatics in the former Yugoslavia engaged in genocide against Muslims. Critics of Islam are not to blame because an anti-Muslim fanatic murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011.

homosexuality a curable perversion. She professed to disdain men and insisted women had been “enslaved by the institution of marriage.” Yet she loved many men and married twice: she treated her first husband abominably, and was physically and emotionally abused by her second. She considered sex degrading, but was an enthusiastic advocate, and energetic exponent, of free love. “Out here I’ve had chances to sleep with all colours and shapes,” she wrote to a friend, shortly before meeting Ursula. “One French gunrunner, short and round and bumpy; one fifty-year-old monarchist German who believes in the dominating role of the penis in influencing women; one high Chinese official whose actions I’m ashamed to describe, one round left-wing Kuomintang man who was soft and slobbery.” She was a communist who never joined the party; a violent revolutionary and romantic dreamer; a feminist in thrall to a succession of men; a woman who inspired intense loyalty, yet inflicted enormous damage on many of her friends; she supported communism without considering what communist rule involved in reality. She was passionate, prejudiced, charismatic, narcissistic, reckless, volatile, lovable, hypercritical, emotionally fragile, and uncompromising. “I may not be innocent, but I’m right,” she declared. Ursula was entranced. Agnes Smedley seemed to embody political passion and energy, the very antithesis of the smug complacency she found in the bourgeois boudoirs of Shanghai. “Your very existence is not worth anything at all if you live passively in the midst of injustice,” Smedley insisted. Agnes was everything Ursula admired: feminist, anti-fascist, an enemy of imperialism and defender of the oppressed against the forces of capitalism, and a natural revolutionary. She was also a spy.

Of course, reactionary ‘anti-woke’ types are operating in ignorance at best, and often in bad faith. Their basic position is ‘some people are so marginalised that they have to build a language to describe their oppression, but the real victim is me, who has to learn a new word every nine months’.

The anti-revolutionary temper of the Revolution belongs to 1787, not to 1776. Another element was at work, and it is the other element that is new, effective, characteristic, and added permanently to the experience of the world. The story of the revolted colonies impresses us first and most distinctly as the supreme manifestation of the law of resistance, as the abstract revolution in its purest and most perfect shape. No people was so free as the insurgents; no government less oppressive than the government which they overthrew. Those who deem Washington and Hamilton honest can apply the term to few European statesmen. Their example presents a thorn, not a cushion, and threatens all existing political forms, with the doubtful exception of the federal constitution of 1874. It teaches that men ought to be in arms even against a remote and constructive danger to their freedom; that even if the cloud is no bigger than a man’s hand, it is their right and duty to stake the national existence, to sacrifice lives and fortunes, to cover the country with a lake of blood, to shatter crowns and sceptres and fling parliaments into the sea. On this principle of subversion they erected their commonwealth, and by its virtue lifted the world out of its orbit and assigned a new course to history. Here or nowhere we have the broken chain, the rejected past, precedent and statute superseded by unwritten law, sons wiser than their fathers, ideas rooted in the future, reason cutting as clean as Atropos.

oppressive behaviors aren’t the same as phobias. Phobias are real mental illnesses, and conflating phobias with bigoted beliefs and behaviors invites further stigma and relies on ableist language. For more on these troubling dynamics, I strongly recommend Denarii Monroe’s excellent piece for Everyday Feminism, “3 Reasons to Find a Better Term Than ‘-Phobia’ to Describe Oppression.”1 Accordingly, throughout this book, I’ll be using the terms anti-fatness and anti-fat bias in place of “fatphobia.

Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change. —AUDRE LORDE

If that’s the case, even immortality might lead to discontent. Suppose science comes up with cures for all diseases, effective anti-ageing therapies and regenerative treatments that keep people indefinitely young. In all likelihood, the immediate result will be an unprecedented epidemic of anger and anxiety. Those unable to afford the new miracle treatments – the vast majority of people – will be beside themselves with rage. Throughout history, the poor and oppressed comforted themselves with the thought that at least death is even-handed – that the rich and powerful will also die. The poor will not be comfortable with the thought that they have to die, while the rich will remain young and beautiful for ever.

At the same time, the reader is led to identify individualism with the views of Thrasymachus, and to think that Plato, in his fight against it, is fighting against all the subversive and nihilistic tendencies of his time. But we should not allow ourselves to be frightened by an individualist bogy such as Thrasymachus (there is a great similarity between his portrait and the modern collectivist bogy of ‘bolshevism’) into accepting another more real and more dangerous because less obvious form of barbarism. For Plato replaces Thrasymachus’ doctrine that the individual’s might is right by the equally barbaric doctrine that right is everything that furthers the stability and the might of the state.

From the point of view of totalitarian ethics, from the point of view of collective utility, Plato’s theory of justice is perfectly correct. To keep one’s place is a virtue. It is that civil virtue which corresponds exactly to the military virtue of discipline. And this virtue plays exactly that rôle which ‘justice’ plays in Plato’s system of virtues. For the cogs in the great clockwork of the state can show ‘virtue’ in two ways. First, they must be fit for their task, by virtue of their size, shape, strength, etc.; and secondly, they must be fitted each into its right place and must retain that place. The first type of virtues, fitness for a specific task, will lead to a differentiation, in accordance with the specific task of the cog. Certain cogs will be virtuous, i.e. fit, only if they are (‘by their nature’) large; others if they are strong; and others if they are smooth. But the virtue of keeping to one’s place will be common to all of them; and it will at the same time be a virtue of the whole: that of being properly fitted together—of being in harmony. To this universal virtue Plato gives the name ‘justice’. This procedure is perfectly consistent and it is fully justified from the point of view of totalitarian morality. If the individual is nothing but a cog, then ethics is nothing but the study of how to fit him into the whole.

white Christian nationalism has animated the oppression, exclusion, and even extermination of minority groups while securing privilege for white Protestants. It permits white Christian Americans to demand "sacrifice" from others in the name of religion and country, while protecting their "rights" in the names of "liberty" and "property." White Christian nationalism inspires the anti-democratic, authoritarian, and violent instincts on display in our contemporary political situation.

Helen laid out our fall agenda: we’d conduct a survey, we’d lead “cottage groups” with church members about the search. We’d receive anti-oppression training and create a “packet.” As recording secretary, I’d write newsletter squibs to keep the congregation informed of our progress. Clearly, my vision of the search committee as a series of intense theological discussions was a chimera!

From numerous angles, wokeness encourages us to distrust the order God has created in the world He has personally made. As an ideology, it reads our society as fundamentally oppressive along racial lines, but often stops short of substantiating this claim. Furthermore, it conflates individual experience with societal structures, training people to read real wrongs done against them as necessarily part of a broader public square campaign. In addition, wokeness is fundamentally an anti-authority system, but as we have noted, it is itself deeply authoritarian. Though it speaks against “oppression,” it actually creates injustice, for it teaches us to distrust God-made order and God-given authority. Though CRT gets most of the headlines, it is in truth intersectionality that really brings the pain. People who will never read a sentence from an intersectional author nevertheless buy into and express an intersectional framework when they view our society as oppressive and read leadership in terms of power imbalances