In case you’re wondering what Berlin is like—someone messaged the group chat to say that the left wing cafe is having a chill clean up party because the cops ripped the place to pieces during a raid. They had been alerted to the presence of Palestine zines
Literally insane that Germany is gonna make you sign a fucking loyalty oath to Israel so you can do your angular little installation about how microplastics have agency
Truly an epochal failure that almost nobody in the media suffered even minor, reputational consequences for parroting the lies that led to the Iraq invasion. Not the most important thing but—we really can’t let that happen again
I have just witnessed the most egregious - violent! - example of “it’s more of a comment than a question”. A young man stood up and told Zadie Smith (!!) that he was having an identity crisis about being a writer and then ASKED HER TO READ HIS SHORT STORY
Turns out that in the zany funky freaky deaky international art world you’re free to express ANY opinion except that Palestinians shouldn’t be slaughtered en masse
A friend said that some Germans are in fact thrilled that everyone currently thinks they’re nuts. The “guilt” was often a seething, hateful resentment of the moral prestige of their historical victims, and a desire to reclaim it for themselves. And now THEY get to be—pariahs
🚨City College announces it is closing its food pantry as a result of the solidarity encampment. In 2022, 40% of CUNY students reported having low or very low food security. Thats 110,000 students.
“That Palestinians must be patrolled and censured for their supposed anti-Semitism by the German state testifies to the perversity that now drives this national project: having committed genocide has become a claim to moral authority.”
Glad that someone wrote this
From comrades in Berlin:
“In Germany, anyone who dares to publicly oppose this carnage—at a rally or on the internet—faces the threat of ostracism, censorship, arrest, sacking by employers, and in the case of foreigners, deportation.”
“The voices of ‘law and order’ rushed to excuse a violent crime.” A year ago today, Daniel Penny killed Jordan Neely on the subway. Read
@_thebadside
on the city’s response:
I love that right now in Germany the far-right voting cops have carte blanche to beat the shit out of Arabs and patrol their neighborhoods, stopping kids in the street and asking for their papers—in the name of anti-fascism
If you’re among the sick idiots who insisted that the pager attack was in fact precise and targeted then you should be appalled by the carpet bombing of civilian infrastructure and hundreds of deaths in a single day. But of course you’re not
“What we see in Palestine will also be the suffering in the world of all the peoples of the south.”
Petro on the catastrophe in Gaza as a sign of what’s to come
La barbarie del consumo basado en la muerte de los demás nos lleva a un ascenso del fascismo sin precedente, y por tanto, a la muerte de la democracia y la libertad. Es la barbarie, o el 1933 global, como la llamo. 1933 fue año donde ascendió Hitler al poder.
Lo que vemos en
On MSNBC, Mayor Adams says in NYC "you had the DSA and others carrying swastikas and calling for the extermination of Jewish people" following Hamas' attack on Israel.
“Gaza is a real-time alarm bell that genocide may become a political tool in the decades to come for resolving capital’s intractable contradiction between surplus capital and surplus humanity.”
The explicit equivalence between genocidal Serbian forces and Palestinians—in the middle of this genocide—is obscene. And there’s only passing mention of present claims that the Israeli assault on Gaza has included sexual violence. Only quotes from Israelis who can’t believe that
Rape is a shocking and sadly predictable feature of war. But, Masha Gessen writes, the nature of the crime makes it difficult to document and, consequently, to prosecute.
As whole neighborhoods are blasted to pieces, the self-styled pragmatists look far more callous and pointless than the self-styled radicals. Even politicians who said and condemned what you wanted them to are getting smeared in the relentless bipartisan drive to annihilate Gaza
Oddly, I remember a piece, published by Jezebel, in 2015, that skillfully mapped the dynamics of backlash/offense/clickbait and women’s online writing—and the many paradoxes thereof. Didn’t answer any massive questions, but asked the right ones, well. It’s by Jia Tolentino lol
It was clear from reading Butler’s initial piece that they thought the real event, the only proper object of contemplation, was October 7. They don’t mistake 10/7 for the “start” of this historical sequence—but a kind of ending, or breaking off
“What we are witnessing, in other words, is perhaps the first fusion of old-school colonial and genocidal violence with advanced state-of-the-art heavy weapons; a twisted amalgamation of the 17th century and the 21st”
Best, most harrowing account in English of what’s going on
“Author Annie Ernaux, Palestinian poet and activist Mohammed El-Kurd and actress Indya Moore call on artists to strike against German institutions.” Damn
@strikegermany
The great-grandchild of a Nazi reaching out to the grandchild of one of the architects of the Nakba.
Naturally, both are art dealers and hated the Artforum letter
Beyond disgusted at the length French TV pundits go to to justify the murder of children. Listening to
@celine_pina
it's almost as if Palestinian children need to thank the IDF for killing them.
Listen to this, it's absolutely unreal: "Crimes against humanity and war crimes are
Israel is not invading Lebanon, it is liberating it.
This is a historic moment, not only for the Israelis, but for the Lebanese, Arabs, and Eastern Christians.
To not understand this is to have lost all moral and political compass.
#StandWithIsrael
#Lebanon
#IDF
Feels ridiculous to have spent years trying to parse how “race” is mediated, contingent, intricately reproduced at the conjunction of capital and the state—only for global order to explode because of ethnic supremacism and a literal genocide
A small point: This piece explicitly revives Michael Walzer’s plea for a “decent left.”
The 2002 essay (also in Dissent) was not a call for peace, but part of Walzer’s infamous, full-throated defense of the Afghanistan invasion. Worth mentioning
Today I acted on a perverse impulse and reread this 1976 Nadine Gordimer piece about South Africa and was struck anew by near-total inability of anyone on the white left-liberal spectrum to imagine that “one man one vote” could ever happen. Then it did
Not sure on what grounds *American* *socialists* are supposed to tell Palestinian organizers that the demand "one person one vote" is too unrealistic to support
Protesters block the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade and hold the street! No celebrating the genocide of the indigenous people of the americas, no funding genocide in Palestine
Butler has a great book on speech acts, and a bad book on non-violence—so they have, with almost arithmetical exactitude, produced a totally whatever piece about the speech act of condemning violence
“At the Democratic Convention in Chicago in August 1968, when Hubert H. Humphrey’s nomination was announced, the enthusiasm of the American liberals—that sort of misty, Bavarian, psychedelic delirium—was so unbearable that I got up to leave.” Jean Genet
It also should be noted that this rabid official position is not actually THAT widely shared among most Germans—according to polls. It retains elements of bourgeois narcissism/neurosis
This Harvard thing should remind everyone that when push comes to shove, power will not reward your reasonable little compromises so you might as well have dignity. Saves time
An entire layer of the liberal journalistic establishment got to feel stern and pragmatic for supporting the war, then righteous and humane about the ensuing catastrophe. Having your cake and bombing it too! Anyway those guys are now everyone’s bosses
I’m sure many know this but it’s worth saying/repeating: administrations are trying to negotiate cynically with demonstrators in order to avoid a nationwide graduation showdown
These chin-stroking distinctions are so pathetically insubstantial. What do you call “ethnic cleansing” when it’s accomplished by a massive bombing campaign in a territory it’s literally impossible to flee?
@OsitaNwanevu
I think it is useful to be able to linguistically distinguish between the act of attempting to systemically exterminate a people, and the act of waging a regime-change war with total disregard for civilian life (and/or, a hope of engineering ethnic cleansing via displacement)...
Dissent this, Dissent that. Psychotic racism + sneering literary criticism suffused with a totally unearned sense of authority—that’s the REAL legacy of the New York Intellectuals! Kudos Tablet
"Alareer’s work, tenderly keening at its best and banal and formulaic at its average, relies on strained cultural and historical transpositions."
On the intifada generation that sacrificed its poets, from
@MaximDShrayer
.
“Palestinian martyrdom crosses the boundary between secular and theological, suffusing the gap left by the absence of the right to have rights.”
@bassem__saad
’s incredible new essay on Palestinian martyrdom, ethics, and the limits of human rights
Since there’s a massive action today to
#BlockCopCity
—please read this masterful, panoramic, supremely affecting essay about what’s happening in ATL. It captures the scale of the phenomenon and the stakes of that place. An actual masterpiece
@nplusonemag
Not his most awesome contribution but I’ve always appreciated that he referred so matter-of-factly to the League of Revolutionary Black Workers as “the single most significant political experience of the American 1960s”
Thinking about France today, just a year after the pension reform demos AND the uprising for Nahel: The conventional wisdom that riots/uprisings are a gift to right wing parties is starting to look…outdated
What’s more offensive, daring to protest an ongoing genocide wherever the President speaks—or speaking at the site of a white supremacist mass shooting to rustle up some votes
Part of the point of this piece was to take the epigraph to A Woman’s Story seriously, and to make the case for Ernaux as a speculative, dialectical writer—not just bravely authentic (though she can also be that)
The 74th Berlin International Film Festival will award US-director, producer and screenwriter Martin Scorsese the Honorary Golden Bear for his lifetime achievement in an award ceremony at the Berlinale Palast on February 20, 2024.
Read all:
That’s why the piece ends with the wistfully fanciful call for “our poets and our dreamers, the untamed fools”—it simply did not occur to JB that the Hamas operation would have any significant political effect or expose the limits of Zionist ideology and military capacity
Which seems to be an instance of their ethical commitment to non-violence overtaking the descriptive/political capacity to assess the balance of forces. This rupture has resulted in mass bloodshed—as well as the reinvigoration of global sympathy for the Palestinian cause
Most of the people saying Israel is committing a genocide are low information fools following a trend, performing edgy empathy, seeking social credit. Ignore them. If you’re feeling charitable, urge them to find another hobby.
We are (rightly) reaching for Vietnam as a point of comparison, only to be confronted with monstrous contemporary ignorance about what the US did in Vietnam
Bitter irony that Shibli was censored in Frankfurt for her novel’s damning portrait of Zionists during the Nakba. The second half is (inter alia) about how a contemporary writer under apartheid can’t have a functional professional life because she’s banned from everything
Germany has just gone to even greater lengths to punish pro-Palestine speech.
If you live abroad and have gig or talk or DJ set or exhibition in Germany: DON’T DO IT.
In the name of Palestine:
STRIKE GERMANY
@strikegermany
Whatever I’m not sure why I typed all of this. But I actually do believe them when they say that they didn’t foresee the campus crackdown. They were totally incapable of thinking through 10/7 as something other than the violation of a fundamental ethical principle
From the Standing Together socialists (!) interviewed in Dissent to Hito Steyerl in FAZ—everyone seems to think that boycotts are a way of shutting down otherwise valuable dialogue. How did self-professed leftists get so stupid so fast?
To someone like JB—a thinker whom I have learned a lot from, political differences notwithstanding—even to contemplate the strategic outcome of 10/7 is not just impossible but brutal, disgusting, and defeats the purpose of liberatory struggle
I DO think it’s important not to be glib, or to trivialize moments of brutal, world historical gravity like this one. But nothing is more trivializing than Democrats turning the bloodbath in Occupied Palestine into an excuse to bash the left
“We maintain that the total and complete journalistic malpractice we are witnessing is shocking, even by the standards of dehumanization and lies that have historically marked coverage of Palestine.”
I’m a) glad David said this and b) convinced that this episode was a turning point in the asinine “discourse”—I think the public uproar/firing is one of the things that cemented this kind of ceremonial acknowledgment as an absolute prerequisite of liberal conversations re: Gaza
So Butler’s apology is also a kind of epistemological update, a reckoning with the fact that the political process that straddles every scale and locale (Gaza, Knesset, Congress, campus) wasn’t ended or even arrested but sprang back to life