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   ramonita :trantifa: (ramonita@todon.eu)'s status on Wednesday, 28-Feb-2024 23:02:20 JST ramonita :trantifa:

   still thinking about how every time they want to whitewash the genocide in Palestine it's always "but they raped Israeli women" or "but they're homophobic" or "but they would kill Jews if they had the chance". it's at a whole other scale, but the structure of weaponising cancel culture feels very familiar:

   - you don't want to be _antisemitic_, do you? → you have to support Israel / bar Arab refugees

   - are you telling me you're _pro-militarism_ / _pro-imperialism_? → you have to let Russia invade

   - you support _feminism_, don't you? → you have to be a terf/swerf

   - are you _against gay people_ ? → you have to be Islamophobic

   and you can try to question the accusations, e.g. that Israeli reports on the actions of Palestinians have been shown again and again to be wildly unreliable so how can you know that those rape accusations are real. or you can try to tu-quoque it and say, what about the accusations of IDF soldiers raping women—backed by the UN etc. maybe you can Uno-reverse with an accusation of racism and ask, "if an Arabic majority was doing to a Jewish ghetto what Israel is doing to Palestinians, how would you react? if Russia slaughtered Dortmund because they harbours Nazis, would you support Russia"? ...

   • AnthonyJK-Admin repeated this.
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     ramonita :trantifa: (ramonita@todon.eu)'s status on Wednesday, 28-Feb-2024 23:02:34 JST ramonita :trantifa:

     in reply to

     or you can throw men under the bus and say that there can't possibly be a justification to kill tens of thousands of women and children (leaving unsaid the implication that every Arab man is suspected to be an abuser/murderer/etc).

     but all those ripostes are red herrings, they accept the underlying assumption which is the moral blackmail of punitive justice: to be against rape means you want horrible suffering to be inflicted on rapists, and if you question that logic, "ah so you're opening space for abusers in our movement then"? set aside the fact that punitive justice has never remotely worked to actually stop, remedy, or prevent abuse, or any other social ill; set aside the fact that punishment is so easily coopted and therefore always weaponised against the most oppressed classes; the question at the core is the substitution of action for symbolic allegiance. because everyone is terrified of being ostracised forever in the Activist Offender Registry as an -ist, they have to jump at every opportunity to loudly and publicly denounce everything accused of the -ism.

     AnthonyJK-Admin repeated this.
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     ramonita :trantifa: (ramonita@todon.eu)'s status on Wednesday, 28-Feb-2024 23:04:07 JST ramonita :trantifa:

     in reply to

     if you want to support the liberation of the working class you have to come to terms with the fact that a large part of it is right-wing, misogynistic etc. they still shouldn't be exploited by capitalists. no one should. if you want to abolish prisons, you have to come to terms that a lot of ppl in prisons are in fact abusers, swindlers, murderers etc. they still shouldn't be jailed. if you want to support trans rights you support trans rights for every trans person, including the terrible ones. if you want to run a rape shelter you must be prepared to shelter female MAGA voters etc. and if you oppose colonialism, then you oppose colonialism of societies whose ideology you disagree with. because none of it is about "deserving", the logic of "deserving" is a cover. the logic of punitive justice, dividing the world into innocent and unworthy, will always deflect responsibility from the systemic, and therefore serve power. this is after all the original excuse of colonialism: sure, it's bloody work, but that's a burden colonisers must take because Indians are savages, we're ultimately bringing about progress. Islamic ideology is misogynistic, therefore Gaza should be... well, cancelled.

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     ramonita :trantifa: (ramonita@todon.eu)'s status on Wednesday, 28-Feb-2024 23:04:08 JST ramonita :trantifa:

     in reply to

     say you want to actually do something actually effective about "abuse in our movement", you actually want to stop it from happening, you want to actually improve the lives of those hurt by it. you don't have to read a whole book by adrienne maree brown to know what that would look like; first of all your movement needs support structures—social, emotional, financial—for people who have been or will be harmed; you need mediators and educators; you need to take collective responsibility, look at past cases of abuse, figure out what sort of situations and structures left people vulnerable and how to change them; and so on; but all this is work. looking at someone you don't know making a sarcastic online quip about someone else you don't know and joining in with your own sarcastic quip _substitutes_ this work. symbolism and (loud, public) identitarian alliances replace the mess of doing things with neat binaries of right and wrong.

     AnthonyJK-Admin repeated this.