Notices by PallasRiot (pallasriot@kolektiva.social)

Why are TERFs all so clocky?

If you've spent the last few days hand-wringing about "pro-Hamas leftists" or whatever, you can delete those posts and sound the alarms on the genocidal war crimes being carried out against Palestinian civilians. No one is going to make a fuss about you taking longer to focus on the issue at hand, just get fucking focused.

Every humanitarian organization of earth is warning us about the genocide being carried out. The Red Crescent Society has reported direct hits on marked ambulances and marked paramedics, and they've pledged not to evacuate from northern Gaza so that Palestinian civilians do not "have to face death alone", their words.

Half the populace of Gaza is children. Children who weren't even born when Hamas took over. There aren't shelters, there is no where civilians can flee, there is no escape from Gaza. The cutoff of power has destroyed the ability of hospitals in Gaza to function, the destruction of infrastructure has made it so that ambulances can't travel from one part of Gaza to another and paramedics are forced to go on foot. Drinking water was already so scarce that dehydration was a constant threat, and now there's no water coming into Gaza and the water infrastructure has been targeted. This is utterly indiscriminate, and these are actions that murder the most vulnerable first. The elderly, the infirm, and the very young are all most vulnerable to this kind of deprivation. Disease will follow from the breakdown of clean water infrastructure.

I remember what happened after 9/11, how genocidal madness took over people I knew to be good. How their worst impulses were fed, how they either hand-wrung or even outright supported "turning the Middle East to glass" and other such sentiments. How Islamophobia became a staple of everyday life and violent Islamophobia was condemned half-heartedly at best by the good nice liberals. It took years before people started to look back and wonder what spell had come over them, and they never admit that they were part of it, even if they now accept the horror done in the Middle East and the authoritarianism it built in Europe and the US. We need to not do this again, we have to wake up more quickly, we can't like genocidal sentiment become the unchallenged default of the body politic.

What's happening at this very moment is industrial ethnic cleansing, indiscriminate and unjustifiable death for the purpose of ethnic cleansing. It is beyond monstrous. We have to countenance this on it's face, because if we can't do a single other thing then we need to at least make sure it isn't whitewashed. Don't let yourself be someone who looks back in two decades and wonders what spell was cast over "all of us" while you silently refuse to admit that "us" was you.

Project 2025 is a "get out if you can" kind of moment. If you're a queer person in the US and you have the means, you should leave the country. It can happen here, it *is* happening here in fits and starts in various states, and it will only get more difficult to escape if any of this happens on a federal level which there are reasonable odds of.

In every genocide that has happened, the majority of victims were arrested in peaceful, orderly manners, even long after the genocide began. They were arrested in their homes more often than in hiding, arrested while trying to live their lives as normally as possible more often than they were caught being involved in underground resistance. Part of what makes fascist genocides so horribly successful is that people can scarcely comprehend the danger, it's nearly impossible to actually hold in your mind that things will get that bad, not in the abstract but in a direct, personal, immediate sense. People do not believe in gas chambers even when they can smell the crematoria, because the human mind buckles under the weight of that horror.

It *can* happen here. It has begun happening here. Powerful electoral political institutions that draft successful legislation have published public plans for it to happen here, in an orderly, legal, formal, dreadfully complete manner.

It can happen here. You, the person reading this, need to repeat that until you believe it. It needs to exist in your mind with the same sharp danger as walking into your living room and finding your curtains on fire, it needs to be real like a gun being pointed at you while your wallet is demanded. It can happen here.

As a coda to the previous thoughts, I want to ask you to read Blessed is the Flame by Serafinski, and to read at least one memoire of a victim or survivor of the Holocaust. Blessed is the Flame is available as an audiobook for free, as are many Holocaust memoires.

Blessed is the Flame is about what it means to resist even without hope of things getting better, and about resistance in the Nazi concentration camps. I think it's necessary reading for our time. I also think we owe it to those subjected to the worst depredations of the Nazis to learn their stories in their voices, to kindle them in ourselves as the human beings they were. Those who were interned in the concentration camps often had nightmares of being voiceless or mouthless, of crying out unheard, of begging to deaf ears. They feared their fates being unknown. We owe them not allowing that to happen, and we need to know these things for our own sake too.

Fascist dictatorships are highly legalistic entities, they require frameworks of legitimacy to survive and they require legal systems to carry out their goals. The Nazis eventually eschewed the stochastic terror of encouraging random pogroms because pogroms invited public displeasure, and public resistance. Even virulent German antisemites often did not approve of their neighbors being firebombed, shop windows broken, and random beatings in the street; the more widespread that terror got, the more the public felt the Nazis were illegitimate thugs causing chaos. So the Nazis pursued formal, systematized means of destroying the livelihoods and eventually lives of Jewish people, they interpreted German law and built legal theories that let them arrest and concentrate their targets using law enforcement, they used doctors and lawyers and police in place of street fighters and firebrand terrorists.

The genocide carried out by the Nazis was legal, and it wasn't just legal because Nazi Germany was a dictatorship, but rather because the Nazis built from prior existing laws and expanded the power and authority already available. They took pains to act in ways that preserved that legitimacy.

Project 2025 is that.