A thing probably worth talking about more is the dehumanization of Russian (and Eastern European) people that our European-American culture has had going on for the last 100+ years so our soldiers could more easily be prepared to kill Russian civilians and children.
You know the image: brutish, uncivilized, untrustworthy, unintelligent, violent.
This image has been created to block empathy and justify violence. It existed before the 20th century but it was massively pushed by anti-communists right after the communist revolution, increased and mixed with antisemitism by the Nazis and quite easily re-purposed to during the cold war.
And it’s still here. It’s heavily present in memes about Russia. A lot of these memes seem relatively positive but the fun is the ‘lol, violent uncivilized Russians again’ and at the end of the day there’s no empathy when it’s needed. Even things that seem like positive presentations of Russian strength and resilience translate to ‘I never have to care about Russians being hurt’, but like the ‘strong black woman’ trope translates to ‘I never have to care about black women being hurt’.
Even the phrase ‘The Russians’ serves the exact same function as ‘The Jews’, ‘The Gays’, etc: it presents a group of people as a whole without individuals, that can be collectively blamed for anything bad and collectively punished. We’re systematically pushed away from empathizing.
We see the results of this whenever workers from Eastern Europe or Russia come to work in Western Europe and are vilified with all the same tropes. We saw this when Putin’s persecution of LGBT people resulted in a lot of demonstrations against Putin as the symbol of everything bad about Russia, but almost no actual acts of solidarity for the Russian LGBT people effected. We see this now in the silence in anarchist scenes about the fact that anarchist and antifascist activists are literally being tortured with electric shocks and just randomly disappear.
And those are just some examples, there is a massive reserve of dehumanization there that can be easily tapped by any politician that at some point wants support for some kind of violence. This is something to be aware of and recognize.
(No, I am not Russian. Yes, I will talk about it. If Russians wanna talk about it I will listen and learn, but I am also talking now because if a form of dehumanization does not effect you and you see if from the side doing the dehumanizing it is your job to be a traitor to ‘your side’ and name what you see from the inside.)
Bigotry is the same, they know young folk are more socially aware this time, they cant just use the same old scapegoats, we won’t buy it – but if the bogey man is macho white people, we’ll lap it up
Identity politics is less than useless, there are only two forces at work, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat – everything else is an illusion designed to make the hopelessly outnumbered bourgeoisie seem more powerful and valuable, there has to be a bogey man so we feel we need protection, they manufacture the threat to keep us afraid and compliant
Nah, you’re wrong there.
Identity politics has a lot of problems, particularly when it embraces liberalism, individualizes the struggle, ignores systematic oppression and doesn’t include anti-capitalism.
But sexism, racism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, colonialism, etc are NOT things we can just ignore. We’re not doing our own movement any favors by just focusing only on class struggle. When we do, we allow violence to continue within our own movement, making our own spaces unsafe for women, for people of color, for lgbt people, for people with disabilities.
And we’re basically asking everyone to put parts of their own liberation on hold until we’ve won the class struggle, which is not a reasonable request because sexism, racism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism , colonialism,
are literally killing us. Fighting all forms of oppression isn’t optional. The survival of the people in our movement depends on it and we all have to do our part.
Can oppressed people be scapegoated by presenting them as if they’re actually privileged? Yes. That happens all the time. When Slavic people and working class people are presented as racist white men, when transwomen are presented as sexual predators, when Jewish people are presented as rich capitalists, a lot of us fall for it. But we can recognize those things, resist that trick and stand by oppressed people. And we’re not doing ourselves any favors by just not dealing with any forms of systematic oppression against minorities anymore.
The only ONLY WAY we can build a revolutionary movement is by seeing capitalism,
sexism, racism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism , colonialism,
as interconnected systems of oppression, which must be dismantled
all at the same time. Capitalism is right at the center of that web, for sure, but the struggle is everywhere and to change anything
we must be prepared to change everything.
QueerAnarchism 