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'We Are All Culpable': Third American Self-Immolates to Protest Israel's Gaza Onslaught
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2024
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politics
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If your elected leaders are using your tax dollars to send guns and tanks and bombs to Israel then THEY are responsible for the resulting carnage, not YOU. And your time would be better spent electing better leaders instead of setting yourself on fire.
Yeah, but it kinda breaks down at the "electing better leaders" part, since we don't have an anti-genocide candidate in either major party.
Very few policies are determined by party platforms at election times. There were no pro-civil-rights-movement candidates from the major parties back in the 1960s either. Events drove them, and those events didn't just randomly happen. There were decades of organizing, recruiting, training, planning, and hard debate that went into them, and people laid their lives on the line in furtherance of actual goals, not empty gestures.
Similarly, neither major party opposed the Vietnam war, or either of the Iraq wars, or the invasion of Afghanistan, or gay rights. That's all just an excuse for inaction. Public opinion can be changed, even if it sometimes happens too late. But if you're not willing to get out in the streets, nothing will happen at all.
Then "electing better leaders" was the same canard it was in all those cases. Just a platitude to delay.
Do you think there is only one election in November?
Do you think Democrats are ever going to move any direction other than right?
In down-ballot races? Absolutely.
But that's not even the same conversation.
Well, let's have that conversation. The party uses incumbency as an excuse to lock out progressive candidates like Jessica Cisneros. They pulled out all the stops to make sure Coathanger Cuellar won his primary. But when the incumbent is a progressive like Jamaal Bowman or Cori Bush, incumbency does not convey with it party protection. The party's move to the right is deliberate in down-ballot races as well.
Electoral politics ends with the presidency. It doesn't start there. Bernie worked for progressive causes for decades before running in 2016. He worked his way up from mayor to Congress to Senate. His near miss in the primary in 2020 pulled Biden to the left on several issues.
If you want to end support for Israel, and I agree we should end support for Israel, even if they stop the war tomorrow. Then you should be writing letters, going to county Democratic meetings and finding candidates to run for state legislature that share your beliefs.
We just had two demonstrations of how that ends. Their names were Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman. AIPAC openly bought candidates to replace them. I don't have enough lifetimes to stop that, and neither do you.
Not speaking for them, but someone committing ineffectual self-destruction isn't something worthy of emulation.
Nothing like a little binary thinking to capture the nuance of a situation.
Here's a thought exercise: if everyone here in the US who cared even an iota about stopping the genocide were to self-immolate, what difference would it make besides leaving a trail of bereaved people and a small contribution to making climate change even worse? Do you honestly believe that, even if hundreds of thousands or millions of Americans set themselves on fire, the ethno-chauvinist goons in the Likud would give a shit, or American public opinion would be swayed even slightly from its lethargic apathy? Only organizing, engaging in the political process and continuing to publicize the situation, along with BDS, will make any difference. The rest is displacement activity that, at most, will make you feel good about your own righteousness, but which benefits nobody.