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#nationalistic narratives

rosielindy · 2 years

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Yesterday I started reading The Flag and the Cross and emphatically recommend it, especially if you want to be able to influence the narrative that is pushing America toward White Christian Nationalism by a terrified minority to retain power. Jemar Tisby’s foreword compels the reader to absorb and embrace the facts presented and use them in our daily lives to recognize and confront the historical myths being used to control the masses.

As Tisby points out, this is not a conceptual book to be read and put back on the shelf. The authors borrow an approach employed by geologists who study Earth’s tectonic shifts, similarly seeking to understand and forecast America’s cultural shifts that are leading us away from democracy. I’m using the insights it provides to look differently at the people and institutions around me and hone my message to counter the lies and false understandings of history.

#american democracy #american history #nationalistic narratives #activism #changethenarrative #effectchange #talk to each other #get the facts #facts matter #jointheconversation #be the change #let’s keep democracy #fight for democracy #history is not mythology #culture war #culturaldiversity

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dostoyevsky-official · 2 years

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The 2022 Peace Prize is awarded to human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski from Belarus (and by extension, his organization, Viasna), the Russian human rights organization Memorial and the Ukrainian human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties.

All three have tirelessly fought for the common dignity and the rights of people in their countries, and all three have fought against the violation of that dignity, whether by Putin or the reactionary forces aligned with him.

За нашу и вашу свободу

#i do not agree with the narratives about a bad choice which i frankly consider rather thoughtless expression of nationalistic chauvinism

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like-butterflies-and-glitter · 6 months

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homonationalism is sinister. do not fall for the narratives of homonationalism, just because one group of people supposedly tends to oppress their queer people don't forget so do the ones pointing it out to you they do not care any more about you, think about their motivations and agenda, this is a ploy and honestly a thinly veiled (if at all) fight against liberation, because no matter how far your queer liberation goes, no liberation is complete until everyone is liberated.

#hindutva uses it zionists are using it #it is becoming such a common tool to justify Islamophobia #i have only ever seen it in effect to justify islamophobia and i bet it can and has been used against other groups of people too #but yeah it is just so awful and apparently an easy enough narrative to fall for #the hindu nationalists will not treat you better for being queer than a more secular state that shouldn't need to be said #and even if they did the idea of trading your oppression for that of another cant really seem like a good idea #no liberation is complete until all liberation is complete hammer that into your brain if you must #free palestine

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skalidris · 6 months

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the thing is that in JP video games that depict tea ceramics it's never just about representing Japan, it's also about representing Europe (whatever that actually means in either case), but it's more obviously an act of total imagination (arguably because concessions have to be made for media constraints, or nationalistic purposes) and it's so fascinating. and then you have an american play it and go tea=england for two hours. i am putting this situation in a microscope.

#i still can't get over how i watched thsi one us-american play fire emblem engage #and him & his audience kept making jokes about how this one island was england #because its maps and bracketing narrative indicated they grew tea there #and it's like. uhm. you know what else is an island that grows tea? japan........................#i get it i get it tea's been weaponised to construct post-imperial british identity i get it i do!#but the layers of nationalist story-telling contained in that one single moment. peak. i've never been the same.#ref.

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muncedes · 1 year

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the US is a joke i despise living here i despise the declines and backtracking we’ve made in quite literally every aspect of life.

gun control could have and should have been set in place after sandy hook. no one should be dying at the hands of an assault rifle but most importantly children should not be dying at school. white conservative americans refuse to acknowledge that the right to bear arms is not the right to committing mass shootings. worrying about banning an app ahead of every other social justice issue is indicative of how incompetent our government system is.

#this isn’t the land of the free this isn’t the best country on earth #and it hasn’t been for decades #nationalists continue to skew the narrative every time this happens #trump single-handedly allowed racist sexist homophobic americans come to the surface and express their prejudices outwardly and confidently #it was the biggest mistake this country has ever made

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tianshiisdead · 1 year

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Finally cracked open 'Resisting Manchukuo: Chinese Women Writers and the Japanese Occupation' by Norman Smith I have high hopes for this 😤😤😤

#library tag #manchukuo cw #some of the reviews are intensely irritating 'wah wah breaking from nationalist narratives to show REALITY abt chinese collaboration' but #high hopes anyways

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despazito · 5 months

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Colonialism is an ongoing problem in the purebred dog world and i just wanna take as second to talk about the national dog breed of Israel, the Canaan dog. Because here's the CKC's blurb on them

I have no doubt and am not denying ancient Hebrews lived with these dogs, but the Canaan comes from a stock of landrace breed native across the Levant and it has also gone by names such as Bedouin Sheepdog or Palestinian Pariah Dog.

Organized breeding of the Canaan began in the 20th century from captured Palestinian dogs (i would also point to the wording of 'redomesticating' used here, implying the feral pariah dogs were in some way not domesticated, which i think is disingenuous phrasing.). If you look up the Canaan, most sources you see on them explicitly brand Canaans as an Israeli breed, neglecting or downplaying any history they have with any of the other countless peoples or cultures in the region this breed has coexisted with across millenia. There's even an archeological site with ancient remains of canaan-like dogs was found in Ashkelon, located just 13 miles from the Gaza strip.

The developer of the 'modern' purebred Canaan was "ardent zionist" Rudolphina Menzel, who trained attack dogs for the IDF:

What really gets me about this story is how this native landrace breed was taken and trained to guard colonial settlements from the very people they lived alongside, there is something so twisted about it..

This is unfortunately nothing new in the world of dog fancy. There are many instances of explorers and settlers importing exotic new dogs from their travels, establishing a breed club, and then claiming stewardship over said breed without any involvement from the local peoples they took or bought them from. I'm not sure what to leave this on, i just think more people should be aware of these 'softer' forms of colonialism and how domestic animals can play a part in colonialism and nationalist narratives.

Anyway, long live the Palestinian pariah dog/ Bedouin sheepdog!

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the-boy-branithar · 15 days

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Something I appreciate about Monkey Man is how doesn't try to frame revenge as just a pointlessly violent, self-destructive pursuit the way many films do. I think it's because Dev Patel was unafraid of adding a political element to the story. The kid wants to avenge his mother, but he also doesn't want what happened to them to keep happening to others. The presence of the hijras really drives this idea home. They fight with him not only because he's their friend, but because Baba and the nationalist party will bring violence literally to their door even if they don't fight back. I often roll my eyes at anti-revenge narratives. I think Dev Patel gets what it's like to be a victim of systematic violence in a way most filmmakers seem not to. Revenge isn't just a selfish pursuit that perpetuates the ~cycle of violence~, it can also be a desperate desire for the violence to end.

#monkey man #dev patel #someone smarter than me can probably word it better but yeah

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opencommunion · 3 days

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one reason (white) queer people misuse the term homonationalism is that they see queerness (or whatever you want to call it) as naturally disaffiliated with the US empire. so they understand homonationalism as a divergence from a natural mutual antagonism between queerness and empire. they talk about homonationalism as if it's an exclusively "normie gay" project, and as if it's a divergence from, rather than a consequence of, the overall trajectory of western lgbtqia+ politics. ironically it’s that self-exceptionalization by the queer, on the basis of their queerness, that imbricates them in homonationalism. they produce themselves as a homonationalist subject, and reproduce homonationalism, every time they articulate their queerness as individualized freedom. and Puar actually anticipates all of this in her original theorization of homonationalism in Terrorist Assemblages, and that's why it really helps to go to the text instead of osmosing queer theory solely through tumblr posts (esp when tumblr is so white and the queer theorists are not): "Some may strenuously object to the suggestion that queer identities, like their 'less radical' counterparts, homosexual, gay, and lesbian identities, are also implicated in ascendant white American nationalist formations, preferring to see queerness as singularly transgressive of identity norms. This focus on transgression, however, is precisely the term by which queerness narrates its own sexual exceptionalism.

While we can point to the obvious problems with the emancipatory, missionary pulses of certain (U.S., western) feminisms and of gay and lesbian liberation, queerness has its own exceptionalist desires: exceptionalism is a founding impulse, indeed the very core of a queerness that claims itself as an anti-, trans-, or unidentity. The paradigm of gay liberation and emancipation has produced all sorts of troubling narratives: about the greater homophobia of immigrant communities and communities of color, about the stricter family values and mores in these communities, about a certain prerequisite migration from home, about coming-out teleologies. We have less understanding of queerness as a biopolitical project, one that both parallels and intersects with that of multiculturalism, the ascendancy of whiteness, and may collude with or collapse into liberationist paradigms. While liberal underpinnings serve to constantly recenter the normative gay or lesbian subject as exclusively liberatory, these same tendencies labor to insistently recenter the normative queer subject as an exclusively transgressive one. Queerness here is the modality through which 'freedom from norms' becomes a regulatory queer ideal that demarcates the ideal queer. ... I am thinking of queerness as exceptional in a way that is wedded to individualism and the rational, liberal humanist subject, what [Sara] Ahmed denotes as 'attachments' and what I would qualify as deep psychic registers of investment that we often cannot account for and are sometimes best seen by others rather than ourselves. 'Freedom from norms' resonates with liberal humanism’s authorization of the fully self-possessed speaking subject, untethered by hegemony or false consciousness, enabled by the life/stylization offerings of capitalism, rationally choosing modern individualism over the ensnaring bonds of family. In this problematic definition of queerness, individual agency is legible only as resistance to norms rather than complicity with them, thus equating resistance and agency.

... Queerness as automatically and inherently transgressive enacts specific forms of disciplining and control, erecting celebratory queer liberal subjects folded into life (queerness as subject) against the sexually pathological and deviant populations targeted for death (queerness as population). Within that orientation of regulatory transgression, queer operates as an alibi for complicity with all sorts of other identity norms, such as nation, race, class, and gender, unwittingly lured onto the ascent toward whiteness. ... To be excused from a critique of one’s own power manipulations is the appeal of white liberalism, the underpinnings of the ascendancy of whiteness, which is not a conservative, racist formation bent on extermination, but rather an insidious liberal one proffering an innocuous inclusion into life."

Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007)

#library #imperialism

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communist-ojou-sama · 4 months

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I hate having to drag these kinds of discussions into the public in front of nonblacks but it seems like the constant shameless behavior on this site has forced my hand, so let me be very clear about this:

In the past, anti-imperialists on this website have rightly made the analytical point that all citizens within empire to some extent reap its benefits even second- and third-class, and how this is especially true in the case of a global website like the US.

In response, a clique of mostly bourgeois black bloggers and their enablers have weaponized their identities to silence critiques of black USian complicity in US imperialism and any analysis of the specific ways in which all USians benefit from US imperialism.

As a result, it's become necessary to make my own voice clear as a black communist. This narrative of total and infinite black USian victimhood is false. It is lazy. It is perverse, and it is shameless. If any of you were true black nationalists, true pan-Africanists, then you would put anti-imperialism before your own personal feelings and look at how the movement of black people toward the middle class, which has been substantial over the past few decades even as we remain the poorest demographic, has come first of all at the expense of people of our own skin color in the global south, or how as much as the auspices of choice are constrained, the informal economies that keep the poorest black communities above the absolute depths of destitution are intimately related to the drug trade that US uses to sow chaos and mass murder throught Latin America. But you all (and I'll do you the grace of not naming names) aren't ready to have that conversation, you just want to weaponize white guilt against anyone who pisses you off and invoke the suffering of our venerated ancestors to win internet arguments. Fucking shameful.

My nonblack followers should feel free to reblog this if they feel comfortable doing so. I have long felt this issue has needed to be addressed.

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mostlysignssomeportents · 11 months

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Conservatives are fringe outliers - and leftists could learn from them

The Republican Party, a coalition between Big Business farmers and turkeys who’ll vote for Christmas (Red Scare obsessed cowards, apocalyptic white nationalists, religious fanatics, etc) has fallen to its bizarre, violent, noisy radical wing, who are obsessed with policies that are completely irrelevant to the majority of Americans.

As Oliver Willis writes, the views of the radical right — which are also the policies of the GOP — are wildly out of step with the US political view:

https://www.oliverexplains.com/p/conservatives-arent-like-normal-americans

The press likes to frame American politics as “narrowly divided,” but the reality is that Republicans’ electoral victories are due to voter suppression and antimajoritarian institutions (the Senate and Electoral College, etc), not popularity. Democrats consistently outperform the GOP in national races. Dems won majorities in 1992/6, and beat the GOP in 2000, 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2020. The only presidential race the GOP won on popular votes since 1988 was 2004, when GW Bush eked out a plurality (not a majority).

But, as Willis says, Dems “act like it is 1984 and that they are outliers in a nation of Reagan voters,” echoing a stilted media narrative. The GOP’s platform just isn’t popular. Take the groomer panic: 71% of Americans approve of same-sex marriage. The people losing their shit about queer people are a strange, tiny minority.

Every one of the GOP’s tentpole issues is wildly unpopular: expanding access to assault rifles, banning immigration, lowering taxes on the rich, cutting social programs, forcing pregnant people to bear unwanted children, etc. This is true all the way up to the GOP’s coalescing support for Trump as their 2024 candidate. Trump has lost every popular vote he’s ever stood for, and owes his term in the Oval Office to the antimajoritarian Electoral College system, gerrymandering, and massive voter suppression.

Willis correctly points out that Dem leaders are basically “normal” center-right politicians, not radicals. And, unlike their GOP counterparts, politicians like Clinton, Obama and Biden don’t hide their disdain for the radical wing of their party. Even never-Trumper Republicans are afraid of their base. Romney declared himself “severely conservative” and McCain “put scare quotes around ‘health of the mother’ provisions for abortion rights.”

The GOP fringe imposes incredible discipline on their leaders. Take all the nonsense about “woke capitalism”: on the one hand, it’s absurd to call union-busting, tax-dodging, worker-screwing companies “woke” (even if they sell Pride flags for a couple of weeks every year).

But on the other hand? The GOP leadership have actually declared war on the biggest corporations in America, to the point that the WSJ says that “Republicans and Big Business broke up”:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/republicans-corporations-donations-pacs-9b5b202b

But America is a two-party system and there are plenty of people who’ll pull the lever for any Republican. This means that when the GOP comes under the control of its swivel-eyed loon wing, the swivel-eyed loons wield power far beyond the number of people who agree with them.

There’s an important lesson there for Dems, whose establishment is volubly proud of its independence from its voters. The Biden administration is a weirdly perfect illustration of this “independence.” The Biden admin is a kind of referee, doling out policies and appointments to its competing wings, without any coherence or consistency.

That’s how you get incredible appointments like Lina Khan at the FTC and Jonathan Kanter at the DoJ Antitrust Division and Rohit Chopra at the Consumer Finance Protection Bureat — the progressive wing of the party bargained for these key appointments and then played their cards very well, getting incredible, hard-charging, hyper-competent fighters in those roles.

Likewise, Jared Bernstein, finally confirmed as Council of Economic Advisers chair after an interminable wrangle:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2023-06-16-team-biden/

And Julie Su, acting labor secretary, who just delivered a six-year contract to west coast dockworkers with 8–10% raises in the first year, paid retroactively for the year they worked without a contract:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/06/14/statement-from-president-biden-on-labor-agreement-at-west-coast-ports/

But the Biden admin’s unwillingness to side with one wing of the party also produces catastrophic failures, like the martyrdom of Gigi Sohn, who was subjected to years of vicious personal attacks while awaiting confirmation to the FCC, undefended by the Biden admin, left to twist in the wind until she gave it up as a bad job:

https://doctorow.medium.com/culture-war-bullshit-stole-your-broadband-4ce1ffb16dc5

It’s how we get key roles filled by do-nothing seatwarmers like Pete Buttigieg, who has the same sweeping powers that Lina Khan is wielding so deftly at the FTC, but who lacks either the will or the skill to wield those same powers at the Department of Transport:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/11/dinah-wont-you-blow/#ecp

By refusing to stand for anything except a fair division of powers among different Democratic Party blocs, the Biden admin ends up undercutting itself. Take right to repair, a centerpiece of the administration’s agenda, subject of a historic executive order and FTC regulation:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

Right to Repair fights have been carried out at the state level for years, with the biggest victory coming in Massachusetts, where an automotive R2R ballot initiative won overwhelming support in 2020:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/13/said-no-one-ever/#r2r

But despite the massive support for automotive right to repair in the Bay State, Big Car has managed to delay the implementation of the new law for years, tying up the state in expensive, time-consuming litigation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/26/nixing-the-fix/#r2r

But eventually, even the most expensive delaying tactic fails. Car manufacturers were set to come under the state right to repair rule this month, but they got a last minute reprieve, from Biden’s own National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, who sent urgent letters to every major car manufacturer, telling them to ignore the Massachusetts repair law:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7bbkv/biden-administration-tells-car-companies-to-ignore-right-to-repair-law-people-overwhelmingly-voted-for

The NHTSA repeats the car lobby’s own scare stories about “cybersecurity” that they blitzed to Massachusetts voters in the runup to the ballot initiative:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

The idea that cybersecurity is best maintained by letting powerful corporations gouge you on service and parts is belied by independent experts, like SecuRepairs, who do important work countering the FUD thrown off by the industry (and parroted by Biden’s NHTSA):

https://securepairs.org/

Independent security experts are clear that letting owners of high-tech devices decide who fixes them, what software they run, etc, makes us safer:

https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2022/01/letter-to-the-us-senate-judiciary-committee-on-app-stores.html

But here we are: the Biden admin is sabotaging the Biden admin, because the Biden admin isn’t an administration, it’s a system for ensuring proportional representation of different parts of the Democratic Party coalition.

This isn’t just bad for policy, it’s bad politics, too. It presumes that if some Democratic voters want pizza, and others want hamburgers, that you can please everyone by serving up pizzaburgers. No one wants a pizzaburger:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/23/narrative-warfare/#giridharadas

The failure to deliver a coherent, muscular vision for a climate-ready, anti-Gilded Age America has left the Democrats vulnerable. Because while the radical proposals of the GOP fringe may not enjoy much support, there are large majorities of Americans who have lost faith in the status quo and are totally uninterested in the Pizzaburger Party.

Nowhere is this better explained than in Naomi Klein’s superb long-form article on RFK Jr’s presidential bid in The Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/14/ignoring-robert-f-kennedy-jr-not-an-option

Don’t get me wrong, RFK Jr is a Very Bad Politician, for all the reasons that Klein lays out. He’s an anti-vaxxer, a conspiracist, and his support for ending American military aggression, defending human rights, and addressing the climate emergency is laughably thin.

But as Klein points out, RFK Jr is not peddling pizzaburgers. He is tapping into a legitimate rage:

a great many voters are hurting and rightfully angry: about powerful corporations controlling their democracy and profiting off disease and poverty. About endless wars draining national coffers and maiming their kids. About stagnating wages and soaring costs. This is the world — inflamed on every level — that the two-party duopoly has knowingly created.

RFK Jr is campaigning against “the corrupt merger between state and corporate power,” against drug monopolies setting our national health agenda, and polluters capturing environmental regulators.

As Klein says, despite RFK Jr’s willing to say the unsayable, and tap into the yearning among the majority of American voters for something different, he’s not running a campaign rooted in finally telling the American public “the truth.” Rather, “public discourse filled with unsayable and unspeakable subjects is fertile territory for all manner of hucksters positioning themselves as uniquely courageous truth tellers.”

We’ve been here before. Remember Trump campaigning against a “rigged system” and promising to “make America great again?” Remember Clinton’s rejoinder that “America was already great?” It’s hard to imagine a worse response to legitimate outrage — over corporate capture, declining wages and living conditions; and spiraling health, education and shelter costs.

Sure, it was obvious that Trump was a beneficiary of the rigged system, and that he would rig it further, but at least he admitted it was rigged, not “already great.”

The Democratic Party is not in thrall to labor unions, or racial equality activists, or people who care about gender justice or the climate emergency. Unlike the GOP, the Dem establishment has figured out how to keep a grip on power within their own party — at the expense of exercising power in America, even when they hold office.

But unlike culture war nonsense, shared prosperity, fairness, care, and sound environmental policies are very popular in America. Some people have been poisoned against politics altogether and sunk into nihilism, while others have been duped into thinking that America can’t afford to look after its people.

In this regard, winning the American electorate is a macrocosm for the way labor activists win union majorities in the workplaces they organize. In her memoir A Collective Bargain, Jane McAlevey describes how union organizers contend with everything that progressive politicians must overcome. A union drive takes place in the teeth of unfair laws, on a tilted playing field that allows bosses to gerrymander some workers’ votes and suppress others’ altogether. These bosses have far more resources than the workers, and they spend millions on disinformation campaigns, forcing workers to attend long propaganda sessions on pain of dismissal.

https://doctorow.medium.com/a-collective-bargain-a48925f944fe

But despite all this, labor organizers win union elections and strike votes, and they do so with stupendous majorities — 95% or higher. This is how the most important labor victories of our day were won: the 2019 LA teachers’ strike won everything. Not just higher wages, but consellors in schools, mandatory greenspace for every school in LA, an end to ICE shakedowns of immigrant parents at the school-gate, and immigration law help for students and their families. What’s more, the teachers used their unity, their connection to the community, and their numbers to get out the vote in the next election, winning the marginal seats that delivered 2020’s Democratic Congressional majority.

As I wrote in my review of MacAlevey’s book:

For McAlevey, saving America is just a scaled up version of the union organizer’s day-job. First, we fix the corrupt union, firing its sellout leaders and replacing them with fighters. Then, we organize supermajorities, person-to-person, in a methodical, organized fashion. Then we win votes, using those supermajorities to overpower the dirty tricks that rig the elections against us. Then we stay activated, because winning the vote is just the start of the fight.

It’s a far cry from the Democratic Party consultant’s “data-driven” microtargeting strategy based on eking out tiny, fragile majorities with Facebook ads. That’s a strategy that fails in the face of even a small and disorganized voter-suppression campaign — it it’s doomed in today’s all-out assault on fair elections.

What’s more, the consultants’ microtargeting strategy treats people as if the only thing they have to contribute is casting a ballot every couple years. A sleeping electorate will never win the fights that matter — the fight to save our planet, and to abolish billionaires.

If only the Democratic Party was as scared of its base as the Republicans are of their own.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

[Image ID: The title page of Richard Hofstadter's 'Paranoid Style in American Politics' from the November, 1964 issue of Harper's Magazine. A John Birch Society pin reading 'This is REPUBLIC not a DEMOCRACY: let's keep it that way' sits atop the page, obscuring the introductory paragraph.]

#pluralistic #tgop #politics #centrism #centrism kills #qgop #democrats in disarray #trumpism #conservatives #robert f kennedy #Massachusetts #climate emergency #naomi klein #oliver willis #right to repair #pizzaburgers

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