#12. Moments to movements: The spectre of ideology

How do we translate protests and outrage into real, lasting change? How can we be better prepared as the global system withers? What is our role in oppression?

Oct 27, 2023

[This is a different type of piece than usual but given the way things are going, it was important to write this. The next few pieces will go back to the earlier plan of writing about electrification, ecological crises, USD vs BRICS, China, etc.

Although this explicitly talks about Palestine, the framework used here applies to all socioeconomic topics: poverty and development, climate change, women’s rights, etc.

Understanding what needs to be done and expressing our support for it is wholly different to actually making things happen — and that is what this piece is about. Also, check out the resources section at the end to learn more about Palestine from this specific framework.

Please share this with others and engage in this conversation, even if it is in your own social spaces. This a highly complicated situation and no single individual has all the answers.

Lastly, please consider donating to relief organizations in Gaza as they deal with one of the worst massacres of our generation.

Islamic Relief, UNRWA, Save the Children.

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Disclaimer: The authorship of this piece comes from the Fictitious Capital publication and is not linked to any individual or organization.]

Introduction

“The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” — Antonio Gramsci, 1929.

[A more literal translation: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”]

Even the most cynical of us did not expect the grotesque violence of the last 2 weeks to be so glibly cheered on by many. But we shouldn’t be surprised. Society has been teetering on the edge of ripping apart the false sense of decency and “shared values” that we — the elite — have been living in. Just look at what is happening to the freedom of speech and right to protest in Europe, to rising tensions in US colleges (the microcosm of liberal Western society), to the polarization in workplaces and other typically apolitical spaces.

What are witnessing is not a show of strength; it is the angry lashing out of a system in decay, and the reluctance of those in power to accept that reality.

https://twitter.com/hazarwlabgad/status/1716799400054329560?s=46

We thought we could have our cake (benefit of a grossly unjust system) and eat it too (have our egos stroked by pretending to be civilized and liberal). As has been the premise of this publication, the global system is fraying — “the old world is dying” — and for many reasons, some of which we will discuss here, “the new world is struggling to be born”. The last time the world was going through this natural cycle of rebirth, and leaving space for monsters, Gramsci was writing his notebooks — where the above quote is from — under imprisonment by the Italian fascist regime.

Anyways, this piece is not about the evils of apartheid and fascism. Nor is it about trying to convince people about right vs wrong. If you’re still having moral qualms about what is happening, then there are deeper problems.

Instead, this is for those of us who have been feeling the pain, agony, helplessness, and anger — which itself is merely a fraction of what those who have loved ones or a personal connection to Palestine are going through. We who continue to share the horrors that we are witnessing, speak out against those committing these acts and those defending them, expose the hypocrisy of those that lecture about morality, and proclaim that we will never forgive and forget.

However, while trying to wade through a deeply emotional climate, some questions must be asked:

Why do we keep repeating the same tactics for decades when nothing has changed? Selective humanity, media bias, disregard for morality and international law, etc. have all be thoroughly documented and discussed since the 1970s. So why will this time be different?
Is this an isolated incident — and exception to the norm — or a feature of the system we live in?
Why do we keep acting surprised by “civilized countries” and liberals enabling such evil when they’ve given us centuries of evidence to prove jus that?
Who exactly are the “we” who are not going to forget, and who exactly are we not forgiving?
What is the alternative to deliver real change?

Whether you are concerned about Palestine or climate change or poverty or any other socioeconomic topic, the above questions, and hence the topic of this piece, are critical to making progress.

Compared to previous pieces, this make sound like academic intellectualization. But it isn’t.

It is a fact that we are stuck in a rut, where various forms of brutal oppression and injustice continue despite our moments of outrage. If we want real change in the real world, the type Palestinians and others desperately need and deserve, there is no way way around the questions above.

There is a reason that although the past decade has been one of protest movements — from Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring to Latin America uprisings to Black Lives Matter to the climate movement — we have barely any results to show for it. So why would the result for Palestine be any different, lest we step back and reassess.

So in this piece, we try to answer the questions above by talking about ideology and Politics (note: capital-P politics refer to the concept of be political, not about elections, political parties, etc. that we usually think of).

Most of us are political in the sense that we have opinions about right and wrong, but being Political (ideological) is something one level deeper, which most of us avoid.

Ideology is what translates moments of outrage into movements for change. It is what opens our eyes to the world as it is and our place in it, no matter how hard or painful that may be. It is what births the new world.

The thesis is simple:

Oppression acts as a system and is a feature of it, always. The genocide against the Palestinians, and the decades-long apartheid, is a *part* of the system. This is inextricably connected to current and previous instances of apartheid, fascism, imperialist invasions of countries, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, racism, poverty, etc. The same system that is enabling the violence against Palestinians creates poverty and suffering in places like Pakistan, Argentina, Sudan, etc. If we pick and choose, we’ve lost. Like cancer, oppression is a disease that festers, redevelops, evolves, and feeds off itself.
The system and it’s oppression is mostly hidden, until it is not. It is mostly good-natured, well-intentioned people propping it up, not just those with guns and bombs. This is why ideology is so important — without it, we are at best blind, or at worst, complicit because we fail to understand the context and implications of what we falsely believe to be localized actions.
No form of oppression is externally imposed in totality. There are always native/local beneficiaries who are helping propagate that system and profiting of it. Resisting them is often harder. Recognizing that, at times, we may be those local beneficiaries is the hardest.

“For the most part, empire was not the work of villains, but of people who believed they acted conscientiously” — Priya Satia, Time’s Monster, 2020.

“People [Westerners] are surprised, they become indignant [when evil turns towards them]… [but] before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated Nazism before it was inflicted upon them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had only been applied to non-European peoples” — Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 1950.

I. What is ideology?

Ideology, different from politics, is a framework that allows us to organize, and hence understand, disparate pieces of information about the world. It is distinct from politics such that is not only a set of beliefs, values, and goals; instead, it is a way of forming connections between events across time and space in a coherent and systematic way.

We are bombarded with so much socioeconomic and political information constantly. Events, opinions, analyses, and predictions from around the world stimulate and overwhelm us. How do we know if these are interconnected? Or if they have the same root causes?

Ideology serves as a canvas or a map through which we can arrange all this information into an image that connects, demystifies and explains what is happening. For example, is there a link between European support for ongoing apartheid and the debt-traps propagated by the IMF? What do women’s rights in South Asia have to do with water pollution by chemical factories in Ecuador?

It is not controversial or particularly insightful to say that the world runs based on power and operates as a system. But how can we analyze that power or develop an understanding that system if we don’t have a framework that takes what we learn about the world and organizes it into something coherent. Therefore, ideology is the canvas which takes the seemingly random colors around us and creates a digestible image.

Put another way, ideology is like a language. You don’t know what you don’t know when you don’t speak a language. But as soon as you learn it, it unlocks new realities. You learn new words to describe things, your inner voice make sense of the world in new ways, and your imagination can think of more possibilities. Psychology tells us that when we learn new words, we start seeing new things. And language isn’t even about just words, it is about the ability to access the treasure of existing knowledge in that language, it is about connecting to others, and it is about being a part of something bigger than ourselves. Endless possibilities.

Note that thus far, we haven’t talked about or propagated any specific ideology. Instead, we have just discussed the importance of ideology as a concept and the need for all of us to expand our horizons through it.

Most people will hear this and think one of two things: this is some academic hogwash that has no value in the real world; or that this is something radical and I am too “neutral” or “apolitical” for this.

Both those concerns can be expressed through the simple fact that, whether we like or not, and whether we realize it or not, everyone is ideological all the time. There is no such thing as neutrality.

Like language, ideology is pervasive and always present. Again, it is simply the way we make sense of the world, how we ascribe cause and effect, and how we judge right and wrong. Can you think of someone who doesn’t do this?

The trick here is that we live under a dominant ideology that is so deeply rooted that we don’t even realize it is there. Like fish living in water who don’t know what water is.

That ideology, unless you explicitly ascribe to something else, is liberalism.

Two key points here:

Being a liberal (colloquially used to represent a political position) is different to liberalism (an ideology).
Liberalism (and liberals) have nothing to do with leftists (and the left). It is only the result of recent reductivism and the dumbing down of American, and hence global, discourse that these two are somehow used interchangeably. Liberals and leftists are as different as liberals and conservatives.

Liberalism is about a belief in universal human values and rights, such as the right to property, the right to self-determination, free speech, etc. It deals more with the world of ideas, seeking to teach and transform one mind at a time, with the belief that conflict and oppression is overcome through debate, dialogue, and reason. It believes in the individual as the unit of analysis. To reaffirm, this isn’t about liberal political opinions, which we may or may not agree with; it is about using the liberalism framework to make sense of the world.

Leftism (vague generalization) is more about recognizing the material conditions, such as the ownership of resources, as the source of power and oppression. It argues that society progresses not by rationally convincing those at the top to be more moral, but by stripping away their power. It also recognizes that society is organized primarily by class, where one class is rich and powerful *because* the other class is not, and that the struggle between the two drives change.

II. Understanding the oppression

There is a well-defined playbook, perfected over 50 years, that is being deployed against the Palestinian cause. The 3 key features of it are:

Manufacturing consent: All political systems require some form of broad consent. Previously, monarchs used to appeal to their divine authority. Today, liberal democracies appeal to their secular authority. The narratives are the same though: “us, the civilized, embarking on a holy mission. Look at the terrible things they, the uncivilized, did, leaving us with no choice”. In this case, the instant use of the 9/11 analogy, the false flag stories about the 40 babies, the fake global threat on Friday 20th October, etc. were all ploys to quickly manufacture support for brutality, as it was done for Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc.
Dehumanization: How do you get people to override their conscience and participate in oppression? Dehumanize the victims. Call them “human animals”, paint them as uncivilized brutes, and demand that they constantly earn their humanity. The repeated questions about condemning Hamas are exactly this — prove you are not a terrorist, otherwise we are right in oppressing you. This is a trap that liberals set because the answer doesn’t matter; simply by responding to their demand, you have participated in your own dehumanization.
Platitudes: Liberalism has mastered this, which is why it has been so successful for so long. It creates these beautiful narratives of rights, values and ideals that are impossible to oppose because who would not be for equality and freedom and so on. But again, there is a trap. All of these values either are contradictory by design or only apply after the oppressor is already in position.
For example, freedom of speech is inherently contradictory because it leads to chaos and stupidity and hate. But the contradiction is the point as it creates the space for oppression through selective us. Burn religious scripture in Europe? Free speech. Say the wrong thing as a Muslim? Imprisoned under the Patriot Act.
Second example: the right to property. Sounds fair, but we forget that the liberal philosophers who came up with its modern formulation were doing so after they had already stolen land from indigenous people and were slave-owners. See why they suddenly wanted the right to property as an inalienable right?

Most of this stuff isn’t news to most people. The question is: what do we do about it? Right now the strategy by and large is calling out people when they use the playbook. But what’s the theory of change here?

Do Christian Amanpour and Piers Morgan and all the rest not know what they are doing, despite executing it so perfectly over decades? Does Mr. Goebbels (Blinken) not know that he is being so brazenly hypocritical that it’s comical?

Of course they know! They don’t need us to tell them. They know they’re duplicitous, they know they’re dehumanizing, they know they’re supporting a genocide. But they do it because they sit atop a system that requires them to do it. Without this, their power fades away. No amount of brave and dignified interviews by Bassem Youssef, Hussam Zomlot, Mustafa Barghouti, and others will make them realize. Because that is simply the wrong game. Has anyone ever given up their power voluntarily?

Our strategy of naming and shaming and moral outrage is also a liberal trap. Liberalism preaches the theory of change that:

information —> awareness —> moral awakening —> public pressure —> policy change

It makes us believe that evil in this world is an exception that only happens because the evildoers don’t know any better. So if the oppressed can get enough people to care, the problem will be solved. Climate folk, human rights activists, and others should recognize the similarities here.

They want people to stick to expressing their disbelief about “how could xyz let this happen,” “what about international law,” and so on. That is the point! This is the easiest form of resistance for the system to deal with. It exhausts us, frustrates us, and keeps us from realizing that true resistance is to give up trying to appeal to the morality of others and stand up for ourselves.

This is true not just of the neoliberal, war-mongers that most of us know off, but also of our “progressive” heroes (Bernie, AOC, etc). Being a “progressive” is not an ideology, it is not a political position, and is a meaningless catch-all term that revolves around sterilized, feel-good content but cowers when it’s time to resist. It has been extremely surprising to see even leftists show their anger at people like Bernie being sell-outs. Come on, the writing has been on the wall for a long, long time!

Also, it is not just about the present; in fact, liberalism rewrites history using this narrative. And this is the history that many of us, even if subconsciously, base our worldview on because the mainstream scholars and their books, which is what we read, propagate it — talking about the likes of Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond, James Scott, Yuval Noah Hariri, Frank Fukuyama, etc.

They tell us that history is some linear process where bad things like slavery and colonization happened because people didn’t know they were bad, and as soon as a group of smart, rational people realized this stuff was bad, it stopped. And this is why the rational Western world is so developed while the Global South needs workshops and trainings on being civilized because they are simply a few centuries behind. What they forget to teach is that many of their heroes were blatantly vile, corrupt, and brutal (remember Cesaire’s quote from above).

"I do not admit that a wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race … has come in & taken their place” — Winston Churchill, Former British Prime Minister

“We think the price [500,000 killed Iraqi children] is worth it [removing Saddam]” — Madeleine Albright, Former US Secretary of State

So how would they be shamed into decency and morality now? There is no recourse here. There is nothing we can say or do, no imagery grotesque enough we can show, no outcry loud enough or plea desperate enough to tackle this system. To rely on a strategy of primarily calling out “the other side” and sharing information in the hope that it will lead to more awareness and a moral awakening is an insufficient strategy. That is exactly what liberalism wants the extent of the resistance to be, because that can be neutralized by new ways to manufacture consent, dehumanize, and apply platitudes.

But before moving on, there is a critical point to make about how this “us vs them” outlook serves as a convenient situation for us as well. It externalizes the problem, making it seem as if there is a clean split between “us” as the victims and “them” as the sole perpetrators. And that all we have to do is use our words to stand up and explain our position. However, oppression is a system and grounded in material reality, not just narratives. Actions speaker louder than words.

For example:

People in the Global South manufacture consent all the time when it suits them. That is exactly how countries like India and Pakistan have fed perpetual war narratives against each other in order to serve those who profit off this jingoism.
Our elite (us) dehumanize the poor and minorities constantly, using that to justify the stark social divisions and exploit cheap resources in those countries. Whether it is migrant labor in the Gulf or religious minorities in South Asia or indigenous communities in Latin America, we — who see themselves as victims most of the time — partake in recreating the global system locally.
Nothing unites the global elite —including the elite of the Global South — like a shared sense of political correctness to veil exploitation. We all believe in equality and collective prosperity, until we need to profit of the working class’ labor or takeover peasant land to build housing projects.
On Palestine, Muslim leaders love putting out bold statements condemning Israel and its supporters but lack any real action. But weren’t the Gulf states in the last stages of normalization, despite the raging apartheid? Aren’t all Muslim states either financially or militarily or operationally capable of materially helping out the Palestinians? So why just the platitudes? Why does the Muslim community only focus on Biden and Macron but not its own leaders?

As we hope this sections makes clear, ideology lays out a clear map that charts oppression and its working (this was just a tiny summary). But what it also does is force us to reckon with uncomfortable truths which, without a map, we can simply cast aside. Truths about us and our role.

It is only through an ideological map that we can then identify how and where to resist injustice.

Of course, no ideology calls for or can achieve moral purity. At the very least, however, it can provide doses of humility and create pockets of impact more locally around us. This is not meant to detract from the larger, global causes — like Palestine — but to recognize that our biggest contribution to them is to counter the system wherever possible.

And for so many of us, that is resisting against the liberal enablers of fascism.

III. What is to be done

“Simply being right is not enough” — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 2023.

This is the big question. But rather than theorizing, let’s learn from history and get to the point.

Abolishment of slavery, women’s rights, de-colonization, labor rights (incl. the weekend and the 8-hour work day), civil rights, etc. — basically all the things we take for granted today — were won through the same method:

Organized, ideological, and collective movements.

Liberals, in order to distort history, will deny this and say “look at Martin Luther King Jr, Mandela and Gandhi, they peacefully were able to make the case for their cause”. This is, of course, not just factually untrue but a fallacy so amateurish it insults our intelligence.

For every MLK Jr, there was a Malcolm X and Black Panther party. For every Mandela, there was the ongoing struggle of the ANC (remember, Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years for “terrorism”). For every Gandhi, there was a Bhagat Singh, and the countless others who were imprisoned, tortured, and murdered.

Back to what is to be done.

Organized: Liberalism preaches that everyone can do what they think best. But fighting injustice needs to have a structure and discipline to channel people’s energy towards a united cause, rather than have have their energies dissipate in different directions. This requires an organizational structure — a movement — with clear leadership, roles, and commitments. Movements that lack organization are easily crushed or slowly fizzle out. The current system is deeply organized and structured through its institutions and schools and media organizations, etc. That must be matched to stand a chance.
Lastly, moments and emotions are fleeting, regardless of how intense and painful. Humans have a remarkable tendency to get desensitized to thing; this, combined with a world of information overload, makes the need for an organized movement to sustain public pressure even more important.
Ideological: Liberalism has made “ideology” a bad word. If you’re ideological, you’re a “radical”. But the system that creates oppression has an ideology of its own. Whether we look at economics, climate change, social rights, etc., the principles of “free markets” and “individual action” remain constant. That’s how strong the ruling ideology is. The only way to counter it is to be ideological, and put together a coherent and comprehensive alternative. Being ideological means everyone in the movement has a shared context that brings them together.
Collective: Liberalism has done a tremendous job of making us all feel alone and isolated, individuals lost in a vast and complex system. The concerted effort to takeaway communal spaces and collective organizations (e.g. unions, student politics, etc.) has left a void in us individually and as a society. This is why we feel helpless; this is why there is a major mental health crisis globally. But a collective movement, where different causes come together in solidarity against the common enemy of oppression, and where there is a strong system of support and motivation, empowers us. It stops us from falling into reductive traps of “West” vs “us” — instead, it creates solidarity between whoever shares a common cause, regardless of ethnicity or religion or class. There is no space for misogyny, anti-Semitism, racism, Islamophobia, and other forms of oppression in such movements.

Most of the movements over the past decade failed, despite at one point having vast public support and a lot of passion, because they were leaderless, structure-less, lacked an ideological agenda, and could not create solidarity with other causes.

Take Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter or the Arab Spring or the climate movement. They all got crushed or even back fired (in the case of Egypt for example) because they had no plan of what happens after the brief moment of resistance, and the lack of organization allowed other forces to co-opt the fervor on the streets.

All this is true for Palestine today. We can be as passionate as we want individually, but what is the larger plan? Who is representing “us”? How are our energies being concentrated so that they have maximum impact? There is definitely growing support for the cause globally, especially amongst the youth. But that support and energy needs to be channeled into a movement that can actually take on a well-resourced, well-organized, and deeply entrenched oppressive system. Even if a ceasfire is achieved, what happens after that? Where was the resistance before Oct 7th?

Spontaneous moments of protest always get co-opted by the system. That is why so many civil rights in the Global North are under threat. That is why whatever bare minimum progress that has been made on the climate front is also under threat.
The question isn’t about the intentions or passion of those involved, but about strategic value in first getting over the line, and then ensuring that those gains are protected.

“…spontaneous element, in essence, represents nothing more nor less than consciousness in an embryonic form…

But why, the reader will ask, does the spontaneous movement, the movement along the line of least resistance, lead to being dominated by the ruling ideology?

For the simple reason that the ruling ideology is far older in origin…, that it is more fully developed, and that it has at its disposal immeasurably more means of dissemination.” — Lenin, What is to be done, 1903.

[small word changes made to adapt content to present context]

Take the following examples of what ideology, or the lack of it, can do. And let’s alsonswer the questions of “who is not forgiving” and “who is not being forgiven”. Chastizing the West is easy, but who is the West? Who are we? We can broadly break it down between governments and their people.

Global South people: The Palestinian cause naturally appeals more to Muslims and people of the Middle Eastern & South Asian regions. And yet a vast majority of people there aren’t willing to go beyond periodic condemnations and some self-victimization narratives. They don’t want to fight against the system as a whole because the liberal trap of merely speaking out provides a comfortable middle: protect your own morality but also not disrupt your participation in the global system (e.g. people in Pakistan jump to speak about Palestine but about pushing back Afghan refugees to the Taliban or the continuing brutalities against religious and ethnic minorities). Hence the lack of protests in Muslim countries against their own governments’ roles.
Western people: Of course Islamophobia, and even anti-Semitism, are deeply rooted in these societies. At the same time however, this is also where there are large swathes of people going through the struggle of organizing massive rallies, protesting against arms suppliers, hosting teach-ins, etc., all at great personal risk. They are acting out against their own governments (0.5M people in London, Jewish protestors in NYC and DC, etc). Many of them are driven by the ideology of anti-imperialism and justice, otherwise they have no stake in this.
Governments: When the Russian invasion of Ukraine happened, Europe and the US immediately launched a campaign to defend their ally, even at serious domestic costs (inflation, food and energy shortages, economic shocks in Germany, etc.).
But Muslim countries and Arab states aren’t doing the same for Palestine — and didn’t for Yemen, or Libya, or Afghanistan, and so on.
Why is that? If we apply the mainstream framework, it doesn’t make sense. Aren’t religious-ethnic communities supposed to stick together? If the “West” can do it, why can’t the “non-West”?

Fact is, this is the wrong framework. If you look at it from an ideological lens, it makes much more sense. Ukraine helps serve the ideology of Europe and the US, while Russia does not. So it’s clear why they are going full steam ahead with their support. When it comes to Palestine, Muslim nations are ideologically aligned with the global system. Hence their passivity makes sense.
But there are other countries and leaders with a clear ideology against global oppression who speak and act out against economic inequality, climate change, and now the genocide against Palestinians. They have no religious-ethnic link to the Palestinians — it is simply the moral compass and empowerment that comes from their ideology that enables this.

This is true today as much as it has been over the past 50 years. Castro, Chavez, Allende, and others supported Palestine with whatever limited resources they had.

“Blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb”

Therefore, talking about the “West” in some vague generalization isn’t helpful. We need a framework that is not just more nuanced but just more accurate.

Why this matters

Just to repeat, the world has drastically changed just in the past 2 years. Band-aids have been ripped off, and they are never going back. There are crises, risks, and volatility around every corner, and yet we are only in the early innings of this historical phase shift.

Like all forces of nature, it doesn’t matter much whether we acknowledge what is happening or pretend that we are immune from them — eventually, everyone will be affected.

The opportunity to be “moderate”, “neutral”, and “practical” is gone — these were always just ploys meant to appease and sterilize dissent anyways. We have had 50 years of (neo)liberalism delude us into thinking there is a “marketplace of ideas” while it destroyed heterodox academia, dismantled unions and grassroots politics, rewrote history through media propaganda, terrorized resistance movements. We walked into that trap and are still in it.

“The internet is the Che Guevara of the 21st century” — Alec Ross, former Hillary Clinton advisor and US state department official, said about social media and the Arab Spring.

But no amount of techno-utopianism can replace the reality that it is only the collective human spirit, represented by organized movements and their leaders, that pushes us towards progress. It is now time to now move past these rose-tinted liberal fallacies and recognize the need to actively choose between right and wrong in ways that are consistent and structural. And that starts with having an ideology.

Oppression is a system, and that the only way to fight it systematically.

Much like learning a new language or starting the gym, the initial phase of “becoming ideological” is frustrating, hard, and painful. But like with other things, the gains are life changing. To be clear, this point of the piece was not to propagate a specific ideology, but to generally explain the concept of having one. Ideological diversity is critical because it is only through debate and dissent that we grow collectively.

To conclude, the arc of history bends towards justice and ultimately Palestine will be free one day. But we must ask ourselves: what role did we play in it, and can we avoid the next round of oppression?

And even if you don’t care about Palestine, it’s good to learn from history that injustice can never be contained. The chickens always come home to roost, and no arsonist can control a wildfire. So whether you’re a “progressive” that cares about climate or social justice or inequality, you should know that the same forces of oppression are coming to a topic near you.

[Bonus: Highly encourage reading the history of the 1920s-50s. You might be surprised by the similarities to today, and how fascism didn’t just come out of nowhere. Like today, there were a lot of “normal” people that supported, enabled, and profitted off it, right till the very end!

Bonus bonus: In ~10 years, the climate movements, especially the climate justice part, will be facing the full wrath of this system. The scramble for materials, energy security, industrial policy, etc. are all leading us there. At that time, we hope those that were silent on Palestine at least have the intellectual honesty to not act surprised.]