If you live in the US or one of its allied nations, then you live under the single most tyrannical and murderous power structure on earth, and that’s where your focus belongs. You do not have any legitimacy in squandering any of your energy and attention criticizing human rights abuses in empire-targeted nations while living under a globe-spanning empire that is fueled by a nonstop river of human blood.

Preach, poster.

The propaganda is often visibly shoddy. But this paradox is resolved once we realise that Israel’s hasbara apparatus does not aim for plausibility. Its mission is expediency, to find something that might introduce a trace of doubt, or give those who wish to look away a reason to do so. [...] But while outfits like the legitimisation cell manufacture these pretexts, the demand for them comes from a Western ear that is desperate to avoid the truth.

I genuinely feel like in some years from now, perhaps a long time but hopefully not so long, we will see the long suffering of the Palestinian people as one of the most glowing, hot-red contradictions of the current American imperialist world order. And, as Stalin said and I am paraphrasing, it is where those contradictions are the sharpest that we can start to see a different future.

Ultimately the problem lies entirely outside of documentation or argument. For Western institutions, the excess of evidence has produced the opposite of a crisis of conscience. Instead there is a saturation that enables the desire to put this all behind us. Bearing witness to everything, registering the horror as it passes through the digital feed, creates a comforting illusion of a debt discharged, of a crisis already dealt with. This is why more evidence fails to move the needle. The Western subject already has the facts; what they require is a disruption that prevents this sense of closure. Even when the evidence compels an admission that genocide is taking place, what follows is too often a passive resignation: an assumption that nothing can be done about this truth, or that naming it is all that is required, while Israel carries on killing and dispossessing. The structure of moral stupidity functions by converting raw evidence into the mere performance of its own absorption. Witnessing is revealed to be an insufficient means of preventing a genocide.
[...]
All of this is designed to prevent a single, shattering realisation: that to truly hear Palestine is to hear a total indictment of Israel, but also of the global order that sustains it. This is a system built on the foundational myth of a “rules-based” liberal internationalism, which is underpinned by the flow of Western capital and weapons, and dependent on a selective and racialised definition of humanity. Moral stupidity is essential to the perpetuation of this order.

The role of the intellectual -- the writer or poet or philosopher -- is also critiqued well here alongside that of the (presumably Western) observer.

The intellectuals of this era did not speak on behalf of the collective; they were continuous with the people, constituted by the same dispossession, and subject to the same erasure. [...] One way to measure this collapse is to ask: can one imagine a writer doing today for the Palestinian Authority what Kanafani did for the PFLP, or what Darwish did for the PLO? The question answers itself.

The intellectual is often, but not always, situated as some part of the more prosperous native classes. This is as true in Palestine as it was in turn-of-the-century Russia, and as such there are contradictions in the ways that the intellectual can support a revolutionary movement. In order to truly "support" such a movement, they must accept that the future they are building may inherently remove their class position (or, at least, shake it critically). This makes the intellectual a complex figure! They can be interlocutors with the greater powers (imperialist, capitalist, whatever) but they are also vulnerable to counterrevolution by their very position -- it would not be unusual for them to side with a counterrevolutionary (or, in the Palestinian case, imperialist) force because that force would allow them to maintain a comfortable position.

This leads to a dangerous dynamic between the national liberation forces -- in this case groups like the PLO and PFLP, and now Hamas -- and the intellectual classes. To be sure, this can be seen even in modern work from Palestinian intellectuals who are well-worth lauding as much as criticizing.

All of this is not to say that "the intellectual" as a figure is inherently counterrevolutionary or inherently a class enemy or anything like that -- but that the position of the intellectual within the national liberation struggle is... well... nuanced! Complex. Fraught with contradictions.

It’s not simply that intellectuals talk while others fight, or that fighters distrust words. The real crisis unfolds when speaking and acting finally meet. When the intellectual takes the logic of their own analysis seriously enough to act on it, they encounter the full weight of the abandonment that the words had been circling around all along.

Also touched on here is the role of Germany, which I do think is worth noting specifically. The creation of Israel as a state -- imperialist outpost as it is -- is inextricable from Nazism.

Some years ago, a German Jewish friend visited me in Ramallah. She walked its streets, observed the settlements that surround the city, met my family. [...] What unsettled her most was not the hills or the walls, but the checkpoint on her return to Jerusalem: an old Palestinian woman struggling to pass while soldiers, with their smirks and revulsion, enacted the routine of humiliation. [...] Shaken, she texted me afterwards: “Now I know why Palestinians blow themselves up.”

Post-war, post-Imperialist-takeover Germany has to align itself with Israel, due to its position in the US-aligned world order. Of course it does! To materially support Palestine would be to admit a fault, to admit a crack in the logic of the current imperialist order. This is, of course, existential for the heirs of West Germany, indebted as they are to the United States power-mad hegemony.

To speak is to risk becoming part of the system that absorbs speech and renders it harmless: to produce, for the Western ear, another document to be acknowledged and archived and acted on by no one. To fall silent is to abandon the field to those whose version of events requires no refutation, and to perform, at the level of the intellectual, the disappearance that the colonial project has always demanded. And to act – to follow the logic of one’s own analysis into the domain where words give way to something else, as al-Araj did – is to be already betrayed by the organisations and formations that should have received his words.

Revolutionary suicide, as Huey Newton put it. To know that to act is to doom you, and choosing to act anyway. The hard part is choosing how to act.

In light of the recent Ceuta massacre, Iker Suárez provides deeper historical context regarding the immigration policies of Spanish social democracy, focusing on the contradictions between progressive rhetoric and border enforcement in a world structured by imperialism.

Even simple equipment failed with slapstick regularity, six workers said. Conveyor belts broke down. Automated carts got lost. Safety gates meant to shut down machines when workers approached did not shut down machines when workers approached. A pipe exploded, spraying water up to the ceiling.

Hilarious article about the USA's super efficient military capitalism. Paper tiger!

This selective application of the term “authoritarian” reveals that Western discourse on “freedom” is designed to delegitimize resistance while legitimizing empire. By treating anti-imperialist struggle as equivalent to fascist tyranny, the so-called “collective West” erases the distinction between liberation and oppression.

What disturbs the sensible center of American political discourse most is that, should somebody succeed, it is very likely that a huge number of Americans would only find fault with the assassin for provoking a potential backlash, if they found any fault at all.

Scathing and brilliant criticism of Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground by Zayd Ayers Dohrn, son of two Weather Underground members. The younger Dohrn has grown up a liberal, well-indoctrinated (and, to be fair, traumatized) to hate and question his parents actions. The author of this piece rightfully interrogates this assumption on the part of Zayd Dohrn.

“I was in a rage,” Dohrn told her son decades later in an interview for his book, “at the absolute stench of American life.”

Any serious accounting of the Weather Underground must take into consideration that they were young, idealistic, and a bit naive. But those are not unreasonable faults. You could say the same about the Bolsheviks, and I would. The USSR was full of naive dreamers. What the Bolsheviks had that the Weather Underground did not was numbers and training.

One must imagine if the Weathermen had killed a million people in the New York Tristate area with a decade’s worth of bombs. Would it have been better if the Weathermen had worn medals and planned their actions from the Pentagon?

I think a lot about the American New Left. An attempt, however flawed, to bring about an apocalyptic (in the original Greek definition) reckoning with American society, tragically splintered and rife with infighting, both genuine and manufactured.

I learned recently that my grandmother's brother was part of the SDS, and was jailed for it. Why, she didn't know. But it happened, at least. That era is not so far from us.

If you are reading this, sweaty with the worry that I am “normalizing” or “justifying” political violence, consider that I am only asking why you find so many forms of political violence so normal, so justifiable, so adequately met with well, it’s a shame, of course, while the specter of old radicals looms like a nightmare. Sometimes you must stand athwart history, yelling Are you fucking serious? Is it only that you get used to that stench of American life after a while? Is it worth it?

What is to be done?

But the reality of a leaderless and structureless movement started by 50 people is, who decides who’s in and who’s out? When millions are now joining you, how do you centralize messaging? How do you stay on target for what you are organizing? In a running theme of this era, the political explosion that MPL created against not a fascist military dictatorship, but a progressive, left-leaning democratic administration, gave open ground for the far-right to take control.

I think that it would be understandable for people to take issue with my growing feelings around needing strong, verticalized, centralist structures to build movements on, but it comes from the same feelings that motivate this piece. Horizontalism is a deeply frustrating way to organize an entire movement, or even worse an organization. Best case scenario is things are slow. Worst case scenario, you are destroyed by the same fascist forces you are hoping to defeat.

It is obvious we have seen consecutive ‘biggest protests in human history’ to little global systemic change. Spontaneous uprisings have been a feature of the 21st century. In some places, one political elite was simply replaced with another. In other places, the states and capitalists cracked down on the movement so hard it hasn’t recovered. Other places were broken by the political vacuums created with no real, organized working class movement to fill that gap.

Imagine for a minute, the ICE uprisings keep scaling upwards. Millions and millions are shutting down the country. Rolling General Strikes from state to state. Then mass marches on the capital, and Trump’s goons flee to Epstein’s Island or some other far hideaway. Who, or what groups, will take over the political power of the country? How will the next decision get made? Did classes disappear? Did the social ills created by US settler colonial society disappear?

This is the key question and my greatest frustration with the modern American left. I am tired of "street protests". I am tired of "calls to action". Not because these things are bad, or even unnecessary, but because in order to work they have to be backed up by concrete organization, something that I feel we are terribly lacking.

So when looking at the vast field of lost revolutions of the 21st century, and the gravestones of all the martyrs we lost along the way, we have to ask ourselves, did we organize correctly? And the answer from the available evidence in most cases says we didn’t. Now we are facing an even worse ecological crisis, rising fascism, a new state of imperialist world order, and mass fascist violence in the streets of the capitalist hegemon—the U.S.. What changes have been made? Are we organizing differently from 2011? Because if we wish to succeed, we must.

We're very much in the 'radium underpants' stage of the surveillance economy. A lot of the hype is silly, some of what we're doing is useful, and some of it is downright harmful.

On surveillance, data, and the military-industrial complex.

I've become very interested in the way that American Capitalism managed to make so much progress -- genuine, real progress -- in the 20th century and then stalled out so dramatically in the early 21st. This is a great video analyzing the rise of American power (which dovetails with American worker power in the early 20th century) and how the process of dismantling that worker power in favor of capitalist power has led to our current state of bloated neoliberalism.

Why hasn’t the so-called u.s. left, despite all of the efforts made over the last two years, been able to meaningfully intervene in a live-streamed genocide?

All revolutionary and anti-imperialist organizations must struggle between one another for unity on this line, and where such organizations do not yet exist, they must be built.

Jake Paul’s ascent in boxing is a cultural symptom of an empire in decline. It reflects a country that now prefers empty spectacle over real strength, both in sports and on the world stage.