Hands Off? You Might As Well Shoot Yourself in the Stomach

on a politics of delusion, hypocrisy, and comfort

As the media quibble over whether Saturday’s “Hands Off” protests brought out millions of peaceful protesters or just hundreds of thousands, I think it’s vital to speak more seriously.

It is far too late in the game to forget:

• Up until three months ago when they were pushed out of power, the Democrats were deporting more people than the last Republican administrations and upholding a border policy that kills over a thousand people a year

• The Democrats consistently fund and arm genocide, and they bear a huge share of the responsibility for the murder of over 100,000 Palestinians and the displacement of over 2 million more

• The Democrats turned their backs on trans people at the drop of the hat, at a moment when lethal threats against our trans friends, family, and neighbors is growing on every front

• The Democrats did almost nothing to stand up to the rampant xenophobia coming from most media; they were even too cowardly and too racist to make the instrumentalizing, self-serving argument that “prices would go up and our economy would collapse without immigrant labor” and instead pitched themselves—accurately for once—as anti-immigrant

• The Democrats and their huge host of non-profits were more effective than the cops in pacifying and obstructing the anti-police, anti-racist movements of 2009, 2014, 2020, through bad-jacketing (“the rioters are actually cops/militia members/privileged white people”), the criminalization and silencing of the people who actually made up those uprisings, candlelight vigils and media-focused parades led by Black politicians and figureheads backed by white money, promises to defund the police that they reneged on once the rioting died down, reforms they knew would do nothing, leaving real people vulnerable and unable to defend ourselves even as the far Right was provoked and energized

• The Democrats have made sure the only mainstream alternative to climate denialism is counterproductive greenwashing and green energy investment, fueling genocide and massive scale mining while also causing greenhouse gas emissions to continue rising past the point were billions of deaths and extinction of half the species on the planet is now our likely future

• Every step of the way, through incompetence, cowardice, or profit-motive, they have made it easy for the far Right to shift the political center line into ever more dangerous territory

It is insanely delusional to believe that the Democrats are capable of changing in a meaningful way, and it is insanely delusional to trust them. They are guilty of genocide, mass murder, mass incarceration, impoverishment, bloody wars, and oppressive politics. The system they uphold, the system they promise can be reformed if we just trust them one more time, has condemned this generation and the next one and the next one to a future of unimaginable suffering, danger, and poverty.

I say this as someone who depends on Medicaid and food stamps, both of which I am more likely to lose under the Trump administration: the political distance between Democrats and Republicans is not enough to make a difference between death and survival, between humiliation and dignity, between oppression and freedom.

Telling on themselves…

Any older folks reading this who think the Democrats deserve another chance, or they’re the best alternative we have? You probably did alright under the economy of the past half century. Well guess what? Your kids, your grandchildren, and your great grandchildren are all f*cked because the system you think can be reformed has been enslaving, bombing, genociding, ecoding, deforesting, pillaging, and exploiting for the last 500+ years and now it’s time to pay the piper. Now—forget getting a mortgage—the conditions for life on this entire planet are becoming increasingly inimical to basic survival. The signs of this, the data, the peer-reviewed reports are everywhere you look, yet you have your heads so far up your asses because I guess it’s comfier that way that you cannot see basic realities that are factually indisputable.

I say this with a lot of love (honestly I tend to like old geezers more than a lot of these screen-addled cyborg zoomers) but also with a lot of rage: if you cannot own up to your profound wrongness and dedicate the rest of your life to fighting for the possibility of a future, just die already if it’s the only way you can keep from painting these Institutions of Death with a thin layer of naïve legitimacy.

And while I’m hating, let’s share the hate: young people, people my age, everybody: learn your fucking history.

Nonviolent movements have not worked one single fucking time to achieve a transformative, radical change in society.

• The Civil Rights movement? Wasn’t nonviolent. People in Birmingham turned their backs on MLK, beat up the pigs, and burned all the white businesses to the ground.

• The antiwar movement in Vietnam. Nonviolent? It would take an absolute racist to come to that conclusion. It was the Vietnamese killing tens of thousands of US troops, and then radicalized, discontented troops, refusing orders and killings hundreds of their own officers, that ended that war. Peaceful hippies didn’t accomplish shit.

• Independence in India? There were riots and armed struggles for decades before the British left.

All the big publishers, movie studios, and public broadcasters put out huge productions about how amazing nonviolence is, about Gandhi, about MLK, and they do it to erase the deeply complex, contradictory, and diverse resistance movements that have actually existed, so that we don’t have a history to learn from. Meanwhile, if you write a book laying all this out, only the tiniest of presses will consider publishing it, and you can expect to get stopped at a lot of borders for the rest of your life. And no, it’s not because there are errors in your citations.

Authoritarian political parties? Marxism? Ecosocialism? Are you kidding me? These things are making a comeback? Learn your history! Revolutions lead by political parties only recreated the oppressions they were fighting in a slightly altered form. Marxist revolutions were capitalism’s best friend throughout the 20^th century in all the marginalized, less resourced countries where private investors were dropping the ball, focusing on short-term parasitism rather than building up the state institutions capitalism needs in order to function.

I’m going to have a heart attack if I keep on like this so here are some links.

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Please for the love of all that is holy, friends don’t let friends become Marxists. Family can be difficult terrain, but if you’re in touch with your family, let them know they would be treating you with greater consideration if they strangled you with piano wire instead of supporting the Democrats (or Labour, or the Socialist Party, for my readers across one pond or the other).

Now I want to apologize. I know this newsletter has been extremely angry and insulting. But hey, it’s alright. Everyone does stupid things. I’m not going to tell you what my politics were like when I was 19, and I’m not going to tell you about the stupidest things I’ve done in the last couple years, but believe me: it’s embarrassing. And that’s okay.

The point is, genocide is not okay. Destroying life on this planet is not okay. Racist murder and torture, not okay. Mass extinction, tens of millions of humans dying every year right now and possibly within a few decades billions of dead – not okay.

Getting extremely angry that people are causing those forms of extreme suffering for power and profit? Perfectly reasonable. Getting wildly upset that people more or less like you are legitimizing the institutions responsible? Also reasonable. However, at that point I think we need to allow some room for contradiction, and for love.

[Sibling/aunt/uncle/parent who really thinks the Democrats might do better next time], I love you. I remember the time you were there for me when I was having a really hard day, the time you taught me to cook your favorite dish… I think you’re a really great person. But please please please, I’m begging you: take a look at the world. The real world. Please look at our history and be honest with yourself: there is no moment when these institutions you cherish weren’t complicit in brutal forms of harm and death; they really aren’t getting better over time.

Look at the death toll, look at the emissions, look at the problems we’re facing today and where they come from. They never fix anything. If resistance heats up, they just move the worst of the exploitation, the worst of the suffering, someplace else. Or they change masks, and slavery becomes the prison system, segregation becomes red-lining and urban development, oil extraction becomes lithium mining (except that the oil extraction doesn’t stop, it keeps increasing, but you pat yourselves on the back cuz look at all these solar panels and Teslas! Yeah. That was you. Whoopsie.).

Look at the emerging scientific consensus around predictions for the near future. Those scientists, when they characterize what 3ºC-5ºC of warming means, they’re being just as naïve and optimistic as you are, so take their numbers and ask yourself. When was the last time the planet’s temperature changed that much in a century or less, and what happened to all the widdle baby animaws and plants who were alive back then? Did they mostly go extinct? Yes they did. And when was the last time the world’s economy contracted by 50% kept dropping for decades? Oh, that’s never happened before? Well look at the worst economic crisis in modern history and think about the kind of suffering that accompanied it, then make it exponential. And what happens when well over 50% of human food in a globalized agricultural system comes from grains that evolved when the Earth was much cooler than it’s about to get?

Take a day. Take a weekend. Now please hear this. I love you. I think you love me. Your opinions about the institutions in power and the structure of our society – they are harmful to you. They are harmful to me. They are harmful to all the generations that have not yet been born. I don’t know if it’s fear of change, or stubbornness, or comfort, or prejudice, but if you have faith in the Democrats or any of the other institutions that shape our society, I don’t think you have an informed understanding of reality. If you do have a couple facts in your repertoire, they’re an alibi, cherry picked, things you latched onto because of confirmation bias. Please, make the changes you need to, and stop pledging your loyalty to this social machinery that condemns us all to misery.

The more of us who say the naked truth: this society and all its dominant institutions constitute a war against everyone, a war against life itself, the quicker we can be done with the bullshit and masquerades, and start moving towards healing.

Comic by KC Green

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