8 Comments
Oct 13Liked by Peter Gelderloos

Although depressing, this is great fucken writing. Really felt like your words captured exactly how you’re feeling. It’s hard to find positives in this world, but finding good writing like yours, and the amazing fiction author you got to see speak (whose new book rips), is definitely something to hold onto. It feels impossible to imagine a different world, but god knows I’m going to keep trying. Thank you for your words.

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Oct 13Liked by Peter Gelderloos

Thanks for putting these thoughts to words, Peter. I often feel things like this, but through coping mechanisms and just daily stress, I can't really find the way to clarify the feelings into words. You did so. Thanks.

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Oct 13Liked by Peter Gelderloos

I keep thinking about the banality of evil every time I drive around the Florida county I’m in, where the military-industrial complex and it’s big players (Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and many more like L3 Harris or Space X) are probably the biggest employers. I’ve felt the tsunami of a panic attack while considering that my family and my neighbors’ survival (not just prosperity) is now predicated on the mass murder of Palestinians and Lebanese people, not to mention every other victim of the US imperial greed. Is it too far to say the greatest threat to peace and justice around the world is the enmeshed and codependent relationship the warmonging US government, led by capitalists without scruples or expansive humanist morals, has with its citizenry it doesn’t even truly care for?

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I would say for a long time now things are so enmeshed, parsing the whole thing as a US imperial project just isn't accurate anymore. They're still the biggest military funder without any doubt, and a major promoter and initiator of wars and ecocide around the world, but there are growing zones of the world where NATO is losing influence, is not the dominant player, and nothing gets better in those places: other governments step up. I guess I would say the State, in whatever form it takes, is the greatest threat to survival and healing around the world.

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Oct 13Liked by Peter Gelderloos

Trying just to breathe in these times feels like a full time job, something that’s not autonomous , not automatic, something one has to remind oneself to do.

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Oct 14Liked by Peter Gelderloos

Yep. This is so good, thank you Peter.

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Oct 24Liked by Peter Gelderloos

Thank you for the powerful text. Sometimes I don't know how to bear it anymore. We breathe day by day, but as long as we breathe, we can be loud and break the silence and give a voice to those who hardly have one or nothing anymore. That's all we can do at the moment. That's what I do, and that's what I do on the internet. I call the texts, articles and testimonies the archive of horror, but they are testimonies and everyone decides whether to look or not and to remain silent and thus lie to themselves. This colonialism is such a shitty thing and it won't stop as long as this system and its profiteers and everything stops existing. And yet it seems just unattainable to me, as if humanity is losing. Send greetings to Rachel, I'm not here that often, but I read you in the news letter. Solidarity and strength, Sofie

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Insights aplenty there, Peter. Some of the issues came forward quite plainly when Indigenous Australians came together to offer reconciliation in the form of A Voice to Parliament enshrined in the Constitution. The referendum last year was defeated and all manifestations of settler-colonial power in this country, when not actively decrying the idea, completely failed to identify and call out the structural racism at the foundation of this nation. But only because their very reality and positions of power are based in that racism.

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