The case for abandoning the burning house – Mondoweiss
| | | | | | | | | | | The case for abandoning the burning house The Gaza genocide has revealed the role of liberalism in upholding the brutality of the West. On the eve of U.S.... | | | The case for abandoning the burning house The Gaza genocide has revealed the role of liberalism in upholding the brutality of the West. On the eve of U.S. elections, the question remains: what comes next for those wanting to build a new world? Currently, the staunchest of Black liberals are demanding their community and its allies disregard the interests of Palestinians by way of voting for their butchers under the guise of sparing Black and other marginalized people from their domestic antagonist, Donald Trump. In doing so they are ignoring the many crises already plaguing these communities, under Democratic leadership on both the state and federal level. 2023 was one of the deadliest years for police violence, homelessness continues to skyrocket, and the Biden administration continued the American presidential legacy of ruthlessly starving, bombing, and destabilizing multiple countries—including Cuba, Palestine, Libya, Somalia, and Lebanon. But these are accepted, naturalized outcomes of liberal democracy, outcomes that the Black liberal elite is willing to live with in exchange for their own prosperity and general escape from such conditions. In fact, if they listened to, took seriously, and analyzed the conditions of working-class Black people, they would see there has been a continuous domestic and international war against Black Africans and other racialized peoples and the Democratic Party is at the outset. In addition, these cultural, economic, and political phenomena are cyclical indicating that they are not aberrations but the intended results of the dominant order. In other words, if mass shootings, police killings, climate change intensified or induced natural disasters, unemployment, organized abandonment, premature death, and perpetual war are happening routinely, these are systemic and therefore accepted outcomes pardoned by the ruling class and its aspirants. If anything, the 2024 election season in the United States has demonstrated that the multicultural ruling elite—including but especially those of a liberal stripe—have no intention of solving the many crises of its own making. On the contrary, their role is to manage “through brutality,” the contradictions of a global necrocapitalist order. To suggest there are identifiable patterns cyclically reproduced by a colonial capitalist world order is not to encourage a sense of hopelessness but a sense of clarity, a grounding toward what can and cannot be accomplished within the given regimes of liberal redress. The Zionist mass extermination campaign in occupied Palestine, with the open and active participation on the part of the liberal democracies of the West, exemplifies the reality that liberalism need not fascism to carry out its regimes of racialized horror intrinsic to Western civilization. Liberalism, in its own right, efficiently exports perpetual violence and war—through occupations, aerial warfare, and economic terrorism—that is largely proclaimed to be exclusive to twentieth-century, or more recently, Trumpian fascism. And yet, every region on the receiving end of Western liberal democracies’ deadly exports of democracy and freedom is left with mass corpses and new avenues of extraction and accumulation that enrich Euro-American cities. Despite this, liberalism—due to its strategic attempts to position itself as the benign alternative to far right-wing tyranny—is widely believed to be a benevolent institution, political ideology, and therefore a willing ally to the concerns of and political struggles from below. However, a thorough internationalist investigation of the machinations and material outcomes, specifically as it pertains to the working poor, of liberal democracies paints a vastly different reality while also demonstrating the inefficacy of the ballot towards remedying these outcomes. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#33318): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/33318 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/109394430/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
