Tag: equity

By Daviemoo

The west is trying desperately to crack down on the pro Palestine rebellion, because the movement highlights what our modernity, what our ‘civility’ is built on- the bones of the oppressed.
The pro Palestinian liberation movement must not be hijacked, either by those seeking to expand it into obsolescence or to divert it to irrelevancies- instead, a wider moment must form from this one: a movement which focuses on holistic uplifting, the equity so many are denied and the creation and maintenance of a society that’s built on fair principles, rather than the silent muzzling of other regions and groups to protect the blood covered leaders of this outdated world.

Whenever anyone writes “the West” in anything but neutral or glowing terms there is an immediate mistrust of their words – as though holding criticism of our society is anathema despite the ever growing pool of evidence that the way our world was formed is through the crystallisation of inequity. No society is perfect and immune from scrutiny- yet the arbiters of western democracy will ruthlessly crack down on defenders of it.

Hundreds of years ago, our ancestors set sail to Africa, took innocent people as property and hauled them across the ocean- removing their links, land, family, heritage, freedom, so we could sit in the garden doing experiments and drinking tea as those enslaved folks cleaned our shit out of bedpans, built our government buildings and washed our clothes.
We’re told that the West just magically came to enlightenment, ignoring the protests, the acts of desperate violence and radical calls to action and awareness to instil some rationale in oppressors both silent and loud – and it’s all sanitised, as though this stain on our history was a blip, a mistake, and not a continual campaign of murder, rape and dehumanisation where everyone from housewives to eminent scientists & politicians alike gave reason or theory as to why slavery was fine and should continue.
Even after its abolition, the schools of ignorant thought around racial discrimination remained and remains to this day: it is 2024 and weak minded fools like Nick Fuentes believe black pilots are less qualified than white ones, despite the rigorous testing needed in order to be a pilot.
You even have those like Candace Owens who will state she thinks women are led by emotion & shouldn’t be leaders in a world where powerful men must not be angered lest they punch a hole in a wall, where promotion to the boardroom is given through primal act driven by his hormones over hard headed sense.

Racism, yes, is still alive in the West: in 2020 we had a whole months long set of protests about it- and black women showed up to kick out Trump from his rancid presidency.

But lurking under that, hidden in our own carefully crafted journals of history, lingered an open secret that was engineered to be kept from public discourse: it wasn’t the problem of racism (though it exists and is a problem) but the Colonialism that led to those atrocities, which is not some ghostly thing, long dead and relegated to the past: it’s alive, well, flourishing, and the pro Palestinian marches are the clarion cry of its long needed exposure.

Before Israel was formed, there was discussion of creating a Zionist state in other regions: the Uganda scheme was a potential plan to offer a refuge to Jewish people from persecution, but it was rejected because many in the zionist movement of the early 1900s felt it would make the eventual establishment of a Jewish state in historic Palestine would be more difficult than we see now, and for non or anti Zionist Jewish people was seen as capitulation to the monstering so many innocents suffered: why flee ignorance and let it win and breed when you can stand against it with allies and defeat it?
If this state had been created, we’d have seen the exact same type of land displacement and violence in Uganda as we see now in Palestine, much as we saw the disgusting dehumanisation of Jewish people expand into a murder machine in Germany- fleeing that type of irrational, evil slaughter is common sense, but engineering more dehumanisation and murder to protect yourselves is transference, not transcendence.

Ultimately, the sad truth is that it was perfect for the west to hand over land that wasn’t ours after the Balfour agreement, and give assent to the creation and maintenance of a state in the Middle East as an ally- because we required a strategic presence in the region.
The Middle East is overflowing with wealth in the form of everything from historical artefacts to goods like oil: having a partner there would make diplomatic discussion easier- to say nothing of the Christian Zionists (because Zionism is not specific to Jewish people- Joseph Biden, a life long devout Catholic said he is a proud Zionist) – who believe fervently that Jewish people need to establish a homeland to bring about religious prophecy.
Ultimately the disgusting idea that Jewish people should be relegated to a patch of land to bring about the end of the world turns my stomach- Christian Zionists believe jewish people and everyone outside their group will burn in hell as they are raptured to heaven and I’d say the mass death of everyone but them is hardly a helpful way to think of others, rife with supremacism as it is.
On a personal level- I don’t want the people I love who are Jewish to go anywhere they don’t want to, or to be forced there by antisemitism stoked up by the actions of the Zionist state erroneously legitimising the lies of the past about Jewish people- but I also don’t want the safety of any peoples to come at the expense of others, because starting with an unbalanced scale never leads to measured safety, progress and civility. The right to safety, life, happiness, protection- this isn’t hierarchy, it’s human.

The history spoken about is complicated: Jewish people have faced persecution for thousands of years because of the embarrassing ignorance of too many – folklore typifying anti Jewish sentiment was replaced by judenhass, supposedly scientific reasons to hate Jewish people coined by the forebears of the Nazi scum who knew they had to bring their argument into a different scope than tattletale to maintain it.
Jewish people, yes, have faced oppression and the debate about rights to homelands are complicated in that respect, but simple in this: if your homeland is established by the violent displacement, dehumanisation, rights removal, bombing, shooting, crushing by tanks, beating and more that Palestinians have faced- one has to question the legacy of that homeland: I was born into a country hundreds of years old, verging on thousands, whose legacy I did not choose and I’d like to hope if I was born in a time my state was committing atrocities to grow I’d work against that as we all are now… because violent expansionism which oppresses is not how states can grow, certainly not without expecting repercussion, and maintaining a state through evil acts means that state delegitimises itself.

Prominent Israeli figures have been heard to say statements that any rational person would call evil at most demure, genocidal in intent if honest: one prominent Israeli politician whose job is to oversee the IDF asked on Israeli TV recently why they aren’t allowed to “kill more Palestinians”. In the West Bank this week, a place with no hamas presence a teenage boy was shot in the heart because he stood too close to a wall- a wall over 15 feet high guarded by snipers. He was chasing a football.

The back and forth of origin is both important and superseded by the latest egregious actions: Yes, the hamas charter did originally refer to mass murder of Israelis which is evil- and Likud’s 1977 charter referred to erasing all Palestinian land. As a devout atheist it is odd to turn to biblical screeds but an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.
If “peace” is brought to a region by force it leaves a bloody legacy that doesn’t wash off with the liberal hand waving of some future peaceful time that might just happen if you kill your way there, and it seems that many members of the Israeli state want to finish the job started 75 years ago by wiping out the Palestinian resistance in whole to pretend that peace won by brutal extermination is peace and not the echoing silence following a gunshot, the still calm hanging in the air like the stillness in a room where a murder was committed.

No land settled on the bones of the innocent should exist peacefully because peace is the method to peace- and this is exactly what people all across the west are realising about our own historical and contemporary roles in the world we see around us.

This colonial legacy, we’re reassured, is gone and dead, dust in the wind: it is not legacy: it is alive, well and flourishing through our uncritical support of Israeli military oppression. Before we go further we have to point out that innocent people were murdered on October 7th by hamas and this is terrible- nobody deserves to die in such a manner- nor though, do they deserve the penning in and neck crushing that leads to such extremist retaliation.

Hamas are not the good guys, hand picked by Netanyahu to serve his rationale that you need an enemy to direct at (see the essay “the essential terrorist”, which lays bare Netanyahu’s thinking and justification of his actions).
Hamas’ treatment of women, people in the region in general and minorities is appalling, their collaborative denial of democracy for Palestinians is egregious, and human rights reports will tell you as much. Nevertheless so many wish to pick and choose elements which fit their narrativisation rather than the whole picture: Hamas are bad, but so is the state of Israel’s horrendous crimes against humanity in response to Hamas’ atrocities- I can condemn Hamas and Israel and understand the actions because of the history: Understanding is not acceptance or forgiveness. And yet, we see a rise of people who think it’s as simplistic as picking one side and uncritically pushing for it- more on that and a particular hat clad exponent of this type of reductive thinking further down.

When it comes to western people all over, we’re suddenly keenly aware that the resources we consume, the comforts we enjoy- all come at the cost of the maintenance of a totalitarian regime we’re the unwitting beneficiaries of. Remember how those who benefit from oppression often don’t see it? Many of us are starting to, in spite of the best effort of state to prevent that by cracking down on discourse around it.

Suddenly we know the iPhones we enjoy videos of critical analysis on this very topic may well have parts made by starving children forced into labour inside them- we know the apps that are letting us talk about this are a threat to the status quo as politicians frame us as talking from ignorance and endangering society when what we learn isn’t ignorant dogma: we learn that the food we eat is grown in fields thick with dried innocents’ blood, or extracted from countries whose citizens are in famine as we gorge on their proceeds: their government ministers feed on our dollars and pounds, assuring their countryfolk that their shrinking waists can be survived.

We know our lights are kept on by oil we buy from despots like Putin or extract under duress with the threat of retaliation, oppression or intervention, or we take easily from theocratic regimes we install after we encourage assassinations of the socialist leaders of those Middle Eastern countries or countries in Africa- the women, the minorities who suffer there, sometimes suffer because our governments chose to arm extremists who swore to do our bidding over leaders who wanted better for their countries- because sometimes better meant not dealing with us, or actually making us pay fair trade for their resources.
Capitalism writ large is installing a dictator who accepts pittance for resource as the price of power, instead of working with a government who wants fair price so they can sink that into betterment of state for their citizenry.

The West’s dark history is still being written in blood, and this must stop- but the enemies within are also rallying.
People like George Galloway gain political influence for the righteous cause of standing against the oppression of Palestine, yet recycles the same dull hard right rhetoric of “anti wokeness” and his followers will recite the same as if it’s common sense to expect those of us whose identities mark us as woke whether we believe it of not to accept this meekly.
Recently he said he thinks people like myself are not “normal”: what is the definition of normal, because if it’s creating a loving relationship and contributing to society, we do not differ. Biological arguments against trans and gay/bi people don’t work- we can’t help our biology nor does it harm anyone. Biological arguments about child rearing are pointless- I have the same capacity as a heterosexual man, I just don’t weaponise it as some type of supremacy because it’s ludicrous to think that the genital collusion of two people makes them innately better, when they might ham fistedly raise a child who is miserable.
Galloway’s argument is that normal is a man, a woman and children: to say nothing of the heterosexual people who do not want or or cannot have children, those who lose children and so on- our worth is innate as human beings and not predicated on whether we follow a socially prescribed model of human behaviours or progress, especially in a world where so many do that it is an irrelevance: if our greatest artists, our most strident writers and our most open hearted fellows were child free does it devalue their works? Does it mean they lived empty lives because they didn’t follow the steps of billions of others? Or do they matter because they were here and because of what they left behind beyond more people?
He says we’re worthy of respect – but that telling children about us is “sexualising”. Is saying “that married couple” sexualisation, if you’re referring to two men instead of a man and a woman? Is referring to “Aunt Penny” who began transition 13 years ago sexual? It is gross to feel sexualised simply because my existence is acknowledged, and it is weaponised incompetence to pretend you cannot tell people about our existence without sinking into the seedy. If you cannot speak to children about other humans without sinking into the crass, rethink having children until you learn.

It is the pushers of this dull “anti woke” ideology who sexualise us unwillingly, it is a rape of our existence, and my existence is no more or less sexual than Galloway, than Sunak, than Starmer, than anyone.
Galloway fronts a cause to help some and hurt others, using his megaphone shouting for justice in one area to divert criticism of his poor ideas in others.

Ultimately his cause should be something decent: we do need a world where identity politics takes a back seat: but not because it makes cis-het people uncomfortable: because it should only be relevant when it is relevant: the very distaste Galloway and his followers feel for us is exactly why that relevance in wider political discourse remains- if you didn’t bring us up, if you didn’t speak so dispassionately about us, if you weren’t threatening to hide us like a dirty secret- if you didn’t have such twisted views about us, we wouldn’t need to be on the defensive and have to force progressive legislation through that drags equity out of your hands when you should offer it freely.

These views will always infiltrate movements: in the BLM uprisings, much discourse was had on holistic inclusion of black and brown people with further marginalisation.
I choose the words of a black commentator I’ve admired for many years, TheConsciousLee who says “if your activism isn’t intersectional it’s not useful” because uplifting some and not others is not uplift: it’s a framework for a new supremacist order.

The anti trans movement, too, typifies this: there is objective truth in womens’ continued suffrage in society. To deny that is to be obtuse: but to pretend that movement is about liberating women when it’s so clearly about removing trans rights, and jest that those topics are a monolith is fallacy- see the proof in the states where trans healthcare is banned alongside womens’ reproductive choices, where anti trans women hospitalise each other for each thinking the other is trans, where existing access to spaces is banned, where trans people can be legally punished for seeking healthcare… and now in the UK where trans people are singled out to be offered third spaces in hospitals so overburdened you sometimes cannot even be admitted when you need to be- if your care is delayed because a trans person is being ostracised that’s the fault of knee jerk fear metastasising into politics, not the sick trans person. This erosion of human parity based on arbitrary characteristics and labelling of “woke” is to say there is a hierarchy you want, just not the one that prevails when so many of us are fighting to abolish a hierarchy at all.

People like Galloway claim they want socialism- but if socialism is a social system designed to empower the proletariat and give us executive control over the production of goods, meaning we’re as liable for the rewards as the company owners who currently offer us paltry salary for the money we make them, how can we seek equity if people don’t even get the chance to be workers?
The Equality Act doesn’t endow people with more rights: it prevents the violation of their existing ones: If a gay man isn’t offered a job because an anti wokeness afficionado runs the company, he cannot access the fruits of a labour he is denied.
A new system built on a lack of equity is another not fit for purpose: and all it takes is for something else to be declared “woke” for its exclusion: many think the pro Palestine movement is “woke”. Here we feed back to the fact that Galloway is eager for Donald Trump- who also reviles wokeness- to win the US presidency because he will pull out of NATO: conveniently ignoring Trump’s Muslim ban, his bigotry spilling into policy which erodes peoples’ ability to enjoy the proceeds they would otherwise reap as humans outside of their marginal identities- to say nothing of his multitude of schemes which have decimated the rights of workers in his empire, to say nothing of his status as a supposed billionaire violence agitator (though he whittles at this himself with his own egregious behaviours).
I myself have spoken about being sick of identity politics, not because it’s not important: because of its weaponisation by people just like Galloway, Trump, Starmer, Tice, Sunak. The constant consolidation into a shibboleth like “wokeness” and it’s invocation as the enemy diverts focus to our human existence- and means it’s diverting from real issues we should be facing and breaking down. Centralising an issue that shouldn’t exist in the first place is a waste of everyones’ time, not to mention half the equalities bunting you see is simply liberal chest beating about how accepting they are, and how quickly the worm turns if you question them elsewhere- liberals will swear they’re allies and yet how quickly that latent hate bursts to the surface if you come at opposition on their stances on workers rights, Palestine, world affairs, anything… liberals see their acceptance as a reward for being their good little pet, not an innate right.

Galloway is not the leader of a better politics; he’s a voice for a free Palestine, and vital to that cause and little more because his politics is crafted from a different type of hierarchy.

Better politics by its own nature must account for inequality in society: if people are treated unequally from the knee because of skin colour, because of their sexual characteristics, their gender, sexuality, their dialect, their ability, that society grows out of the muck of inequality and cannot shake off those constraints and affects that person’s path, chaining them to fewer and fewer directions.
Equitable politics is not some overbearing political correctness: it’s the fertile seedbed for a world to develop that admits, and ceases, its colonial actions: It’s a world that offers everyone the opportunities they’re due, accounting for who they are and giving them uplifting in line with their own needs, rather than demanding people behave in line with a framework developed by others who proscribe their experiences to everyone.
It’s a time where your identifying characteristics don’t matter because people rationally see that their own small minded biases don’t stop you being a good worker, a decent person. And it’s a society which focuses, not just on uplifting one group, or a few groups who are palatable- but overthrowing a system built from floor to highest ceiling on the oppression of many for the benefit of the few- the central socialist ideal.

You can look at this time and understand that, whilst we were all sanguine in our ignorance and compliant with the whims of state, it seemed like freedom: but now people are being kicked from campus, stabbed, shot, imprisoned and worse asides for the crime of genuinely being disgusted by the mechanisms of state and asking for change, for a society that is not built from the ashes of those we trampled during its creation: Biden says peaceful protest is a right sacrosanct as he watches agitators on his side instigate violence and as the press try desperately to tell us it’s the ones screaming for peace who did the violence: and that is because he is the violence. His office is the violence: It led to one Trump presidency and is leading to another.
America must reconcile with the truth of its creation and the cost of its maintenance in this form, or it will veer from extremist president to extremist president who will throw human rights, citizenry and liberty itself into the jaws of state maintenance.
The further maintenance of the Israeli state is a facet- though a very relevant- facet of that larger idea. The foolish sleight of hand that anti Zionism is anti semitisim doesn’t work when Biden, who is a catholic, says he is a Zionist- and when his uncritical diffidence to Zionism means he’s letting Americans die and be injured over standing up to a foreign entity, it means he chooses state over liberty. Blue or red, the chains still fit the same.

State is now entering delusion to maintain itself- America is gearing up to pass a bill claiming antisemitism is speaking out against Zionism even as a catholic Zionist is president, and as jewish people who are at the white hot forefront of the movement to liberate Palestine are beaten, arrested and mistreated- in Germany, anti zionist jewish organisations are having their assets frozen: we see the same thing in the UK where Rishi Sunak pushes forward the unreality of new legislation to declare an unsafe country – Rwanda- safe in his bid to maintain state as it stands: in shambles.
Rwanda is verging on open war with Congo. Rwanda has sold of 70% of housing stock for migrants. Migrants have died in Rwanda previously because of the negligence of state. It is not a safe country, but our government who talks often of common sense and reality, is legislating against reality itself to declare ignorance to enact a scheme that will not help the problem. Every single migrant to our shores could be sent away and we would still have hospitals bereft of staff, schools crumbling into dust, parochial workers rights and corruption bleeding from the heart of our government. But state must lie to maintain itself: and that means state itself is a lie.

It’s bigger than all of us

At this moment in time, our states are more interested in protecting the colonial regime they collectively embody than our liberty. Biden ignores the death of innocents in Palestine both born there and innocents there to pass out aid- innocents from his own country, because to stand up to Israel is to imperil the rank behaviours of all states held together through colonial action. We can literally die because of Zionist extremism and Biden will overlook it, because dismantling that cultivated system threatens the world he grappled with long ago and accepted the cost of: the blood of dissenters.

This all fits into the wider skein of my own political awakening. In the UK, the battle isn’t so trite as to just “remove the tories”- it’s to utterly break apart the system that empowers them, a system that allows the opposition to offer the barest stirrings of change to be seen as electable- a system where minoritised people are expected to live “less than” lives so people around them can enjoy the simple life as their noise cancelling headphones tune out the screams of the bombed whose corpses grow the plants they eat in coffee shops, whose laptop screens block the vision of a fellow citizen having their right to use facilities removed to accommodate small minded bigots- a life where the student loans we pay go to universities knee deep in the arms trade or funding countries who mistreat their citizens: a world where the dint of your birth sets your choices in stone before your character begins to develop and other avenues are cut off by the bigotry of your familial wealth, diction, skin colour, region, gender, sexuality and you’re cajoled, pushed and pressed into being another body in the ceaseless machine of capitalism, your blood oiling the cogs as they turn to produce more people to keep powering this shuddering project forward.

We can do better- we should do better. The pro Palestine movement is the tip of an iceberg big enough to sink the titanic states we’ve existed in for a millennia. We surely do not want to live lives where merely existing under our states causes pain elsewhere for others: where our resource guarding means others suffer, where we force people into militant labour to produce clothes we discard after months, and where the proceeds go to the rich who scorn our request for equity.
This is not the human condition: capitalism is not the human condition, bailed out by socialist theory every decade since I was born or collapsing into ruin and taking everyone with it as we defend regimes accused of genocide over our own citizens.
Racism, bigotry and more are not the human condition- humans intellectualise reasons to hate rather than accepting the reality that we are all the same until our heads are packed with the empty vessels of hatred, and we’re pushed into a tiny space where only the proscribed, narrow thoughts we’re told are vital to consider, paralyse us.

We’re a species with so much potential to coexist with each other and with our world itself, and the movement to call for that and work to it would be an earth shaking change.
People would need to compromise, to adjust, and to work within the bounds of a new way to live which guarantees coexistence in peace.
But better that than to keep careening towards the fulfilment of the colonial project where everyone who is in our way becomes a bloody smear under our boot, and our history is that we slaughtered our way to a manufactured peace filled with the shouts of those we brutalised to get there: isn’t it?