PallasRiot21h ago

For real though, Palestinian olive oil is the highest quality olive oil I've ever had, hands down best for cooking, best for dressing dishes, like an absolute joy to work with. And it's not a mystery why, right? When a culture has long standing reverence for a product such that there is ancestral practices that go beyond simple industrialized, maximally alienated labor, the results are better. It's the same for like French butter or coffees from some parts of Africa or whatever else.

Like obviously this isn't an area of focus in discourse over settler colonialism because the immediate horrors of genocide rightfully come first, but the settler destruction of indigenous foodways and relationships to the land ultimately do impoverish all of us through robbing the world of the aesthetic beauty that can be experienced through actual cultural exchange. Capitalism and settler colonialism impoverishes us all by destroying our ties to our own place and time, and then offers us luxury commodities as the balm to those missing relationships.

Show threadPallasRiot

This is why, by the way, we can't accept the imperialism and settler colonialism of the small tyrannies. Palestine is being scourged by the horrible, awesome might of the currently most powerful empire on earth, but Kurdistan is being ravaged by far less powerful fascists of Türkiye and Syria. When a Kurd is forbidden from speaking Kurdish in public, is their plight less severe because Türkiye doesn't have as many aircraft carriers as the US empire? Ukrainians have struggled again and again and again for freedom from the Russian yolk, from the Tzars and then from the Bolsheviks and now from the petro-oligarchs; when the rich black earth of Ukraine is saturated with the blood of the people who have tilled it for centuries for the umpteenth time in history, is there less cultural loss because some of the oligarchs of Russia have divergent geopolitical interests from some of the oligarchs of the US?

The degradation of the human spirit that is inflicted by capitalist extraction is not limited to a single empire or a single camp. It is an inhuman force carried out through systems across the world, and we must fight it everywhere.

Apr 4 at 6:14pmWeb
Show threadPallasRiot20h ago

We have to be internationalist. I see many in the English speaking left moving towards reactionary pitfalls, chiefly the false anti-imperialisms of campism and antisemitism. We are betraying Palestine if we let bad actors use the Palestinian cause to move us towards embracing the imperialism of small tyrants and the reflexive suspicion of Jews, often two sides of the same coin in the campist milieu.

Campism is the idea that the world can be understood through geopolitical blocs with divergent interests and thus antagonism, these blocs being the different "camps". Campists believe that to oppose the US camp you should be supportive of, or at least not opposed to, the anti-US camp. These people often call themselves anti-imperialist, but they quite straightforward aren't. They embrace China's imperial extraction in Africa and across eastern Asia, they embrace Russia's imperialism in Ukraine, they embrace figures like Assad and Erdoğan at times as their interests are opposed to the West, even as they carry out neoliberal extraction and cultural destruction of the people they rule over. The antithesis of imperialism isn't campism; it's internationalism, the notion that all oppressed people are in struggle together, that an injury to one is an injury to all. The Uyghur child taken from their parents and sent to be "educated" by the Chinese government is facing the same terror as the indigenous American child sent to residential school. The Kurd lynched by Turkish fascists in Bakurê is facing the same terror as the Black man hanged by the American white supremacists. The Nigerian farmers alliances fighting to restore their local supply chains so that their people don't rely on fragile imported agritech systems is fundamentally connected with the struggle of European and American trade unionists trying to fight to reverse deindustrialization that has hollowed out their communities. The Palestinian struggle for liberation is woven through all international struggle, and while we are absolutely correct to put on focus on moments of acute plight and where there are particular responsibilities and opportunities because of our placement in empire, we betray the struggle if we allow ourselves to be mislead by reactionaries and thus isolated as a result of engagement in the Palestinian cause.

Show threadEmma needs ☕️ and paying work20h ago
@PallasRiot thank you. We have to be for people and liberation.