#just bc a person presents themselves as an expert doesnt mean everything they say is true

[discountdyke]

sorry but i dont know how anyone can take dr ramani seriously why do so many ppl think shes credible just bc she has a youtube and a doctorate. i regret to inform you that even educated ppl can record themselves saying a bunch of bullshit and post it online for clout. she literally uses narcissism to describe any sort of behavior on earth. i can hardly get thru 5 minutes of her videos bc she is literally just saying "narcissists narcissism grandiose narcissist" over and over. if you made up a drinking game of this you would die within minutes. that is not information that is word salad

[alexanderpusheen]

so a bunch of people are talking about how the national library, the azhar library, and a cultural center in palestine has been destroyed, and worse, it was deliberately targeted for destruction by israel, and if you cared about the notre dame but not this then youre a piece of shit white supremacist etc etc

....okay.

first of all, i cannot find a single reliable source that the library has been destroyed. i found a tweet from the 6th, but no news articles. and google, as helpful as ever in aiding genocide, really wants me to read what israellycool has to say on the matter, as no matter how many different search terms i use, that shitty blog is either the first or one of the first results. no i will not link it, go find it for yourself if youre that curious, but im sure if you tried to fact check this at all you already saw that childish fascist screed already.

secondly, imperialists have always targeted centers of learning and information storage. massively important cultural artifacts for all of humanity were lost during the iraq war, and they were not ‘lost’ so much as the US deliberately rounded up librarians and intellectuals and murdered them and then bombed museums and libraries, a MASSIVE geneva convention violation. i remember hearing about that growing up just a few miles outside of NYC in a NJ suburb and i remember losing all sympathy for american soldiers who got themselves blown up in a war that was more about forcing a people to submit to US will than anything else. (yes, including oil.)

what is the point of all this?

i had very complicated feelings abt the notre dame fire, mostly because i hate france, i hate europeans, and i hate white people, but notre dame was not built using colonial money, and the very original building was connected to an antisemitic pogram but it had already happened hundreds of years before the present day notre dame construction. i saw some spicy takes like ‘well even if the notre dame wasnt funded by colonialism, everything in europe before the slave trade was made from jewish capital!’ which was like, oh, so we’re all medieval scholars now? bc thats not even a little bit goddamn true. 

and even if it were, there is something that truly angers me about all of these hot takes. because theyre not only false, but they look for some ‘us vs them’ justification for why we deserve to be free. no, mon frère, we deserve liberation simply because we do. it has nothing to do with inherent goodness.

the reason we dont like europe is because imperialism is objectively exploitative of the most vulnerable and marginalized. trying to look for this primordial evil in europe and a primordial good in other populations completely defeats the purpose of examining things through an anticolonial (or marxist) lens. we do not deserve liberation because we are Good, but because, as marx said, systems of oppression are not sustainable in the long term. you cannot fuck over billions of people forever. they will eventually demand something better than what we have. it doesnt mean each and every one of us is a good person, because what is good is highly relative, and denying or granting liberation based on goodness or good deeds is something a religion does, and liberation ideologies are not religions but means to an end.

i dont know if those libraries were destroyed recently. and if they werent, i dont know why people would lie about that. israels relentless campaign of terror over the past few weeks should be enough of a call to action, rather than some weak ‘a building was destroyed in a place no one cares about’ nonsense. i care about palestine because they are all my comrades in arms. they are my comrades, oppressed by the same system of oppression that oppresses millions of brazilians. those systems look different everywhere in order to adapt to the situation, of course, but they are the same, and thus, our struggle is the same. even if the palestinians had no history, had no libraries, had no culture, i would always be on their side because they are my comrades. we are one and the same, together, against imperialism and apartheid.

likewise, making a call to action, appealing to zionists who wept over the notre dame but not this important palestinian cultural landmark....listen. it is not the building itself. it never was. white supremacists latched onto the notre dame fire as a symbol of western civilization being taken over by THE OTHER (which i am very much a fucking part of!) and trying to get them to care about a building theyve never heard of that does not make up the western canon of Important Things is absolutely useless. theyll say ‘well hamas bombs palestinians’ and act like that was the most devastating proof against seeing palestinians are real people who deserve to live outside of an open air prison. is it true? who fucking cares. every palestinian could be a member of hamas, they could all be bomb making experts and love bombs and be really into just bombing everything including their own homes, and they would still deserve to live outside of israels apartheid regime. but you cant explain this to someone who is determined to view you as a Thing. you cannot.

i cried when the notre dame burned. by the logic of a lot of idiots on this site, i must be a white supremacist. sure, whatever. its extremely not true so you can say whatever you want. but the issue is that galvanizing others into action using buildings is never going to work. because it is and isnt about the buildings. i extremely dont care about white french people because like, why do i have to care about them. but i care deeply about palestinians and my solidarity will always lie with them, whether or not they have nice cultural things that i like. it doesnt really matter if i like palestinian culture and hate french culture. thats not the point. one gets to thrive because of the bounties imperialism has given it, while the other rots on the vine as a direct result of imperialism. i care about that.  and we can go into what it means to care and if caring as an individual (esp a colonized individual) matters very much at all in terms of political action but like.....this narrative of ‘you have to care only about the third world’ is funny to me because you guys just dont. you dont do it. youre very eager to use us when convenient, but you dont really. so ultimately, what does that mean? nothing i guess.