Thought about this essay so much last night watching Rustin which I think is a powerful film that can show the ways in which anger can galvanize and simultaneously be marginalized within a movement. Thank you as always for your writing.
I never thought I would be subscribed to a substack that would call for the removal of Jews from Israel, per the above comments, and call the torture of babies righteous violence, but I will be removing myself now.
TLDR: You're so confidently wrong and you will be in for a rude awakening when you'll take the time to see the horror you're either excusing or glossing over. Rape has nothing to do with revolution. I can believe I keep on having to spell it out to leftists basing their inane opinion on the most complex conflict of the century on TikToks sourced by Al-Jhazeera. We're going to lose worldwide elections to the far-right because of how dangerous, gullible and out of touch the left political base proved to be here.
Please, don’t believe and spread misinformation. Hamas is using ambulances to smuggle fighters and weapons. That makes sense when you declared war on Israel and are actively being searched and rooted out. You don’t have to believe Hamas’ twisting that fact of their guerilla tactics to make Israel look evil.
There’s verified and trusted sources detailing both, no need to invent some and take as gospel what you found on TikTok. You may only write Al-Jhazeera lies on your blog, but some people read those and go hurting the first Jew they find.
Look for yourself: No EMT on sight but a driver, and two dudes looking dandy climbing in the back. Does that look like terrorists trying to escape the surveillance of modern intelligence on an active war theater, or a regular emergency call?
Bonus, to see the misinformation on sm some eat up. @saleh.aljafarawi, an Hamas ‘influencer’ with 80k of followers, with a very different tune depending on what’s needed to sway the opinion: appeal to fanaticism or to sympathy.
You mentioning the Haitian Revolution and proposing this hypothetical of placing it today that makes no practical sense shows how out of touch you are, and so confidently wrong. First of all, there is no world where France still hasn’t abolished slavery but the rest of the world did, so I posit that in your scenario, it is not de facto abolished in every country of the world like it is today. So I suppose that yes, most people would side with the French.
But you grossly misinterpret the events and romanticize revolutions, which are all pyrrhic victories that peace and actual diplomatic and political work need then to heal. I’ll not downplay how important was the violent takeover by Haitian, not only freeing slaves but granting their island independence from France.
But you forget that it was facilitated by the own work done by the French Revolution in 1789, and again, it’s not the violence that built lasting change, but defining the Declaration of Human Rights, positing that all men were created equal. Declaration that is the basis of France’s constitution, so again, there is no France today that could side for slavery, you’re showing here how purely theoric is your argument. The humanist values of Les Lumières were a paradigm shift that made everyone conscious, ruling class and oppressed, that their current world order was obsolete and made it prime to crumble. Slavery had no more place in that new world order and in minds once those ideas became law. And Haitians were wise to capitalize on that base. That revolt would have been squashed and reverted if the French people didn’t agree with its legitimacy.
Voltaire happened to be one of the writers whose ideas and values were echoed in that declaration, like freedom of speech. So much so that his biograph Evelyn Beatrice Hall attributed to him something that you could use “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
But it’s not enough to do that. I find it’s also important to hear it. That’s the impasse the political discourse is and where the left especially fails. I get that it’s asking a lot, and I’m not sure myself that I have the patience to do what I preach, but this division will lead us nowhere.
You should have heard your Zionist friend. You should have talked to him, as human beings.
Thought about this essay so much last night watching Rustin which I think is a powerful film that can show the ways in which anger can galvanize and simultaneously be marginalized within a movement. Thank you as always for your writing.
From The River To The Sea.
I never thought I would be subscribed to a substack that would call for the removal of Jews from Israel, per the above comments, and call the torture of babies righteous violence, but I will be removing myself now.
This is really great, Angelica.
Angelica, your writing is always so clear-eyed, I'm not at all surprised to see that you're clear-eyed on this subject as well. Thank you for this.
TLDR: You're so confidently wrong and you will be in for a rude awakening when you'll take the time to see the horror you're either excusing or glossing over. Rape has nothing to do with revolution. I can believe I keep on having to spell it out to leftists basing their inane opinion on the most complex conflict of the century on TikToks sourced by Al-Jhazeera. We're going to lose worldwide elections to the far-right because of how dangerous, gullible and out of touch the left political base proved to be here.
Please, don’t believe and spread misinformation. Hamas is using ambulances to smuggle fighters and weapons. That makes sense when you declared war on Israel and are actively being searched and rooted out. You don’t have to believe Hamas’ twisting that fact of their guerilla tactics to make Israel look evil.
There’s verified and trusted sources detailing both, no need to invent some and take as gospel what you found on TikTok. You may only write Al-Jhazeera lies on your blog, but some people read those and go hurting the first Jew they find.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-military-says-hit-an-ambulance-being-used-by-hamas-2023-11-03/
Look for yourself: No EMT on sight but a driver, and two dudes looking dandy climbing in the back. Does that look like terrorists trying to escape the surveillance of modern intelligence on an active war theater, or a regular emergency call?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7O114V9PdmM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY3O0R805MY
Bonus, to see the misinformation on sm some eat up. @saleh.aljafarawi, an Hamas ‘influencer’ with 80k of followers, with a very different tune depending on what’s needed to sway the opinion: appeal to fanaticism or to sympathy.
https://www.reddit.com/r/2ndYomKippurWar/comments/17f8rux/the_gaza_man_who_recorded_a_video_of_himself/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
You mentioning the Haitian Revolution and proposing this hypothetical of placing it today that makes no practical sense shows how out of touch you are, and so confidently wrong. First of all, there is no world where France still hasn’t abolished slavery but the rest of the world did, so I posit that in your scenario, it is not de facto abolished in every country of the world like it is today. So I suppose that yes, most people would side with the French.
But you grossly misinterpret the events and romanticize revolutions, which are all pyrrhic victories that peace and actual diplomatic and political work need then to heal. I’ll not downplay how important was the violent takeover by Haitian, not only freeing slaves but granting their island independence from France.
But you forget that it was facilitated by the own work done by the French Revolution in 1789, and again, it’s not the violence that built lasting change, but defining the Declaration of Human Rights, positing that all men were created equal. Declaration that is the basis of France’s constitution, so again, there is no France today that could side for slavery, you’re showing here how purely theoric is your argument. The humanist values of Les Lumières were a paradigm shift that made everyone conscious, ruling class and oppressed, that their current world order was obsolete and made it prime to crumble. Slavery had no more place in that new world order and in minds once those ideas became law. And Haitians were wise to capitalize on that base. That revolt would have been squashed and reverted if the French people didn’t agree with its legitimacy.
Voltaire happened to be one of the writers whose ideas and values were echoed in that declaration, like freedom of speech. So much so that his biograph Evelyn Beatrice Hall attributed to him something that you could use “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
But it’s not enough to do that. I find it’s also important to hear it. That’s the impasse the political discourse is and where the left especially fails. I get that it’s asking a lot, and I’m not sure myself that I have the patience to do what I preach, but this division will lead us nowhere.
You should have heard your Zionist friend. You should have talked to him, as human beings.