More from @Sisyphusa

michael

@Sisyphusa

Jul 7, 2022

seeing a load of politicians, journalists, large institutions only now suddenly brave enough to ridicule Johnson the individual now that he's a diminished figure only underlines how effective the convergence of far right politics into the mainstream has been.

'Johnsonism', its discourses and policies and claims to power and legitimacy, has been widely supported and accommodated by powerful institutions across state, civil society, opposition forces because so many of its claims are the stuff of consensus

every reactionary violence & impulse, the sense of "why aren't they miserable like me", that stews in the ugly juices of British social life being projected onto a phantom 'Red Wall' or 'white working class' is no innovation of Brexit or Johnson, it goes back *at least* to Powell

Read 6 tweets

michael

@Sisyphusa

Jun 8, 2022

https://twitter.com/periuspb/status/1533710981817323521

if you look through some of the British socialist publications around the time of the Boer War or in the lead-up to WWI they're full of nationalist conspiracy theories like Mason's about traitors to the left who show no allegiance, fears for national security and culture, etc.

https://twitter.com/periuspb/status/1533710981817323521

these attacks generally targeted Jews & anarchists (at certain times perceived to basically be the same thing). But the targets were at least genuinely autonomous actors, who proposed diff practical forms or who ideologically challenged or frightened existing workers orgs/leaders

depressingly for us today this map of 'targets' is basically Labour politicians, social democrat influencers & Trotskyist groups who've basically been doing and saying the same things for fifty years, all of whom pose little threat to anything.

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michael

@Sisyphusa

Dec 19, 2021

on my run yesterday a saw wall-to-wall graffiti saying "covid1984" and i've been trying to figure out what bugs me about it so much

i think it's that whole forms of "anti-establishment" politics in Britain, including a lot of Orwell and a lot of Covid-period movements, are convinced that attacks on freedom & individual liberty are essentially against British or English culture and tradition.

Orwell feared Russian "totalitarianism" was an alien form that couldn't be allowed to usurp his patriotic sense of English socialism. Posh British radicals today see "authoritarianism" as inherently characteristic of "other places" that shouldn't happen here

Read 9 tweets

michael

@Sisyphusa

Nov 22, 2021

as you'd expect from Greenwald, someone who's made an entire career out of defending white supremacy and white supremacists, this much-repeated "gotcha" of recent days attempts to obfuscate the operations of white supremacy in US history.

white supremacy has worked to reproduce white domination in wide-ranging contexts. to take the land of Native ppl, to control the labour and bodily autonomy of Black ppl, to make racialised ppl's lives less free and less valuable, under the power of the state.

another consistent aspect of US white supremacy has been to discipline the behaviour of whites (also at times a changing category). White abolitionists were regularly murdered between 1830s-60s. Whites building alliances with Black ppl during Reconstruction were assassinated.

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michael

@Sisyphusa

May 16, 2021

https://twitter.com/chimenesuleyman/status/1393953935866667011

my experience: i was in the thick of the march in London for ~5 hours yesterday. at one point i stood on a wall and watched its entire train pass by, 10s of 1000s of ppl, hearing the chants, seeing the signs & placards. i experienced one instance of antisemitism.

https://twitter.com/chimenesuleyman/status/1393953935866667011

i chose not to say anything onhere yesterday because i didn't want it to give a false impression of a huge march that was not characterised by antisemitism but by a desperate desire to see an end to the suffering, oppression and colonisation of Palestinian people.

the experience was painful because i was penned in & couldn't move while a guy on a megaphone talked about how The Jews had been kicked out of every country they'd been in and then he denied the Holocaust. i was on my own & felt i couldn't say anything, that it'd be bad to do so

Read 10 tweets