Jul 20 2020
The actual stated demands of the protests may not necessarily be met or be successful. I think of things like the Occupy Wall Street protests and others where the idea of reforming how Wall Street works or maybe putting more breaks on the way in which income inequality occurs in the United States. Like those goals of course never really happened or materialized out of some of those protests. I think people getting disillusioned that you go to a protest like No Kings and it's large and you feel good and you feel the sense of community. But then the next day this hasn't really moved the needle on policy. It hasn't moved the needle on the practice of governance. And I think that's where in the book I try to push people a little and say, ‘Well, yeah, that's because it can’t. It can't end there, right?’ That and the same with elections, right? People of course get disappointed and disillusioned with the way elections have gone and the way even when supposedly better candidates win things still don't change either. I think one of the points of the book is that you have to kind of drive past those two traditional techniques for social change when they're not really doing the job that you need to create a more inclusive and sustainable society.
Writer and researcher Sasha Davis speaks to This Is Hell! to talk about his new book “Replace The State: How To Change The World When Elections And Protests Fail”, published by University of Minnesota Press. The book talks about bringing new hope for social justice movements by looking to progressive campaigns that have found success by unconventional, and more direct, means since elections and protests might have become stagnated in regards to bring forth societal change.
We will have new installments of Rotten History and Hangover Cure. We will also be sharing your answers to this week's Question from Hell!... read more
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Jul 19 2020
Posted by Matthew Boedy
Welcome to the Moment of Truth, the thirst that is the beverage.
The CEO of Goya Foods, until recently a popular brand, if not the most popular, among Latinx consumers, praised Donald Dump, as if to say, “I have no idea who buys our products, and even less what they care about, and even less than that why I should care what they care about, so I’ll just add the most offensive thing I can come up with into the public discourse, dragging the company name down with me.” And it worked like a charm. An instant, ferocious boycott was initiated, and in sympathy with the boycott, the hashtag “Goyaway” came about. It’s a play on “go away,” I think.
Goyaway. To me it sounds like a brand of gentile repellent. Like something you would spray on yourself before going outside to keep a mob of late-19th-century Polish peasants from coming to burn down your shtetl. Something to keep priests from landing on you and sucking your blood. A shield in the war on Christmas.
I recently had an interaction with a Jew who treated the word “goy” as if it were the N word, or at best equivalent to the derogatory shin word for Black person in Yiddish. Goyim, though, is the Hebrew word for gentiles, it is in the Torah, where its literal translation is “nations,” that is, the nations other than the Jews. Goy is not a bad word, as much as Anglophone Ashkenazi dabblers in Yiddish might beg to differ.
It’s interesting, because the day after Goyaway was first trending, the hashtag, JewishPrivilege, also started trending, and Jews on Twitter claimed it, turned it on its head, and used it as a label for their own stories of anti-Jewish oppression. I’ve had a great deal of contact with ghetto, labor, death camp, and death march survivors, so I was familiar with a lot of the material, but some of it – being killed in Ethiopia for being Jewish, jumping from a death camp train to uncertain danger, but at least alive, getting stabbed in front of your house in Odessa, getting pennies thrown at you on the bus, not even too long ago – some stories were outside the Elie Wiesel model, or the Wilna Ghetto narratives, or the mass executions and mass live incinerations with which I was more familiar.
There are so many ways to harass, torture, and kill a Jew! You’d think they’d all been attempted by now. And maybe they have, but the well-played hits and the... read more