Episode 1603
The Pandemic Isn't Over / Matt Mazewski
Jun 12 2023
If you think of democracy as simply something that’s constituted by regular elections and if you don’t think that an ethno-nationalist state that badly treats about 20% of its population, which is the Arab population, which enforces a brutal state of occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, which treats the people living there as 3rd class citizens, which periodically bombs them. Kills them in large numbers. I think we are stretching here, quite dramatically, the definition of democracy. I think it’s a nice rhetorical move on the part of Israel supporters to claim that Israel is a democracy and for that reason morally superior to the people it oppresses and morally superior to its neighbors. But I think we are looking at a democracy where majority opinion is in favor of genocide and ethnic cleansing. I think we do have to radically redefine our notion of democracy and try to fill it a little bit more with positive content. Otherwise, democracy equals murderous majoritarianism and that’s what we’re looking at in Israel right now.
Award-winning author Pankaj Mishra returns to “This Is Hell!” to talk about his new book, “The World After Gaza: A History”, published by the Penguin Random House.
Check out Pankaj’s book here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/780437/the-world-after-gaza-by-pankaj-mishra/
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Tanner Mirrlees
Mar 19
Covertly Manufacturing Consent for US Imperialism and Militarism in Hollywood / Tanner Mirrlees
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Jun 5 2023
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May 24 2023
Posted by Alexander Jerri
There’s a vicious circle, or cycle, eating its own tail in the West. Here’s the mechanism: people protest, civilly disobey, subvert, argue, and generally struggle against a status quo that oppresses them. The status quo reacts, overcorrects to prevent not just the change but even the possibility to struggle for change. The resistance has to rebuild, refashion its tools, explore new options for struggle. By the time they’ve almost clawed their way back to their former visibility and power, the status quo has reiterated so many outrageous lies against the resistors’ counter-arguments that it forces them to reframe the discourse. But eventually even the reframing starts to suffer from the law of diminishing returns.
Meanwhile the status quo has pounded home the argument that “everyone’s sick of the resistance” and weaponizes whatever public opinion they can along those lines. This makes the resistance fight harder, resort to more rigidly doctrinaire arguments, harsher tactics, ad absurdum, which the status quo in its turn uses to further discredit them in the zeitgeist.
By this time, though, the status quo has divided into two sides: on one side blandly ineffectual representatives of the resistors, funded by the blandly ineffectual “reasonable” rich who water down the true resistance’s arguments, aims, and strategies; and on the other side, funded by openly undemocratic wealth hoarders and corporations, the ferocious and exciting cutting edge supercool badboy violent authoritarians who take discrediting of the resistance to utterly insane lengths. For the lulz. And money. They accuse their “enemies” of the most sexually perverse varieties of violence in order to justify the violence they themselves want to use to extinguish them.
Maybe the violence turns into a war. Or maybe it subsides for a time, though the root problems don’t get fixed, or get half-fixed at best, keeping hostilities kindled.
We’re at a moment where everybody’s just damn fed up with each other. Those in various groups on the left are fed up because they can’t believe they have to fight the same battles all over again. They shriek louder and fight harder because they want to make sure once and for all their grandchildren don’t also have to fight the same battles all over again.
Groups on the right are fed up because... read more