Project Esther: A Trumpian Blueprint to Crush Anticolonial Resistance / Yoav Litvin

Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.

Is that all there is? You march in a few marches, chant a few rhymes, grin and bear it while the usual rowdies torch and loot a few big box stores and police cars, and then the death squads come and disappear you? How come they get death squads and we don’t? How are we supposed to snatch their people off the streets, put them in unmarked vans, and take them away to oblivion, or to black sites for torture, maybe put them in little coffin-sized concrete cells in, say, Syria? We definitely have the manpower. And the womanpower, and the everything-in-between-and- beyond power. There should be a law, kind of like the fairness doctrine of olden times, where if one side gets to disappear people, the other side gets to do it, too. And if you can’t afford an unmarked van and various torture equipment, such will be provided to you by the fascist government’s equal rights department.

It doesn’t seem fair. How can fascism be so prima facie unfair? I mean, I get fascism being unfair in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, but this the USA. You’d think our fascism would have checks and balances. Some kind of built-in freedom and equality. At least an ombudsman. But no. It’s almost like they just don’t care.

And if anything makes people in the US angry, it’s the feeling that their feelings don’t matter. (Oh, and lots of white people hate when people who aren’t white get anything good, even if it’s equal to or worse than what those same white people have had forever. But that’s no excuse for fascism to be unfair.)

Fascism has become the national pastime. Fascism is the governing philosophy of the regime under which we live. Fascism should be a role model! What will the children think? Of course, the children killed at the border or in their schools don’t think anything. That’s part of fascism’s built-in efficiency.

If fascism is going to monopolize so much of the public’s time, energy, and material resources, I and others like me would suggest it ought to be made a public utility. Nationalize fascism! Who could argue against that? I’m sure no decent citizen would mind paying a small tax for free public fascism. They’ve paid for the military and police all this time, it’s more a name change than anything else. And those who want to be active fascists can pay... read more

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