Are you saying that if they were conducting an actual Holocaust-level genocide against LGBT people, it still wouldn’t be moral to wage war against them? I’m not claiming that it’s quite at that level in Palestine or other Islamic nations, but they’re certainly on the same spectrum.
You’ve just caused Liz Cheney to re-evaluate her position on homosexuality…purely to justify bombing the shit out of every Islamic country in the Middle East, of course.
Stranger
I am mildly surprised no one’s given that reasoning before. I’ll have to look up what the Log Cabin Republicans have said on the matter, if they’re still around…
I’m not talking about a hypothetical, I’m talking about Palestine.
Let’s face it. Most Unionists didn’t give a damn about the slaves. “Plucky little Belgium” was just window-dressing for British Imperialism. An infinitesimal fraction of Germany’s enemies gave a damn about the Jews. And the war against ISIS was hardly “full steam ahead, save the gays!”
But yet here we are. Not the motives of the victors, but the justly vanquished. Look at history’s biggest assholes, and who they victimized.
And I was talking about a hypothetical (“At a certain point…”).
At any rate, if it were simply Progressives For Palestine, it would be easier to understand. But QfP implies that there’s some kind of link between the Palestinian cause and the LGBT one. But there isn’t… unless you think all oppressed people have some kind of commonality, and that oppression is some kind of moral issue independent of the actual details.
Well, okay, let’s discuss your hypothetical.
Your hypothetical is Saudi Arabia. Real world, right now, actually existing, fully non-hypothetical Saudi Arabia.
Do you think we should start bombing Saudi Arabia?
There are, of course, still queer people in Saudi Arabia, because when your government puts you to death for being openly gay, you get in that closet and you nail the fucking door shut.
Do you think any of those closeted, queer Saudi Arabians would thank you for bombing them?
No it doesn’t.
But even if it did, how does “Progressives for Palestine” make any more sense? An independent Palestinian state is going to be scarcely more progressive than it is queer-friendly.
I guess we can wrap this thread up with the “ends justify the means”. Oppression is good if the victor says so.
No. I don’t think we’re obligated to do everything we have a moral right to do. Certainly not if it’s likely to make the problem worse.
A fair point. It’s easier to understand only in the sense that I already think that the primary moral axis that progressives have is oppressor/oppressed, and so I can see why they’d support Palestine in a broad sense, even if I disagree with their reasoning. But for LGBT people specifically, I’d think it would be a bit more personal.
Nuh-uh!
I came here for an argument, not just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes.
I’d say you drew ample to what you deposited.
Regressives live by selfishness and narrow-mindedness. Progressives believe in a future where we can do better than that.
Granted, regressives rely upon brute force to impose their will, hence the surface observation “oppressors vs oppressed.” But it’s much, much more complex than that. Besides brutality they rely on coercion and beguilement. To a very great extent. And, as the English used the vanquished Scots to oppress the Irish, or the Austrians the vanquished Hungarians against the Slavs, and many many other examples, the line between oppressors and oppressed blurs, as they intend it to. And then there’s the big teat of Consumerism that we’re all latched onto, for the stuff we need and the jobs we fill, its winners and losers indistinguishable.
Well, that’s… something.
Even if I agreed that progressives were always for progress, their own ideas are often the biggest impediment to said progress.
California’s High Speed Rail is proving difficult to implement, in no small part because the route itself is subject to political winds. In a decade or two we may have a route linking the famously rich cities of Madera and Bakersfield instead of, say, San Francisco and LA.
Apparently, it’s more important to be seen as supporting underserved communities than it is to, say, actually build a viable train route.
…there is no obvious paradox here, and Queers for Palestine are not, genuinely or otherwise, confused.
I’ve seen this paradox too. Chicago (Dailey’s “City the Works” version) plowed through neighborhoods at will to increase public-serving infrastructure. Fifty years later, Blue, blue Seattle couldn’t put in light rail because it might impede some poor Vietnamese woman’s nail salon access. After a certain point, justice becomes picayune and performative.
And in the age of keyboard sanctimonioids, finger-pointing is counterproductive to the cause of progress. Blaming needs to be replaced with forgiveness for progress. The British killed 30,000 Boer women and children, and would have killed more if it hadn’t been for Emily Hobhouse. And her advice to them afterward was priceless: “As your tribute to the dead, bury unforgiveness and bitterness at the foot of this monument forever. Instead, forgive for you can afford it”
I’m queer. You don’t speak for us. We don’t need or want your kind of “help.” If you’d foreground our voices instead of your own, you might begin to understand.
Who says this? Because I, for one, consider Japanese society racist as hell in general (you just need to look at their historical treatment of their own minority ethnicities), and their immigration policy is especially so. But I don’t really see anyone saying the opposite (who isn’t Japanese).
I don’t think campism itself is a mainstream view on the left. It’s more associated with communists, who are a minority. However, I’ve certainly encountered people with somewhat naive views of the world that map to this concept. There’s a hippy contingent who believe in a sort of ‘noble savage’, where indigenous people lived in harmony with nature until Europeans arrived to ruin everything. And there’s a more common vaguely anti-West view that I often find among young people.
An example would be people blaming anti-LGBT laws in developing countries on Britain or other former colonisers, when those countries have had decades to change them if they wanted to.
What I think is behind much of this is a sort of pendulum swing of action and reaction: one set of people tries to spread self-glorifying and self-justifying narratives about Western countries: inventions, development, progress, colonising other countries benefited them, and slavery was universal but only the enlightened West abolished it. And then another set of people try to counteract that, pointing out the exploitation, oppression, and cruelty involved in colonisation, and the ways in which it impeded rather than helped the development of places that were colonised. And how the Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery as practiced in the US were particularly cruel. But then kids who have only been taught the latter view and were never exposed to the original narrative can end up with their beliefs skewed in the opposite direction, thinking the West is uniquely bad and the source of all the problems in the world, and you start to get calls to go the other way again and show comparisons like the Ottoman slave trade so kids understand that non-Western countries are equally capable of evil.
What someone needs to hear and learn about in order to acquire an accurate view of events depends on their pre-existing beliefs, and that’s why you end up with this back-and-forth where people can’t agree on what needs to be taught. Eventually, maybe, you reach some kind of equilibrium, though that may be a vain hope in the current climate.
(I do think progressives often sell their predecessors short though, playing down their accomplishments in eg abolishing the slave trade and slavery by saying it was the result of economic self-interest (entirely incorrectly, as far as I can determine) or the achievements of the Civil Rights movement because it didn’t manage to reach perfect equality, and they don’t want people today to become complacent.)
That’s incorrect. The only requirement for oppression is that you find someone less powerful than you and choose to engage in one-sided violence against them. Oppression is an action and a choice, it’s not sun flares.
That’s incorrect. You can predict which actions they’ll oppose with almost perfect reliability simply by identifying the oppressive actions.
I oppose the IDF’s atrocities in Gaza, because they’re violently oppressive against helpless victims. I also oppose Hamas’s actions in Israel, because they’re violently oppressive against helpless victims. Nearly everyone on the left–including every progressive–that I know thinks similarly.
“What are some forms of information that undermine the simple ‘oppressor vs oppressed’ western narrative?”
Answer: Platitudes
1965: “The System is rigged against Black and brown Americans in favor of white Americans!”
2015: “Success! The System is now rigged against Black, brown and the vast majority of white Americans!”
The vast majority of white Americans: “Hey!”
“when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”
Some middle class young couple who can’t afford to buy a house or have kids aren’t going to listen to that crap.
Hopefully the middle class won’t vote GOP and only make their lot worse. But we’d also hoped the post-industrial working class wouldn’t get hooked on meth and make their lot worse, too.