I keep trying not to get political on here too much but there are things that Need To Be Said so like
Y’all...people are actually arguing that it’s better to have Trump as president because biden will make people “complacent.”
The nature of humanity is that every so often someone reinvents Christian extremist fundamentalism again?
This is not the End Times, we do not need to watch the world descend into hell so God will come and annihilate evildoers faster, nobody is going to come and Rapture the believers out. None of this is inevitable, and even if it was inevitable because of some biblical prophecy we still shouldn’t attempt to hasten disaster because this isn’t the Bible where evildoers will get obliterated in the firestorm while the believers get taken up into heaven. This world IS our home, and no matter what we have to live in the ruins of what happens.
Trump getting a second term is not going to light the destructive flame that creates a glorious rebirth. Please study history. The darkness of fascism does not forge the light of a fair and equal society in its darkness. IT’S FASCISM.
Everyone is talking about “revolution.” And there’s definitely this idea that if things just get bad enough, complete upheaval will occur, and that will somehow fix everything.
I don’t think armed revolution is what the majority of people are seriously discussing as the needed solution, but let’s look at it for a second, because it connects.
Just from a “history major and general nerd about this sort of thing” perspective. I know it’s Memes, but I don’t like to see the idea of “revolution” as salvation for all the problems. We cannot turn the world off and turn it back on again. It is impossible. People have tried. The world we have is to some extent what we have to work with, no matter what. Even if it was possible to completely annihilate all traces of the American system, our government, our laws, our institutions, we would still not be free of them, and the racism and colonialism that exist in them, because they would still exist in us.
Of course, drastic changes probably will happen and are needed, and we should actively try to change, not just within our institutions. But...even the memes, the jokey tweets...I feel uneasy about them. Please don’t mythologize the idea of revolution and especially not the idea of destruction. Revolution as purifying fire is...not reality. It’s more along the lines of propaganda. It’s a fundamental part of the American myth, that we created The Ideal Society through destroying what came before in violent revolt.
Armed revolution leads to a variety of things in real life:
The revolution being violently crushed, resulting in mass death and even more repression
The revolution popping up on and off for years, resulting in years of chaos adding up to massive amounts of death
The revolution being co-opted by violent extremists who create an even worse government than before
the revolution not being co-opted by violent extremists, but still creating a worse government than before
The revolution succeeds in name, but in practice the government makes concessions and nothing actually changes except that there was mass death
The revolution succeeds in name, but the leaders of the revolution are buddies with the minority faction in the old government or with other powerful interests in the old government and it’s kind of the same thing again
The revolution creates a government that is better, but that still is deeply flawed and needs to be gradually reformed and improved
The idea of “overthrowing” a set of complex institutions and building a new one without the problems of the old from the ground up is a fairy tale, y’all. The new institutions...almost can’t avoid referencing the old ones, and sometimes they’re the same thing again. Sometimes they have the same problems, or even more problems. It’s never going to be from the ground up, because you literally can’t destroy every institution in a society. The difficult fact is that change tends to happen gradually and in many increments. (Those increments can be violent revolts, of course, but sometimes they aren’t.)
It’s also worth discussing that yeah, violent revolt often results in mass death of innocent people. And I mean sometimes people under a repressive regime gotta be like “no more.” From a historical perspective it’s like...it happens. But it’s a hell of a thing to glorify as the one true solution to all ills, especially at the exclusion of other forms of action. The mass death being mass death and everything. It’s heavy shit.
All this to say...don’t fall for the same mythology that leads Christian fundamentalists to eagerly anticipate the inevitable apocalypse—that by annihilating everything that exists now, a new, “purified” existence can rise from the ashes. That’s not reality. We absolutely do not need things to get worse so we can avoid “complacency,” or so we can trigger the revolution that rebuilds everything. We don’t need fascism to make things Bad Enough that we can finally attempt to overturn the System, and even if there was a causal connection there, it might well result in mass death and fascism and nothing else. No one is coming to Rapture the believers into heaven. This is the earth we have and there isn’t another one. Evil and destruction do not galvanize and purify; this is real life and they kill people.
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