"I mean, I consider myself a leftist. But I get into a lot of arguments, because I think a lot of the time there’s this romanticization. . . . I think people’s hearts and their desires are in the right places. These are people who are seeking justice and equity and to live in a better place. But sometimes I feel like they are repeating the same things that I grew up with. Nobody talks about what happened and what will be done differently.
If you look at the world at the end of the 1970s, when I was a child, leftist forces and ideas had captured much of the developing world. Of course, they were in combat with right-wing forces and ideas. Nobody’s pretending that communism was just allowed to flourish. When we talk about things like the Black Panthers and people say, “But COINTELPRO” . . . Well, of course, if you’re attempting to overthrow the government, the government is going to work against you. This is just A plus B. If you’re looking for a world in which those in power just allow you to remove them from power, it doesn’t exist. So if I’m evaluating a revolutionary movement, part of how I’m evaluating it is the ability to overcome those obstacles, or at least whether you planned or had a logical, sound idea of how to do so.
I have that same problem now sometimes talking to people about Palestine and Israel. People say, “Oh well, this is a sad and upsetting moment, but this is the most Palestine has ever been in the world consciousness.” And I’m like, no it’s not! We’ve done this several times! We’ve done this! Palestinians have the right to resist; the oppressed have the right to use violence to throw off their oppressors. At the same time, I think it’s important sometimes to look and say what has happened when this has happened. And steadily over the course of my life as a person who grew up in a profoundly anti-Zionist culture, country, and domestic environment, [I observed] how Israel has gotten more territory, how it got more powerful, and how Palestinian lives have become more and more miserable.
When I was a child, Palestinians moved freely through Israel. Now, after two intifadas and several wars, Palestinians are worse off than they ever have been and are currently being ethnically cleansed. It’s okay to question what these movements have done for their people. I’m not going to sit here and say that Hamas is great just because they fight. Lots of people can fight, and if you fight and lose or every time, everything you do helps your opponent... The Israelis actually used Hamas’s growth to split the Palestinian movement and neuter it in many ways. It’s okay to acknowledge that and look at things.
For example, when I was a kid, I found the Shining Path really exciting and fascinating. And then later in life, I was thinking: thank god they didn’t win. That doesn’t make their opponents good. But the Shining Path was a cult of personality led by a psychopath.
In the 1970s, ostensibly leftist movements were in power in many parts of the Middle East and also were the dominant groups fighting for revolution and liberation in Palestine. And here we are now. The failure of those governments, the rise of political Islam, and the failures of the secular state in the Middle East have profoundly changed the whole dynamic. Now if you’re talking about the Middle East and resistance movements, you’re almost always talking about movements that are religious in nature. And you see the rise of political Islam and the sidelining of socialism.
Some of that is also the failure of ostensibly socialist states that just became kleptocracies and dictatorships. There’s nothing wrong with wanting and desiring revolution. But [there should be] some level of recognition that in any revolution you’re letting a tiger out of the cage. What’s going to happen after that is hard to say."
- billy woods
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