Thanks!

I would say that if a word has been misused for a century it actually just has a new meaning. And I’m not aware of it ever being used consistently.

I didn’t conflate antizionism and antisemitism - you conflated Zionism and Judaism and I criticized you doing so.

You should read what I wrote again.

Fun fact that runs parallel to your point: it’s not terrorism if you only destroy property.

Terrorism is defined as using violence (or the threat of violence), against civilians, in pursuit of a political goal. All 3 requirements must be met for it to be terrorism: violence, civilians, politics.

Many people who only damage property are still labeled as terrorists by the powers that be. The dictionary can be quite misleading, as it does not really analyze inconsistent usage, particularly for political or propaganda purposes.

For example, “ecoterrorists”. Classically labeled as such even when just destroying property. Or even sometimes just for slowing down logistics. Predominately First Nations protesters and activists were labelled “ecoterrorists” by Rick Orman, citing examples like chaining themselves to equipment.

The inconsistent usage has at least two means of biased use. I’ve already mentioned one, which is using the term for those damaging private property or slowing down enterprise, i.e. equating damage to private property as violence (when private enterprise seizes land or destroys water this is never called ecoterrorism). The other is in inconsistent application: it is a label only routinely used by the targets of capitalist-run states. When their states destroy entire cities and target civilians, it is not called terrorism. When their targets go after a politician insteas of strictly military installations, suddenly they are terrorists. Hell, they can be called terrorists even when going after only military targets. The actusl use of the term corresponds to the means used and the political and ethnic background of those engaging in the acts more than whether the acts are violence for political (isn’t everything political?) ends. Terrorism is when a car bomb and not a JDAM.

The real meaning of terrorism must be understood through describing its actual mainstream use. Descriptivism not prescriptivism, lest we miss the reality of propaganda. This is important because the term will continue to be used as I described and to justify rounding up protesters that occupy buildings or block highways or burn down a Tesla dealership. It doesn’t really matter ehat the dictionary says, tge law will say enough, the cops will arrest on orders of preventing “terrorism”, the judge will convict and sentence based on calling a dumpster fire terrorism, and one might even get sent to a black site to contain such “dangerous” people, “terrorists”.

And this is not new. Anarchists and other cool people were lazily labelled exactly the same way over a century ago for the same types of acts.

lmao trying to pretend that trying to leave a building you’ve been locked in by force, by cops, is protester violence.

You are, to put it mildly, full of shit. The only violence was the police beating and hurting protesters.

Please try to be more honest going forward.

lmao did you even read what I wrote about conflating private property damage and violence?

Bill Gates? The Epstein guy?

Sure, but let’s step back and analyze it a little more.

Protest itself does not achieve political change. Its usefulness is in direct action or in recruiting those present into further action, education, and organizations. Liberal protests are state-sanctioned parades. Real protests tend to have an actual action to take, demands to be met, people to impact, costs to incur on others.

The terminology of “peaceful protest” is already poisoned and should be questioned. The media and politicians - and those propagandized downstream, all conflate private property destruction and violence. If a protest breaks windows, suddenly it is no longer “peaceful” and can be rejected by the propagandized as invalid and not to be supported. The US is full of such good little piggies, happy to align with the ruling class picking their pocket and doing actual violence because they exist exclusively in a world of capitalist propaganda.

Under these auspices, all direct action that the capitalist system wants to crush is, will, and has been labelled terrorism. It’s already done this for private property destruction by environmentalists, peace activists during all major wars (except WWII, where American Nazis were coddled and of course did not damage private property), labor organizers, anti-segregation organizers, socialists, communists, Mexicans, Chinese, Native Americans, etc. They happily do it again against anti-genocide protesters, particularly because they can play on the islamophobic use of the terrorism label at the same time. Like all fascistic logic, they must frame themselves as the true victims, so they also happily call every critic of Israel an antisemite.

All of this bombards the US population 24/7. Americans exist in a haze of accusations and terms they barely understand, trying to slot it into what could only charitably called an ideology - the naked reactionaries in red and the obfuscated reactionaries in blue.

All of this is to say that the greatest barrier in the US is education, and education begins with agitation, e.g. these protests in any form. Get as many people as possible to show up to the next thing, to organize the next thing, and spread knowledge.

A stunningly ignorant and antisemitic comment.

Jewish leaders? I assume you mean Israel, which despite that entity’s propaganda, cannot be conflated with Judaism.

Russia does not have a dictator. It is a capitalist oligarchy much like other counties, and they keep Putin as their face because he is good at what he does. With the support of the bourgeoisie and lsrge teams of bureaucrats and oligarchical functionaries, he can and will be replaced and there will be a full continuity of policy. Russia also has little historu of “trying to Annex Ukraine”. The area now known as Ukraine has been occupied by a number of nations (the territory was much smaller and constantly bullied by Poles and Lithuanians), but Ukrainian national identity, and its current borders, is something largely created within the last century at the behest of the USSR. Ukrainian national identity and independence was created by the inheritors of the Russian Empire, the Bolsheviks.

China, like any state, engages in “population control”, but this highlighting it as such - including the telltale sign of a Redditor brain Winnie the Pooh reference that nobody else actually cares about - is ignorant chauvinist orientalism. China is also not engaging in minority segregation. Quite the opposite.

The US, similarly, does not have a monarch. It is also run by the bourgeoisie, it is the global epicenter of the global haute bourgeoisie. Everything there happens with the consent and often prodding of that class and most political “change” is the result of fights between its members. The legislative branch could toss out, e.g., Trump, whenever it pleased, legally. Does it refuse to do so because Trump will send his knights to kill them? Because they hold land titles only at his pleasure? No, it is because they are all beholden to the same masters, the people who actually sign all of the checks, produce all of the media, and control production.

The “spats” in the Middle East are a continued Western-backed genocidal bombing campaign on Yemen, the only country in the region outside of Iran doing anything in solidarity witg Palestine, and a Western-backed Daesh/HTS takeover of Syria that makes Assad look like a kitten. Also very friendly with Israel, antagonistic to ethnic minorities, and belligerent towards Hezbollah.

India is trying to start a war. It already occupies Kashmir with massive troop levels. Taking land may be part of the plan, but their goal is really to weaken Pakistan and feed into Hindutvas via kneejerk nationalism.

The US was already the old Reich, history just whitewashes it. The US was the Third Reich’s biggest political influence. The US is premised on genocide, chattel slavery, and shifting tides of racism and marginalization to scapegoat and exclude to serve capital. Terrorizing Latines has a long history, this is a revival. The US bourgeoisie creates a contradiction, which is that it creates an economic underclass of largely latine immigrant workers of precarious legal status in order to hyperexploit their labor but then scapegoats them when eveyone else inevitably hits an economic diwnturn. Marginalization has always been used for this dual purpose in the US. Eugenics has been here, it is just whitewashed with racialized poverty being treated as “normal”. Death camps and work camps have been here, slowly ramping up over decades. The current volume actually isn’t that high compared to the last decade. It has been this bad, they just don’t put the spotlight on it.

Please educate yourself before speaking.

The country in question never denazified, it just banned Nazi aesthetics. The underlying practice of scapegoating and war and anticommunism were never dealt with. Nazis were kept and promoted in positions of power. There, the holocaust is taught as something focused solely on Jewish people, ignoring the systematic killing of communists, Roma, LGBTQ+, and slavs. Germans are taught to feel proud of their shame towards Jewish people and that are now experts at it, gladly admonishing anyone that, say, does not conflate Judaism with the genocidal apartheid settler colonial ethnic supremacist project known as Israel. This, of course, means that Germans remain deeply antisemitic, just with new aesthetics that, rather than scapegoat Jewish people, pigeonholes them into a violent project against brown people that must be supported at all costs.

Of course, there are Germans that do properly reckon with this history and are coherently against antisemitism and settler colonial genocide. They are the subject of this state crackdown, the state itself being an eager lapdog for US empire, happily complicit in yet another genocide.

The trade unions are calljng for one then

Nationalists will so long as they can wrap it into their logic of domination. That is surely why Modi et al thought they could start an all-out war.

Organizations vary massively by region, but if you oppose this war I recommend getting plugged in locally, especially if there can be any kind of tie-in with the May 20 planned strikes. That is probably the most powerful action that could be taken against war, though not at all an easy one.

As always, don’t reveal any personal info online, e.g. telling me/others your locale! Stay safe and organize carefully.

The silly appeals to fallacies and then ignoring basically everything I say is super debatebro.

Is this the second or third recently?

The information is in the thread you are replying to. And no, you actually don’t, becauae what we are discussing is your paternalistic liberal response to others refusing to donate to a transphobe and then your leaning on debatebro fallacy misunderstandings when I explained what was wrong with it.

If you can’t self-criticize and adapt then just don’t respond.

Why do I need to prove a negative? Get your fallacies in order! I also recommend against relying so much on trying to identity fallacies, as we are not exactly engaging in formal modus tollens here and what I am saying to you is intended to get you to critically engage with what you are saying, not be an unassailable treatise on resistance that covers every eventuality.

Societal liberalism reinforces the status quo, or I should really say, reinforces capitalism, and that tends to mean reproducing oppressions that can be leveraged by capital. Even the existence of reactionaries who marginalize others is often in the interests of caputal. “Don’t blame the people firing you for losing your job, it must be the immigrants doing this to you! Hey, don’t complain about your life, at least you’re not [oppressed group]” These serve very practical functions for disunity among people that could otherwise find common ground against the interests of capital.

The liberal tut-tutting of what is supposedly ineffective opposition is part of this as well. It comes from op-eds from ghoulish warmongers, those complicit in genocide, and a political class invested in you not actually aligning against oppressors in any meaningful way. Notice the complete lack of action from yourself in doung anything about this transphobe. Just pushing against those who do. Ask yourself what role you are playing.

As a capitalist company, their goal is to maximize profit. Their previous marketing and products were intended to increase their monopoly position. Now they are trying to take more profit based on that monopoly position. Every large company tries things like this.

How it came together is that Houthis started taking out jets from aircraft carriers and the US ran home, being unable to implement their only remaining military strategy: bombing brown civilians with impunity.

Reactionary nationalism has no place on lemmy.ml

Hindu nationalists are very inspired by Israel and want to mirror it as an oppressive ethnostate. They align completely on using islamiphobia to do so, as well, right down to the slurs they use.

Hindu nationalists currently control Indian national politics.