Denial by a thousand cuts
Far left online spaces are slowly trying to build a way to minimize or deny Hamas's atrocities, and get cranky when you think that matters.
Leftists, in a thousand small ways, are denying the atrocities committed by Hamas.
I should clarify something. The average person - even the average progressive - has never encountered Leftist culture directly, so they usually just see ‘leftist’ as a broad slur for progressives. But when I say leftist, I literally mean people who describe themeslves as leftists, who use the term deliberately for their mostly-online political subculture. Leftists are people who call themselves and each other leftists.
Even if you’ve never encountered the subculture directly, its influence has seeped into more mainstream progressive culture. You probably know Leftists best as the people who, when progressives say “Nobody is saying X.” are in fact, saying X. They’re also best known for their explicit, genuine hate for liberals, and denying that they’re liberals. It’s like one of their main things. These are the easiest ways to identify them.
Leftism - as it actually exists in the real world, and not as an imaginary superideology that swallows all of communism, socialism and anarchism into itself - is super decentralized. It has no actual founding texts or theories to refer to. You might think “Wait, what about Marx? What about Foucault?” and the answer is still no, because being a leftist isn’t about agreeing with specific theories, but being part of a specific subculture, one that’s half-defined by how much leftists disagree with each other on Theory topics. All ideology is social, and the community is more important than the ideology it claims to exist around, no matter what they claim.
Despite being so invisible to normal people, Leftists ideas absolutely do percolate up and effect and influence more important people. I mean, if you’ve ever used The Discourse before, that’s a leftist meme from like 2015 Tumblr. It’s actually the perfect way to really think about Leftism too - Leftism is a subculture that claims to represent a coherent political ideology, but their main social activity is Discourse - chaotic reblog chains of inane activistspeak, chiding everyone for not already agreeing with them, both sides trying to cancel the other, and the issue only dying not because there’s progress and consensus, but just because the fad moves on.
A few years ago, I was a leftist too. I’ve seen everything I post about here from the inside, in some way or another.
Leftists are now denying Hamas’s atrocities, in order to protect Leftism.
I want to start with this.
OP here’s a relatively popular, relatively influential leftist account. Compared to your bog standard @ACABSailormoon’s or @pissdrinker69’s, Colin has an actual followers, including some with actual mainstream legitimacy, and has even been published in a few mainstream websites. Usually when talking about furry porn or video games, which is how you know he’s an expert on US politics.
This post was on October 12th, US Western time. CBS’s article with a firsthand eyewitness report was on October 11th. Of course, since then, we’ve also had the Jerusalem Post, and we’ve had pictures on Twitter posted by the Israeli government, we’ve had all kinds of confirmations, enough that any normal person, you’d think, wouldn’t so confidently say “The baby beheadings are misinformation” and perhaps have at least a little bit of doubt. It’s funny, in a hollow and bitter way, to see someone chide people for focusing on leftists because the President is out here spreading disinformation, while spreading disinformation.
But this isn’t really about denying baby beheading. This is about attempting to minimize Hamas’s massacre to as justifiable, reasonable an act as possible, to minimize anger at Hamas and refocus it on what Israel and Israelis have done wrong. The baby beheadings are just one example of this denial - slowly, the entire focus on Hamas atrocities and ability to acknowledge how uniquely evil it was, is getting progressively undermined.
Colin asks us to think about whose posts, what kind of posts, actually affect shit. Alright. Let’s consider it.
“We are powerless” is a fundamental belief in Leftism.
That little tweet thread above isn’t just about the Hamas denialism that’s engulfed leftist scenes. It’s also about defending leftism. It says that leftists are simply silly goobers who you overreact to, their posts aren’t important, and how dare you care when leftists do something bad or stupid when there are other bad people who exist as well? Don’t you have something better to care about?
There’s a lot at stake for leftists in all of this - and for many American leftists, what’s really at stake is nothing more than the credibility of leftism in general, its prestige, its mana. More “moderate” leftists (i.e. the ones who do the sanewashing) have a lot invested in the credibility of leftism, because they believe it’s the only political movement that can actually deliver a just world, and they know that threats to its credibility are existential - a lot of leftists have a founding “trauma”, so to speak, of how right wing internet culture was in 2014-2016, how desperately they tried to fight against it, and any sense that leftism is losing cultural ground can trigger the fear that it’s returning and they’ll go back to only being known third hand through cringe compilations that lie about their beliefs.
This “Don’t you have something better to care about?” is not an isolated sentiment in leftism. In part, it’s born from that same founding “trauma” of 2016. Here’s another example.
This mirror’s Colin’s feelings awfully well. Some leftists did something provably indefensible, but the people who are really at fault are, of course, the people who care when leftists do something wrong. The person who posted this was very much not pro-throwing-soup-at-paintings, but they absolutely needed to defend the people who did, however they can.
You cannot criticize Leftists for doing something stupid, because [insert sanewashing here]. And if they did actually do something stupid, you cannot criticize leftists for this, because don’t you have more important things to worry about? Um, it’s not a good look sis.
These more moderate leftists are absolutely friends with the ones they sanewash for - the radicals who they pretend mean “reform the police” when they say defund, who’ve had Decolonize and Land Back stickers on their laptops. The ones who’ve defended at length why it’s okay to post pretty violent sounding shit about white people or rich people and their kids or guillotine memes. The ones who say “This is what decolonization looks like” and “What did you think land back meant”. And if you have a problem with that umm, that’s not a good look sis.
Why do leftists say “This isn’t a good look sis” about having a problem with what leftists do? I mean, there is the self-interested image concerns I mentioned above, but the reality is, those leftists really do think that Leftist Did Something Silly is unimportant. They actually do think it’s weird to care. Why do they think that? Because leftism is about powerlessness.
No matter how much influence you think “wokeism” has, no matter how much you think “Every cultural institution leans left”, leftists, in their heart, feel totally powerless. They know that no politicians actually represents them, because “Oh legitimate office is all just a tool of the US empire” or whatever else they want to go with. Or they just assume that anyone who gets into office is spiritually tainted and morally corrupted by being forced to serve their Imperial Oligarchic Corporate Masters, except when the discourse of the day is about “We can use Bernie to build up to real leftism” or other shit, and then the mood switches just like that, because leftism isn’t about acting on deep principle, but letting your social environment tell you what to think.
Leftists are often people who are discriminated against in real life, and especially people with childhood or other trauma, and if you’ve ever spent time around leftists for two seconds, you know how overwhelmingly widespread that is. Leftists believe they’ve inherited the legacy of Black radicals, the Civil Rights Movement and other radical parties who got COINTELPRO’d, and they feel like the government is out to target and crush them. Leftists presume, usually without evidence of reason, that expressing anti capitalist opinions in movies, or as actors, or singers will get you blackballed by execs who feel threatened by communist movements, because business is also out to get you and they somehow think leftism is relevant enough to execs for them to deliberately blackball leftists, even when leftists literally get cast as fucking Namor in the MCU. Leftists are people who feel like they have no power.
The ones who don’t have NY Media jobs all have normie families who see them as the uncouth radical, and normie friends they can’t express their politics to. And frankly, judging by the tone in leftist spaces, half of those families put them through brutal emotional abuse to top that off. When they imagine the future, leftists - as the graph above suggests - see a boot stepping on the human race forever in a climate change armageddon that’s sponsored by Pepsi because liberals did late capitalism.
It’s pretty much forbidden in leftist spaces to focus on positive news instead of bad news, because bad news is validation to their attempts to turn their personal trauma into politics. It tells them “You’re right to feel this bad and perpetually angry, you are oppressed this badly and there’s nothing you can do, you should lash out at people who suggest otherwise forever”. This survey above says “liberals”, but given the age range it’s measuring and how it only used two labels, we can pretty confidently say that leftists were included in that group.
Why has it been okay for leftists or minorities to be able to make offensive jokes about majority groups? That’s easy. It’s punching up. It’s okay to talk aobut guillotining billionaires because it’s punching up. It’s okay to talk about violence behind your hello kitty avatar when you can’t make a phone call to the doctor because you’re too nervous, because it’s punching up, you’re just a powerless squib and people focusing on you are missing the point. You have no effect. So long as this is true, you can freely endorse as much political violence and claim as much moral high ground over it as you want, because let’s be honest, you know it’s never going to happen, you just want to be free to call for it and fantasize about it and endorse it.
Take those more radical friends that the moderate leftists have, who say “okay but killing white people is kinda based” - they aren’t racist. You see, racism is when Prejudice + Power. And more than nearly anything else, leftists feel powerless.
Leftists fucking love political violence.
Like, ideologically, fundamentally, they love political violence.
Leftists fantasize about only getting back at evil people, especially if it’s guillotines for capitalists. They really want you to know that they think punching Nazis is based, and usually, that this doesn’t go far enough. They’ll write books about why riots are awesome, because it’s violence against The Oppressor, so it’s based. Leftists love political violence.
They especially love violent rhetoric! Online feminists in 2013 - the proto-leftists of the day - loved to defend their right to say “Kill all men”, the Arkh Project gang loved defending their right to say “Die Cis Scum”, and the defense is always “we’re powerless and can’t do it, so it’s okay to say it.” That’s how you convince other well meaning friends and allies to not only enable it, but potentially say it themselves too, so now you can hide behind them too. Then you can go back to saying “Magneto was literally right, I would be on Magneto’s side and kill non-mutants”.
And then, in real life, Hamas appears to put the rhetoric of violent leftist fantasies into action. The oppressed rise against the oppressor. As an enlightened leftist, unlike those stanky civility-obsessed monocle-wearing liberals, you know that real change only comes through violence. Because Israel is such a powerful oppressor to fight, you can’t help but feel hopeful that this might finally mark a turning point, and the crushing sense of a bleak future filled with defeat after defeat might finally start to pass.
So you say “This is what decolonization looks like”, or you defend and sanewash the people who do.
And then the videos come out.
What can you do when you can’t sanewash the indefensible?
You simply deny that it matters, because you’re all powerless losers anyway so why would anyone care what you all think? Um, worry about the big problems. You have to get the heat off you, so people don’t start to think that all your violent fantasizing and plans for eco terrorism are actual violent fantasies that would involve actual violence, otherwise then you won’t get to enjoy the truly delusional degree of good faith you’ve been given by more important people for so long.
And so the only defense “Well it doesn’t matter”. Or “We can’t do that though, but oppressors can do it to us” will crumble, if the people who say “This is what decolonization looks like” say it about the baby beheaders and people who commit massacres.
The Leftist version of Palestine is a blameless victim who’s been as powerless as they are - they identify with Palestine, and Hamas doing bad things reflects badly on them. And even if the average Palestinian hates Hamas, if an oppressed group’s violent radicals are bad… well, that would reflect badly on leftists, who aspire to be the violent radicals of their own oppressed groups. So it cannot possibly be right.
Not to mention - the belief that Israel Bad is as deeply ingrained as America Bad. There’s no point speculating about the deep theory leftist justification for it, because the average leftist doesn’t know where it comes from. They just know popular tweets they’ve scrolled past confirm Israel is bad, and they know that you can’t say otherwise in their social spaces or you’ll be crushed like an empty soda can. So they adopt the belief instead, because it must be correct.
And because Israel is like America, that must mean Israel does conspiratorial lying propaganda in concert with Big Business, which is what Leftists already believe about The Corporate Media in America too, so everything that hints at sympathizing with Israel must be treated with maximum skepticism.
That’s the beginning of the why of denialism. This is the how.
Denialism
You cannot actually come out and say “Hamas did not kill civilians”. It’s obviously false. But denialism is more than just saying “It didn’t happen”. If you said “The holocaust happened, and it was very bad, but it’s too sensationalized”, of course that’s denialism, because minimization is denialism. If you say “Oh it happened, but it was mostly work camps which is normal for war prisoners through history”, that’s absolutely denialism, no matter how many times you avoid saying “It didn’t happen”, so long as you try to deny some of the most important key facts.
Leftists actually understand this, because Leftists definitely Nazis, and they hate everyone who denies war crimes that the West does, or defends them in any way (which usually means people who explain that they misunderstood the context of what happened). So I’m sure they won’t go out of their way to deny an-
Yeah. Let’s go through some of these. I want to push the point as much as possible that leftists are 100% doing this. What’s happening with Hamas’s massacre is gradually, all the most sensational facts, the worst atrocities, the things that most move ordinary people into sympathy with Israel, are slowly getting chipped away at.
I first felt how unhinged this was getting leftist started an argument with me on Twitter. First, the argument started by - again! - condemning me for bothering to care about what leftists were posting at a time when there was much worse going on. But then, it became how it was reasonable to be skeptical of baby beheadings, but also “btw the girl Hamas paraded around as a corpse was alive”. Then it becomes “We can’t focus on punching left right now, we have to focus on building a consensus for peace and an end to occupation, I am telling you that is the only thing that can help right now”. Or in other words - minimize, deny, and distract. And this shit just pisses me off.
You can’t say “Denying or minimizing or lying about atrocities is bad, especially when you’re do it by accusing other people of misinformation”, because there are More Important things going on and don’t you know leftists are powerless? Of course, in any other case, if you ever deny an atrocity America has done, leftists will absolutely crucify you. You can’t say “the girl in the video is very clearly dead and sadly, her mother’s sources don’t seem to hold up”, because everything that makes you feel gut churning dread and horror at what Hamas has done must actually be a lie or exaggeration by Israel to justify violence towards Palestinians, Israel can never be a victim of valid oppressed violence. And also, you have to focus on this goal I told you you need to have, which is again, about Israel not doing things that provoke Hamas, and also about letting Hamas get away with as little damage as possible.
“Oh that never happened, the whole thing is fake” makes you look insane. Instead say “Don’t uncritically accept the US and Israeli version of events and just assume there were beheaded babies, that’s obviously exaggeration to make people feel bad and justify war. Anyway, please take this grieving mother’s sourceless claim that the woman paraded around Gaza by Hamas, who was clearly and definitely dead, on video, is alive at face value.”
You have to chip away at each individual claim. Whatever you can’t deny, you minimize. Whatever you can’t minimize or deny, you just cast skepticism on and never elaborate. “There’s no proof that Hamas raped anyone”. “Those photos are fake”. “We just learned that [x event] was mischaracterized, who knows how much more it was exaggerated?” And each time you do it, you can focus on just this one part of the claim, while other people look to attack the rest of the edifice, chipping away at the entire thing one little detail at a time, however much you can.
And when you can’t even do that, you do this.
Anything at all that you can do to prevent sympathy going to Israel or Israelis, to preserve the sense of Israel as an uncomplicated villainous oppressor, which is not just about preserving worldview, but showing everyone else how hard you’re fighting for The Truth That The US Empire Wants To Suppress, to deny you have any responsibilities to common sense morality or decency because that’s just Lib Shit.
This paragraph might seem uniquely, shockingly insane, and yet this kind of call to avoid performing common decency is super common among leftists, who want to resist any and all attempts for The Empire or The Capitalists or The Libs to ask them to, for just one second, stop acting like violent freaks who justify bullying and gaslight people into thinking they deserve it and it didn’t happen, and then escalate from gaslighting about bullying to war crimes, for all kinds of insane spread out justifications, but ultimately, again, just because the subculture you’re in demands it of you, and some discourse will pop up telling you the reason why eventually, you don’t actually need to worry about it.
Don’t forget though, while libs can’t punch left because everyone needs to be unified for peace, if you think Hamas can win, then it’s okay for you to punch left!
Well, that aged badly. That’s okay, onto the whataboutism.
Good whataboutism, frogan! I would just like to point out that frogan here is a Twitch Partner. It’s okay! Keep up the whataboutism, eventually you can build from that to minimizing, and then questioning, and if you’re lucky you’ll be able to outright deny some events, and try to throw egg back in other people’s face for not being war crime deniers. Or, you can just be really really stupid, and that iwll probably work too because other leftists will see that you talk like them, and appear to be a burnt out gifted kir or whatever like them, and so assume you’re on the right track too because they love responding to actual arguments with dismissive insults
Good work! Apparently, there’s no difference between being pro-Palestine and being pro-Hamas. Picture that you’re an impressionable pokemon fanartist who’s just become mutuals with a bunch of leftists, who retweet things like this - do you think that maybe, an environment where speaking out with things that seem like obvious logic to you gets responses like this, and in fact endorsed by your friends, could warp you into picking up the insane ideology too? But that’s not insane enough for establishing a good culture of denialism frogan. Learn from the master.
Wow. Now that’s some insane denialism. This Twitch chatter is truly an example for all to follow. I sure hope that Hasan and his moderators banned this chatter for den- Oh, what’s that? Frogan is a moderator for Hasan? Ah. Well, not to worry. We can always look to elected officials who have leftist or progressive sympathies to show a more sane way of-
Lmfao. This is the whataboutist mode alright. Ilhan’s always been a bit too on the nose about sympathizing with insane leftist perspectives though, but the entire squad voted against the Iron Dome funding on ideological grounds not so long ago, with the exception of AOC, who voted “present”. But then again, to AOC’s credit, I can’t think of a single moment where she’s shown her ass through this entire ordeal. Let’s take a look at one of her other colleagues.
Hey, this could be a lot worse! It doesn’t say anyone deserves to die, it doesn’t try to defend Hamas, it looks totally agreeable! Unlike everything else, it doesn’t deny the actual massacre. Instead, it goes back to presuming “Israel bad, Palestine good” as a simple black and white view again, subtly and implicitly. Israel are the ones implicated as the ones who need to de-escalate, end violence and restore calm, even as Hamas is still engaging in war with them. There’s no implication that Hamas has any agency here, instead the usual, subtle treatment of them as just being a natural reaction to oppression that doesn’t need special analysis is calmly restored.
Look. You get the point.
What’s at stake here for Leftists, as people feel more sympathetic to Israel, is Palestine’s moral status as the Victim. That needs to be protected more than anything else. Palestine is the Oppressed, which also makes them The Good Guys. Any statements by oppresors like say, America, or Liberal Capitalists, about the oppresse is always risking full scale blowouts of the oppresed being steamrolled by oppressors at all turns. That’s why people like Rashida Tlaib can barely focus on the fact that Hamas - not even necessarily ordinary Palestinians, but Hamas! - is evil, and killed Israeli people in a horrible massacre.
Helpfully, Brie Brie said it outright - if the baby beheading and rapes were real, among the many many other horrible things Hamas did, then that *would* complicate things morally and not allow anyone to spend time on Israel Is The Villain And Only They Have Responsibility To De-Escalate.
Anti-Semitism
Leftists think that all anti-semitism looks like - and only like - nazis, or white rednecks, and occasionally, if you’re very lucky, they’ll acknowledge the Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan. They can imagine a version that cloaks itself in I Just Hate Israel, but whenever they imagine it, they still basically envision a far-right white American concern trolling, and not respectable Jordanian politicians or PhDs who’ve read Frantz Fanon. And of course, they think accusations of anti-semitism are just a way to deflect from Israeli crimes.
Leftists don’t conceive of Anti-Semitism as ever looking like the above tweet. They don’t think about how much anti-semitism exists in Arab countries, and how violent it really is, and they don’t think that maybe some people in the West from Arab countries also share those views. It’s not an important form of anti-semitism to them.
They sometimes recognize and think about this type, however. It does come up on their feeds.
You can’t deny that this is anti-semitism, and if you have a brain, you won’t try to call it an isolated one off incident, because it’s happened so many times in the same fucking way. Some Jewish store is vandalized with messages about Freeing Palestine on it. Unlike with the rest of what goes on in Leftism, I have no real intuitive understanding of the psychology of the people who are just outright anti-semitic. But I do know that when it does happen, once again, you have to dismiss and minimize every incident to make it clear there’s no anti semitism problem on the left or among people who are “just pro-Palestine”, because if you did, you’d call the whole thing into question.
The thing is - in leftist spaces, it’s very easy to encounter lots of surface support for Jewish people. There has been tons of discourse about detecting hidden right wing anti-semitism, and noticing it in the media - hell it’s been a huge theme in the leftist quixotic campaign against Hogwarts Legacy! It can’t be denied that when given a straightforward and unambiguous example - or, frankly, an ambiguous and debatable examplebut one that can be more easily linked to the right - leftists will jump at the chance to show that they’re phenomenal allies to Jewish people.
And yet, there’s obviously a double standard. Leftist discourse is littered with people who insisted that we couldn’t tolerate Activist Y even if they were great at supporting X, because they’re a terrible ally to Z, and all oppression is linked. Showing your support for Activist Y, refusing to condemn them, letting your balls gently touch the edge of a node on Activist Y’s social graph, and you have some explaining to do. Oh, you tolerate Y? Did you know that they hate Z people? Did you know that they did this anti-Z action? Here is my thread full of out of context screenshots about Y and their actions towards Z, and if you don’t immediately and uncritically believe it we can’t be friends and I’ll tell you to kill yourself and so will all the people who call you their friend right now.
Likewise, conservatives who try to distance themselves from the obvious racists in their ranks are treated with similar contempt, especially if they can be perceived at all as dogwhistling. Leftist activism holds that Intent doesn’t matter, what matters is Impact, so it doesn’t even matter if someone isn’t Xist on the inside, what matters is the effect their words and actions have on X people, who are a powerless oppressed group. And if you have an entire culture that minimizes and denies this to justify still being able to make offensive jokes about X people casually, or using slogans that historically were used to hurt X people but nobody is aware of the history of, then leftists will demonize that culture as irredeemably Xist.
So where, then, is this energy for Jewish people, when pro-Palestine rallies chant “Gas the Jews”? Where’s the energy for people like the Stanford instructor?
Here, this one’s a great example, because the tweet about it is wrong. She’s probably saying “martyrs” rather than murders but with her accent it’s just a little difficult to make out. And yet, could you get away with that kind of thing with any other oppressed group in leftism? Could you accidentally say something that sounded a little bit off, while hanging out in rallies that have in multiple major cities around the world had “gas the jews” chants break out, and clothe yourself in their aesthetics, and not be judged as one of The Bad Ones? As enabling them, legitimizing them passively, by simply lending your silence or minimization? No! But leftism isn’t about an actual theory of justice, but about rationalizing your trauma response or depression about your own sense of social powerlessness, and it only extends as far as your ingroup tells you it must. God knows they’re not arriving at these positions by logic.
Why do you think leftists say “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”? I saw another tweet saying “It’s frustrating that you can’t tell if someone uses it to mean a peaceful two state solution or ethnic cleansing”, and others saying “How could it mean anything other than ethnic cleansing”. But I’ll say that there’s a secret third thing - it means nothing. It’s an empty statement to signal that you believe some overall cause, one that you know absolutely fucking nothing about, that you have no understanding of, but you can imagine your own vague blurry wishcasted vision of some solution to that barely exists in your head, and so that’s what you use the slogan to mean. Assuming leftist really mean something by it when they repeat or endorse their friends saying it is to make the fundamental mistake that leftists actually have solutions or answers to things. They don’t have solutions. They have problems. That’s the entire ideology.
But it doesn’t really matter. It’s a slogan used by other people to mean ethnic cleansing of Jewish people, and that alone should disqualify it from use in polite leftist society, and it doesn’t. Because leftism isn’t about theory or justice, it’s about deferring your opinions to your social graph. That’s why leftists will sleepwalk blindly into anti semitism at every opportunity, no matter how much the things they argue aggressively for should make them stop for even two seconds, because those are just things they say to justify themselves, not the foundation of their belief. That’s just what they say to get away with shit.
And of course, you can never talk about it anyway.
Because then you’re just punching left. You’re treating powerless leftists like a problem when we need solidarity, so look over there instead and stop hurting the left. We’re unimportant powerless nobodies who also need to be united to do activism that will psychically make the Netanyahu stop trying to bomb the Gaza strip into rubble. It goes right back to where we started. To quote that first leftist above, its’ about “whose kind of posts, what kind of posts, actually effect shit”. No leftist has any difficulty doing the right thing on that when it’s about anti-Black racism or homophobia, but somehow, in this one, words this time are just words and you need to stop being a baby.
But obviously, this kind of post doesn’t affect shit, you’re just getting mad about Crazy Teens On Campuses like Bret Weinstein or something and you need to have some perspective. How does that saying go? “If there are 9 people at a table talking comfortably with 1 Nazi, there are 10 Nazis”. By professed leftist standards, they’re being anti-semitic in a way that absolutely cannot be tolerated, but you can’t have a problem with it, because you have to think about “whose posts actually matter”.
Fuck, sorry, I can’t really hide my contempt for this vile shit. This post is already super long and I still haven’t plumbed the depths of my disgust.
—
There is a lot of pressure in Leftist scenes to not just automatically disown or face up to bad shit other Leftists are doing. That leftist founding “trauma” of being lied about online makes leftists care in general a lot about how leftism is perceived, and yet, simultaneously, leftists also reject the idea that they have any ability to influence public perception of them. You cannot sacrifice other leftists for civility or decency, because you’re punching left and caving to libshit. In leftism, your exclusion from the mainstream, their hate or prejudice against you, is permanent and monolithic. Sacrificing your radicals for normie morality is just a slippery slope to sacrificing you next. Hamas is just another Freedom Fighting Radical group that normies hate, after all.
But they also fantasize about a mass movement of workers developing class consciousness.
But they also think persuasion is bullshit.
But they also think liberals and conservatives are fascists, but also that they’re workers who can develop class consciousness, but fascists need to be killed, but, but, but, but they also -
Look, there is no coherent ideology or strategy in leftism. All of this shit is so contradictory because the ideology is not just decentralized, it’s purely based on social proof, and so there’s no internal logic, there’s Discourse. As a leftist, what you do is reassure yourself that Expert Leftists have done all the logic and proven the ideology completely, so you can sit back and relax and let your beliefs exist in a blurry superposition of different Discourses, to be collapsed into one state based on whatever the most recent tweet you saw was. Nobody should ever act like they’re actually motivated by theory as opposed to just behaving as their culture demands them to.
Leftists believe that they’re powerless. They’re not really, but their power is so diffuse between them and indirect that none of them can perceive it. In reality, the truth is always that power in these kinds of spaces is communal, where the individual is relatively powerless, but has the power to endorse, amplify, or resist different trends. But because each individual in the space feels individually powerless, nobody ever feels like they’re doing something wrong, or part of wielding a massive amount of social power. This is the old thing about no snowflake feeling responsible for an avalanche. That’s why cancelling is always okay, because it’s always punching up.
In reality, I don’t think your moral worth as a person is determined by what horrible things you don’t do because you lack the power to act them out, but what horrible things you might do if you really had the means you want. For leftists, their status as eternally powerless victims ensures that they never get to act out the horrible things they want to do, openly fantasize about, spend so much time defending their right to do, ESPECIALLY those fucking guillotine memes that even the most “moderate” leftist will indulge in, and they feel morally superior not because they would never do those things and think they’re wrong, but because they’ll never get to and so will never have to be judged for it and taken seriously. They’re morally lucky enough to have no ability to act on their fucked up ideology.
Which, of course, the whole point of moral luck is that if you consider it real, it breaks morality. If the only thing keeping you from acting out your insane levels of depraved violence for your ideology is the fact that you lack the ability, or you just want to wait until everyone else wants to, you’re not actually a better person for it. If the opportunity arose, you’d act on the exact thing you want to act on. You’re not a better person just because you’ve morally lucked out on getting the opportunity - you’re as bad as if you’d act on it.
Unless of course, you don’t actually mean it, you’re just joining in on the performance with everyone else and you’ll back out of it the second it gets too real, but until then, you’ll deny how real it is while simultaneously upholding the people who insist it’s real and claiming that they’re just in some way joking without joking, trying to resist the realization of how real this makes it. Congratulatoins, you’re not one of the true sickos, you’re just an enabler.
Mind you! Maybe this screenshot isn’t a great example of that, because Kareen Attiah, who wrote this article, also retweeted the above “This is what Decolonization looks like” tweet. So rather than just sanewashing for her insane friends, she may actually just be engaging in the same types of denialism we’ve seen above about the entire massacre. As you can see, the number one top priority for leftists isn’t “Wow, something has to be done about Hamas, this situation is more complicated than I thought”, but to protect the Leftist stance on the issue. Here’s a much better example of being an enabler.
Which, in a way, inspires more contempt in me than the people who just outright want to do revolutionary violence. That’s just a personal thing - sickos will be sickos, but enablers have to carefully think and justify the ways in which Sickos will be Sickos. But maybe that’s unfair - Leftist enablers are the type who’ll see a developing country politician talk about American or British crimes against his country and confidently retweet it with the attitude that everyone needs to learn about this and agree, without realizing that this politician stands for the Kill All Trans Children Party because they don’t know anything about that country, but they feel like they do relative to normies due to their superior political subculture.
What will be particularly pathetic to me though is that leftists will go on after this, after forgetting it,a fter forgetting how much war crime denial or minimization and depravity and evil they engaged in, how much they humiliated themselves by rrefusing to go “Woops, we endorsed Hamas a little too much” and admitting how much their act of Knowing Politics And World Events is a facade borne from being able to remember popular posts on your timeline rather than actual understanding, and still go on with this undeserved smug moral superiority
One last move is to say “These are tankies, who leftists condemn”, and I’m sorry, but that’s just not true. The boundary between tankies and regular leftists has gotten more blurred over time thanks to some crypto-tankies becoming more prominent, but the reality is, the people who are Moderate And Thoughtful Socialists are not the real core leftists, it’s the people who post furry porn in between their threads about why the US Empire must be destroyed. Before the Ukraine war started, it was normal, non-Tankie leftists who were raising concerns all over social media, for years, that Ukraine was full of nazis. Leftists have still never questioned where all of these concerns came from. The non-tankie leftists, at least, have mostly moved on from this delusion, but tankie concerns constantly creep onto regular leftists in all kinds of ways. When you’re a leftist, someone touching your leftist social graph probably denies war crimes in Syria, and you just sanewash for them because “Oh, I’m not well read on that, I’ll leave it for now but the leftist view is usually right lol”, and passively absorb it even just a bit. Tankies and Leftists aren’t as cleanly separated as it might look.
And once you can’t do that, you’re left with really only one conclusion - Leftists are Bad. Like, genuinely, morally insane. The people whose main thing is being against war crime deniers, punching nazis and believing victims will make sure that the only victims they believe are Palestinian ones and never Israeli or Jewish ones, to deny any war crimes if it’s by their chosen victims, to call you evil and fascist and genocidal for pointing this out, to deflect, deny, minimize, whatabout and then cry that you think their awful behaviour is worth talking about for two seconds, and then fail to punch any of the nazis who show up at their Palestine rallies. This is not just a normal little annoying subculture that it should be okay to share social graph nodes with on Twitter, this is a deranged and abusive subculture in more ways than just this which will consistently produce detached, smug, privileged westerners who love political violence but aren’t brave enough to make doctor’s appointments over the phone.
And as the subculture demands, they’ll be sure to bring Politics into everything they touch, so you can’t even exist in other groups where Leftists may be that don’t have “no-politics” rules, because they’ll take that one over too, because they’re committed to it. That’s why I can’t simply exist in normal trans spaces, because trans spaces have been totally co-opted by leftists. Leftists should be treated like an extremist radical fringe, ostracized and excluded in the same way we treat other radical fringes. This doesn’t even have to mean excluding all socialists, or etc, because like I said above, they’re not necessarily Leftists. It’s leftists who should no longer be accepted. They have proven they deserve it.
—
As I’ve been writing this post, pretty much every hour, I’ve stumbled upon a new thing I wanted to include to make my point about the genuine inhumanity that leftist culture trains otherwise optimistic and idealistic teens and 20 somethings into adopting. I come across a new perfect example all the time - at this opint, I have to stop adding to it, even though I really want to talk about Jeremy Corbyn and how uncritically popular he was among leftists as a soft-hearted perfectly ethical good guy. I really, really, really want to talk about leftist norms about abuse and personal conflicts and how they betray every one of them in situations like these and lie and say that they don’t. I really want to talk about how popular Twitch streamer Hasan, who has been given so many mainstream fig leafs of credibility, has left his streaming and business partner Ethan Klein (h3h3productions) in tears over the way he’s treated Hamas’s massacre. I’ve especially wanted to talk about the reaction of his discord chat during this, but at this point, I just have to stop. Leftists will invent new forms of denialism every day now. I can’t keep up.
But there’s just one last thing I want to draw attention to.
This is an interaction between a bigger name, someone with a podcast, webcomic and patreon and over 100k followers, and a no name leftist. The no-name leftist reminds me so much of me - this is the invisible part of leftist consensus building, and you can see the sanewashing in real time, as the small name leftist responds to vastly, vastly overconfident claim of “These documents from Hamas are obviously fake and propaganda and NBC news is an idiot” with an attempt to find a way to stay on board and endorse the other person’s logic, but not break the spell themselves. Normal, small leftists everywhere can be like this, and this is how they enable the freaks. A few years ago, that probably would’ve been me.
Maybe just one more.
Thanks Shaun for demonstrating what I said above. I’m not editing out this guy’s name, given his two hour video about how there could be no possible justification for nuking Japan that was probably mostly written by his ex, because he’s one of the most prominent leftist names out there that most leftists can agree is on the right side. He’s as representative as it gets.
Thank you for writing this. I’ve been losing my mind over the past month as a Jew living in Canada.
Thank you. I stumble slowly into online leftist spaces and every time something like this happens get so repulsed I find myself unsubscribing and unfollowing almost all my daily content.