Pandora's Diaries | Thought
it's difficult to parse all the varied ways i have come to hate this oppressive world. there are so many layers and intricacies to our suffering, but it is not like an onion, it is a rot. the rot has become a darkness so great it permeates every aspect of our lives. we cannot even love one another without the tentacles of capitalism and colonialism getting between us. a society built on borders and walls will never liberate us. in so many ways, maybe because of a lack of courage or imagination, we become prisoners to this world. we call it surviving, but are we living? can we even know who we really are within the confines of ideologies that seek to subjugate us? and if we are strangers to ourselves, how can we build bridges of solidarity to 'the other?'
yes, i have come to hate it here. the sacrifices needed to make it in the land of milk and honey have become too great. the bees are dying and the milk has spoiled. what are we even trying to preserve in this rot? it's not just our labour that must be given at the altar of capitalism, but also our blood, our literal humanity, families and communities. this violence that keeps us on our knees must be turned outward. but what and who is our target? depending on material conditions, you will get many different answers from socialists, communists and anarchists, but maybe the best place to begin is ourselves. we offer our whole lives to the death cult of the state but what are we willing to sacrifice for liberation? are you willing to slaughter the enemy within?
the first death is the hardest. it's when we begin to understand that the end is just the beginning, and that every revolution is not a singular event but a journey of revolutions within revolutions, that we see why death is necessary. violence is necessary. some of us are seeds, some of us are the soil, still, others are the sunshine and the rain; and like the cycles of the natural world, even the rot has its place. we can mourn what we lost, but do the trees cry over their leaves decomposing on the ground? maybe they comprehend in ways we are just beginning to see, that roots of solidarity are stronger than the death that shatters our perceptions of existence in this world.
false choices.
as we descend further into fascism we will be presented with an array of false choices. the same dichotomies and paradigms that brought us to the oppressive 'here' will be repackaged and offered up as new "solutions." our world will become so so small, as we build more and more walls both physically and ideologically. so we are here, in the belly of the beast with an ever-increasing number of hungry bellies to feed, asking questions that only keep feeding the systems we seek to abolish.
the answers we are looking for will not be found by asking questions that keep the same frameworks in place. we must subvert the very ways we think of this world and most importantly how we view ourselves within (and not above) the network of life necessary to keep this earth alive. this is where we can look to the zapatistas of mexico to help guide us to ask the right questions to create new ways of being. concepts like 'a world where many worlds fit' give us glimpses into what is possible.
"we agreed that if it wasn’t possible to do it in this world, then we would make another world, a bigger, better one where all the possible worlds fit, for the ones that already exist, and the ones that we haven’t yet imagined."
-EZLN
often we are presented with false choices, for many reasons, but at the root, it's to keep the same power dynamics in place. these power dynamics are often fed by fear that feeds the dominant ideologies in place (capitalism, colonialism, heteropatriarchy, etc). it is easier to lie and betray, to offer reform with coded revolutionary language, and even to destroy than to create alternatives and question the assumptions we make about ourselves and each other. in what ways have we been invested in our own oppression, and by the very nature of power, the oppression of others, by not questioning the structures we've been complicit in. maybe because we lack courage and imagination to see new worlds we keep recreating old ones.
liberation is possible. but we cannot stay the same people born out of the old one. this is an uncomfortable truth and internal violence that must be committed against ourselves. but this too is a false choice born out of the duality frameworks that keep the systems we're fighting in place. because out of this sacrifice comes new life, new ways of being and thinking, and new questions to be asked.
By Eshal Zahur
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