The war in Afghanistan was never about helping anyone. 🙄
queermunist
If this becomes a fad among progressives I'm all for it.
Never gave up on any of the other demons the Republican Party produced, though.
If they had any hope in them it's embarrassing.
The work week took everyone's time away, sure, and No Kings took the weekend away - the nail in the coffin.
I think we'll see more outbursts from the masses in the future (a single weekend of counterrevolution can't actually pacify the masses forever) but I think they bought themselves time with this stunt.
What seems to have happened is No Kings sucked all the oxygen out of the room and the confrontation in LA has calmed down. Yesterday there were no overnight arrests for the first time since the protests began. The struggle isn't over, but it seems to have been pacified in LA.
They're also just ignorant of recent history and somehow forgot that regime change in Syria took over ten years.
The fact that they invited Nixon, Reagan, Bush 1 & 2, and even Trump the first time around is appalling.
What “potential leftism” was derailed by these protests?
The anti-deportation protests that were crushed by the military had the potential to become another summer of uprisings.
Although of course the uprisings in 2020 weren't really "leftist" and were just an outpouring of outrage from the masses, and of course there is no organized left to lead the masses towards productive action, but the purpose of No Kings was certainly to help Trump prevent unrest.
It's the algorithms. They only promote the monoculture and everything else stays off your feed. Either people get sucked into the game or you never hear from them again because the algorithm has silenced them.
Zizek, like Chomsky, is popular precisely because he helps metabolize radical politics into a form that the bourgeois hegemon likes. They allow him to gain mainstream appeal because he is no threat.
Of course, the purpose of a system is what it does.
But that means there is no path to fixing anything through voting, and in fact, the worst thing is people believing that voting "works" and voting is the only thing they have to do to change the system. We aren't going to give Democrats comeuppance to Democrats by voting for them either. Voting is a busybox.
Do something else.
Not cynical enough.
The goal of the war was to destroy Afghanistan and kill its people. The empire needs to "mow the grass" periodically to keep the underdeveloped world in its place.
Same in Iraq. Same in Libya. Same in Syria. The death and destruction is the point.