It’s honestly so fucked up that I have to worry in leftist spaces that talking about rehabilitative justice will lose me friends.
In 2010 I took a class called Terrorism in the Modern World, which was one of the best classes I’ve ever taken. We learned all about the causes and cyclical effects of terrorism, about why people get seduced by dangerous worldviews, about how we cannot possibly offer more than palliative solutions until we reckon with the task of trying to understand them. About how futile America’s endless escalations have been. It was awesome.
The following year, when Osama bin Laden was killed, all my liberal friends joined me in reminding the world that he might have done terrible evil, but he was still a human being. We huddled together to grin smugly about how much more empathetic we were than those evil hawkish conservatives. Not that I endorse that, but we were 18. Point is, at the time we construed liberalism, and leftism more broadly, as an explicit rejection of the vengeful, punitive ethic that was blanketing our world. And I know we were not alone in that. Liberals around me talked about prison reform, about transitions from criminal dysfunction back to a productive life, about reaching out to the people who were hardest to reach. I was, at that time, proud to call myself a bleeding-heart liberal.
And now I’m seeing them, the very same leftists who joined me in calling for empathy with our enemies, posting endless diatribes against those they deem too far gone for any kind of understanding. The same people who stood up in a sea of patriotic zeal and reminded us that terrorists were real human beings with motivations beyond mustache-twirling villainy are the people I see calling Trump supporters garbage, calling them worthless, calling any attempt to understand them “collusion with the oppressor”. I’m over here advocating the same exact outreach I’ve advocated all my life, the same outreach you once praised me for, but now because it’s your pet enemy I’m evil and weak and awful for it.
These were once my people, and now I don’t recognize them. I’m horrified to see them acting exactly like post-9/11 nationalist zealots, dismissing any attempt at understanding or empathy as spineless, as cowardly, as oppressive. You think I haven’t heard this all before? I’ve heard it all my life. I was a child when 9/11 happened. I don’t remember a United States not at war in the Middle East. My whole life I’ve been a pacifist, raised by pacifist parents in a pacifist community, and my whole life I’ve heard that trying to understand and reach out to your enemy instead of fucking annihilating them was weak and cowardly and siding with the terrorists. The difference is that I once had the left on my side.
Your principles do not cease to apply when it’s your pet enemy on the chopping block. Believe it or not, people who got cruel and hawkish in the face of terrorism were exactly as scared and powerless-feeling as you are now. They weren’t spouting martial rhetoric out of pure evil – there was real fear there, but they let it make them into hateful people with no sense of empathy or common humanity. Like hell I’m going to let that happen to people I once called mine.
Holy fuck, this.
The reason I don’t want to punch Nazis today is because I had all the violent graphic appalling vengeance fantasies about bin Laden…
…and by the time we got him I didn’t believe in war any more.
If we believe that extremism is seductive, why do we want to punch the people it seduces? Does half of Tumblr have some weird belief that a good whack on the head will dislodge it, like curing a mindwiped character in a cartoon show?
Thiiiiiiiiiiiiis
I can respect people who draw their lines for “When is punching the guy considered an act of defense, rather than offense?” in a different place than I do. But a lot of what I’m seeing on the Left (not just on Tumblr, but in a lot of Leftist spaces) is straight up warmongering on a small scale.
Now, I’m a Filthy Liberal, not a true Leftist, so maybe this is one of those idealogical differences that I didn’t pick up on until I understood the distinction between those two things, but…I seem to recall a time when pacifism (real pacifism, not the Batman kind) was considered a virtue on the Left.
And I can’t help but see a connection between the fact that the people who really loudly advocate punching Nazis (and honestly, I find myself struggling to care about whether or not Nazis get punched. It’s the people who merely Look Sortof Like Nazis I’m worried about) are the same people who call shippers Actual Child Molesting Pedophiles. And then those same people move from sending anon hate to doxxing and organizing mass calls to people’s bosses and to CPS and shit.
And now we’re right back to punching Nazis, except that we’re trying to ruin the lives of child molesters, except that anyone we don’t like is a Nazi or a child molester, except that when that stops working we’ll call them something else (maybe we’ll call them terrorists), and really we don’t even know who we’re shooting at anymore but goddamn it feels good to pull that trigger.
And in my head? All I’m seeing is scared, angry redneck neighbors threatening a terrified woman in a headscarf because she sortof looks like what the warmongers told us the wives of the people who attacked New York City might have looked like, and that’s enough to brand her Terrorist ‘round these parts and we don’t hold with Terrorists here.
When they say “violence begets violence,” they don’t mean the people you punch are gonna punch you back. They mean that when you run out of people to punch (or can’t reach the dude you really wanna mangle,) you’re gonna broaden the criteria for who’s an acceptable target. Osama Bin Laden becomes All Terrorists becomes Anyone Who Looks Vaguely Middle Eastern.
I wonder if the reason we’re seeing this same logic among Leftists and Liberals now is because so many of them are the kids who grew up post 9/11; in the era of warmongers telling us all to punch an amorphous and difficult to identify Enemy for the good of American Decency. And even if they recognized that the “looks like a terrorist” criteria is bullshit, they still internalized the underlying message: Violence Against the Enemy is Righteous.
All they needed was a different enemy.
I wonder if the reason we’re seeing this same logic among Leftists and
Liberals now is because so many of them are the kids who grew up post
9/11; in the era of warmongers telling us all to punch an amorphous and
difficult to identify Enemy for the good of American Decency. And even
if they recognized that the “looks like a terrorist” criteria is
bullshit, they still internalized the underlying message: Violence
Against the Enemy is Righteous.I believe in rehabilitative justice because I’ve seen it work, honestly.
And I’ve seen so many people who were nominally defending me or people like me end up broadening the “people I can attack” criteria until they included me… You know after a while the pattern sinks in.
Published
just moving along like everyone else 