I really need to do more studying and write an essay on how Americanism is a genuine folk religion which reveres capital and the vague concept of “the free market” as a god of providence to be pleased in order to lead a prosperous life, also that the founding fathers are prophetic, perhaps even messianic figures who basically gave birth to this god through the revolutionary war, and that the vast majority of conservative Christians in America revere capital more than the god they claim to serve in an ironic sort of golden calf situation.
There is a trend amongst depictions of the founding fathers to show them as literal christ figures, a trend that started very early in the nation’s life.
I’d also like to point out Washington & Lincoln Apotheosis, artist unknown, about 1865, the same year as lincoln’s assasination
The personification of America in the form of Columbia, a goddess of both the land and the concepts that America tends to inhabit. A pre-anime Hetalia. She was often used in depictions of Manifest Destiny, a religions ideal that stated that America, by God’s will, must go from coast to coast.
American Progress by, John Gast, 1872. Note the indigenous people cast in literal darkness, away from the light. The religions deification of America relies upon colonialism and white supremacy
Like, there are actual studies on this stuff. Look up “American civil religion” if you’re struggling for search terms. Or “American founder worship.”
I was asked why there’s a zionist claim that the Palestininian identity is not legitimate. And I think it’s important to understand why Palestinians as a whole are seen as a threat by Israel. To understand why it’s not about Hamas.
The claim is that the Palestininian identity was made up in order to push us out. Palestinian existence is a threat to the legitimacy of Israel as a country.
I was taught in school that Palestine was empty when we got here. They used a Mark Twain quote. It was a barren land full of swamps and some nomadic people (Beduins) but as soon as we wanted to come here, the awful antisemitic Arabs sent people to settle here before we could to take up the space. I was in school in the settlements though. I was taught the most extreme version of this.
Another version of this is that Palestine was never its own thing, they’re just Arabs the same as all Arabs from the surrounding countries. So they could just… scooch over and give us the space, please and thank you. In Israel no one uses the term Palestinian. If I do, people roll their eyes and dismissively go “Arab.” An Arab is an Arab. It’s a way to strip away their unique identity and blend them in with the rest to say they could always move to Jordan, or Syria, or Lebanon, and it’s all the same to them.
It’s a way to make Palestinian existence by itself into a malicious plot to deny us a homeland.
Because if Palestinians exist as a distinct group of people, we aren’t the only ones with a connection to this land. And you don’t create an ethnostate by sharing.
You still hear echoes of this mentality. Why won’t all these Muslim countries take the people of Gaza as refugees? That’s asking why they won’t let Israel make its ethnic cleansing more neat and convenient. Yes, refugees should be taken in and given shelter. But this question shifts responsibility away from Israel. Palestinians shouldn’t be forced suffer either ethnic cleansing that leaves them as refugees, or a genocide.
The claim here is that Palestine was never its own country, but the name that foreign occupations gave this land, and Palestinians can’t be indigenous because why would an indigenous group identify with the name given to it by an occupying force?
This disregards just how long Palestine has been under occupation, conquered by different forces. Whoever named it doesn’t matter. The indigenous population gets to decide what they call themselves, and even if they didn’t have their own self-governing country for a very long time, this doesn’t erase their shared national and cultural identity.
This is Israeli propaganda using past occupation and colonization to erase the people who had to live under them.
How can a person make up for seven decades of misrepresentation and willful distortion in the time allotted to a sound bite? How can you explain that the Israeli occupation doesn’t have to resort to explosions—or even bullets and machine-guns—to kill? That occupation and apartheid structure and saturate the everyday life of every Palestinian? That the results are literally murderous even when no shots are fired? Cancer patients in Gaza are cut off from life-saving treatments. Babies whose mothers are denied passage by Israeli troops are born in the mud by the side of the road at Israeli military checkpoints. Between 2000 and 2004, at the peak of the Israeli roadblock-and-checkpoint regime in the West Bank (which has been reimposed with a vengeance), sixty-one Palestinian women gave birth this way; thirty-six of those babies died as a result.That never constituted news in the Western world. Those weren’t losses to be mourned. They were, at most, statistics.
What we are not allowed to say, as Palestinians speaking to the Western media, is that all life is equally valuable. That no event takes place in a vacuum. That history didn’t start on October 7, 2023, and if you place what’s happening in the wider historical context of colonialism and anticolonial resistance, what’s most remarkable is that anyone in 2023 should be still surprised that conditions of absolute violence, domination, suffocation, and control produce appalling violence in turn. During the Haitian revolution in the early 19th century, former slaves massacred white settler men, women, and children. During Nat Turner’s revolt in 1831, insurgent slaves massacred white men, women, and children. During the Indian uprising of 1857, Indian rebels massacred English men, women, and children. During the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s, Kenyan rebels massacred settler men, women, and children. At Oran in 1962, Algerian revolutionaries massacred French men, women, and children. Why should anyone expect Palestinians—or anyone else—to be different? To point these things out is not to justify them; it is to understand them. Every single one of these massacres was the result of decades or centuries of colonial violence and oppression, a structure of violence Frantz Fanon explained decades ago in The Wretched of the Earth.
What we are not allowed to say, in other words, is that if you want the violence to stop, you must stop the conditions that produced it. You must stop the hideous system of racial segregation, dispossession, occupation, and apartheid that has disfigured and tormented Palestine since 1948, consequent upon the violent project to transform a land that has always been home to many cultures, faiths, and languages into a state with a monolithic identity that requires the marginalization or outright removal of anyone who doesn’t fit. And that while what’s happening in Gaza today is a consequence of decades of settler-colonial violence and must be placed in the broader history of that violence to be understood, it has taken us to places to which the entire history of colonialism has never taken us before.
Do not fall into despair. Continue calling your local officials, attending protests, boycotting companies that fund open genocide. Because of this media blackout, we are now Palestine’s voice - please do your best for them.
the death toll in Gaza has reached over 4,000, and half of Gaza’s population is under eighteen. Gaza is under siege and only a small amount of supplies are getting through. the number of the dead is dwarfed by the number of the injured, many of whom are without painkillers or food. Gaza’s kids are dying hungry and thirsty. Gaza’s kids are dying without painkillers or anesthesia. they’re dying terrified, trapped in the rubble of buildings, knowing that their families have already died or knowing that their families might be next. the usa was the ONLY country in the un to vote against and veto a HUMANITARIAN CEASEFIRE. PLEASE call your senators and representatives and ask them to PUBLICLY CALL FOR A CEASEFIRE. it takes five minutes and it won’t harm you in any way!
“I am a constituent. I am calling about Israel and Palestine. I am asking Senator Someone to publicly call for a ceasefire” it can be as simple as that!
USCPR script:
My name is [YOUR FIRST & LAST NAME], and I’m a constituent of [SENATOR’S NAME]. I’m calling about Palestine and Israel. The senator must take immediate steps to deescalate, by calling for a ceasefire, pressuring Israel to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, and refusing to send any additional weapons or funding to the Israeli military. I am asking the senator to publicly call for a ceasefire along the lines of the new resolution in the House led by Cori Bush and Rashida Tlaib.
my dealer: got some straight gas 🔥🤪 this strain is called “into the unknown”💀 it’ll have you making a pilgrimage in a place between our world and the next 💯☝️
me: yeah, whatever. I don’t feel shit.
five minutes later: bro I swear I saw the beast following us through these mysterious woods that I don’t remember entering
