Anonymous asked:

One of my biggest issues with the left is how they don't seem to care as much when poc are oppressed by other poc. The lefts big bad guy is "white oppressor/non white oppressed" and they aren't wiling to give the same energy for anything else. It's why they ignore chattel slavery in Yemen and human rights abuses in China. People are literally being put into camps in China and the left shrugs. There isn't a single popular blogger on here that addresses modern day slavery.

They are so obsessed with hating Israel because they think it's a bunch of white people oppressing poc. Imagine how the Left would react if Israel was not a Jewish state but a Muslim one. Would they have the same dehumanization and hateful energy for its population? I doubt it.

unsolicited-opinions answered:

Selective Solidarity

You’re describing a segment of the far left which has gotten very good at performing justice, but remains uniquely terrible at recognizing it.

Oppression must fit the aesthetic

Modern left-wing online activism runs on a simple premise:

White/Western = oppressor
Non-white/Non-Western = oppressed
Justice = reversing that

It’s not subtle, but it’s sticky. You don’t need history, geopolitics, context…or even the basic facts. Just emotional resonance, a look, some slogans, and a peer group.

When neither the victims nor the oppressors are themselves white (as in Liberia), the aesthetic shatters.

Nuance and context make the script messy and disrupt the flow of the narrative. An inconsistent narrative doesn’t go viral and doesn’t fit the aesthetic…so nuance and context must go.

Examples:

Yemen and Libya’s modern-day slave markets?
Ignored.

Uyghur concentration camps in China?
Minimally acknowledged, rarely organized around.

Ethnic cleansing in Tigray?
[Yawn]

Rohingya genocide and continuing crisis in Myanmar?
Briefly trendy, now long abandoned

They’re happening in places where the perpetrators aren’t seen as white or Western, so the Western Left is silent.

Anon is right that this is inconsistent. It’s hypocritical and selective.

If jews break the narrative, rewrite the narrative

Nowhere does the mental sorting of Oppression Hierarchy get more tortured than in the conversation around Israel.

If your movement’s entire moral structure depends on dividing the world into white colonizers and brown natives, Jews become a problem because they don’t neatly fit into binaries and don’t stay where you try to put them.

More than half of Israeli Jews are Middle Eastern, the other half have some family history in Europe…and all are indigenous to the Levant. Between Mizrahim and Arab Israelis, about 70% of Israel’s citizens have no European family history.
They’ve been persecuted for 2,000 years, but now have sovereignty.
They’re a minority religion and ethnicity (0.2% of the world), but with a state which punches way above its weight class.
They fled white Christian genocide and Arab Muslim ethnic cleansing only to now be called white colonizers by Brooklyn’s top influencers.

These complex truths break the narrative. Since the movement is built on narrative-driven activism (ideology must come first, facts awkwardly crammed in later) there’s only one fix.

Flatten the truth and recast the roles in framing which makes sense to the Western Leftist.

Jews become “white.” Palestinians become “Black.”
Israel becomes the settler-colonial villain.
Facts, like half Israel’s Jewish population having been ethnically cleansed from Arab or Muslim countries and that 20% of Israel’s citizens being Arab…are erased.

Inconvenient history is memory-holed to keep the narrative nice and simple. In narrative-driven activism, complexity is a liability.

The Western Left is silent on:

Why? Because they don’t fit the West-vs-Rest aesthetic.

They don’t come with the right optics. The perpetrators are protected by geopolitical utility (China), cultural relativism (“we don’t criticize Muslims”), or just…apathy because it’s not a tending topic on their feeds.

Israel, by contrast, gets all the outrage because it can be falsely framed as white, Western, colonial, capitalist, and militaristic. All the villains in one package. That makes Israel catnip to them.

The problem, of course, is that people are suffering in those other places.

Ignoring them because their stories don’t flatter your narrative and view of yourself as a savior is lazy, inconsistent, hypocritical, racist, and inhumane.

Justice Isn’t a Team Sport

If it isn’t universal, it ain’t justice.

A moral framework which only recognizes certain villains isn’t a moral framework because it has no consistent moral principles.

If you can’t make room in your mind for:

Jews as indigenous people?
Muslims as perpetrators of violence?
Non-Western states as colonial actors?
Non-European ethnic groups as aggressors?
Former refugees as sovereign citizens?

…then justice isn’t what you’re fighting for. You’re fighting for simplicity, for protecting your fragile ego, for clout, for belonging, and/or for content.

That’s what you’re seeing, Anon. It’s a movement more interested in punishing symbolic villains than helping real victims.

**The easiest way to avoid doing this is to ask yourself a simple question:**

Would I care about this situation the same way if the identities of the oppressor and oppressed were reversed?

If your answer is “no,” or “maybe not,” you’re fighting for a pleasing narrative, not justice.

Stories are comfortable, but they don’t liberate people. Consistency, pressure, and truth do.

So if you’re posting “Free Palestine” every week but you’ve never once mentioned Yemen, China, Iran, or Ethiopia, please ask yourself:

Who taught you which victims to care about?

What would it take to care about all of them?

That’s the job. Not flattening the truth, not flattering your feed, not boosting your brand with friends or strangers, and not aestheticizing and appropriating someone else’s trauma to prove your moral worth.

Want to fight for liberation and justice? Great! Start by telling the truth even when it’s inconvenient, unfashionable, or doesn’t get you likes.