On Democrats and Obligatory Amnesia
consequences of clinging to a history that is more fanfic than fact.
I just rewatched Sinners and have a million things I want to say about it and about my new favorite show #1 Happy Family USA, but it’s been night after night after night of the worst massacres in Gaza since the genocide began; Israel is carpet bombing the 2 million people they’ve been starving to death in front of the whole world; my Twitter feed is full of Palestinians saying their last goodbyes, pleading for help that isn’t coming, cursing a world that has abandoned them, and it’s all I can think about right now.
“Listen, Israel is in the final steps to wipe us out,” journalist Bisan Owda said this week.
On Tuesday, the UN reported that 1400 babies could die in Gaza in the next 48 hours due to the Israeli blockade.
I don’t have wisdom or poetic words. I don’t know how we get out of this, how to stop it. I just know what we can’t do is ignore, pretend it never happened, that we aren’t funding it, and hope it’ll just vanish and never have happened if we plug our ears and close our eyes. Vanishing is exactly what zionism demands of Palestine; even though we may feel powerless in so many ways, we can refuse the erasure, the demanded silence.
Trump is continuing the genocide that Biden started. On Bluesky when you mention Biden’s enthusiastic support of these endless masscares, a cadre of blue hats will show up to accuse you of supporting trump or ask if you’re happy now that things are this bad or, as one guy said to me the other day: “And this information helps us how?” It was the same day some random center-left bro was insisting that the US was actually built on principles of freedom and equality because the Founding Fathers said it was, nevermind the slavery and genocide.
This line of thinking — that a politician’s words matter more than their actions, especially when it comes to the founding fathers — is, like, very patently absurd, childish, lazy and false from any angle, but it’s also the mainstream going rationale across both political parties, and to this day you can hear any democrat you like espousing it. This refusal to deal with even a very basic level of truthtelling, this juvenile insistence on hagiography, on the innocence of horrific people — it’s one of the reasons we’re still here, locked in Forever War after Forever War, funding a genocide, locking up people who are against genocide, burning down the world while screaming freedom into the smoke.
So yes, Random Bluesky Reply Guy — this information does in fact help us now, even though it makes you uncomfortable. There’s a very straight line between the two lies: “This country was founded on freedom and equality” and “The Biden/Harris administration was doing everything it could to attain a ceasefire.” They are the same refusal of facts, they come from the same desperate demand to be seen as the Innocent One in all matters. They both require a Bad Guy in the narrative to serve as a Worse-Than foil. It’s not that these forces aren’t terrible— they obviously are. It’s that the hyperfocus on those villains above all else allows for that presumed US innocence to continue, and that in turn causes even more atrocities.
And yes, I’m talking to and about Democrats here. Why them? Because of the two parties, that’s who is following me on socials and in the professional communities I exist in, for one. There’s no point in me talking to trumpers because they’re not listening to me. And because this is the fundamental dissonance at the heart of the doomed, dangerous United States liberal project, the endgame contradiction. No one who’s been paying attention is shocked that Republicans have gone all in on open white supremacy. I knew that was happening when I was an actual child. But democrats spent these past decades pretending otherwise, chiding anyone who disagreed as alarmist (including me, as a child), and here we are: The Democratic Party has failed catastrophically. It failed to get votes, it failed to build momentum. It failed tactically; it failed morally. By any and every measure, it’s a failure. It lost what it told us was the most important election of our lifetimes, in part because it was committed to an ongoing genocide, and then it continued to lose in the aftermath, failing to rally itself into a useful resistance party, and, more crucially, failing to soul search in any meaningful way. Instead we got defensiveness, childish gotyas, and demands to be coddled.
During the election it was “shut up about the genocide so we can win the election.” Now that the dems have lost, it’s somehow become “I told you we would lose if you talked about the genocide and also shut up about how we had anything to do with the genocide!”
I think democrats like to forget that the “Great America” that maga is trying to claw its way back towards was a den of bipartisan inequality. That the book bannings and crackdowns are bringing us back to a status quo from very very recently, when the baseline of our bookshelf was much more white and heteronormative and all schoolbooks taught a sanitized version of our genocidal history, instead of just some. That’s the world most of us grew up in, and democrats and free speech groups were fine with that, because the censorship happened within the publishing industry and it was targeted at voices of color who were trying to tell the truth. It took activists, radicals, loudmouths, organizers, and yes, social media, to push things even slightly more towards equality, and that came with backlash, including from the very liberal publishing industry and those same free speech groups (which are now largely silent on Palestine).
What I suspect happened for a lot of liberal folks is that they never imagined they’d support a leader who was pro-genocide, then suddenly found themselves in exactly that position, and their response was to not call it out but deny the very reality of it as hard as they could, hoping it would all just go away. But it takes more than cognitive dissonance to ignore a genocide so intently. One has to buy into the total dehumanization of Palestinians first. And so we got pundits and randos who were suddenly experts on what is and isn’t genocide, and absolutely knew better than the people on the ground experiencing the genocide, the stated intentions of the leaders and soldiers committing the genocide, experts and institutions dedicated to genocide studies, and numerous holocaust survivors, all of whom agree on exactly what’s happening, in no uncertain terms.
The dissonance part shifted after the election, and that’s one reason we’re suddenly seeing an onslaught of pundits and institutions suddenly, a year and a half later, deciding to name the genocide what it is, now that a politician they hate is at the helm. And that’s why they’re so determined not to talk about how we got here.
But the history of how we got here always matters, and it did not go anywhere; it’s still all around us, especially because one of the main reasons the world is in such a pit of shit and fire is that same age old imperial tactic of obligatory amnesia (word to Eduardo Galeano), which both sides of the aisle have enforced in their own devious ways.
There are consequences to clinging to a history that is more fanfic than fact. Many millions pay the price for that willful self-delusion.
I don’t like morality questions and I hate math, but the moral calculus here is extremely, unnervingly straightforward. For US taxpayers in particular, the genocides we’re funding are the moral imperative of our time. Gaza is a bipartisan holocaust, and each of us owns it. Even those of us doing everything that we know how to stop it, it’s ours. That’s not a guilt trip, it’s a starting point. It’s about grounding ourselves in the truth that neither party was going to end the genocide. Neither side was even pledging to end it. Neither side would even call it what it is.
For a lot of democrats, there is no greater evil than trump. Functionally, for them he is the Big Bad that allows any other crime to be shrugged off. Clearly, I’m not here to say he’s fine or should be ignored. If you read that into my words, that’s on you. And also clearly — shit is not that simple. Outside of genre fiction, here in the real world, the root of these enormous, worldending problems is never The One Really Bad Guy To Rule Them All. There is not a single villain and there is not a single answer. The trump administration ending would be great, but it would not automatically end empire or the genocide. Netanyahu stepping down would not stop the zionist war of extermination against Palestinians that has been going on for over three quarters of a century. Systems and ideologies need to be addressed, confronted, dismantled, and we need to dream of new ones to go in their place.
And I realize it may appear otherwise, but I’m also genuinely not interested in the blame game, or trying to score cheap political points or Toldyasos. The reason for calling out democratic whitewashing of their genocidal heroes is to start from the truth. Period. What I’m interested in, what we need to be doing, is ending the genocide, unraveling a system that’s destroying the world while giving us these impossible non-choices. I’m interested in us getting free. All of us. And that starts with the truth. You can’t build a movement based on lies and whitewashing. Democrats have been trying to do that for centuries and look where that got them.
I was rereading Pema Chodron’s book Taking The Leap, as I often do in heavy times. She closes by speaking of the Buddhist master Shantideva — “he explains how the bodhisattva or spiritual warrior begins the journey by looking honestly at the current state of his or her mind and emotions. The path of saving others from confusion starts with our willingness to accept ourselves without deception.”
The great Saul Williams recently asked us not to lose faith in humanity, but instead: “Lose faith in capitalism & its mercenaries who insist that there is no other way.” There is a path to freedom beyond the either/or nonsense we’ve been fed. It starts with divesting from these vapid creation myths that are only designed for public absolution, redemption arcs for the damned, and a shutting down of the political imagination. We can do so much better than this. In fact, we must.
A truly wonderful essay. Thank you.
Very well said. Very well written.