Let them LARP

Said without irony in the anarchism thread

revistaelestornudo.com/boric-chile-soberbia-falso-dilema-cubano

A piece my Mel Herrera from 2021 yall might find insightful

Translation:
Boric won and Cubans, as it occurs when there’s elections in the region, we keep ourselves expectant, we make our a***ysis and prognostics, give our opinion and, what costs the most, we learn the complexity and the truths via democracy.

The exile is maybe the harshest. The demand of us all the time that we stop looking to such a site and concentrate in our dilemma that, in the end, is ours we must fix it ourselves. Why should pay attention to the elections of other countries of the region when there’s so much to do with ours? Well just for that; to take experiences of other countries in democratic transitions.

There’s no lack among us of those that give lessons about what we don’t have, and that is the most understood things in democracy, participation, elections, and pluri-partyism. They specialist in prognosticating and warning others of what will happen in their countries if they vote for the party or whatever candidate, as if the people of those places were deprived of self-agency and only us are the awarded ones with so called common sense. The worst we Cubans have is that we believe ourselves the last Bucanero of the Caribbean.
I don’t what path will Chile take from now on. I also don’t know if Boric is the solution. I have the humility to admit that I do not the Chilean conflict and that my knowledge in politics can be very limited. I’ve learned everything via hits of disappointment, of experimenting that feeling of not belonging, of feeling comfortable in any nation project, because many of them leave outside other intersections of my body that is, at the end of the day, the only homeland I know, the territory that I defend above all.
If I was Chilean or resident in Chile, I would have voted for Boric without a second thought. To say it in a clumsier way, I sympathize with Boric because I don’t sympathize with Kast. That is to say, with nothing that resumes neofacism, pinochetism, colonialism, ultraright. Nothing that puts other demands of my body in a second or third steps of priorities or that annuls them just as the Cuban state has done. I sympathize with Boric because when I see the most putrid of the right, those white saviors in which some Cubans see freedom –Vox, Monasterio, Abascal, franquists, the Spanish Popular Party, Trump, Bolsonaro, their eagerness of recolonizing the dehumanized zones, of controlling the bodies and the sexualities, and that nostalgia of barracks and engines—I understand that there I cannot be, just as I also understand that those who sympathize with them do because they don’t see their most elemental privileges and rights threatened.

I understand the Cuban terror to “communism”; such a terror that anything that doesn’t meet the expectations or is in line with the political ideas of others is called “communism”. What I don’t understand is that false dilemma of ours that often goes from escaping authoritarianism to seeking refuge in another, that only leaves two options, the most extremists always.

Not always is a known bad better than good to be known. We don’t know exactly what turn Chile will take with Boric. Everything that can be said is speculation and prejudices valued in accordance with our suffering, which doesn’t have to be centered or a measure in this case. However, we know perfectly well what was going to happen in Chile with Kast.
I prefer to risk myself for those who speak with fresh language, running the risk that later, like every revolutionary process, falls into statism, conservative positions or that it becomes what it took down. Those who have resisted political loneliness or disaffection do not believe in politicians or saviors. I will criticize Boric if he entertains the authoritarianisms and dictatorships of the Latin American left, and I will be following his plan of government. But don’t ask me to sympathize with parties of the extreme right for the simple fact that they oppose the Cuban state and that they recognize it as a dictatorship, when those same parties show no sympathy for people like me nor for others also marginalized by the Cuban state.

I write from the body that I inhibit that I can’t do from another site no matter how much I want. As a black transgender woman, I could never decide through parties and politicians that wish to exterminate me in different ways: annulling my rights, putting me back in the closet, keeping in the zone of “invisible lives” that Judith Butler talks about.
It is not a secret that the parties of extreme right are openly racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrants, anti-feminists, anti-science, LGBTphobic, and it is a shame that after we have lived the eternal Cuban drama of crossing the stretch to Florida, of running to other places of the world, of experiencing the repression and the criminalization of political dissent, the precarious work, the structural racism, the UMAPs, we arrive at other countries and we ally ourselves with parties that sustain everything mentioned, with the fairy tale of common sense, that rationality that is so euro western, want to destroy the state of welfare, the public assistance, anything that might hurt “communism” or social justice, and they are incapable of inventing a better alternative.

I believe that Cubans we don’t flee from Castro nor from communism nor from hunger. We flee from that low self esteem that follows us since times immemorial and that it costs us to acknowledge, but in many cases with take off from our cost to step on someone else and to take out how miserable we can be. Vox and the Spanish Popular Party have wanted to abolish anti-discriminatory laws, and the Trans Law in Spain. I cannot feel complacent. However, for some I should be applauding because they are the parties that reject and recognize the political repression in Cuba. In summary, others that are not a danger to the democracy.

They will not annul me using counterparts as examples that are accepting of those ideologies. Vox exhibits its trans person and black person like festival clowns just to annul critical discourse. Being trans or black in it of itself does imply a conscience of what means to be it in a Eurocentric world and cis-hetero-patriarchal. A profound work must have been realized.

Just because I reject and oppose the state of affairs in Cuba doesn’t, I will run into the arms of any political extreme. Turning to there doesn’t look very far from where we are. We can try what Paul Preciado says: “Invent … a new political imagination capable of confronting the logic of war, the heterocolonial reasoning and the hegemony of the market as site of production of value and of truth”.

Some zones of the Cuban opposition, due to wear or whatever it is, lack imagination and creativity; they are stubborn and have known how to construct alliances nor come up with new language. They have not known to win over other bodies also in conflict with officialism, because to them they are also expendable identities and bodies. They design nation projects, movements and platforms that speak of plurality, and it is the plurality that sustains the idea that all opinions are valid and respectable and that it is alright to sit in the same table irreconcilable positions to reach agreements in the name of the common good, it’s to say, that which is commonly good for the same of always, when we all know that in these agreements it is not them who sacrifice the most.

They put, for example, the activism for the rights of sexual dissidence and of gender to dialogue with religious fundamentalism that wants to cut those same rights. They preach about liberty, democracy, take down the dictatorship… And I don’t what is all that, because those who ask for it the most also don’t know. In the end, we return to what we have known for more than 70 years: authoritarianism, and that low national self esteem that makes us dependent on the United States or Europe, like someone that due to emotional dependency maintains a relationship with someone to which they do not matter, and don’t realize it. That fascination for the North and that disconnect with the processes of the global South, with the people most impoverished and marginalized, like someone who spends all their time shaming their place of origin because they believe something different.

Why do they worry so much for black people, for the black political prisoners? Why do they mention the color of the skin if they do not have much interest in that color seizing to be the color of the jails and of the victims of the political repression? Why do they do the act of worrying for the most marginalized Cuban neighborhoods and the impoverished people if the neoliberal economic model for which they yearn for will move these people from these zones?

Why do they denounce the lack of legal guarantees of women and victims of gender violence if the parties that many love do not recognize the violence of gender and are profoundly anti-feminist? Why do they rip their clothes when a trans woman’s gender identity is not respected by the repressive bodies, if the parties they baby also want that?
The conservative anticastrists do not want that the people of sexual dissidence name themselves, because naming us implies signaling, due to situations that have nothing to do with our capacities, that access to a life of dignity is more difficult for us; disadvantageous situations to which they turn their backs, and which in the majority of cases they are also responsible for. But when it comes to state violence against a trans woman, they name her in the headline. A black person is killed or roughed up and they are quick to denounce castrism, and the truth is that to many they do not care about black people, nor the jails, nor do they recognize their profound racism and assume finished a conflict persisting for more than 500 years saying that we are all already equal, that only on race exists: the human, and however many messages of love and peace occurs to the to frustrate a more serious and profound debate.

The problem of racism is not a problem of communism or of castrism. It is structural in any political-economical system, in any state nation. Many are not interested in the more ancient dictatorships, of patriarchy, colonialism, racism, but they already learned how to write patriarchy, colonialism and racism when comes to a political opponent. What would’ve happened if the sexual aggressor Fernando Becquer was white and dissident? What would’ve happened if in place of Becquer the denounces of sexual aggression would’ve been against an opposition person, a director of an independent medium or an important anticastrist politician? Why the do they criticize castrism for that which in democracy also aren’t capable of fixing since they do not care and the struggles of gender, race, class, and other intersections are not priorities?

As I read yesterday after the triumph of Boric, the right will have to adapt to social justice yes or yes, just like the left has to accept it will continue to live in capitalism.
Many will tell me immediately that it is not all. Clear as day. Or they assure than in reality it is not that many Cubans that yearn for the return of colonial times, bastistians, franquistas or any other contradictory thing they demand: democracy, liberty, human rights, respect for all lives. At this point, I am not so convinced.

Later there are those that do not lawyer for these parties or political extremism but criticize whenever someone speaks of them. It’s giving them visibility, they say, and that we can concentrate energy in other things. The damned circumstance of authoritarianism everywhere. The problem is that there’s always something that is more important. The rest, for later, and there is, in summarized accounts, a whole country that has been left for later. Where they see they give visibility, I see counterspeech.

Fascism and all the forms of discrimination are combated. And it has to be said: not only did Boric and Chile win. When fascism is defeated in any of its forms, all that live in planet earth, us who have been displaced from the category “human”, and even the humans of always, win.

If this Janes Revenge stuff is all hype and no action, I'm going to be disappointed in you guys

didn't they already bomb a few pro-life centers? i heard of one in florida and one in buffalo at least

Had a conversation with my brother where he explained how he was an anarcho-communist despite being too blackpilled (realitypilled?) to think that it was ever possible to instantiate on a mass scale

He also expressed disdain for anarchists who fought for a state/alongside Azov in Ukraine, but then got offended when I casually mentioned that such behavior by self-proclaimed anarchists was what fueled tankie allegations that anarchism is objectively opposed to the anti-imperialist effort ("I just don't know why you wanted the conversation to go in that direction.")

He also is really invested in wanting Greg Abbott to lose to Beto and our Republican congressman to also lose his seat.

but then got offended when I casually mentioned that such behavior by self-proclaimed anarchists was what fueled tankie allegations that anarchism is objectively opposed to the anti-imperialist effort ("I just don't know why you wanted the conversation to go in that direction.")

hes a good guy and wicked smart, just too emotional to think about politics rationally sometimes

He also expressed disdain for anarchists who fought for a state/alongside Azov in Ukraine, but then got offended when I casually mentioned that such behavior by self-proclaimed anarchists was what fueled tankie allegations that anarchism is objectively opposed to the anti-imperialist effort

I believe u bro it's just funny to imagine an anarchist getting upset about his fellow anarchists being dumb especially saying "idk why u want the convo to go in that direction"

haters.noblogs.org/post/2022/08/19/dreams-of-black-revolt-a-reflection-on-the-2-year-anniversary-of-the-george-floyd-rebellion-and-its-meaning-from-a-black-anarchist

Ten more pages than the average age of everyone itt

Who’s the first guy?

darajapress.com/publication/black-anarchism-and-the-black-radical-tradition-moving-beyond-racial-capitalism

Camilo Cienfuegos. One of Fidel’s main commanders during the revolution. His flight disappeared on the way to the eastern part of Cuba on an assignment. Urban legend is that Fidel disappeared him

Besides the fact that there's 0 evidence for that, it never made sense to me since he was very loyal to Fidel