30 July 2024 – View on Unity of Fields Telegram
Statement from a Palestine Actionist read aloud at a Pittsfield, Massachusetts protest against Kopmala Harris’s fundraiser:
When this phase of the genocide in Gaza began, we were moved to direct action against weapons companies because we knew that no “democratically-elected” official would listen to those of us crying out to stop the slaughter in Palestine – that to do so would mean interrupting endless streams of profit and sacrificing hold over the entire globe from the proxy state and military outpost named “Israel.” The only way to put a stop to the most horrific thing we’d ever witnessed was to make business as usual impossible, to lie our bodies on the cogs of the machine that manufactures not only genocide around the globe, but mass consent for it among our own people. And that is exactly why we championed the fight against Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer. The extreme repression we faced from the state afterwards forced us into silence, but now, as Kamala Harris makes one of her first public appearances since securing the Democratic nomination here in my hometown of Pittsfield, my continued silence feels only like complicity in the suffering of humankind everywhere. There is no one in this world I hate more than Kamala Harris and all that she represents, and here she is in this auspicious moment in our tiny city. It seems almost poetic to me that Kamala is here in Pittsfield, fundraising for her new campaign among Berkshire elites like James Taylor and Yo-Yo Ma. It’s almost the perfect metaphor of the Pittsfield experience, a city whose population is forced to work in service of imperialism at General Dynamics, the county’s second largest employer, or in the service industry, propping up cafes, breweries, and restaurants owned and frequented by out-of-town gentrifiers. In this way the Berkshires can be read as a microcosm of imperialism, where a local population is beholden to the political and economic will of outside wealth and power, where the beauty of the natural environment is marketed and sold under the slogan “America’s Premier Cultural Resort,” where huge segments of our people suffer homelessness, drug addiction, extreme poverty, so that wealthy weekenders can make a buck or enjoy an idyllic getaway at our expense. This is what Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, Wall Street, the entertainment industry, all that is American, represents to all of humanity.
Our share of the suffering here is magnified to the extreme in the rest of the world, and is channeled most profoundly right now in Palestine. If we feel it here, what must every enslaved human anywhere be feeling? Now I could stand up here and tell you all of the policy failures of Kamala Harris, or talk about the slippery way she was elevated to the position of Democratic nominee. But to do that feels like legitimizing a democratic process that we can so clearly see does not exist. The truth is that Kamala is not a presidential
candidate, but a focal point through which the fascists can weaponize identity politics to manufacture consent for imperialism. An emperor with a brown face, with a woman’s body, is still an emperor. Under a Harris regime, the money would still flow from the exploited corners of the globe to the coffers of fascist America. Suffering would still be exported en masse to prop up this capitalist system that benefits nobody but the elite that suck the blood of the world. Cop cities would continue to be built all across the US, including the one planned down the road in Lee, paving way for an intensely militarized police state to deploy the same weapons of control perfected in Palestine on anyone who tries to speak up. Kamala is and will always be a cop, a prosecutor, an executor of the fascist agenda on the most marginalized among us. We cannot fall for such blatant political theater when the fate of humanity hangs in the balance. No matter who the democratic nominee is, we have to realize that these two corrupt parties will not and cannot save
us, and that we need to build mass power and resistance in our own communities to create the world we want to live in. We owe this to ourselves, to Palestine, to all of humanity.
Since October 7, we have seen the growth of a mass movement of people standing up to protest the genocide in Palestine. The messaging of those rallies has pinned the blame on Biden and Netanyahu, not American imperialism. The speeches and chants put forth at the parades championed by the so-called left-wing Orgs have emphasized the victimhood and suffering of the Palestinian people, and have skirted the responsibility to unequivocally support their resistance. It is not these rallies that have forced the Democrats to shun Biden and exalt Harris, but the victories of the Axis of Resistance and the efforts of those who have escalated the conflict with imperialism here in the belly of the beast. Zionist morale is crumbling as its power is dismantled piecemeal by those in Palestine, in Yemen, in the US, everywhere and anywhere, who are ready to confront the war machine head on. The failures and shortcomings of empty political sloganeering have become evident in this moment. It has allowed Kamala to position herself as somehow separate from Joe Biden, claiming the supposed successes of his administration while separating herself from what has been falsely deemed Biden’s personal failures in Gaza, quite literally fabricating the narrative of “what can be, unburdened by what has been.” It has allowed a psy-op campaign of coconut tree memes to grab our consciousness and make us see a genocidaire as more relatable, or at least silly enough to entice our sick and twisted post-ironic attention. The humor of her drug-addled stupor, her weird, quirky anecdotes, her intersectional identities – we cannot allow this to be enough to manufacture our consent. The world as we know it is ending, and we have a duty to bring the new one to fruition. It cannot end like this.
None of this political theater can be legitimized. We must be staunchly anti-imperialist, and every single US politician, Democrat or Republican, is an imperialist. And if we diminish our political duties to just voting for one fascist candidate or the other, we have forsaken our own humanity and failed the entire world. For Palestine, for Congo, for Sudan, for Haiti, for Cuba, for Kanaky, for Puerto Rico, for us, we must elevate the struggle and not settle for the profound mediocrity presented to us. We must keep disrupting imperialism. I have never done anything more beautiful than put myself and my freedom on the line to try and bring about a better world. It’s been a long and difficult process personally, but it would be more difficult to look at
myself and know I’d stood by idly watching, deluding myself that the finale of US imperialism would come from anything other than rising up to fight it. There is no personal sacrifice worth shying away from when it’s
made for the evolution of humanity past this system that keeps us all enslaved. Breaking the bounds of our own psyches, rediscovering all that is possible, looking past the lens we’ve inherited from living in this system our entire lives– all this is painful, and turning back to simple answers, like voting, like identity politics, this is all very easy. But there is no change worth making that doesn’t involve the growing pains of overcoming our own limits, or making sacrifices in our own lives. We must escalate this struggle. We must stop our rallying outside the empty halls of power and appealing to the non-existent morality of our oppressors. Look around you and find your people, intensify your practice, strike at the heart of the war machine. It only takes a few willing to act to bring about profound change. We know that power only moves when we give it no other choice. Our historic task is to bring about the death of the world as we know it, and the rot of this system will be the fertilizer in which the new world will grow.