Transcription
Sacha (00:09) Welcome everyone to the resistance is fertile podcast. I think we're calling this episode six and you are with Benji, Nounja and Sasha. And we're here to talk about the psychology of the oppressors and the oppressed. The theme for today's episode we think is probably about colonial demands and colonial defenses. So, and I guess this came about because, on Friday the 21st, there's the sick from genocide webinar. So, I was asked to talk about that, to talk about how the genocide has affected me. it forced me to track back the last 16 months. Yay. And really track out the processes that I went through to be in this moment that I'm in right now. And I think the things that have shown up are hmm, because it's easy to say October 7. But then you think it's not just it's the behavior of the resistance and the behavior of Israel as well. I've down, Israel destroys, the resistance creates. So, I did notice during that time, the metaphor of, every university Israel destroyed, the universities in our Western societies started also cracking open. But then I also noticed the metaphor about the resistance digging tunnels and how those tunnels can be dug into our consciousness, down into our unconscious. I don't think I came up with that image, someone else might have.
I've been thinking a lot about colonial demands. Before all of this happened, I'd already had the thought that, living in our Western society, I didn't feel totally free that I was at least economically enslaved. I came across something recently, I think it was Karim who said the West is the most propagandized society that believes they are the freest society in the world. So, the stuff that's been playing around in my head is tracking those processes out. And, thinking about the big picture consequences, which ties in about the schisms that are left between groups and within groups, even within our own societies. I look at that bigger picture, and I wonder, I think, well, on the part of our government, there hasn't been much long-term thinking. But that long term, what are the long-term consequences in terms of real schisms between people? That's what I've got at the moment.
Nounja (02:09) You know, the colonial demands, the capitalist demands, I think those are one and the same because of the way they are intrinsically tied up. But sometimes specifying one aspect of it can be helpful in illuminating the nature of the psychological process. I think of this as the taming of the spirit in order to be a good colonial capitalist subject and an agent to either maintain or at least not resist empire. And so, what are some of those things? Starting with kids, we see it as being indoctrinated in school, learning the propagandized history of a settler colony, for example.
This is something you've talked about Sacha in being in Australia. And then when we grow up, a lot of that has to do with upholding capitalist society. So, this is why also we see the DSM, all diagnoses, everything that's pathologized is about not being a productive functioning member of capitalist society. What things come up for you guys around colonial capitalist demands?
Benji (03:59) One thing that shows up for me on the side of being a white guy, being educated and socialized in the colonial white supremacist mindset has a lot to do with what I fear the rest of the colonials will think about me. What I mean by that is this is something that happened with the flood actually, when we talk about Sick from genocide, I filled in that questionnaire and the funny thing and I mentioned it last week but the funny thing for me.
And it's horrible to say it because of the human cost and, even more horrible to say it from the position of a white guy. But it's actually freed me in many ways. And the main way in which it has freed me is from the suspicion that I may be anti-Semitic.
I've been on the side of Palestine, fully, wholeheartedly since December 1981. So, that's a very long time. And before that, the two things that had touched my heart the most were poverty and learning about the Nazi Holocaust. And I realized that, from December 1981 to October the 8th 2023, psychologically speaking, I spent a lot of my time trying to find a way to be pro-Palestinian, even just between me and the person in the mirror, that couldn't be suspected of being anti-Semitic.
If I look into my heart, I know for a fact that I am not anti-Semitic. I have been touched by the Nazi Holocaust. I've learned about Jewish culture. I've learned about Jewish resistance. I've learned about Jewish political movements in the late 19th century, early 20th century. I've learned about the political economy of Jewish communities throughout the ages in the West and how anti-Semitic practices and ideologies emerged from the peculiar position that Jewish communities were assigned in those societies. But still there was a part of me going: could anybody ever think that this could be anti-Semitic in some sense? And the Flood just cleaned all that out in the sense that I went: I truly don't care. Why should I care about what people I have come to see as being amongst the most dishonest players in the world, I mean the Zionists think. But the Zionists are propagandists, of whichever ethnicity they might be. Why should I care about what they would be able to say about me given that the minute you criticize their precious settler colony in any way they call you an anti-semite anyhow?
Then, going further into this because we're here to talk about the psychological side of things, I realize how much this has to do with narcissistic systems and narcissistic family dynamics where you get into a position where there's a part of you that deep down wants to believe that this is all a giant misunderstanding. One day the narcissist will see that you have a pure heart and they will be touched by that and their heart will open and it will all be kumbaya around the campfire and we're all going to reconcile and that will be the end of the misunderstanding. Until that day you have to worry very much about what the narcissist could think about you because you don't want to be misunderstood by that person. Because the minute you stop being misunderstood everything clears up and everything is happy again.
But that never happens because that is precisely the toxic dynamic of a narcissistic relationship. That moment of reconciliation, that moment of common understanding is always a few inches beyond whatever you've been doing, whatever you've been saying, and so, the onus is always on you to go that extra inch, that extra half inch, that extra millimeter. It's like the carrot that is being held in front of you, psychologically speaking. And you can spend a whole lifetime there.
I spent between 1981 and 2025, quite a lot of time, trying to chase that carrot. If only no one will ever think I'm antisemitic, everybody will see the justness of my views. And the flood just made it all wash away. I will never know if they truly believe their bullshit or if they're a bunch of evil manipulative demons, or something in between, and it doesn't matter anymore. It's about my self-determination in a sense. I choose to support this thing because to me, humanity makes no sense if I don't. And that's the beginning and the end of it. And that is extremely interesting because when you draw a parallel with the clinic, this is kind of the space to which, when we help clients get out of narcissistic dynamics, you want to guide them, in which you want to walk with them. We're not bringing them to anything, we're just witnessing the unfolding of that process with them. So, those were my thoughts about that.
Nounja (10:10)
One of the colonial defenses is what will people think? That can be conscious or unconscious. That's very different than community accountability. What will dominant society think? How will people react? How will I be punished for acting towards liberation? It is very different than how will this be in community? How is this affecting being in right relationship with people, with all living beings, with the land. So, just to draw that distinction, that's one of the colonial defenses that keeps people from acting and causes or induces this process of, well, is speaking for Palestine anti-Semitic?
Mohammed Al-Kurd says something along the lines of it's not our fault that the settlers happen to be Jewish. They're settlers. They're just settlers. This is about whiteness. This is about settler colonialism. So, the way in which this enters into the discourse where I'm not anti-Semitic comes into play is a part of the function of settler colonialism and how that plays out in Palestine in particular.
Sacha (11:31)
Do they know, could know what they're doing? Lots of stuff showed up as Benji was talking. I started thinking we should split it into colonial demands, colonial threats, and then colonial defenses. Because the anti-Semitism thing is a threat that shows up. That's been thrown at me when I spoke out in my organization and I posted about speaking out about Palestine and the ex-president spewed out all this propaganda, called me anti-Semitic, and said I was spreading hate speech. Even though I have the awareness that is all BS, that's the gaslighting that's used to shut people down. It still had that sting to it. It still had that taint of my reputation, which, now I'm saying it out loud, is exactly what Benji's talking about.
That is how they get to you. They get to you with that, which is another form of narcissism. It's the ego. It's the form. It's the narcissism. You're raised in this, in our society. I asked this kid the other day. He comes in and goes, I really hate school, man. I really hate school. And instead of exploring with him why he hates school, I flipped it to the reverse. And I went, Yeah, man, , I'm not a fan of school either, to be honest. What do you reckon? How do all those other kids just go to school? They don't even think about whether it's right or wrong. How is it they just all mindlessly do this thing? And because you've got autism, you're a bit of a truth, truth seeer. So, you can see right through all this stuff, you can see that they're stealing your time and then you don't have your freedom to choose. And this kid says, Well, that's they tend, and this is like first year high school.
They teach us about how bad history was to make us feel grateful for being in this present moment right now. They don't just do that with history. They do it with comparisons with other countries. Like look at these other countries. They don't have this. They don't have that. Whereas you have all this stuff. And that's part of the narcissistic cultural narrative. Is that that they don't say that we're better, but they imply that we're better because we're not living like that. I remember when my wife and I went to Uganda and on the car ride from the airport, there was this concrete building a backyard shed size, and it just had the word school written on it. My first instinctive thought was, wow, look at that rubbish building. And then the indigenous person was, so proud, look at this, look at us, we've got a school, look at our school! And then that was just one of those moments where I went Oh, man!... Probably one of those moments where the colonial defenses broke down because that's one of the ways to break down is contact with the other.
So, thinking about the last 16 months, anytime I watched a speech from the Houthis, or a speech from Obaida, or I saw resistance videos of bravery, what I see, what I read, those words, that's what I can trust. I trust that more than I trust all the stuff hat's thrown at me from my government. So, that resonates with my values and cuts through those defenses. When I think about the three of us, if we're on a continuum, Benji was from a young age way more aware of all the injustices of the world. Whereas I think I was more, I guess, indoctrinated.
Side note: there's a difference between school and learning and education. And I think what happens is they conflate all this language together. So, when you say things like kids are indoctrinated in school, then they'll play it out, you're a conspiracy theorist or you're this or you're that. And it's like, no, no, no. I say to my clients, there's a difference between learning stuff and having to go to school five days a week legally, by law, having all that time taken away. There are two very different things. So, I was thinking maybe I'm a little bit more aware of what those colonial defenses are. When this stuff starts happening, the defenses aren't happening for me.
Maybe that goes back to what you're saying in a previous episode that creates the disconnect between people. That's not me, so therefore I shouldn't do anything about that. That's happening over there. that's a mess over there. We don't know what's going on. I think, one of the main demands of our society is to fuse with the narratives that they provide us and don't defuse from those narratives, don't act inconsistently from those narratives. And that's where they've created different narratives to block you in the terrorist organization narrative or the anti-semitic narrative or whatever.
Benji (16:22)
That's super interesting because I can't escape looking at the whole colonial system on the of ideological plane as a giant narcissistic family or social system and what's really striking about those narcissistic social systems, families or relationships. Families are interesting because there are a number of people in them, and the roles are set, they are cut out in advance, and you generally are given a role without having any say in the matter.
Sometimes you can move to another role, but mostly they're set, and if you move too much, then you just become the other, the black sheep or whatever. But you have absolutely no say in it. And when we look at the colonial demands of that role, it's got layers upon layers upon layers of it, beginning 500 years ago. There's something about “Us and Them”. Us the real humans and Them the kind of half civilized animals. That is the first narcissistic system where you go so, because we are more than, anything that we do to them is less than. And because they are less than, anything that they do to resist what we do to them is more than is acceptable to us. Therefore, we can do whatever we want. It's very, very hard to move out of that system. And through the years, through the centuries, it has changed in form, but never in function.
Today, in the present state of the empire, for reasons that I won't get into today, Zionism has almost become the religion of the empire. They teach you the Holocaust at school as if it were the one thing that determined everything, and then you can feel, either consciously or unconsciously, that every position is determined from this. They already said you have the perfect victims; you have the justified righteous victims that can do whatever they want and you can't get out of that.
Sacha, you were mentioning Sacha earlier what you went through as you started speaking on our professional association Listserv. I had a similar experience. I started speaking up first, and in very clear terms. And I got the antisemitic label. The first time I got it publicly, I knew I was going to get it. So, that's what it is. I noticed what it was doing to me. A number of Zionists and people from the entity responded, maybe not to me directly, but to what I had said. I approached them all and said do you want a conversation about this? I'd be very willing to have a conversation. One responded and I had this Zoom conversation with them. It was kind of your traditional liberal Zionist, very reasonable. For peace and yes, Palestinian human rights, and everything until they went: Iran, it's all about Iran. They are the head of the snake, and we need to cut the head of the snake! It all got a bit weird from then on. But before that, he said this thing, and it worked on me. He said, I've been speaking to others in the branch, in the entity's branch of the association, and some of them thought you were an antisemite, and I wasn't sure. So, I decided I would speak to you and now that I've been speaking to you for one hour, I realize that you know a lot of the history, maybe even more than me, and you're not an antisemite. And when he said that I could feel...
Sacha (20:05) The seal of approval.
Benji (20:09) He's seen my heart! I am so blessed! And that's part of the narcissistic system again, because honestly, if you ever watch this, my good colleague, I don't give a fuck what you think about what's in my heart. You have absolutely no access and you are still profiting from genocide, so you have absolutely no grounds anywhere in the universe to judge my moral standing. Even if I was prejudiced against any group of people on earth at least I have never openly supported genocide. You see the way that, and I could feel it, a guy from the entity, and a psychologist that can read people's minds as we all know, told me I was not an antisemite and he's going to tell his colleagues! So, the misunderstanding will disappear, and we will all be able to have a big Kumbaya moment. Maybe we could have a rave party at the border of the concentration camp, and we will bring peace to the world. So, that is very deep, very deep.
This system is always calling you, calling your name and saying: come back, come back, there's a little place for you inside of it. This is tough. It's the colonial demand, but also the colonial threat. It's all wrapped into one and we are literally drinking this stuff in the West. I think it applies also to people from colonized communities, excuse me, or who were raised in the West or through Western education. We get it in our, not our mother's milk, I hope not, but at least in the baby formula. We're raised on this stuff. I think psychologically that is how it keeps us subservient to what at the end of the day are just the material interests of a raping, pillaging, enslaving, ecocidal and genocidal empire based on whatever massive compulsive accumulation disorder. If we need to use DSM categories, at least let's use them on them.
Nounja (22:14)
That makes me think about how Indigenous people and people of the global majority, which is a way of saying people of colour, respond to these things. Because we're also affected, I mean, we're overwhelmingly affected by empire. Wherever we grew up, I grew up in the belly of the beast, right, in the heart of empire. So, the way I see it is that there are fundamentally two things, because you were shut out from humanity and from the dominant society. So, you can respond to that by either pleading to be a good colonial subject and trying to assimilate, trying to capitulate to the system, or you can respond by saying, I'm out of this.
And what life do I lead? What is my path? What are my values? And that's one of the ways in which we are already more free. The folks who most directly and physically materially experience oppression and state violence, colonial violence, are already freer in our mindset. Because if you're not capitulating to the system, then you have to think, well, if I'm a doctor, how do I do medicine? If I'm excluded from this society, then who am I? What is my world? What are my values? What is my community? What does that mean?
And that's something I'm really incredibly grateful for, for coming from the lumpenproletariat, so to speak, is that I have been excluded from dominant society and that gives me an incredible opportunity to not capitulate to the system, to not follow the scripts and the roles and the path of this is what you're supposed to be. I'm not supposed to be alive and free right now. And I am. So, I get to decide what that means. And I didn't have expectations about success and prestige and income and these kinds of things. So, I'm already freed from all of that and incredibly grateful.
And of course, there are a lot of folks who attempt the other path of assimilation, who seek to emulate and go after those colonial demands. And we can have empathy for that. We can understand the places where it comes from, while also saying that is not the right response to oppression, is to seek to prove your humanity in a system that is incredibly violent and should never exist. And this is also what Mohammed Al-Kurd talks about in his new book Perfect Victims, was that Palestinians should not have to prove themselves to be, oh it's women and children, or oh it's elders. No, it's people. It's living beings. It doesn't matter if this person is abhorrent. You just shouldn't be colonized. You shouldn't have to prove yourself to a system that has already delegitimized its very existence. Europe is indefensible, again, in the words of Aimé Césaire. If we even try to prove ourselves as worthy within this system, we are already foregoing our own paradigm and supporting theirs.
Sacha (25:59)
The term I came across recently was disciplined resentment, that we need to be practicing disciplined resentment. I had a thought about tying these things together. Benji talked about feeling psychologically healthier as he moved closer to supporting Palestine. I know if I self-assess, I feel psychologically healthier the closer I move towards resistance and Palestine. And part of the thing I noticed, and this ties in so well to the narcissism, is the closer I get, the less my ego shows up. So, I noticed my ego would have shown up in certain spaces. And things like owning ideas or these sorts of ownership things, which is very interesting when you think about it, because owning is like occupying something.
Side note, I did notice last week we used the word occupation to describe a job. Now I think that's a bit strange, so I wonder if Benji feels better because there's less ego. Not only there's all the other things: living his values, etc., but there's also less ego involved. Then, the other part of this is the defenses. As soon as you said, if I’m excluded, who am I? Where do I stand? That's one of the defenses. So, people are if I let go of it… I thought of something really simple this week. Mackelmore released his new song. the Fucked up song. I'm listening to this song thinking this is awesome. But then my mind that naturally just went where are all the other artists? where are all these African-American rappers that have been rapping about their own oppression. Where the hell are they making these songs? What the hell's going on right now?
And then my mind was: Hmm, I'm imagining the person that goes, I don't want to give up. If I move in the direction of the resistance, I might have to give up Taylor Swift, you know what I mean? I might have to give up the Super Bowl, I might have to give up... Because then if you move in a direction, and then you see these people aren't saying anything, they're not speaking up, they're not doing anything, you lose respect for those people. And unless you can hold the two things together… Because I've grown up in this society, I'm very good at holding the two things together, I can sit there and I can watch the Super Bowl and appreciate the physical, whatever, but then also realize that this is a distraction to channel our revolutionary rage into, so that we don't act up in the world. So, I think that the loss of ego and the moving into that space of who am I then? Where do I stand? Where do I fit in? If I go to the shopping center and no one else is thinking about this, no one else is talking about this, I will walk through the shopping center with my t-shirt that says, Israel Terrorist State with the bloody flag on it. And no one stops me. No one asks a question about it. One person walks past and goes: Yeah, I totally agree. and that's the only reaction. And I don't know whether I'm sad that no one's reacting, that everyone's so, dormant. But it's because of the defenses.
Benji (29:10)
Well, couple of points. One, to keep on talking about this stuff from the perspective of a narcissistic system, there are minimal demands. And I think one of the...
Sacha (29:25)
Because you just have to be a victim, you mean? You just have to be the victim?
Benji (29:30)
I don't mean that. I mean, one of the minimal demands, is there is this discourse, the
kind of liberal Zionist discourse, also the liberal pro-US imperialist discourse. It kind of goes, you can criticize the entity, but there is a line, and if you cross that line, you're immediately marked as being anti-Semitic. And the line, I think, goes somewhere around what they call the entity's right to exist. This is the first time in history that a supposed state I don't actually think it's a real state, but let’s say a political entity takes on human qualities. They started with the entity. It has a right to exist. The entity has a right to exist. Humans have a right to exist. They did the same in the US with the Citizens United where now corporations have human rights. So, they have a right to free speech, and they have a right to therefore give billions of dollars to defend their interests because they're just smol bean little human things. We have this discourse and if you go: I don't actually think states have a right to exist. It makes no sense. Humans have rights, communities have rights. In terms having been trained in philosophy in the past, the proper subject for rights aren't physical objects they are not either legal political fictions in our heads that we agree to abide by for a period of time when it suits, or doesn't, the interests of our communities. Humans, living beings are the proper subject of the rights discourse.
Once you step out of that, once you go… So, they force you to adopt something that is absurd as the foundation. One is the white supremacy. It's absurd on its face. You can't do any science that doesn't break down all these barriers. So, you mean it's the melanin or it's the kind of religious ideology that for a period of time, a community chooses to follow, although what we see is you give them enough time and they develop all sorts of variations and then it becomes something else. This is what we see over time. So, you're asked to take in something that is absurd on its face as the foundation. And once you accept that, which is done by a mix of lots of indoctrination very early on, very subtle, but also some rewards and some threats, you're off to the races. And you really need to step out of it. But when you step out of it, it's literally like stepping out of a narcissistic family. The costs are very high. The costs are high in terms of our, I think pre-wired need to belong, pre-wired need to feel attached.
In addition, in our Western societies, in which community has just become a fiction, it's all mediated through these ideological means, mass media and all the rest of, the cost is really high. I've experienced this personally myself since I think 1992. I'm unable to watch television news. I just cannot do it. If I watch, after 30 seconds, I start raging and screaming at the television screen because you become totally excluded and you see this narcissistic system that keeps on going on, where everybody is pretending. It's an emperor's new clothes situation. The emperor is there, you know, prancing about with his private parts in your face and everybody goes what a beautiful, what a fine fabric! What a really fashionable outfit! This is really the height of fashion! We all want to be you, my good Lord! And you're there going: What the hell are you talking about? It’s just a dirty old man waving their private parts in your face! So, the cost is really high on the psychological level. And of course, on the economic level, it can be much higher because they will come after you. They will come after your livelihood. If you don't have some kind of independent livelihood, they will come after this. We've had colleagues come to us and say, I cannot say anything because I will lose my livelihood.
So, we need to understand, these processes because they are an integral part of what keeps people inside those narcissistic colonial imperial systems. There is a verbal system that if you stick to it, if you kind of agree to put your common humanity to one side, to swallow a few crazy ideas and never question those, the third rails of the dominant ideology, you have a chance to kind of make it. But if you step out, your chances of being shunned socially and that hurts most humans, or of being punished economically, or even of being punished physically by incarceration or worse, assassination, increase exponentially. I think this is part of what keeps people into those systems.
And finally, I think thinking of how people stay into those systems and in narcissistic relationships is a lens helps us understand also how and why people can see the whole thing and still stay for the longest period of time. As clinicians, we know this. People are seeing they're inside the narcissistic system. They see everything. They're able to talk to you in great detail about the whole thing. And yet they stay for weeks, sometimes years longer than they have to once they come to the realization. So, seeing it in that way, I think helps us, will help us eventually have a kind of psychologically more astute vision of building class consciousness, building anti-imperial consciousness, because what the anti-imperialist movement, anti-colonial movement, the communist movement have lacked has been a sophisticated psychological approach. We basically think that if we show people this is a class system and only the dominant classes dominate everything, including ideas, then the oppressed will develop their own consciousness for themselves and throw the whole house of cards down. Whereas on other side, the exploiters know exactly how psychological that deal is. Not purely psychological, of course, essentially material, but with the psychological side. And they've been doing this propaganda, advertising, mass media stuff, and now social media stuff, and giving out so much resources to it, which at the end of the day explains some of the difficulties of building class and liberation consciousness in our societies.
Sacha (37:08)
If you look at resistance, one of the key factors in success has been adaptability. Now let's take it back to the scenario you're talking about. To the person that doesn't speak out because they think they have too much to lose. That they think it, doesn't mean that's a reality. But if they stopped and gathered themselves and looked at adaptability and went, on, how could I adapt to my work to other ways and do other things, they could still make the choice to speak out anyway. So, I remember having this thought, because I'm going to create some online training. And then I had the thought: What if the Zionists come after me and da da da da da, and start to try and ruin it.
And then I started to laugh. I was driving to work, I started laughing. I just started laughing out loud because my very next thought was: No, that's a good thing. Because that'll weed out people. And that'll bring people to me. Because if the Zionists hate me, that means the people that are going will trust me. The Zionists will point to me and then that means those people know that I'm trusted. So, one of those big schism consequences is trust in the world. I think it’s one of the consequences. I think people feel they're rigidly trapped in that thinking or that system. But I think it's about trying to find ways to be adaptable as a way out.
Nounja (38:36)
And as you're both talking, I'm sort of imagining this plane where there is a bubble. And this is the bubble of colonialism, capitalism, oppression. And people inside feel it's the whole world. And it's not. The world is infinite. So, the colonial capitalist demands attempt to and often succeed in keeping people within this bubble, which is isolated, it's alienated, it's lonely, and it's wrong. It's not being in right relationship. And people feel if I leave this bubble, then it's an utter void. What will happen? What will happen to me? What will happen to my work? Etc. That's understandable. Some of us are born outside or are cast out and then have the choice of trying to scramble to get back into that bubble of loneliness and alienation, or to look around us and see the world and its just infinite potential, its infinite beauty. And chart our own path. And be part of making the new world, and also be part of trying to free people from that bubble. And there, as Espanol says, the colonial world is a Manichaean world.
It is divided in two. It is divided into this bubble and infinite beauty and possibility. So, that gives us, wherever we locate ourselves within that, to have the choice of that bubble feels safe. And when you break out of it, and Sacha, you've been talking about this as well, then your mind is freed. So, it's very risky, and with everything to gain. And when you join the resistance, when you free your mind from that bubble, then you enter into a community, you enter into people who welcome you with open arms, and you get to discover something that was previously beyond any imaginings.
Benji (40:56)
Yes. I've been thinking about this latest video by this YouTube creator called Indienile. He's a Palestinian drag artist living in Amsterdam and he's been making these wonderfully subtle and astute videos about the psychology of the whole thing and recently put one out that was an analysis of this film which I kind of understand is a remake of the Wizard of Oz, Wicked…
Sacha (41:30)
Wicked. It’s from the perspective of the wicked witch. So, it's trying to take you into the perspective of the villain.
Benji (41:37)
Right. What's really interesting in the way puts those videos is he's able to touch upon the rationality and the humanity of staying inside the narcissistic system. Because of course, the narcissistic system doesn't ask of you that you become an Auschwitz guard or that you become a Gaza genocider prancing around in your victim's underwear. What it requires of you is that you accept this small little atrocious compromises: we are the super humans and they are barely human, or this entity has a right to exist and that is the primacy of everything in your life, but then inside of that, if you make those compromises, you can be… And he always says it, he says you know this person before roasting them to hell, he says I'm sure they're very nice personally I'm sure their friends love them, I'm sure they're really compassionate. I don't think he does it purely on a sarcastic level. What he's trying to point at is, inside of that system you can find some measure of common humanity, you can find some measure of meeting those fundamental human aspirations of being kind to one another, being compassionate, being supportive. But it's being compassionate to your ravers just on the other side of the concentration camp in Gaza or Warsaw Ghetto. There's a poem by, Czeslaw Milosz written in1943 in Warsaw. There was a Carousel right outside the Warsaw ghetto walls. And you had these Polish families and I'm sure the Polish mothers who love their children to bits would bring them to have a lot of fun on the carousel which stood just on the other side of the wall of the Warsaw ghetto during the Nazi occupation. So, you have this possibility of being almost fully human inside the narcissistic system. And that keeps you in because the cost of stepping outside and going: wow, I've been lied to all this time and I've been made an accomplice in, willful dehumanization, enslaving, raping, exploitation, ecociding and genociding are so high because then you get to this phase where, I think many of us had this exeperience after October the 7th, where you literally can't think of anything else. How can I even have fun with my kid doing some normal parent-child activity when I know that bombs are being rained on Gaza as I do this? And with my tax dollars! Which is even worse for us Westerners. If you take our money, this is already taking our precious bodily fluids, our life essence. So, there is that dimension. I want to invite people to go and watch this guys' videos because he gets it. He gets it at a level that is accessible to everybody.
There is comfort and there is humanity inside the narcissistic system. It's just that it's incomplete and it's flawed and it's cracked. And hopefully we and the resistance on the battlefield even more than us, are widening these cracks so that the eventual light of common humanity comes tshining through and offers a way to bring us to a classless, exploitationless, and supremacyless society.
Nounja (45:21)
One more piece to add to that that was coming up and helping to tie together some of these pieces is that the colonial capitalist demands are the external forces to try to keep people within this bubble of violence and exploitation. And the colonial capitalist defences are the internal forces that try to keep us within this bubble. There's an interplay between the internal and the external and then our ability to act with agency, especially when they come into awareness in order to make different choices.
Benji (45:57)
Beautiful.
I suggested that maybe we end our episodes on a kind of humorous note, on something that has jumped at us and that seemed particularly crazy. I shared with you this thing. It's hard for me to even believe it's real and I forgot to check it but if it's not, you know, we're at this place where Assal Raad keeps on saying that you can't distinguish Onion headlines from actual headlines these days. This may be part of that. But apparently, there is a bill in front of Congress called H.R. 1161 to authorize the President to enter into negotiations to acquire Greenland and to rename Greenland as Red, White, and Blue Land. The sponsor is representative Carter…
Sacha (46:49)
I think that's real.
Benji (46:54)
Earl L. Buddy, Republican from Georgia, where else? It's from the House Committee, the Foreign Affairs and the Natural Resources Committee of all things. So, I think, if we could say a few words about that specific thing, maybe I can start by sharing what showed up for me around that idea. I think it's the colonial mind is metastasizing at this moment. The cancer is reaching the vital organs and we are seeing it in the in the US, all that Musk madness. And that is another sign of it, the supremacy is so complete, they are so high on the smells of their own ideological farts that they are thinking of annexing Greenland, but they couldn't keep it as Greenland They need to drop their own little big ideological turd on it and go, No, no, this has got to be called Red, White and Blueland. Those guys, they're supposed normally, to be the leaders of a country and to really think about the best interests of the nation. That's what they're paid for supposedly and delegated for. And one of the most pressing issues they can come up with is renaming Greenland Red, White and Blueland.
Sacha (48:29)
I think the explanation actually lies in the opposite. They're not aware of it. I think the real explanation for the behavior is an unconscious one, because here's the thing people talk about. The resistance successfully defeated Israel. But they didn't just do that because they defeated America as well. They didn't just show that Israel was weak. They showed that America was weak. So, it's not coincidental that the timing is Trump comes in, and he starts talking about taking all these places because he couldn't take that one little strip. That's why I don't freak out when Trump says he's gonna build stuff in Gaza, because they couldn't take it the first time, what's he gonna do, man? So, I think they're compensating. They're trying to show, they're trying to project power by saying we can take Canada, we can take Mexico, we can take Greenland, to compensate for the fact that they lost that perception of power. But sorry, I turned a bit serious, didn't I?
Nounja (49:31)
I've been laughing for the last several weeks because I'm just really thrilled to have the honor to witness the fall of the US empire. I'm literally thrilled. It gives my spirit such joy. And when I see these things, it's like the meme I saw recently of Ronald McDonald holding an AK-47.
with the caption: This is how America looks to the world. It's so absurd. It's so clownish. And it's coming down and we're seeing it now. And Indigenous people, we will continue. We have made it this far. And I am really grateful that the empire is doing its own dismantling. It's shooting itself in the foot with each piece of this. So, fortunately, the compensation is such an extreme overcompensation that it will be its own downfall.
Benji (50:28)
It ties back to something you mentioned earlier, Sacha, about the costs.
Can they make the cost of resistance too high? And then you look at Gaza and the people of Gaza overwhelmingly feel like they've scored a victory. So, how can you make the cost higher? And then you have Trump, prancing around saying, if you don't liberate all the prisoners by noon on Saturday, all hell will break loose. And I'll probably rename it Red, White and Blueza And the guy, when nothing happens is reduced to going - Well, something happened. The entity folded and actually accepted, the resistance demands is what happened. And then you have Trump tweeting something like: I said, all hell would break loose if they don't release everybody and they've listened so much to me and they've decided to do nothing about it. And I said, I would support the entity, whatever it does, and I will continue doing so.
Sacha (51:27)
Well, and you noticed the projection. Do you notice the projection where he’s projected Hamas is weak and bullies and it's: Dude, you're the weak bullies, man, .
Benji (51:38)
I'm gonna call the Gaza coast the Orange Man coast if you don't shape up and do what I say. And yeah, it's it's devolved to this clownish and the new is struggling to be born and the old is not dying in that interregnum is the time of... Gramsci didn't say monsters, I think he said weird stuff and I think we're at the point where the old is just crumbling in front of our faces. I love this Hemingway quote: How did you go bankrupt a millionaire at the time is asked and he says: two ways, first gradually, then suddenly. It feels to me that the suddenly phase is upon us.
Sacha (52:23)
I should clarify and say given I'm the compassionate guy, the same that I said with school and education versus education. The American empire does not mean the American people. I have lots of compassion for the American people. It's the power structures that are dominant that are ruining their whole lives. Go listen to the latest Macklemore song and you'll understand it.
Benji (52:44)
Yeah, right. I mean, very few people benefit from narcissistic systems. You know, in the Wizard of Oz film when Dorothy, it's the dog actually, Spot, finally pulls the curtain and the wizard is revealed behind the curtain just pulling some levers. Dorothy goes and says: You are a very bad man. And he goes: I'm not a very bad man. I'm just a very bad wizard.
And I think it's something like that about the whole deal.
Nounja (53:19)
So, we have the internal, and the external. The external is a colonial capitalist demands to keep us within the system. The internal are the defenses, the psychological defenses to keep us within the system. And then another piece is that similar to what you've talked about Benji, is that to support the mind, to support the psychology, to support the spirit of the person in order to step outside of the abusive system.
And so one of the pieces that we can do to nourish the resistance is to support that psychological fortification, even when people are inside the bubble, in order to make the different choices to step outside. And empire will fall. We are carrying the seeds for a new world.
Benji (54:05)
Beautiful. See you in the next one.
In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori
baskets of olives and lemons,
cobbles spattered with wine
and the wreckage of flowers.
Vendors cover the trestles
with rose-pink fish;
armfuls of dark grapes
heaped on peach-down.
On this same square
they burned Giordano Bruno.
Henchmen kindled the pyre
close-pressed by the mob.
Before the flames had died
the taverns were full again,
baskets of olives and lemons
again on the vendors' shoulders.
I thought of the Campo dei Fiori
in Warsaw by the sky-carousel
one clear spring evening
to the strains of a carnival tune.
The bright melody drowned
the salvos from the ghetto wall,
and couples were flying
high in the cloudless sky.
At times wind from the burning
would drift dark kites along
and riders on the carousel
caught petals in midair.
That same hot wind blew
open the skirts of the girls
and the crowds were laughing
on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.
Someone will read as moral
that the people of Rome or Warsaw
haggle, laugh, make love
as they pass by the martyrs' pyres.
Someone else will read
of the passing of things human,
of the oblivion born
before the flames have died.
But that day I thought only of the loneliness of the dying,
of how, when Giordano climbed to his burning
he could not find in any human tongue
words for mankind, mankind who live on.
Already they were back at their wine or peddled their white starfish,
baskets of olives and lemons they had shouldered to the fair,
and he already distanced as if centuries had passed
while they paused just a moment for his flying in the fire.
Those dying here, the lonely forgotten by the world,
our tongue becomes for them the language of an ancient planet.
Until, when all is legend and many years have passed,
on a new Campo dei Fiori rage will kindle at a poet's word.
Czeslaw Milosz Warsaw, 1943
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