Our Weekly Discontents, 05/31/2021
From Six Nations To Palestine Colonization is a Crime
Hello hello, it’s Nashwa Lina Khan of Habibti Please. I am so honoured to be a new addition to the Discontents collective. I too am and continue to be discontented with how media and cultural production around us is dominated by narratives that consolidate and reify power, even making sense of and legitimizing power that is grueling and grinds us all down.
As an independent media creator, I want to challenge and counter-story predominate corporate media narratives. If you’re reading this you do too. As much as it is fun to criticize cultural production and media, both are important. They always have been and always will be. At their worst cultural production and media can manufacture consent for coups, war, invasions, dispossession, and so much more brutality.
However, at its best cultural production and media challenges unaccountable power that facilitates such evils. We witness this in counter storytelling that allows narratives mainstream media will not pick up. Around the world journalists and media figures who are fearless are often silenced. In tandem with this, we have witnessed the consolidation of media that oppresses people rather than empowers people. Now more than ever we need critical voices in the media to proliferate this landscape.
We have recently witnessed the resistance against the grotesque settler colonialism unfolding in Jerusalem. We have in a few weeks witnessed Muna El Kurd and her brother Mohammed El Kurd intimately and viscerally highlight the jarring scenes of settlers taking place in their neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.
They show why we need other voices globally to push against corporate media machines and to counterstory. Around the world journalists and media figures who are honest and fearless are often silenced or lose work. Last week we witnessed Emily Wilder lose her with the Associated Press for her college activism in solidarity with Palestinians human rights.
Emily highlights something many of us have known, Palestinian journalists and thinkers have continuously been repressed, silenced, and lost work in media for sharing the violence their people face. While we have witnessed the consolidation of media that oppresses people rather than empowers people, now more than ever we need critical voices in the media to proliferate this landscape.
The settler colonial violence we witness in Palestine is also papered over here where I am writing from in Canada. Imperialism and settler colonialism continue to devastate so many while many of us are beneficiaries. Before and during this pandemic and after we will continue to be the beneficiaries of these destructive forces. The pandemic should be a breaking point, bringing to the fore how necropolitics has always worked. This week 215 bodies of Indigenous children who would have been adults with full lives were found. They were killed and disappeared after being ripped from their families and placed in residential schools. The media here has long erased this history and presently our national broadcaster CBC has prohibited staff from even using the word Palestine.
As someone in the imperial core, I believe it is imperative to follow media that is thoughtful, critical, and incisive. I also hope this week we are following events unfolding locally and globally.
Thanks for reading along, if you are looking to start exploring my own project Habibti Please, which is an attempt at counter-storying, I suggest my episode with Palestinian Youth Movement and the 2021 Palestine Resolution group or my episode on The Battle of Algiers.
Yallah Bye,
Welcome to Hell World
Luke O’Neil
“Somebody asked me what changed the most when he was diagnosed and I just said that you say ‘I love you’ a lot more because you want that to be the last thing you say to someone when you’re aware everything you say could be the last thing.”
M.G. McIntyre writes on a year of isolation and lost time with his father who was slowly dying on the other side of the country.
I spent nine months almost completely alone in Vancouver in 2020. I saw one person face to face between March and November of that year. My father had stage 4 colon cancer, which made me hesitant to fly home to Nova Scotia for fear of getting him sick or getting my mother sick. I had contacted Covid myself in April and was sick for almost two months. Beyond the physical toll it really fucked with my head. My already extant mental illness was pushed into overdrive and so I drank too much to self-medicate and sat alone in my apartment staring at the walls. I used to like being alone, but self-imposed solitude and forced isolation are two very different things. There’s a reason one of them is used as a form of torture.
Elsewhere Em Cassel reports on the real reasons restaurant workers around the country aren’t going back to work. Turns out “overly generous” unemployment benefits are far down on the list.
“The existence of a somewhat decent social safety net for like five minutes in this country has upturned these restaurateurs’ entire business model of exploiting a desperate and readily replenishable labor force.”
The Flashpoint
Eoin Higgins
It's Memorial Day here in the US, a day when media and political figures talk about how much they love the military.
In reality, though, those who go to war for America are treated dismissively by the government that sends them to kill people overseas. At The Flashpoint, I updated readers on an ongoing fight with the VA for death benefits. Six years after Vietnam vet Pete Naylor died of cancer—likely related to his exposure to Agent Orange—his wife Kate is still wading through the bureaucracy.
A photo of Pete hangs over Kate’s left shoulder as she sits at the kitchen table, on the red brick backsplash he built her. A pile of paperwork she’s filled in her pursuit of compensation sits before her.
“We did everything they told us to do,” she said. “Now they have to own up to their responsibility.”
Sometimes, said Kate, it feels like “they just want you to give up.”
Also at The Flashpoint last week:
Interviews with people suffering through a violent "ceasefire" in Gaza
Discourse Blog's Sam Grasso on George Floyd and the Democrats
This week The Flashpoint heads to Texas and Mississippi to talk to people on the frontlines of the fight for reproductive healthcare. Stay tuned, and sign up here (if you subscribe today, Monday May 31, get 20% off).
Wars of Future Past
Kelsey D. Atherton
Today is the 19th Memorial Day since the start of the US war in Afghanistan. Plenty has already been written about the weird juxtaposition of formal solemnity contrasted with a holiday commonly observed by grilling and drinking in peace; you don’t need me to say more about that.
My last newsletter is about the weaponization of the memories of the dead. It was tied, specifically, to the latest relitigation of the death of Pat Tillman, the former footballer turned Ranger who in 2004 was killed on patrol by American bullets in the inevitable confusion of war. His death a tragedy, the coverup a crime, and yet like the dead of memorial day, his corpse gets trotted out annually to silence any critics of the militarized state and the violence it does.
“Through an almost alchemical process the Bush administration transmuted classified information and real human death into stories it could wear as armor against criticism,” I wrote earlier this month. It’s a consistent process, hardly limited to the Bush administration, even if the communications team around W turned it into a kind of praxis of evil.
In 2017, Tillman’s memory was necromanced into service by President Trump, as a cudgel against Colin Kaepernick’s protests over police violence. There’s a kind of cemetery gatekeeping in American political life around who gets to invoke the dead and to what ends. We are, forever, worse served by this, as it makes even solemn memorials of personal loss in national service into contested political space.
That war itself is a tragedy, that the bodies it breaks in its service matter just as much as those of civilians caught in its path, is lost in the fights over how, exactly, Americans in public should grill and mourn. We are ill-served by this ritual of public sorrow, so long as it uses the performance of deep reflection to crowd out any meaningful change in our wars and our remembrances.
Foreign Exchanges
Derek Davison
I took a break for most of the last week, but if you’re interested in the institutional aspects of US foreign policy then you might want to check out my interview with the Quincy Institute’s Eli Clifton. He and the Center for International Policy’s Ben Freeman produced a report a couple of weeks ago on the striking lack of transparency in the think tank world. They called for an array of reforms, including greater transparency with respect to funders, more careful application of the Foreign Agents Registration Act for work done on behalf of foreign governments or enterprises, and better self-disclosure of potential conflicts of interest.
Think tanks are vitally important to the conception and execution of US foreign policy—their “experts” advise presidents, testify before Congress, writing op-eds for influential media outlets, among other things. If their work is being underwritten by individuals or entities with a vested interest in steering foreign policy in a certain direction (a large defense contractor, for example, or a foreign government) then it’s crucial that those relationships are made known. Individuals go back and forth between the think tank and government worlds, often picking up a few cool side gigs on corporate boards or as something akin to lobbyists (albeit often without the loaded term “lobbyist” attached), often with little or no disclosure of their affiliations.
It’s little wonder that polling shows that many Americans simply don’t trust anything about the policymaking process anymore. Common sense steps like those outlined in Eli’s report could help restore some of that trust.
Discourse Blog
Hi everyone. Some housekeeping news first! We’re currently in the last day of our Hot Blog Summer sale, which is a 25% discount on all yearly tiers. That puts a year-long subscription to Discourse down to $63 bucks! Hop on it.
Anyway, you’re probably here for the blogs. Let’s get into it. We did a lot of serious political blogging this week, including my piece on Joe Manchin being a little bitty lapdog, and some great labor reporting, like Paul’s piece on a private school union campaign in New Orleans, but you know what. No. Our best performing piece this week was Rafi’s absolutely absurd troll blog about how scrambled eggs suck. And that wasn’t even the most offensive part! Some notes here: Discourse is a worker-owned cooperative and I haven’t checked our bylaws recently but I think it takes a supermajority vote of the other cooperative members to eject one of the partners, but if Rafi keeps up food takes like that we might have to look into it. I kid. But maybe not. Rafi you’re on notice.
In good food takes, however, we had a guest post from our friends at Defector, who wrote about the hot dog condiment island at baseball games becoming a casualty of the pandemic. We also had another content swap with the fine folks at Foreign Exchanges, who sent us an essay about the lazy ways many outlets and pundits analyze armed conflict.
Meanwhile, Caitlin continued her streak of “chronicling absurd things that happen to her” with this piece, about walking into a massive spontaneous TikTok event in Huntington Beach. I didn’t think we could get wilder than the “constantly assaulted by literal bears” blog but this one is about teens, which are arguably scarier than bears. We wish Caitlin well down there but I for one have no idea what the hell is going on in LA.