#but not gal gadot for being a literal colonizer | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

moon-pepper · 7 months

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It's kind of hard to take seriously things like "this celebrity did/said this awful thing so we don't support them" when the thing in question is like, extremely trendy front-page news that everyone's talking about. Like, there's a list going around right now naming and shaming famous people posting in support of Israel, and the thing is you just know 90% of these people have no fucking idea what they're talking about. They've never thought twice about Israel or Palestine except maybe in terms of booking a concert in Tel Aviv, they certainly don't know about the history, and there's a decent chance half of them don't even know what Palestine is. They just checked their phones one evening, saw a million news articles all unilaterally declaring that the gentle and innocent people of Israel were being randomly bombarded by the cruel, twisted barbarians of Palestine and didn't bother looking for context before hopping on Instagram to share the exact same post five thousand other celebrities were all sharing. Then they all went back to their days, not even glancing at the replies because they have managers for that (and realistically, their managers probably told them what to post in the first place too).

If it's something like Kanye randomly going neo-Nazi or Gal Gadot actively using her celebrity to promote the IDF or Depp publicly plotting to ruin his victim's life because she spoke against him, then yeah, hold that grudge, because those people are assholes entirely of their own volitions. But like, what's the point in moralizing things like "this artist is doing NFTs even though they destroy the environment" or "this influencer is mourning Queen Elizabeth despite her being a murderous colonizer" or "this actor is endorsing Amazon despite their monopolistic and abusive business practices"? None of these people know anything beyond what NBC tells them and very few of them would care if they did. They're literally just posting whatever will make them more popular, and unfortunately that usually involves godawful political stances.

#pepperpost #this probably sounds angrier than it is #i'm not trying to vague i'm just exhausted seeing people put so much energy into caring what celebrities think #especially because celebrities usually don't think

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laundryandtaxes · 6 years

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I know an old lady who refused to see wonder woman because gal gadot was in the idf but her own son is literally a cop and she'll defend pigs to the death…not to make a value judgement about one vs the other but it's insane that she can recognize that one murderous military (or paramilitary, in the case of the police) is bad but not that the same logic applies to the other 🤔

I think some of that is certainly antisemitism and the idea that Jewish people doing x is worse than other people doing x, but I also think a lot of it is just difficulty seeing through prevalent ideology. What I mean by that is that Native American cultures and even the existence of Native people here are relegated to history topics- finished history, topics for sort of retroactive study. There’s a massive extent to which the colonization of this continent is seen as complete- a sad thing, sure, oh how awful was that Trail of Tears, etc, but most people have difficulty understanding the colonization here is a continuing process. But people living on Native reservations here still have difficulty getting access to affordable food, reservations are plagued by high suicide rates and alcoholism issues and often lack easy access to treatment, there are attacks at many universities right now on the existence of things like Latin American studies programs, there is a massive wave of sanitization of US history taking place in many states when it comes to things like mentioning slavery or colonization at all, etc. All of these are parts of current colonization. This is still happening- if this is history at all then it is a living and breathing history, and this is before taking into account US imperialist actions abroad. But these are actions which do not seem, on their face, murderous- they don’t look like shooting someone in the head, and because of that it is difficult for someone who hasn’t thought about and worked through what ideology is and how it can distort events to understand and wrap their head around. Even when looking at obvious violence like the massive murder numbers you see posted by US police every year, it is difficult to ask yourself what criminality is, what criminality means, where criminality comes from, etc- it’s easy to justify the murder of people you see as having done something wrong.

On the other hand, it is easy for most people to look at what is happening to Palestine and understand that it is bad. 1948 is much more recent than 1776, and there are still people alive today who witnessed some of the first atrocities committed by the state of Israel. To see homes being bulldozed to make way for Israeli settlements, to see the livelihoods of Palestinians purposefully taken away, to see people forced to live as second class citizens because of their race, to see the joyous reaction of much of the Isareli populace to things like bombing Palestinians who have rocks and poorly-built rockets for self defense, to see the extreme cruelty of the IDF and to witness its peculiarly open obsession with weapons development and the development of the latest and greatest tactics for essentially culling Palestinians- these things reasonably break people’s hearts. No decent person can look at a state armed to the teeth intent on murderously pushing out people it displaced in very recent history, and not see that something truly awful is happening. This is what colonization looks like when seen with our own eyes, with bombs replacing cannons. It is horrific to see it happening in real time, and it is more evidently violent than, say, not ensuring that the peoples whose land you stole and whom you misplaced can afford to eat healthy food and see doctors easily. So I do think part of the inability to understand this stems from being able to see colonization happening there with your own eyes, and not being able to see it happening here without searching out information or looking for news.

#Anonymous

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