A post I wrote on my Resist Archive instagram page in November 2024:

When I look back on my life after having become radicalized against essentially all of Western society, I reflect on all the bourgeois spaces I spent my life and continue to spend my life moving through, how I contribute(d) to the normalization of such spaces. All the parties, the conferences, the holidays, the vacations, the weddings—every ounce of the so called prosperity we enjoyed was founded upon imperialism and genocide. The food we ate, the energy and water we used, the labor necessary to produce the buildings and roads, party favors and Christmas gifts—all of it extracted at gunpoint on stolen land from living beings, from the Earth herself, to generate capital so Joe can amuse himself with a yacht.

Those memories have a sinister red filter pulled over them now, like there was a malign energy underpinning the foundations of our lives that I couldn’t see. What incredible dissonance we live with, to normalize such a hedonistic, individualistic worldview, a whole lifestyle built upon the mass violence of imperialism. I’m ashamed of how we justify this system, defend it, and let the defeatism seep into our very pores. So many of us, the mass of people in Western society, accepted the premise dictated by the ruling class that the best we can hope for are some modest reforms to benefit ourselves won through permitted tactics.

I see now how colonized our minds are. Al Aqsa Flood and everything that followed—our failure to stop the genocide and our contribution to worsening the genocide for over 400 days—demonstrated clearly how colonized our minds are. We need to take stock of where we’re at and ask ourselves why we’ve been willing to sacrifice so little to stop these holocausts we are collectively responsible for causing.

There is no prosperity in the imperial core without mass violence and ecocide in the Global South, and everywhere—these are the two sides of the dialectic, the contradictory elements struggling against each other. The principal contradiction.

The principal contradiction all liberation movements must contend with is imperialism, what Lenin called the highest stage of capitalism.

— D.