I strongly disagree with the idea that it’s unhelpful to bully celebrities about their position on Palestine. On the contrary, I think we should bully them more.
We tend to underestimate the consequences of the fact that all the most amplified voices in our society are millionaires. Under capitalism the people with the largest platforms and the biggest audiences are all wealthy enough to have a vested interest in preserving the status quo, so they’re reluctant to rock the boat politically in any major way.
When all the most influential voices in our society are creating the illusion that the system is more or less fine the way it is by what they say and what they don’t say, it cannot help but significantly influence public political opinion. In this way celebrities function as a kind of goalkeeper preventing dissident thought from reaching the minds of the masses.
When you see Ed Sheeran bawling his eyes out onstage and playing victim because people are criticizing his muteness on the moral issue of our time, he genuinely does feel as though something is being taken away from him. He was enjoying being able to relax in the lap of luxury without having to go against the grain of establishment power in any way, never saying anything which upsets the Zionist billionaires or the media-owning class whose infrastructure he built his lucrative career on. Now that comfortable setup has been taken away from him a bit, and he feels victimized by the inconvenience this has caused him.
This dynamic is what holds the entire construct of celebrity in place in our society. If you make the billionaires happy you get to be a millionaire, and if you make the billionaires unhappy you get discomfort and loss. If you please the plutocrats you get the carrot, and if you displease them you get the stick. This is true whether you’re talking about pundits, news anchors, musicians or movie stars.
This system of carrots and sticks is the main adhesive holding the propaganda apparatus of the western empire together. As westerners we are taught that we live in a free society which is far superior to the “tyrannical regimes” of the global south, because under the tyrannical regimes the news is state propaganda and the entertainment is heavily censored. In reality westerners are consuming tightly controlled propaganda every day of their lives, because all their most influential voices are being aggressively regulated by the carrots and sticks of wealthy capitalists.
The only weakness in this system, apparently, is that it only works if the public plays along with it. If enough people decide to denounce and defund the empire’s celebrity goalkeepers for their complicity in imperial abuses, it turns out that we’ve got a stick of our own. Make it too uncomfortable to toe the imperial line and you’ll start seeing celebrities reluctantly follow the moral leadership of the public, thereby further weakening the vice-like grip of the imperial narrative control apparatus on our collective consciousness.
So we should do so happily and without hesitation. It is perfectly moral to ruin a millionaire’s day for both-sidesing a genocide. It is perfectly ethical to bully people with large platforms until they take a public stand against the abuses of the empire which has made them obscenely wealthy. It won’t solve all our problems, but it will weaken the power of the mass-brainwashing machine of the capitalist empire which has been manipulating the public into believing we don’t urgently need revolutionary change.
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Bullying any amount of conservatism is healthy. Conservatism is pure evil. Fun Fact: Every genocide in human history was caused by conservatives.
Conservatives bring only sickness, oppression and death. If Sherman had finished the job, the U.S. wouldn’t be helping commit genocide right now.
It’s like the infamous anecdote about if you let a nazi drink at your bar, your bar is now a nazi bar.
In the US at least, we spent far too long coddling the fascists, allowing them to grow in power. Alas, a lot of people were in denial, and now that our bar is full of nazis, it’s difficult to act.
One bad apple spoils the harvest
sherman himself helped the US government commit genocide, what the fuck are you talking about? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tecumseh_Sherman#Indian_Wars
The U.S. government was pretty damned conservative during the times they slaughtered native Americans. Thanks for pointing that out!
yes, including sherman. so how would sherman being allowed to “finish the job” have helped?
Sherman was quite conservative. But he worked for the U.S. military at a time when entire states of conservatives decided to become traitors and attack his country. He was ordered to defend his country and he did, conservative or not.
He was on a path of effectively exterminating the conservative enemy when his commander (a progressive president) decided to stop and allow them to live.
I like to complain that “Sherman didn’t finish the job”, but he was just following orders when he showed them mercy. The mistake made there was not really his. He did his job exactly as he was supposed to. Had he been allowed to finish them (as much as possible anyway), we wouldn’t have concentration camps in the U.S. right now.
but he was also following orders when he did genocide on native americans. therefore it doesnt matter, the ACW was obviously two genocidal factions infighting and the US would have concentration camps today no matter what, because it was founded on genocide and all political parties of the US love genocide.
Only conservatives support genocide. This has always been true throughout recorded human history.
Conservatism is evil but blaming every genocide on conservatism is ignoring history. Unless your definition of conservatism is “people I disagree with”.
I disagree with you, but I don’t presume you to be conservative. Conservatives have specific traits. For example, a conservative is biologically unable to experience empathy. This is one of the reasons being a bigot or committing genocide comes so easily to them.