It changes us. We watch people like her and Bushnell become martyrs, and it makes us confront ourselves. That’s not nothing.
Unfortunately, without an organized mass movement that can turn martyrdom into propaganda, it’s just as likely to change us into depressed fatalists. You said it: we watch her die and the genocide continues, so the lesson people might take is “nothing matters”.
There are nearly a million+ martyrs in the last few years, at this point everyone and their mailmen has been confronted with ourselves. Self-sacrifice only can be productive in the context of revolution (including the early organization phase) and without an army of labor - the acceleration into full on world war and fascism continues.
Martyrs also help in the early organization stage as it plays a vital role in radicalization, a there’s a dialectical relationship between repression and resistance. In later stages there’s organizers that can turn martyrdom into propaganda, but in the early stages it creates those very organizers. Martyrdom isn’t the goal, it’s a single step.
There’s also chauvinism that you have to consider. A million+ martyrs outside of the West are just numbers to them, it allows them to tune out the horror to cope. It’s categorically different to the average Westerner when their own neighbors become martyrs.
I don’t think of them as martyrs so much as beacons. It sounds corny but the concept of corny is also a bourgeois Jedi mind trick to keep people cynical. In this absurd, post-truth, post-sincerity world there are still humans of pure conviction. Even if we wouldn’t go down the same path ourselves we can learn from their refusal to bend
My worry is that our deaths can be twisted from being an inspiring beacon to being an example of hopeless futility. They died, the genocide continues, and so people will conclude that their deaths didn’t matter. That their deaths were a waste because they seemingly didn’t “accomplish” anything. “See? They died for nothing. You shouldn’t even try.”
A flaw of propaganda of the deed is that deeds don’t actually speak for themselves. Without an organized propaganda effort it’s just more bad news.
I guess I was more talking about deciding how I would personally respond, which is something that I can control, and which affects how people around me respond. Grassroots sentiment can’t always be easily stifled by the machine.
It changes us. We watch people like her and Bushnell become martyrs, and it makes us confront ourselves. That’s not nothing.
Unfortunately, without an organized mass movement that can turn martyrdom into propaganda, it’s just as likely to change us into depressed fatalists. You said it: we watch her die and the genocide continues, so the lesson people might take is “nothing matters”.
There are nearly a million+ martyrs in the last few years, at this point everyone and their mailmen has been confronted with ourselves. Self-sacrifice only can be productive in the context of revolution (including the early organization phase) and without an army of labor - the acceleration into full on world war and fascism continues.
Martyrs also help in the early organization stage as it plays a vital role in radicalization, a there’s a dialectical relationship between repression and resistance. In later stages there’s organizers that can turn martyrdom into propaganda, but in the early stages it creates those very organizers. Martyrdom isn’t the goal, it’s a single step.
There’s also chauvinism that you have to consider. A million+ martyrs outside of the West are just numbers to them, it allows them to tune out the horror to cope. It’s categorically different to the average Westerner when their own neighbors become martyrs.
I don’t think of them as martyrs so much as beacons. It sounds corny but the concept of corny is also a bourgeois Jedi mind trick to keep people cynical. In this absurd, post-truth, post-sincerity world there are still humans of pure conviction. Even if we wouldn’t go down the same path ourselves we can learn from their refusal to bend
Is there a difference?
My worry is that our deaths can be twisted from being an inspiring beacon to being an example of hopeless futility. They died, the genocide continues, and so people will conclude that their deaths didn’t matter. That their deaths were a waste because they seemingly didn’t “accomplish” anything. “See? They died for nothing. You shouldn’t even try.”
A flaw of propaganda of the deed is that deeds don’t actually speak for themselves. Without an organized propaganda effort it’s just more bad news.
I don’t disagree with that.
I guess I was more talking about deciding how I would personally respond, which is something that I can control, and which affects how people around me respond. Grassroots sentiment can’t always be easily stifled by the machine.