IT’S DIGNITY STUPID
While we cannot end the genocide on our own, we can decide whether our silence will become another weapon.
Comrades,
I’m holding a flash sale;
This week, yearly subscriptions will be priced at just $30.00.
That’s less than three dollars a month for all my writing.
Your subscriptions keep this page going. So if you have the means, and believe in paying for good writing, please do consider becoming a paid subscriber.
In an interview for Italian TV from 1980, Louis Althusser mentions football (soccer) as an example of Communism, of a small Communist area that already exists in our reality (his other examples are religious communities, trade unions, and some cells of a Communist Party):
“Look at how football is played, what happens? It’s not about market relationships, it’s not about political domination, it’s not about ideological intimidation. There are people from different teams that oppose each other, they respect the rules, that is, they respect each other. Communism is the respect for humankind.”1
Althusser knows well this is not the social reality of big football clubs and competitions: they are deep in market relationships (billions changing hands), political domination (just recall Trump’s manipulation of FIFA), and ideological intimidation (the use of football to assert national unity – due to my total ignorance of football, I was often designated as a non‑patriotic traitor). However, he is far from being naïve: he just correctly notices the emancipatory core inscribed into the very form of football – market, politics, and ideology are parasitizing on this core.
And my idea is that Mamdani’s demand that Benjamin Netanyahu should be arrested if he visits New York should be read in a similar way. Mamdani is well aware that our justice system, national and international, is deeply corrupted and biased; however, he is no less aware that the demand for justice should not be dismissed because of these facts, and that when (as an exception, as it were) some legal body does its proper duty, it should be unconditionally supported. Mamdani begins with a simple and clear description of facts often avoided by our big media:
“Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal, the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people. He is responsible for the killing of more than 73,000 people; for the maiming of tens of thousands of children, as those who survive undergo amputation without anesthesia; for the targeting of neonatal hospitals and maternity care centers, denying newborns even the chance to live; for the countless people he starved as he blocked food and humanitarian aid from reaching them; for the gunning down of hundreds of aid workers and journalists. And just last month, the U.N. confirmed that Palestinian children continue to be deliberately targeted and killed by Israeli armed forces — more than eight months after the so‑called ceasefire. The list goes on and on, all as we, as Americans, pay for the bombs that do the killing. There is a reason the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for his arrest.”
What follows is a simple and straightforward logical implication of these facts:
