The classic one is, of course, “ACAB,” but I’ve already gotten into these arguments so I will spare you reading too much on it. Let it suffice to say all US cops are bastards (or, you know, they serve an especially malignant bastard function), all German cops, all UK cops, etc. But, to find a diplomatic way of getting this across, the security patrols deployed by the Panthers were also cops if that word has a non-moral meaning.
I think, and this is why I even bring ACAB up, that it gives people something to rally around and maybe even encouraged them to see things differently, and they get attached to it as essentially a dogma without seeing the analysis that produced it (or justified it, in any case). The slogan becomes the analysis. It becomes what exists in place of having reasons for what you believe, even when good reasons are out there!
I don’t know how to do dividing lines
I think it’s pretty funny when some asshole chud gets fired or injured or whatever and someone comments “another kkrakkka down, unlimited genocide on the first world”. The humor comes from the absurdity, that there is no such genocide in the works and the subject in this case usually isn’t even dead. It seems like a perfectly fine meme.
So then a huge hurricane hits Florida, we have hundreds of normal, mostly poor people dying and people are saying this and, when someone goes “Hey, that’s not right” they double down. [I was busy when this was happening, this isn’t me complaining about being dog piled or whatever]
The weird thing about it is that I thought it was 100% a joke, but some people got attached to the phrase in a way that reminds me of people going “ACAB means ACAB” as though it’s anything other than an unhinged exclamation that is funny because it’s unhinged. I don’t know how this happened, but I am forced to conclude that the way the meme was treated up to this point was conditioning people in a detrimental way. Or maybe they were always bloodthirsty chauvinists, but that seems like the greater leap to me.
Of course there were a couple of pathetic, cowardly losers in the mix saying “Oh, don’t take it so seriously, it’s a shitposting site”. Those people I direct to 4chan. Antisocial behavior is antisocial behavior, and calling it meaningless to escape that it does have a meaning and that meaning is quite negative is contemptible behavior that should be rejected by the policy of any space that claims to be leftist.
Anyway, I don’t really have a call to action or anything, except perhaps: Oppose Slogan Worship.
It’s just sloganeering. Like how Black Lives Matter is a slogan, not a political line about how every single Black person matter. There are plenty of Black people whose lives don’t matter at all. Easiest examples are the neocolonial puppets who sold out Africans for scraps handed out by their white neocolonial masters. But as Ture said, when the time comes, the African masses will spare them not.
This problem isn’t just a Hexbear problem since I see this all the time on Twitter. Going back to the BLM example, imagine if in the middle of a BLM protest, some pig who just so happens to be Black started doing typical pig shit and when the protestors take the appropriate measures against that pig shit, the Ben Shapiros and Tim Pools started crowing, “uh aktually, I thought you said Black lives matter, but you don’t aktually value all Black lives, only some Black lives.” The Twitter response would be to say, “uh aktually, by putting on a pig uniform, the dude is no longer Black but a [word that rhymes with racoon] and [word that rhymes with racoon]s aren’t Black because being Black is a political identity even though we have never used it as a political identity until now and using it as a political identity has unforeseen consequences that we’ll sweep under the rug and pretend aren’t there.” The response is digging the hole deeper by playing around with words instead of just abandoning sloganeering.
Once I realize this, I can see this phenomenon everywhere. People endlessly arguing about what counts as a cop because they’re attached to “ACAB” as a slogan, what counts as a prison because they’re attached to “abolish prisons” as a slogan, what counts as a “master’s tool” because they’re attached to “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” and so on.
If someone heard the slogan “peace, land, and bread” and said “but what about water? what about sex? what about pets? what about blahblahblah,” the answer isn’t tacking on more and more shit until there’s like 30+ items or to say “uh aktually, by “bread” we meant sustenance so “water” gets included under “bread.”” The answer is to say, “It’s just a slogan. But here, read this to understand what we want” and handing them a printed copy of the April Theses.
You sound like you’re more experienced with this issue than I am, but isn’t Black a political identity, like all race is?
I’m more talking about how Malcolm X would say stuff like the “Black people of Asia.” He wasn’t talking about an African diaspora in Asia or dark-skinned South Asians, but the Vietnamese and Chinese in their anti-colonial struggle. In his eyes, the Algerians, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Kenyans were all Black because they were colonized peoples struggling to free themselves from colonizers. It wasn’t about heritage or cultural affinity. I know there are some people who still use it in this political sense so you have some people who say that the East Timorese are Black because they’re a dark-skinned colonized people struggling against Indonesian settler colonialism, but it’s pretty rare nowadays.