Ellie Oemardi

@elliwells.bsky.social

237 Followers 346 Following

late 20s human disaster queer czindo gremlin 🇮🇩🇨🇿⚧️ She/her death to transphobes

Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked... In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D. And one day, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you... [I]n my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying 'Jewish swine' collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. –Milton Mayer, "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45"
If one wishes to indict Israel by comparison, rather than simply opposing its oppression of the Palestinians on its own terms, there are, sadly, plenty of readily available contemporary comparators: Russia’s occupation of Chechnya and its attempted occupation of Ukraine; the oppression of West Papua by Indonesia; the colonisation of the Kurds by Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran; the Sri Lankan state’s oppression of the Tamils; China’s colonial projects in Xinjiang/East Turkestan and Tibet; Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara. But for those for whom “anti-Zionism” represents an entire, politically-determining worldview, invoking these comparisons might risk “normalising” Israel by locating it within trends of which it is only one example, rather than the ultimate, quintessential expression.
A comment from Reddit user Ms_Masquerade, reading: "One day, decades from now, cis het people will apologise. They will grieve. They may even get angry and demand to know how people fell for every obvious lie in it's angry determination to destroy a group of people for no reason except votes, self-absorbed hatred and attention. But all that will ignore the obvious brutal truth to people in the future: emotions can not unkill those killed in cruel circumstances. No amount of regret from cis het people is going to bring back to life teenagers, just kids, who were driven to kill themselves by a society that wanted to tell them all how absolutely undesirable they are. These daughters, sons, brothers and sisters, forced into nooses, overdoses and razorblades by cruelty so profound, that even a medication that is as side effect free and reversible as medication can even get is denied to them on the back of lies. Not even small tiny gasps of relief are afforded. They will sadly be considered suicide so the charlatans, spiteful and gullible will avoid responsibility for what is not murder, not a serial killing, but a total massacre of children. There will be no punishment for these criminals, in the future or today, only punishment for the vulnerable today."