A fetus on the dirt road. The mother’s stomach was cut; beaten, her body butchered. Silence, dreadful and rhythmic, cutting through dense Georgia air. A dirge hanging coffins from trees; swallowing the dragged whispers of a half-dead people.
May 19th, 1918 in Brooks County Georgia.
The death of plantation owner Hampton Smith unleashed a wave of violence on the Black residents in the small Georgia town. Smith, known for being excessively violent towards his workers, also severely battered Mrs. Turner.
Upon hearing the news of the plantation owner being killed, death-hungry and vampiric mobs of white terrorists removed Black residents from their homes, schools, places of employment and worship; then proceeded to torture and lynch them to death. Thirteen Black people were slaughtered in the name of white terrorism.
Hayes Turner would not return to the home he shared with his wife Mary and their future child on that sullen Georgia day. A few days after the May 16th murder of the plantation owner, Hayes Turner was arbitrarily charged with his murder and jailed. While awaiting “trial,” Hayes Turner was taken from his cell by scores of white terrorists, strung up by a tree, and lynched, the deep Georgia air falling to its knees, writhing and sick from the smell of Black death.
Mary was eight months pregnant when she was taken by white vigilantes for daring to raise her voice in defense of her husband. The death-mob proceeded to tie her ankles, string her body upside-down, douse her with gasoline, mutilate, torture, and shoot the young Black woman, and crush the head of her unborn child. In defending her husband against the frame-up by the white supremacist mob, Mrs. Turner also defended herself against the state that would do nothing to protect. It was the state that reaped, and still reaps, a benefit from lynched Black bodies. It is the state and its owners that creates and enforces laws to protect those who mutilate and destroy Black life. Of course it didn’t protect her; it was designed to kill her.
It was more than murder that Mary and her unborn child endured. This was a frenzied bloodletting of an already gutted people. And, yet, the mad cutting and slicing wasn’t enough; white terrorists proceeded to shoot her drained and lynched body multiple times, beating her into a sunken puddle of blood, dislodging her unborn child from her womb.
Already subjected to the savagery of white violence, the unborn child wasn’t even a second old when they stomped, beat, kicked, and smashed it to death. The fetus lay there, butchered and lifeless on the dirt road; never given the chance to breathe one last tiny cleaved and severed breath.
Mary, her husband, and her unborn child are the exemplars, the stand-ins, the proxies, and archetypes of all the victims of a brutal hegemonic violence that casts its net of murder and profit over every corner of the earth.
A few months into Israel’s genocidal campaign last year, The New York Times ran an article, the now thoroughly debunked “Screams Without Words: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on October 7th” by Jeffery Gettleman, Anat Schwartz, and Adam Sella, in which it claimed to expose the vile rape of Isreali women by Hamas supposedly ignored by the U.N. It should be noted that both Gettleman and Schwartz have expressed deep anti-Palestinian views. The article goes on to describe in detail the alleged violent assault and mutilation of these women. Reports of sliced breasts, cut genitals, stabbings during rape, a slaughtered family at a dining table, and mounds of other horrors are “documented” in the New York Times article. In another report by ZAKA, a self-proclaimed nonreligious organization specializing in collecting dead bodies and body parts from scenes purported to be “unnatural” deaths, a testimony from Yossi Llandau,who is head of ZAKA in the southern region of Israel, aired. In the video, Landau recounts seeing the dead body of a pregnant woman who was raped, her stomach sliced open by Hamas militants, an unborn fetus with the umbilical cord still attached falling out of her stomach, and then repeatedly shot.
It’s important to note, the testimonials of the “witnesses” were all either from IOF (Israeli Occupation Forces) personnel or subject to rigid approval by IOF soliders (themselves involved in endless sexual harassment cases that went unsolved, including allegations of rape, torture, indiscriminate killings, and cover ups). Despite all this, no evidence of these “crimes” was collected, allegedly because Israeli investigators were just too “overwhelmed” and “concerned with religious customs regarding the dead” to worry about the very minor detail of making sure any of the claims were true. The entire report was wrought with evasions and excuses as to why evidence of even the smallest kind could not be provided. Many of the eye witness accounts, primarily from ZAKA “first responders,” concerning the state of the dead bodies — for which they have no forensic expertise (they’re only trained in preparing the bodies for funerals “in a dignified way” according to strict orthodox Jewish rituals) — underwent numerous changes with each version becoming more and more macabre.
The parallels between the depraved racist terror Mary Turner was subjected to and the story constructed by Yossi Landau about the pregnant woman whose stomach was sliced open with an unborn fetus, for whom there’s no evidence, is striking. Too striking, in fact.
In order to justify the arch genocidal bloodthirst of the zionist entity, in order to make frail excuses for their ruthless slaughter and forced removal of Palestinians, the zionist government is outright hijacking the painful history Black people have endured at the hands of white terroristic violence. What’s more, its not enough that the zionist entity has turned Gaza into a maze of perpetual death, where the Isreali state marches about violently colonizing and displacing the people of historic Palestine; they are now using our history of being subject to savage Jim Crow violence and instrumentalizing it against us in order to justify the continued genocide of Palestinian people, and, to that end, the broader colonized world.
Further, those invested in the zionist project want to sustain the narrative of the “crazed and violent brown men” with an unhinged animalistic need to rape the “virtuous white woman”. Palestinian men are held in the confines of an animality conjured by the hallucinations of the racist white psyche. Thus, upholding the racist narrative of the savage brown man with a ravenous appetite for rape is a double genocide serving to delegitimize the resistance movement, and further cannibalize a people.
Even more disturbing, is the liberal Western feminist narrative that hurls itself into unhinged hysterics at the mere sight of the mythological threat against the “unsoiled virtue of white womanhood,” yet remains historically silent when colonized women are brutally raped and murdered. All Black people have been forced to endure a necrophilic, blood-lust at the hands of the racist white woman and man. This strain of Western feminism does not contest, and in fact aids in, the reckless hunting and extermination of what theorists defined as outgroup males: racialized men not considered a part of the dominant, normative group. Western feminism revels in the mutilation and slaughter of Black women like Mary Tuner and her unborn child while savagely vilifying Black and racialized men.
It is this strain of feminism that looked on wide-eyed and compliant as Hayes Turner was noosed and ripped from the earth. It is this strain of feminism that stifles the screams of Israeli women abused by cowards like ZAKA founder Meshi Zahav, turning them into cold susurrations of complicity and protection of a known rapist. It is this strain of feminism that propagates proven fabrications of “rape by Hamas fighters” as a strategy to validate their massacre-driven imperialist aims. It is this strain of feminism that hinges its framework on the butchering of Mary Turner and the desecration of Dalal Mughrabi.
It is imperial feminism, with its many arid, post-Intersectional vicissitudes, which grounds itself in recognition by the state and the oppression and murder of Black and brown women, yet never dares speak of revolution and freedom from state repression. It is a feminism tilled on inherently racist axioms that breeds and justifies Black death. Thus, as history has shown, imperial feminists stand undivided with the patriarchal brutality of its white male counterparts.
Where were the Western feminists when Mary Turner was being butchered and lynched? Where were Western feminists when Mary’s unborn child was being kicked and stomped to death? Where is Black feminism for Mary Turner and her unborn child now? Western feminism is where it’s always been, right alongside white men aiding and glorifying the gruesome murder, rape, and plunder of Black life. And Black feminism — bled of its radicality, confusing revolutionary movement for one’s identity, a priori presumptions, a multiplicity of gender categories, and a gutted and deradicalized queerness — now stands alongside Western feminism seeking refuge, celebritydom and financial kickbacks from the state instead of freedom from it.
Black feminists, who laud Kamala Harris as the paragon of success and woman leadership, will uplift her intersecting identities and hardships of navigating the campaign trail as top cop, but not only completely discard women like Erica Garner — a fighter, and, as Dr. Joy James theorizes, a Captive Maternal — but offer them up for the slaughter. James, who theorizes the Captive Maternal as one (beyond gender binaries) who moves inside the tense contours of conflicted care-taker, protester, movement-maker, maroonage, and war resister, affirms, “most black feminist, conventional abolitionists, seek to reject, obscure, or attack the militant Captive Maternal.” It does not present a moral entanglement for Black feminists to praise Kamala, the top cop, who peddles representation as liberation while poor Black women, who are actually at the forefront of the struggle for freedom from state repression, are left to die destitute and broken.
Further, because Black feminism has aligned, has always been aligned, with state forces, it is not only unproblematic for them not to discard the vicious rape and summary execution of Palestinian women and children, but to embrace their perpetual murder as normative; to see their continuous deletion as a necessary corrective on revolutionary Black thought that dares to move beyond the confines of the mercenary logics of imperial feminisms. Because Kamala has presented herself as the “aunty” and “homegirl” of the racist capitalist state, it’s okay for Black feminists to raise millions of dollars for her to continue funding the rape, torture, and mass murder of Palestinian women while feigning support for a ceasefire.
Black feminism exists inside homicidal ruptures that destroy true sisterhood, that cleave through any kind of genuine care and love amongst communities of Black women. Instead of lifting our sisters in an honest communion that seeks to heave against the destructive imperial feminisms that tear away at Black people as a whole, Black feminism embraces and centers racist constructs of Black people and aims to cut down poor Black women who may disagree with their theoretic — the very women they claim to love and protect. In essence, the Black feminist can write about poor Black women — viewing us as some sort of exhibitionist project — but when it comes to poor Black women defining our own genres of being and narrating our own lives, we’re met with cold, paternalizing disregard from the Black feminist. The Black bourgeois feminist academic class seek to legitimize themselves and feed off of the labor and knowledge-production of poor Black people on the ground, while remaining consciously disconnected and disinterested in the lives of the poor Black women they sternly avow to advocate for. They, like all members of the bourgeois class, are cultural vampires. Even as it seeks to offer a critique of Black feminist thought, Black feminism’s analysis remains banal and deflated. There is an entrenched refusal to engage in an honest root-to-stem interrogation of the way Black feminism has been used to delegitimize militant Black power movements, and dislocate a sense of sisterhood and firm togetherness within the Black community. Black feminism, therefore, proffers a synthetic and vain “sisterhood” that only offers uplift and blurred adulation if you commit to propagating racist tropes of both Black men and Black women.
It is a feminism, as in the case of Audre Lorde and June Jordan, that leads Black women to abandon the unflinching truth of her sister in favor of settler feminist lies and distortions. It is a feminism of deep incisions sometimes too scared and riven to repair, where the sutures of love and community become frayed and forgotten. We must begin to build and anchor ourselves in frames that do not opportunistically center one group of Black people while justifying and excusing the slow genocide of another by the state under the veils of “protecting women” from the historic Black male brute. We need a guiding theoretic that understands: yes, these are our mothers, these are our sisters, but our mothers and sisters also have failed in protecting us; and oftentimes barter the depredation of their daughters for their own self-interests.
Imperial feminism — as history has documented — stood idly by as white men ripped Black babies from their mothers and fed them to alligators. It is a feminism where you will never be able to move from Margin to Center as bell hooks asserts because coloring the racist Suffragette movement Black and taking the white supremacist patriarchal dictums of Elizabeth Cady Staton and bearing it as our own, has not helped us as colonized women. It cannot. We must come to grips with the fact that the white supremacist genealogy of Western feminism uses Black men to produce racist tropes about Black people as a whole: i.e, the hypersexual Black male rapist and the hypersexual jezebel Black woman. By employing myths of both the Black male rapist and Arab male rapist, imperial feminism, an arm of the state, is able to justify the lynching and mass genocide of Palestinian men and Black men, and keep colonized people held in the fetters of a cannibalizing demonization. Western feminism, moreover, descends from a racist genealogy. The violently racist logics of white criminologists lie at the taproot of Western feminism, which views colonized people as reified objects they can mutilate and exoticize. Hence, the colonial epistemologies of Western feminism lays the ground and provides the legal framework for the imperial axis of murder that justifies the slaughter of colonized people a world over.
Anat Schwartz, who helped write the evidence-deficient New York Times article, “Screams Without Words”, has committed a double genocide against the Palestinian people with groundless claims of rampant sexual torture by “Arab militants.” What’s more, not only has Schwartz blotted out the vicious torture and actual evidence of sexual assault of Palestinian women and girls by the IOF which spans decades, she has made it such that the pain and endless suffering of Palestinian women and girls is actually a threat to precious white zionist life; and that the very truth of their live-streamed murder and dispossession must, in turn, be absorbed back as that of the suffering and death of only Isreali women. Moreover, this violence through consumption not only discards Palestinian women, it makes it so that they are completely disappeared with the only vestiges of their existence being the bombed homes, hospitals and schools that Israel has consumed and is claiming as its own. Israel is, therefore, a cannibal-state sustaining itself through their own necrophilic fantasies; through the twisted rapturous joy of maiming and exterminating the men, women, and children of Palestine.
Further, as Anat Schwartz employs the feminist label and narrative to propagate the idea that the U.N. and international community ignored the mass rape of Israeli women– claims that have been found to be outright fabrications in many instances, so much so that the New York Times itself pulled their podcast episode on the article — we see how these very white supremacist dictums serve to monsterfy an entire group of people, turning them into phantoms who exist between intervals of deletion and Delectability by the “Child-Killing state.”
Even when the IOF commits the most sadistic and heinous crimes against Palestinian women, to the white supremacist zionist, it is impossible to view their vile acts of sexual terror against Palestinian women as sexual assault because, to the death-state (to use a term from Dr. Tommy Curry), they are the masculinized extension of Hamas. Thus, Palestinian women are held in the interstices of a gendered and de-degendered coffin-state forced to claw at the dregs of a butchered life where horrific abuse against them is not only normalized, but is the very essence of Israel society itself.
As it stands, over 186,000 Palestinians and counting have been killed in Gaza, including over 14,500 children, with 19,000 now orphans, over 150 intellectuals and artists bombed or hacked to death, and over 150 known journalists slaughtered. Israel has bombed Rafah, a densely overpopulated city of 1.4 million people in Gaza’s Southern region, even after the IOF ordered Palestinians to go there. There are no schools or universities — teachers have been slaughtered by the occupation forces with the aid of the West, and hospitals have become a distant and erstwhile memory. Over 10,000 children are missing, while masses of people are forced into living amputated lives. Already scarce water has been poisoned with sewage, soil destroyed, women raped, men raped; medics, academics, and UNRWA, the only battered lifeline, now mercilessly cut while Palestinians are massacred within minutes for daring to ask for flour. All while we listen to the tiny grave and sullen pleas for help from 6 year old Hind and thousands like her whose cries have been suffocated by IOF and the Biden administration’s unending lies and liberal pyrotechnics to justify the total evisceration of the Palestinian people.
Like Mary and her unborn child, the people of Gaza have been stricken down and rendered silent. They are condemned by Western liberal democracy and some on the Western left for taking up arms in an unmatched show of strength, resilience, and revolutionary power. From Denmark Vessey, Nat Turner, Vladimir Lenin, to Ghassan Fayiz Kanafani, Chris Hani, George Habash, PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization), PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) and Hamas – all grasped the elementary fact that national liberation could not be won without an equal showing of brute force on the part of the colonized. Colonial regimes have always marched upon oppressed people with genocidal violence. In peddling utopias of peaceful roads to decolonization, Western leftists end up sending colonized people to their death under the pretense of nonviolence and liberal humanism. What’s more, as a result of the paternalism that plagues the West, many, in truth, do not want revolution as it would expose their own complicity in cutting down and half-pretending to care about the mass slaughter of — children in Gaza.
For the West in general and America in particular, killing children has always been a favorite pastime. This is a country, on the frayed basis of white supremacist reasoning, that gave the electric chair to 14-year-old George Junius Stinney Jr (Curry, 2017); a country that tortured and lynched 14-year-old Emmet Till; a country where, in the horrific case of Kendrick Johnson, Black children are slaughtered with their organs missing; a country, unmatched in its brutality, that bought, sold, traffics, and kills Black children. A country where Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, and innumerable Black children undergo an un-childing; and are transformed, at fatal gun and knife-point and post-mortem, into adults, because their Black maleness indicates an imminent sexual danger.
Recently, video footage has surfaced of settlers storming the Sde Teiman, an Israeli military base in the Negev Desert now serving as a prison camp to torture Palestinians, in support of the soldiers. The settlers, seething with rage, began demanding the release of nine soldiers held in custody by Israeli military police on the morning of July 29th. The soldiers were being held for the sexual torture of a Palestinian man being held prisoner. IOF forces gang raped the Palestinian man, forcing a cell phone into his rectum. The rape was so brutally horrific that the man was sent to a nearby hospital with “severe anal bleeding” where the doctor confirmed the man also suffered damage to other internal organs. This is not only a sustained moral cleavage of the sadist IOF, this is an eternal homicidal rupture of which liberal democracies, from the Israeli death-state to America, is tilled on.
Capitalism/imperialism suffers an historic, homoerotic consumptive appetite for the flesh and blood of colonized peoples. Critical race theorist Vincent Woodard in his seminal work, The Delectable Negro: Human consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture, embarked on a deep interrogation of the psycho-sexual fetishistic terror of capital-white supremacy. Racialized people are simultaneously vilified and sexually desired to sate the rapacious hunger of the state for colonized flesh. Dr. Tommy Curry also builds on this analysis with his theory of phallicism. In Curry’s analysis, Black men are branded rapists, hunted, and fetishized by state forces. Furthermore, Black male ontology is butchered and in its place a feminized nonentity that is also a brute rapist.
This rapist/rapee dialectic bleeds through Curry’s work in the conceptualization of phallicism. In the same way that Palestinian men are designated by the zionist-ethnostate as violent rapists yet are psycho-sexually devoured, so too areBlack men in America consumed; their flesh feasted on by the American gendarme and targeted for murder. Thus, the necrophilic thirst for colonized men drives the homoerotic slaughter carried out by Israeli death-state and the terroristic public lynchings done by American-garrison state.
Black boys remain solidified in the liberal Western imaginary as violent hyper-masculine Black male terrorists when, in fact, they are Black children who have been brutally severed from their families; who have been disintegrated by the state and their white vigilantes, pushed into the enclaves of oblivion and intentionally forgotten — except, of course, when it’s time to excavate the bodies of dead Black men for hashtags and algorithmic hypervisibility; playing intersectional recognition politics and discursive games with Black genocide.
This is a country that endlessly prates about the violence of the PLO, PFLP, Hamas, and The Muslim Brotherhood, but aids in the reckless murdering of Palestinian people and colonized people around the world. Further, this country also continues to assist the occupation regime in killing their own people, as is proven in the Kibbutz massacre, and continually counts all men whom they’ve butchered and hacked to death in Palestine as “hamas terrorists”. It is evident Western humanist moralisms are the logics of murder and hollowed justifications for transferring colonized people from one death world to another, locking them in Sepulchrally: a death that does not end but is sustained under a colonial force (Mbembe, 2019); an endless butchering of one’s sense of self and putting in its place an apparition that moves inside the contours of coloniality; cleaved yet drifting between the narrow ledges of bloody death worlds. The state of Sepulcherality is consumptive and the colonizer (false construction) has a necrophilic thirst for the flesh of the colonized (dual false-true construction).
Inside capital/white supremacy, there is a long tradition to disassociate humanity from the darker peoples of the earth and put in their place imagined creatures driven only by primordial and animalistic cravings for violence and death. Missing from this mythological construction, however, is the liberal West’s own bloody depravity, without which this country and its corollary Israel, would not exist. Moreover, without the relegation of Palestinian men as terroristic sexual brutes — the same taxonomies reserved for Black men as in the case of Willie McGee — they, the Hitlerite ethnostate of Netanyahu, would not be able to carry out its fanatic bloodletting of Palestinian men. Hence, when it comes to poor Black and brown people, particularly poor Black and brown men, from the viewpoint of the death-state, there are no humans involved.
The same misandric assumptions that operate to consume and slaughter Black men, also are at work to categorize all Palestinians, particularly Palestinian men, as Hamas, marking them as targets for final deletion. It is therefore necessary for Imperial feminist thought to brand all Palestinian men as terroristic rapists who, by merely existing, threaten the historically unsoiled virtue of Israeli womanhood. Imperial feminism — which takes as its undercarriage the violent white supremacist ethos of racist ethnologist Samuel A. Carthwright, who theorized the sadistic anti-Black male framework of Drapetomania, attempting to rationalize in the white psyche the power of Black men who rose up in unbroken militancy against slavery — and much of its intersectional adjuncts are tilled on the violently racist ideology of late 19th century ethnology.
Inside the psychic holds of liberal feminism is the belief that Palestinian men are violent patriarchs that must be slaughtered. This destructive misunderstanding of patriarchy as a biological and cultural phenomenon, holding that all men are privileged, regardless of their historically racialized and hunted position by imperialism, because they’re men, and therefore reflexively oppress women; despite being divested from the very notion, let alone category, of manhood (Homo-economicus) however, must be uprooted. We must cut through this imperial feminist reasoning of patriarchy peddled to us by despotic feminisms which takes white supremacy as its base, in order to form a material, cogent analysis that takes into the folds the racialization, degendering, rape, plunder, slavery, dispossession, and genocidal terror against Black and Palestinian men.
In examining the savage raid on Al-Shifa hospital, we see witness accounts of Palestinian men being rounded up and summarily executed. Palestinian men, accused of being Hamas militants, were hunted down by IOF soldiers who disguised themselves as civilians and proceeded to murder three defenseless Palestinian men in their hospital beds awaiting treatment. Instead of going head to head with Hamas (because they’re losing the war and can not) the IOF has — much like Hitler himself, whom they have undeniably modeled their genocidal project after — resorted to the wholesale slaughter of all Palestinian men considered of fighting age. Genocide scholars have also noted the systemic targeting of raciacilzed/ outgroup fighting age males in the hopes of lifting Palestine from the earth altogether.
There are further accounts of Palestinian men and boys being stripped naked and tortured, with hundreds of children held in Israeli prisons. There is proven evidence of Palestinian men and boys being raped and used as human shields by the IOF. In one of the many disturbing accounts, a child who, while simply trying to light fireworks in celebration of Ramadan, was subsequently executed by an IOF sniper. Later, an Israeli official praised the murderer of the child saying that he was a terrorist. The universal dictum of the liberal West and its necro-state Israel, moreover, is there are no children amongst the colonized, therefore all must be executed.
Sepulcherality means traversing one death world to another: jagged and dead inside seams that lead to homicidal ruptures — managed, calculated, and indexed by the state for perpetual execution; a hollowed-out state where racialized groups are spiritually severed, existing only in absence. The psycho-spatial nature of their dislocation not only from their communities, but from themselves, places them into the construct of the oppressor class; thus, existing inside the projection of the imperial force. The imperialist gendarme, through its economic policies, education system, healthcare industry, carceral structure, cultural structures, colonial geographies, and ecological system, bludgeons colonized people into sepulchral non-existence: a ghostly coffin-state where the slaughtered awaits their turn to die another death. In this state, a people exist only as the construct of the Western imaginary and not as themselves.
The apartheid-state continues to carry out Kaliyugan raids on the Rafah tent compound near the UNRWA warehouses. Video evidence and reports of the siege show a beheaded child whose tiny headless body looked to be between the ages of 4 and 6. Despite Netanyahu and the corruption-riddled organization ZAKA’s folktales of 40 beheaded babies, there is ACTUAL evidence of a beheaded Palestinian child. Palestinian children are forced into a cleaved phantom existence,
The media-gendarme of the West has an orchestrated blackout against the material reality of unimaginable violence unfolding on the ground of Palestine because it wants to continue to inculcate the American public with racist propaganda against Palestinians so it can continue its fascist onslaught. Further, while Biden instrumentalizes the Holocaust with bled claims of Antisemitism and gives lobotomized speeches about Israel never being compared to Hamas (a claim that is true — the murder-state could never be as valiant and unbreakable as Hamas fighters, who, even when injured, continue fighting for their people with unmatched revolutionary strength), a Palestinian child’s sodden decomposed body lies on the dirt road with their head blown off by 2,000Ib bombs.
The liberal fits about democracy, wailing from each sunken corner of the earth about the loss of innocent (white) life, are throwing tirades not because they actually care about democracy, but because they do not want their everyday capitalist phantasmagorias interrupted by slaughtered Palestinian people. There is something to be said when Americans view the macabre scenes of headless children as a mere drag on their day. They are appalled not by the suffering and endless murder of Palestinian men, women and children, but by the fact that they can no longer drape themselves in the dead morality of liberal humanist reasoning; screeching about Hamas violence when the entire world is seeing the asymmetries of the genocidal zionist warfare. Liberals and those of the compatible Western left alike — the same left that praises the intellectual breadth of Western analytical Marxism, but looks on disapprovingly, and, I’d argue, with contempt, at Eastern Marxism and the practical application of Marxism as “Totalitarian”–sinks into barren humanist convulsions and does not necessarily want an end to the genocide in Palestine — they want an end to being confronted with the sharp realities of their own proto-fascist ideations.
Western Marxism bears the stain of the chauvinist 2nd international and suffers from an over/under intellectualism: high-minded theoretical analysis that, when you begin to deeply inquire and go from stem to root, there’s actually nothing there (Losurdo, 2024). Steeped in paternalism and chauvinism, the practical application of Marxism continues to elude Western Marxists as they scold global south liberation movements such as Hamas, Ansar Allah, Hezbollah, etc. The basic understanding of revolutionary national liberation movements as being the necessary soil for socialist potentiality to take root is decidedly lost. The Leninist praxis of Marxism has been altogether gutted.
American Marxism in particular suffers a xenophobic psychosis, centering itself and playing up the particularities of the American context while willfully negating the universal tenets of Marxism-Leninism. The absence of rigorous self-critique is reflected in decayed phrase-mongering and entertainment based so-called practical work that views the masses of working class people more as an exhibition rather than leaders in class struggle. Both Lenin and Stalin stressed the deep significance of self-criticism within a party and movement, underlying the powerful role it plays in strengthening the strategic goal of the party in tearing away the capitalist state. Hence, as a result of Western Marxism not being anchored in and mastering the art of self-critique — or, as I’ve termed it, revolutionary self-inquiry — we’ve sunken into a dismal paternalism; a lacuna of sterile and desperate chauvinism, that aids in the derailment of revolutionary class struggle.
Introspection and reflection of oneself are inseparable from the methodology of criticism/self-criticism in a party and movement. Self-introspection, or, revolutionary self-inquiry, strengthens and serves the criticism/self-criticism method. It requires deep self-interrogation into the capitalist-constructed-self, made to reflexively function in this society, and the true self. It is a dialectical movement to thread through the contours of tension, of struggle of one’s self; uprooting the old and working to understand the universal flux that shapes and guides what is to be born anew, and, thus, building political awareness. Therefore, without working to develop the skill of revolutionary self-inquiry, one can not effectively self-critique, and liberal tendencies and prevarications will always prevail, devouring the marrow of what Marxist-Leninist core there is. A movement or party that does not build the necessary muscle of revolutionary self-inquiry is destined to sink into dred economism; peddling reformist policies that serve to strengthen the state under the banner of Marxism-Leninism.
Turning Lenin into a liberal and pulling the innards out of class struggle, Western Marxism — and in particular American Marxism — has altogether distanced itself from militant resistance movements. It exchanges revolutionary struggle for mythologies of peaceful roads often pointing to Chile’s Allende as an example, conveniently discarding the fact that Salvador Allende’s social democratic government — which was left unarmed and vulnerable as a result of the ideology of peaceful-road-socialism — was couped, with Allende himself driven to suicide by the murderous appetite of the CIA-backed Pinochet regime. Moreover, bartering with capitalist henchmen, Western Marxism advances reform over revolution. It navel-gazes in barren disarray about the horrors of Stalinism (which is not an actual thing, but a linguistic bias and an anti-revolutionary mythological construction) emptily quoting Lenin while butchering his core principles and eviscerating the need to engage in militant class struggle (Losurdo, 2023).
Historically, “Stalinism” has been used as an anti-communist trope to deter people from forging resistance against the capitalist offensive. The mythology of Stalinism, however, is not only propagated to upend liberation movements deemed inherently dictatorial by the bloody, enslaving, and genocidal West, it is also used as an indictment against Black men who form revolutionary parties to counter the ruthlessness of the state — as in the case of Huey P Newton, Malcolm X, Kwame Ture, Robert Williams, etc. — and who theorize frames of resistance. In other words, just as there is a wholesale dismissal of the Black power movement as overly “authoritarian” and laved in “toxic masculine ideals” that forgrounds their onto-epistemological position, there is a wholesale (liberal-anarchistic) generalizing disregard for, and false comparison of, any move to form a militant organization to directly challenge the state as “Stalinist” and “authoritarian.” Further, Black male militancy, and, by extension the professed revolutionary nationalism of the Black community, is written off as an historic authoritarian failure that must be cut down by imperial feminism before it can have the chance to develop new roots. Endless derogatory statements of Huey Newton as a drug-induced terrorist with a bloodlust for authoritarianism abound as the counterinsurgent efforts of the U.S. sally forth these narratives in order to reorient the collective consciousness of the Black community away from mass revolt.
In the aim of Killing Boogeymen, of exterminating the perennial militant negro communist threat, imperial feminism is thus employed as disciplinary warfare against the Black community under the aegis of saving poor, backward, non-feminist Black women from the historic insurgent Black male brute. Thus, the anti-communist construction of the “Stalinist” Boogeymen; of the arrested and undone people of the East who dared to challenge the axis of finance-capital of the West with the Leninist practical application of Marxism. The people of the east, under the leadership of Joseph V. Stalin, who dared to defeat the bloody death-march of Hiterite Nazism that Western powers colluded with and defended (Soviet Information Bureau, 1948); the same Nazism that the West has no problem protecting and colluding with today in the form of zionism (as opposed to the vain theorizing spearheaded by the West that views Marxism, with a complete negation of Leninist praxis, as an abstract, idealist liberal-conservative free-for-all with an eternal grimace of revolutionary party organizing and the capture of state power as primordially dictatorial) live as an apparitional psychic threat that parallels the visceral despotism of the Black male militant and the revolutionary Black nationalism/Black power politics of the Black community.
Equating the militancy and revolutionary nationalism of the Black community with despotism also serves a second counterinsurgent function: if you can propagandize the Black community away from mass revolt against the murderous repression it has been subject to, you pacify otherwise potentially insurgent elements. Africana philosopher Miron Gilmore aptly interrogates counterinsurgency in his framework of Killology, which analyzes the U.S. global “war on terror” as a modern form of earlier colonialist counterinsurgent formations. Their transformation builds on Silvia Wynter’s frame of the omnipresent reason of homo-economous Man1 to the capitalist, techno-militarized imperialism of Man2, to now, Miron’s theoretic of Man3 “MAN3/homo homini lupus (man as wolf to another man AKA MAN as Praetorian).”
In analyzing the thick latticework between colonialism, “modernization”, racialization, and the counterinsurgent scholar-soldier trained to kill under the veils of humanitarianism and lifting poor Black/colonized people out of the desperate “backwardness” of the masculinized Black power era Gilmore affirms, “[……]modernization theory must be explicated to properly understand the role of Black feminism’s theoretical agenda as a stratagem of U.S. counterinsurgency, its embracing of the iconography of the counterinsurgent girl, its basic tendencies towards pathological (criminological) cultural representations of Black Power masculinity (and Black males writ large) and the U.S.’s doctrinal mastery of counterinsurgency theory to subvert anti-colonial threats to its hegemony around the globe.”
In the era of the techno-slaughter, the pillaging colonialist ethos of the “civilizing mission” is replaced by alleged humanitarian concerns (which never calls into question the West or its corollary, Israel) that focus on ideology and culture as “humane” methods of counterinsurgency aimed at subduing/eliminating the target population: Killology. Further, Gilmore avers, “a new population-centric approach to Black militancy and thought (along with a strident resistance to the criminalization of self-defense, and a new Black consciousness or set of ‘inner eyes’ based on revolutionary suicide) with the masses as its center of gravity will be the basis for a cultural-logical contribution toward accomplishment of a new truly human theory of victory — the accomplishment of a new Human.”
This cultural-logic, or what is referred to as the 20th century counterinsurgent doctrinal strategy of “winning the hearts and minds” is the seedbed anchoring this epoch’s liberal democratic genocidal advance that creates and utilizes their theory industry, here namely imperial feminism, to sedate potentially revolutionary elements within the Black community, truncating their developing consciousness, and drugging them with the pervasive and septic logic that pathologizes Black revolutionary nationalism as hyper-masculine, deviant, heavy with the burden of an unmatched patriarchy worse than that of the historically racist colonialist white man, and radically insurgent in their antediluvian desire for violence.
It follows then that presumptive presidential nominee Kamala Harris would be the archetypal image of the liberated, educated, Western feminist (who holds no qualms about materially supporting the vicious rape and murder of Palestinian women and children), who built a career on the mass imprisonment of Black men and is now aiding to spearhead a genocide that leaves children charred and headless and blows up civilians in Lebanon through pagers via the cutting edge cybernetic killing machines of the imperial West. Climbing in and out of Blackness, Harris serves the dual function of arch counterinsurgent and “Homegirl.”
What’s more, Harris is able to appeal to Black women and the broader Black community on the basis of posturing her identity as the Chuck-wearing sister/aunty from Oakland, all the while maintaining her positionality at the highest level of empire as the top cop who champions the cowardly assassination of Yahya Sinwar, and creates the policies that drive the mass asphyxiation of poor Black people. Harris’s peculiar ontic as homegirl/mercenary occupies a specific dialectical spatio-temporal zone: the pacification and subsequent bloody deletion of potentially insurgent Black men and other radical elements within the Black community.
Further, even Harris’s strained relationship with her father Donald Harris, Black Jamaican Marxian economist, serves to reinforce the U.S. doctrinal counterinsurgent strategy of marking Black men who theorize alternatives to the capitalist order of blood and profit as communist threats to the racist social hierarchy that must be delegitimized and blotted out. While there is endless footage of Harris exclaiming the strength and grace of her mother — the biomedical scientist who raised the would-be vice president and her sister, the former senior policy advisor to Hillary Clinton, all on her own — her father is seen as the phantasmal derelict with crazed left politics. Furthermore, in the U.S., Donald Harris is viewed as the unfit parent unworthy to be in the presence of his daughter’s success within the great emporium of murder and depredation. He is the seen/unseen vaurien negro communist buck incapable of caring for his exceptional daughters. Harris’s function as arch counterinsurgent genocidal homegirl, moreover, strengthens and bolsters the strategic aim of the U.S., and its corollary imperial feminism, in branding Black and racialized men in the revolutionary tradition as visceral threats to the capitalist social order and maiming advanced revolutionary segments of the Black community.
If we’re to meet this current revolutionary moment we must recognize that facism has changed its shape. It is, therefore, not enough to get lost in worn cultural characterizations of fascism as a distant and isolated jackboot phenomenon. Fascism is structural and woven into every facet of the spectacle that is capitalist society. A serious analysis does away with vain debates about the unhinged fascism of only Trump and The Right Danger; barren debates that often seek to downplay the outright genocidal policies that have killed over 186,000 Palestians and beheads children. An examination of the facts exposes that Kamala Harris and the Democrat cabal move in lock step with Trump and fascism. Historically, from Germany, Italy, to Hungary, fascism could not have thrived without deep liberal collusion.
Without sinking into the frenzied petit-bourgeois sophistry of ultra-leftism, declaring the wholesale uselessness of elections, or uncritically declaring there’s nothing we can do except engage in some ill-conceived suicide mission that dislocates the left (this is in fact not an adequate criterion; it is not enough to be “left” in some general, amorphous sense: one is either in favor of capitalism or wholesale against it) from the broader body politic, we must understand a sober analysis is needed. The needed analysis is one that clearly understands, to paraphrase Gabriel Rockhill, that facism is a mode of governance within the greater structure of capitalism.
Yet, one must, if one considers themselves a serious Marxist, ask how can fascism be completely defeated with a fascist-enabling party? Though conditions are different, and one can also point to certain ultra-left mistakes, we must not forget that it was the social democrats that had a bloody hand in knifing away at the revolutionary movement in Germany of which Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were at the helm . Conversely, whether it is the Biden administration or Harris/Waltz administration, both have vowed to continue, uninterrupted, the death-march in Palestine. The Democrats, moreover, use market liberalism as a narcotic for public consumption in order to conceal mode-one of their fascist onslaught.
Therefore, it is not a matter of whether supporting Harris is a “strategy against Trump” when both capitalist parties, which in actuality is only one capitalist party, breathe sustenance into one another. Liberalism, moreover, has a symbiotic relationship to fascism. This idea that we can choose one fascistic party to fight the supposedly more virile form of fascism of another is, therefore, flawed from the very outset. It is a choice not of a reduced form of fascism even. Rather, it is a choice between a slow lethal injection or a summary execution. However, the paradox is: what is perceived as a slow death is actually a more accelerated mass butchering.
Liberal democracy needs zionism. To have an ethnostate that can instrumentalize the oppression of Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews — the so called “undesirables” the early zionists wanted absolutely nothing do with that Israel treats like detritus while pretending to honor victims of the Holocaust — is a convenient justification for the imperial machine to unleash its techno-slaughter on Palestinians and elide criticism.
Zionism has always maintained shared points of interest with Hitlerism. Imperialism, furthermore, needs zionism to strengthen and fulfill its fascist aims as it is easier to weaponize the history of the Nazi occupation in order to stifle anyone who questions the occupation force’s heinous crimes. If, in fact, facism is the genocidal march of the total evisceration of a people, and we are, as it stands, in the deep of a genocidal march funded, upheld, and defended by the U.S. government, then I argue we are at the very least in a full thrust forward of fascism.
It is liberal democracy that funded, aided, and drafted policies protecting those who hacked and lynched Black people. The settler feminist narratives of Anat Schwartz, therefore — narratives that justify the pained dismembering of a people — are the same narratives that not only ignored the brutal killing of Mary Turner, her husband and unborn child, but deleted her story from the collective psyche, and continue an institutional butchering of Black and brown people. Settler feminist narratives acted as a barricade against indictment of the violent white vigilantes that lynched and mutilated Mary Turner and her unborn child; and continue to act as a barricade for the IOF against any form of possible indictment for their murderous rape of Palestinian women.
From that day in Brooks County Georgia May 1918 to present day Palestine, we see the imperial machinations at work. Ethnic cleansing, as Domenico Losurdo has aptly reminded us, is a “twin birth” of liberalism (Losurdo, 2011) — a twin birth that gives life to mass graves, amputated, and headless children. Those paralyzed and defenseless, lying in a barely functioning hospital awaiting aid that will never come (because the U.S. blocked it), are gunned down in their hospital beds. Almost 400 Palestinians and counting have been buried, with accounts of some being buried alive in mass graves in Nasser Hospital (and Al-Shifa Hospital) in the city of Khan Yunis covered in feces; their hospital clothing still somewhat attached to their charred and desecrated bodies. Palestinian women are raped and tortured, their babies minutes old are left to die of starvation or slaughtered by the IOF just like Mary’s unborn child who was torn from her stomach and stomped to death by “virtuous” white American Christians.
While settler feminism spirals into outrage about the the savage brown Hamas rapists, even a recent U.N. investigation, though desperate to give credence to Israel’s claims of mass rapes, admitted there is no evidence. Settler feminists make bold assertions vowing to defend Israeli women against sexual assault, but are completely mute when it comes to the 260 cases of rape reported everday in Israel. What’s more, while Israel advances its Hasbara about imaginary beheaded babies, actual evidence of Palestinian people found beheaded in mass graves are surfacing as Palestinians desperately try to identify loved ones lost amid the bombs.
These same voices that affirm the protection of women against the Hamas terrorists, interestingly enough, are rigidly silent about the violent rape of their own IDF women soliders by the IDF themselves. It is an imperial feminism that violently imprisons actual feminist intellectuals, as in the case of professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian who was thrown into jail by Israelis for “incitement.” It is the same imperial feminism that finds itself in a sudden catatonic state when asked about the Haredi Jeffrey Epstein.
A Hitlerite feminism, or, as Joy James affirms in her analysis, state feminism, that protects the white supremacist terrorists — as in a particularly tragic case — that kidnapped, gang raped, tortured, murdered, and buried a Bedouin teenage girl because, to quote, they wanted to “fu%ck.” It is a Hitlerite feminism that continues to aid and abet rapists in Israel, ensuring that serial rapists continue to victimize Palestinian and Israeli women with impunity; and that Israel remains a comfortable abode for murderous serial rapists. These settler feminist axioms that claim to protect and honor Israeli women actually offer them up for a lifetime of the imprisoning patriarchal abuse they claim to be defiantly against. Settler feminism serves as an accomplice in shielding predators and covering up their sadistic violence, ensuring the abuse of women is Israel remains structurally intact.
Anat Schwartz, in her imperial feminist logic, can not see the suffering of Palestinian women because, inside the settler feminist inverse, Palestinian women exist only as an orchestrated march of terror against the zionist body. Put another way, to borrow from Louis Althusser, the Palestinian people in general, and Palestinian women in particular, have already been interpolated in the zionist imaginary. They’re, thus, an apparition only appearing as transient projections between clefts of murderous zionist aggression and feigned Western sympathies contingent upon their consent to be killed and never defend themselves.
The Palestinian people have been positioned outside of themselves, dislocated, and reassembled to fit the zionist frame. This seemingly unending horror takes on the quality of being an accelerated yet slowed dismembering of a people. What is needed now is not more discursive notions of revolution. As the genocidal onslaught of the state kills mothers in front of their children; as it rips unborn children from their mother’s stomach and crushes the fetus to death as in the horrifying case of Mary Turner that Israel tried to hijack as their own, a revolutionary movement not built on frayed and compromised solidarities is needed. What is needed in this juncture is not more Rancièrean ideations of liberation that aim to deny and sublate a sharp hedging forth of working class power that seeks to uproot the imperialist state. What is needed is a revolutionary inquiry and understanding in order to advance our “guide to action.” To heave against state capture, therefore, we must cut through the choking haze of fascist verisimilitudes.
Furthermore, we can not take Western disrealities and its imperial constructions of a self and its world to be truth. We must fight this war; this war that thrust forward and maintains its structural grasp on the spiritual, ideological, economic, and cultural fronts seeking to tighten its psychic grips of oppression. We must develop revolutionary understanding that will in turn serve as a powerful anchorage for our practical work. What Mary Turner suffered and what Palestinian women and all the people of Palestine are suffering are the cleaved and deadened veins of imperialism that spreads its rot all over the world.
Capitalist/White supremacy cannibalizes those it pushes into a peripheried existence, causing a mass rupture of spiritual atrophy. The colonized are consumed; violated even in death; devoured by the necrophilic fantasies of the imperialist entente. Colonized people, viewed as reflexively and primordially antisemitic, are marked for the slaughter; walking from one death world to another.
In effect, it is no surprise that Palestinian men are being marked for outright deletion. As history has evidenced with the brutal torture and rape of Black men in the liberal democracy of America, the despotic white, patriarchal machine targets the men of a racialized group first, either wholesale murdering them, or, as Jasbir K. Puar asserts, maims them (Puar, 2017). Thus, in permanently debilitating any fighting-age Palestinian man who may be looked upon as a militant symbol of resistance and hope, the Necro-state of Israel seeks to ensure that Palestinians are too psychically gutted to even imagine a world free of zionist aggression . However, as the world bears witness, their aims are being powerfully destroyed by the resistance.
In the same way, to paraphrase Dr. Curry, as the capitalist white supremacist state thrust forward tropes of Black men, which by extension means the Black community writ large — cataloging them as violent and hypersexual — it is in the same way it catalogs Palestinian men qua Palestinian community as primordially violent, antisemitic, and hypersexual. Thus, just as the genocidal American logic pathologized Black men who resisted slavery as suffering from Drapetomania, and thus, killable, the zionist ethnostate pathologizes Palestinian men as viscerally terroristic for resisting zionist brutality and brands them as rapists targeted for mass extermination.
“Screams Without Words: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on October 7th” by Jeffery Getlemen and Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella exemplifies the fascistic nature of Western liberal feminism. The fundaments of racism that bleed through Western feminist narratives are the very same responsible for the rape, dispossession, torture, and murder of Black women and Palestinian women. Western feminism has always had a vested interest in the rape and slaughter of Black and brown women. Throughout its fascist genealogy, imperial feminism has excluded racialized women and has reproduced the same genocidal logics responsible for slaughtering Mary Turner, her husband, and unborn baby. It exploited, and continues to exploit, Sojourner Truth for its own white supremacist campaign to demonize Black men, and as a result, Black people. While Black women’s babies were fed to alligators, imperial feminism stood by, willing and compliant in the atrocity.
While Black women like Joanne Little are raped and imprisoned, imperial feminism offers anemic solidarities and continues to aid in the structural hardwares at work that enabled the hypersexualizing, de-gendering, cyclical rape, mass lynchings, and mutilation of Black and brown women. It is, furthermore, the same imperial feminism that unceasingly slaughters Palestinian women and girls, leaves babies in incubators to die, and adultifies Palestinian children marking them as terrorists to be killed. It is a feminism that can steal our history of lynching, and mutilation against Black women like Mary Turner and present it to the world as their own and have no one question them about this outright hijacking of Black life, Black truth, and Black resistance. These are the imperial taxonomies of extermination.
The physical and socioeconomic strangulation of the Palestinian people must end. As we reflect upon the insights of Georgi Dimitrov who defined fascism as the open “terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital,” we must inquire what this means as the Biden administration — a genocide that Kamala vows to uphold under the neoliberal, settler feminist axiom of represention — engages in, if not outright fascism, then a type of proto-fascism (which, I’d argue is even worse as it courses through, desperate and heavy, in insidious movements butchering people under the veils of progression and reform).
As the Palestinian people face a genocidal onslaught by the zionist ethnostate funded, protected, and celebrated by the American genocidaire, it is worth it for us to take into account the salient point George Jackson makes and modern day philosopher Gabriel Rockhill builds upon when analyzing the current political tenor within the neoliberal frame and the two imperialist parties, it is “a difference in mode not in kind” within the greater capitalist schema. These are the very same fascist modalities that lynched Mary Turner, her husband Hayes Turner, and stomped to death her unborn child; the very same modalities that massacred and ripped 6-year-old Hind Rajab from the earth; the same modalities that drove Erica Garner to an early death, and sinisterly tried to hijack our history as their own in order to proselytize the public towards zionism and justify the savage rape, torture, and bloody elimination of a people; the very same fascist modalities — with their global reach of terror — that continue, undeterred, the genocidal killing of Palestinian people.
Endnotes
- Curry, Tommy J.. The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017.
- Woodard, Vincent. The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism Within U.S. Slave Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2014.
- Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics (Theory in Forms). Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
- Losurdo, Domenico. Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, How it can be Reborn. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2024.
- Losurdo, Domenico. Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend. Iskra Books, 2023.
- Soviet Information Bureau. Falsificators of History (An Historical Note). Washington D.C.: Information Bulletin of the Embassy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 1948.
- Clay-Gilmore, Miron J. (2023). Thinking for the Bound and Dead: Beyond Man(3) Towards a New (Truly) Universal Theory of Human Victory. [Doctoral Thesis, University of Edinburgh]. Era. https://era.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1842/40895/Clay-GilmoreMJ_2023.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
- Losurdo, Domenico. Liberalism: A Counter-History. London: Verso, 2011.
- Puar, Jasbir K.. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
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