As some of us in cities across the so called U.S. hear the explosion of fireworks going off on Christmas Day, which feels like a nationalistic Fourth of July type flex to emulate bombs going off in tribute to war, jubilation and settlerstatehood. As we approach the January 6th anniversary, and as the numbers of genocided Palestinians approaches 27,000 killed by the Israeli Occupation Forces since 1988, I want us to consider the following. What is an insurrection to privileged patriots in contrast to, what an insurrection is to a captive population? And why are liberals, leftists and rad libs alike describing the events that transpired at the capitol on January 6th 2021 as an insurrection?
I recently hopped back on the IG wagon after being away for over a year for a number of reasons. It seems liberals and many leftists saw liberal white media use insurrection for describing that event and ran with it without taking into account the actual histories of real necessary insurrections and what they mean and how/why they’ve happened. Without acknowledging demands, power dynamics, power relations and power differentials in reference to said historical insurrections.
It also reminds me of how 1 or 2 popular abolitionists mentioning mutual aid to a few news outlets in 2020 without giving context to its actual meaning and history behind the praxis, which led to wide spread co-optation(and the downplaying of it) by many state leftists and rad libs, who initially may have mocked autonomous direct action and autonomous self-collective organizing, jumped on the band wagon of calling their actions within paid work of their non profits “mutual aid” when the term has ALWAYS politically and deliberately been a non hierarchical autonomous decentralized tactic, meant to challenge electoral reform, non profitization and its statecraft. Not owned, or up to, any 1 membership based organization, network, party or state. I’m just sharing my thoughts on how this particular utilization of the misnaming and scope of insurrection by liberal white media has also been used to co-opt, erase and or defang the practices and movements of those who have a history of physically uprising against the state, state sanctioned violence, Law & Order, imperialism, capitalism and other complementary oppressive systems of domination; particularly global movements for autonomy.
This is more than just a misnomer, semantic shift or lack of turn of phrase to describe the January 6th events. It isn’t JUST the fact that so many are using the word incorrectly(which y’all truly are), it’s that most peoples whose lexicons only ever started using insurrection in their vocabulary since 2021 because of liberal white media’s misnomer are now conflating insurrections/insurrectionists with right wing politics. Just how libertarian was co-opted by the US’s proprietary obsessions and usurped by the right wing, these usages have actually done the centrist work of erasing and replacing histories of downtrodden peoples revolting against the settler captor class’ authority or other oppressive governments and their institutions. It’s been a liberal PR wet dream to both, get the collective unconsciousness of the masses to agree that insurrection is bad and to simultaneously white wash the practice of counter violence. So that centrist liberals can continue to frame justice and order through the logics of the state’s electoralism and legitimacy, which ultimately aligns itself with fascism & colonization. In many of the same ways that statehood aligns itself with any ongoing colonial project. The mainstream news and media which studies and co-opts the language of the oppressed has done its social controlling job by introducing the concept of insurrection as a negative, mostly white upper class, right wing reactionary response to an election, and relying on many to carry out this subsequent erasure of actual radical politics and real insurrections critical of systemic coercive power. Leave it to liberal media to not see power at all and to socialize others into its passive spectatorship.
People on TikTok have proven my points being made when they say things like, “why are you conflating BLM with the January 6th insurrectionists?” Or verbatim,
“Insurrection the violent uprising against the government… why would that be used before 2021 when it hasn’t happened in recent history?”
There’s a lot to unpack in this type of commentary. I think I covered the needed unpacking of the latter comment in my TikTok, but the radically minded know by now that the uprisings during lockdown in 2020 were an insurrection against the police. And that BLM proper was never for Black insurrection. The Ferguson Insurrection and many local people on the ground calling the lead organizers from BLM outside pacifiers shows that not all protests are BLM and not all activists/organizers believe in counter violent uprisings against their oppressors. More importantly, these comments are still only using the January 6 capitol riot as a social pin and reference point for all insurrection.
Again, I ask, whom at the January 6th capitol attack was part of a downtrodden, subaltern class, and or historically targeted, neglected, oppressed, colonized identity[s]? Wealthy white cis het able bodied men responding violently to a lost election does not an UP-rising make. Their goal post was to win an election and continue the project of white monied power in response to the threat of losing it politically. This wasn’t like the Battle of Athens where crossed GIs organized a response to police corruption, these January 6 rioters have been emboldened and empowered by Trump’s fascist views and the values of a long existing christo fascist government. How anti-gov can you actually be if you’re not questioning, or critical of, how a White man Power government has socialized you into thinking you’re the superior race or gender? Or that stolen commodified land is “rightfully” your land? In that last question I’m thinking about the Israeli state’s Zionism and its relationship to Manifest Destiny and how both of these cancerous entitlements were financed by the same state and used to spread across Indigenous lands. This also reminds me that the FBI, notoriously known for destabilizing social movements, lists as “Violent Extremism” right wing, white nationalists, white supremacist militias alongside anarchists and animal/environmental rights activists(often Indigenous peoples protecting our lands). Regardless of its intention, this also obfuscates the material reality and history that the FBI and white nationalists alike have all had in terms of ideological and institutional ties to thee premier white supremacist nation state(The good ‘ol United States of America). The state is really trying to convince us all that Food Not Bombs, a loose network of autonmous anarchist collectives that feeds houseless peoples free food and NOT BOMBS is the same as the Proud Boys and other white supremacist groups with ties to mass shootings. These groups are not the same and lumping them together is a joke.
By conflating the January 6 capitol attacks with insurrection, so many are doing the work of deleting ourstories, and liberatory intentions of, slave rebellions, Indigenous insurgency, workers revolts, prison uprisings and other oppressed identities’ resisting organized authority from popular discourse and replacing or even aligning it with that sorry ass attempt for a coup. And an attempt that was surprisingly initiated without US military backing that has destabilized already organized peoples in countries the world over. Like, as sophisticated as state surveillance is and with regard to the state’s collusion with right wing politics, y’all still don’t think that shit was staged, planned and allowed to happen from actors of the government itself? Even despite Trumps deleted tweets?
As we watch live countless atrocities and genocides happening through social media, in the name of white/eurocentric entitlement and industrial civil society that is bringing about environmental collapse, I hope we do not under value the importance of Palestinian, Sudanese, Congolese, Hawaiian or any Indigenous and oppressed/colonized people’s insurrections against violent coercive regimes made and meant to oppress. So for accomplices, allies or whatever you wanna call it, please stop fixing your mouths to say “be ungovernable” while in same breath denouncing actual needed insurrection from the bottom-up. Let them all fall.