[ID text: “You’re not a monster,” I said. But I lied. What I really wanted to say was that a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once. end ID]
[Image description: a screencap from Star Trek: Voyager showing Archer with her chin resting on top of her hands as she says to Chakotay, “It’s Pon Farr night at the Vulcan Nightclub.”
The next image is the purple triangle with yellow, orange, red, pink, and purple rainbow leading into it, with purple metallic writing in the triangle that says, “It’s fuck or die Friday.”
Another bewildering assertion I’ve seen floating around is that the United States of America deliberately destabilises West Asia and North Africa, murders millions of civilians, destroys towns and cities, arms militias &c. because of Islamophobia. I assure you that this is not true and that no one who is serious about understanding geopolitics or Islamophobia has this analysis. Islamophobia may have early modern or pre-modern instantiations, but in its current context it is very much a result of and a rhetorical and social justification for the geopolitical, economic, resource-driven exigencies of imperial capitalism. You’re looking at a cart and insisting that it is pulling a horse around
I think the same argument can be made for European colonisation/slavery in Africa too; sure racist ideology was used to justify their venture, but they didn’t do it because of racism.
“Occasionally, it is mistakenly held that Europeans enslaved Africans for racist reasons. European planters and miners enslaved Africans for economic reasons, so that their labor power could be exploited. Indeed, it would have been impossible to open up the New World and to use it as a constant generator of wealth, had it not been for African labor. There were no other alternatives: the American (Indian) population was virtually wiped out and Europe’s population was too small for settlement overseas at that time. Then, having become utterly dependent on African labor, Europeans at home and abroad found it necessary to rationalize that exploitation in racist terms as well. Oppression follows logically from exploitation, so as to guarantee the latter. Oppression of African people on purely racial grounds accompanied, strengthened, and became indistinguishable from oppression for economic reasons.“
