Comradeship // Freechat

It's not empathy that is the problem. You are looking at a problem that is simply a lack of education and consciousness. Liberalism is hegemonic. The default that anyone absorbs is a liberal take and a liberal approach. The only way to correct this is to become educated in ways resilient to liberal nonsense, which requires unlearning their illogical thought patterns, learning media criticism, learning history, and, of course, reading socialist theory. An effective way to do this is through party organization, forming reading groups and political education curricula and alternative media commentaries.

Unless you were a red diaper baby, we all had bad liberal takes at some point. We were all media illiterate. We knew selective and limited history. And our understanding of socialist thought was liberal straw men and cartoons. We have to bring people over to us and understand that they will have frustratingly bad takes all the while until they learn humility and gain consciousness.

This sounds like an example of what Lenin was talking about in “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder. Not all the Pro-Palestine folk are well principled, but I don't think that has much to do with an excess empathy. It's often hard to tell the difference between treachery and ignorance.

I agree with the underlying point, that they need a grounded actually anti-imperialist view (and in this specific case, they really need education on color revolutions). But I'm not convinced misguided empathy is the issue, as much as western chauvinism is; western chauvinism, and its relationship with the longstanding colonial mythos of civil and savage, enables people to think of the world as carved up into the developed civilized "democratic" world and the undeveloped savage "tyrannical" world. So I guess what I'm putting forth here is: is it really empathy alone that is making them so easy to manipulate or is it more that it's easy for them to have a patronizing "we know better" view of what they may see as the "savage" parts of the world?

It has to be made clear how the opposition is a zionist group that has even signed a joint statement with the Likud party. Thankfully most Palestine news channels I follow on Telegram report on Venezuela charitably and it is evident why.

I think the issue here boils down to this:

Many pro-Palestine people (in the US or west generally) were totally unaware of Israel's Nazi regime and ideology until last year. This isn't me shitting on them, it's just the truth. Most westerners who have no ties to Islam, Arab culture or regions of the world, or Palestine, will never be exposed to anything approaching the Palestinian perspective.

They developed empathy from the months of seeing the full and total destruction brought for Israel for no articulable reason.

For westerners (who are majority white people) Israel is this thing "over there" filled with people who act a lot like they do, but aren't really as white as them, so they're different. It's also a different country, ostensively fully separate from the US (of course those "in the know" know this is just surface level. For all intents and purposes Israel is just another US state that could and has been controlled as such in the past, but the current admin isn't interested in controlling Israel)

It's easy to condemn the actions of a foreign nation. It's harder for indoctrinated, nationalistic (even if they don't think they are!) westerners to condemn the United States (where most of the anti-Venezuela bullshit comes from). Most Americans, and even many who call themselves leftists, are incredibly guarded in criticizing the US. I don't personally understand why as I was born/raised in here, in the American culture, and I shed any of those feelings as a teenager. I have no idea why others continue to be dumbass nationalists, but, 🤷‍♂️

This results in them having a cognitive division or whatever you wanna call it. They can see through the Zionist propaganda. Israel is an evil nation doing incredibly evil things to a captured population. It's all out there and easily seen and absorbed because "who the fuck is Israel? Fuck them! I have no allegiance to that state."

But for Venezuela, for uneducated people, the same who never heard of Palestine in 2023, there is no such clear cut divide to see. Well, there is, except for the important difference that they live in the evil state. They live in the equivalent of the Zionist entity propagandizing against Venezuelans. They live in the imperialist nation crushing Venezuelan independence. And just as the Israeli is raised to never question their media and state, the American is raised the same way.

Why would they ever question the narrative that permeates the media, social media, everything at all times? Mix in a dash of residual Cold War/Red Scare "aren't they evil communists?" and of course it makes perfect sense that most Americans are ignorant, purposely ignorant too often, on topics like Cuba or Venezuela or China. Fuck, "foreign policy" in general. They are the fully indoctrinated population and it takes a lot of introspection, education, and willpower, frankly, to fully break that barrier. Even then, it's so easy to slip back into pro-US narratives.

I don't think it's empathy per se. It's the exploitation of inherent human empathy, sure, I suppose. That's how propaganda works (or one way anyway).