this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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I was very pro-Bernie in 2016 but also against the whole Bernie or Bust idea. Lesser evil-ism in general made sense to me, and the man himself endorsing Hillary on basically those grounds was enough for me to be vocally against Busters or people against voting in general. In my defense, I was a minor and couldn't even vote at the time. By the time I could vote in 2020, my beliefs had shifted enough that I voted for Bernie in the primary but not for Biden in the general. I sure as shit won't now, and not for state-level Dems either like I did in 2020.
I honestly am still not against lesser-evil thinking as much as most people on this site are, but for very different reasons than liberals. That kind of thinking really warmed me up to anti-imperialism. Once I got enough historical background on the death toll of America and colonialism and about how texts like the Black Book exaggerate and fabricate deaths under communism, comparison compelled me to realize that if I believed the lesser evil should be supported, then the DPRK, Iran, Syria, etc. (all the places I thought of as scary dictatorships before, essentially) are the morally superior side in geopolitics. On the basis of morbidity alone is enough to believe so, if nothing else
For that logic to work though, you need to believe people are of equal dignity no matter what part of the world they're from. That every dead body is equal to every other dead body. So, I have also come to realize that the failure of other supposedly pro-"lesser evil" libs to be staunch anti-imperialists comes down to either racism or using the "lesser evil" argument as a rhetorical trick instead of an actual belief. Or worse yet, both!
One shouldn't even need to be convinced of socialism or even social democracy to really follow this logic to its ultimate conclusions and support anti-colonial resistance, but apparently that's too fucking much to ask.
On that basis, I commend Hamas. I think Olof Palme would've understood that. I wish the non-communist """left""" today would have enough of a soul to follow the example of types like him.