Strong Verbs Are Just Better

Ave Maria pic.twitter.com/lb6Y5XV05a

— Ignacio Gil (@Inaki_Gil) April 15, 2019

son of a roofer medievalist checking in with a wee thought: All I could think yesterday was about the workers involved in the restoration work; fire can possibly be pinpointed to a single mistake made by one worker. I'm sure there are dozens of workers associated with cathedral+

— Damian #1cf, for lent Fleming (@FW_Medieval) April 16, 2019

Some people are just do-it-make-it-fix-it oriented, and others have other skills and talents. That’s okay. The world needs its capable stewards as much as its disruptors. Some people are making glorious impassioned quotable speeches on the steps of a venerable monument and some people are bookkeeping for the revolution. All of these people are valuable to the work of justice and liberation. Let’s make sure we are valuing people for what they’re good at and their choices to lend some of that time and talent, whatever it looks like, toward the goal of a better world instead of always valorizing the person doing the face work. The one who spends their Sunday coding and categorizing a list of doors to knock on for the local municipal election doesn’t get much recognition, but without them the entire enterprise crumbles. Let’s be sure we have a clear sense who the entire iceberg, is what I’m saying. For everyone who is at the protest or action with a cheeky sign there’s someone who spent the entire previous day meticulously serving as an expert witness about sexual harassment taking a needed break with whiskey and comic books.

A sensible place to begin thinking about the problem is to consider the nature of contemporary antisemitism and the ways it differs from other types of racism and xenophobia, as well as from older forms of antisemitism – and therefore might not be adequately addressed by generic condemnations of ‘all forms of racism’.

Racist ideologies provided an intellectual cover for the depredations of European colonialism and the slave trade; as such, they presented the racialised Other as inferior, subhuman, irrational, irresponsible, incorrigibly violent and therefore in need of subjugation and oppression. Antisemitism, on the other hand imagines ‘the Jews’ not as inferior but as a global cabal of master manipulators whose power and influence is hidden yet all-pervasive. One need only search YouTube for ‘Rothschild’ or ‘Soros’ to see the continued prevalence of these notions.

Historian and political economist Moishe Postone cautions against thinking of this phenomenon as a mere atavistic reflex: although modern antisemitism draws on long-standing Christian European prejudice against Jews as greedy money-lenders, it is a distinct ideology that arose symptomatically from the rise of capitalism. Antisemitic thought misdiagnoses the malign effects of capitalism; it does not recognise the interdependence of productive labour and capitalist social relations.

Instead of sorting through the hundreds of thousands of files to seek out the most important or relevant and protect the innocent, he dumped them all onto his website, free for anybody to go through, regardless of their contents or the impact they might have had. Some exposed the names of Afghans who had been giving information on the Taliban to US forces.

Journalism demands more than simply acquiring confidential information and releasing it unfiltered onto the internet for punters to sort through. It comes with responsibility.

To effectively fulfil the role of journalism in a democracy, there is an obligation to seek out what is genuinely in the public interest and a responsibility to remove anything that may compromise the privacy of individuals not directly involved in a story or that might put them at risk.