i don't believe in electoral politics, but i believe in the power of propaganda– or what we in the bullshit business call "narrative."
during her initial run for office a few years back, this u.s. politician AOC 'went viral' with a very good campaign video. now that she's running for re-election she has a new, also very good video. i'd probably get kicked off noblogs if i embedded it but you can view it here.
in a twitter thread, austrian antifascist researcher Natascha Strobl provided incisive analysis of elements that make this 30-second blast so suasive. while i personally feel voting constitutes self-harm, i still recognize master-craft *~narrative~* when i see it.
shoutout to @_plafta for providing context and nuance for some of the german idiom… any fuckups are mine
Category: Translations
"revolutionary tourists" in gran canaria
Just downriver from New Orleans is a large (though much-reduced) population descended from Canary Islanders. These "Isleños" came to South Louisiana in the late 1700s and have their own rich conflictual history, including a 1926 insurrection. More on that later, perhaps.
What follows, though relatable to many places, concerns the Canary Islands. It's a (clumsy) translation of a twitter thread about the behavior of "revolutionary tourists" from the Gran Canaria Anarchist Federation, "Combative and neighborhood anarchism from North Africa."
Now that we have survived August, we are going to talk a little about a type of tourism that a large part of the left does not question: "revolutionary tourism". In Gran Canaria we have suffered a lot, to the point of becoming "disagreeable".
Many people from the (Spanish) peninsula, from England, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Greece arrive every summer on the island to "get acquainted." Is this to see how we work, to share ideas, to attend an assembly, to chat for a couple of hours? Only for a minority. The rest come for something else.