porcupine
Starts really good and gets worse as it goes on
It illuminates how and why white Euro-American settlers have always behaved as a group across history. This is crucial, because white settlers keep doing the exact same thing and producing the exact same results, believing all the while that by doing the exact same thing they’ll succeed if only they believe hard enough in their own moral righteousness.
It bounces off or upsets many white folks because they’re unwilling to accept the conclusions that they as a group materially benefit from imperialism, and that liberation is contingent upon the defeat of that group by people outside of it. Even if white people accept that they hold some abstract level of privilege in settler societies, most won’t accept the proposition that liberation doesn’t depend on their convincing their white friends to have the right opinions. Liberation requires colonized peoples gaining power by taking it away from white settlers.
Many white people see this as “defeatist”, believing that if they personally aren’t the subjects of revolution, then revolution must not be possible or desirable. White settlers need to be disabused of this individualistic outlook in order to have any productive role in revolutionary struggle. A “morally good” white settler isn’t a proletarian in the global sense: they’re a class traitor. The highest role that white settlers can take in revolutionary struggle is betraying the class interests of the while settler class.
You’re right, but it gets worse than that.
spoiler
After the success of the attack on the world financial system, global capital basically just pivots and recovers while life gets worse for normal people. I think that’s a good and interesting direction to explore, but the solution the show’s middle posits is basically that trying to change the system was a mistake. The solution is presented as trying to work within the evil company to undo the attack and reform the global financial system from within. By the end, it somehow gets even worse by revealing that the real problem with capitalism was always China, and specifically one insane evil Chinese trans person. The score and acting remain terrific throughout, but the plot outside the character drama starts revolutionary and nosedives into disgusting lib shit really hard.
It’s just settler hegemony. They didn’t enter a vacuum sealed logic chamber one day and come out bloodthirsty freaks. Most of them just internalize and repeat whatever they think most of the people around them believe and say to prevent being alienated. The societies that they live in are colonial societies built on stolen land, and those societies have a interest in perpetuating the cycle of colonial extraction. As long as liberals don’t have to see the bloodletting, it’s easy for them to believe whatever allows them to go about their day not thinking about the fact that they live on the death star. When they can’t ignore it, the simplest solution for them cope with cognitive dissonance is to adopt whatever hastily cobbled together pretext is handed to them that justifies the imperial bloodletting – even makes it noble. That lets them go about their day with their worldview intact, because the alternative would be extremely disruptive to their sense of identity and community.
When you try to persuade libs about this stuff, you’re not just trying to convince them of a set of facts: you’re implicitly telling them that their entire society is evil, and that they should be traitors to the interests of that society. Whether it’s productive to try to personally convince individual Euro-Americans liberals about that is a question I can’t answer for you. When you get frustrated about why it’s so difficult to get these people to accept an obvious truth and how quickly, easily, and desperately they’ll cling to a lie, consider true size of the pill they’d have to swallow in order to accept what you’re saying.
“See fellow comrades? We in the DSA, in order to maintain our credibility as leftists, must commit to funding the destruction of Hamas. Then others will take us seriously, and we can work with with progressive elements within Israel to push Biden left.”