September 24th, 2024: Lessons from a bank-robbing guerrilla turned president, and other things
On September 24th, we discussed the article '“Lessons from a bank-robbing guerrilla turned president”, which features an interview with Uruguay’s former president Pepe Mujica. The introduction to the article reads: “A decade ago, the world had a brief fascination with José Mujica. He was the folksy president of Uruguay who had shunned his nation’s presidential palace to live in a tiny tin-roof home with his wife and three-legged dog. In speeches to world leaders, interviews with foreign journalists and documentaries on Netflix, Pepe Mujica, as he is universally known, shared countless tales from a life story fit for film.”
Though we partly discussed the article as planned, our conversation shifted to the usefulness of protests, disruptive and non-disruptive actions, cultural barriers in the West that prohibit internalizing colonial violence, and how to navigate discussions with those who seem to believe Zionist talking points that villainize the Palestinian people. Given the recent violence by Israeli forces in Lebanon, our discussion began with how to support loved ones with ties to Lebanon.
On Lebanon:
A (on friends with ties to Lebanon): Watching someone’s life fall apart is arguably bad, but not even close to how fucked up it is for that person.
B (on clients who are from Lebanon): International law doesn’t have a sense of immediacy in trying to put a stop to this violence.
C: There are limits to international jurisdictions and what they can actually do.
On protests:
B: Does anyone ever feel that our protests are kind of pointless or futile, or are we truly all united and protesting is a strong thing to do?
D: I know that when I go, it keeps my conscience clear. So in that way, it will always feels like the right thing to do, a strong thing to do.
E: Once you get enough people on your side, [Western] will have to take action. So as futile as it seems now, the more numbers you get, the stronger the cause becomes.
C: Organizing is a lot of work, and there’s a lot of issues and complications that can arise. But that’s a part of the protests.
E: I think that the more you protest, the more that different people might see the protest, become familiar with the cause, and then they’ll empathize… so protesting is not futile.
B: The protest on Friday will be large, now that it involves another group beyond Palestine. David Heap was talking about the difference between disruptive and non-disruptive action. Non-disruptive actions such as reaching out to people and having awkward conversations about the cause without knowing what their reaction would be. I found it important because we would also be leafleting and educating - although it can be risky.
C: Disrupting isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Disruptive action should make people uncomfortable - but it’s also a matter of proportion, and it doesn’t have to make people uncomfortable, just show that a constant presence for a cause exists.
B: In disruptive actions, you still need non-disruptive action. In our last rally, we had a Zionist who harassed us.
A: Disruptive action gets attention - it is done to get attention. But non-disruptive would be educating and teaching. We need disruptive action to attract people, and then we can do the educating on uncomfortable things because anything that people don’t want to hear is technically uncomfortable.
On education in the West:
E: In terms of getting educated in the West, it’s difficult because people in the West will never know the feeling of losing a family member from genocide or massacre. So it’ll take time to get them to understand.
D: There is a point where all struggles are interconnected - so everyone is oppressed in one way or another due to a capitalistic structure, which is heavily tied with colonialism. There are systems in place that maintain capitalistic systems and leads to the oppression that we see even in the West. The roots of oppression are the same - and if we can make people in the West see this, it might serve as a gateway for the West to understand more violent manifestations of those structures, like genocide.
C: There are different demographics and classes. We can arrange them linearly and make things more complicated. Some people really don’t have anything in common with others.
B: I think we can bridge those cultural gaps because so many people can speak up - like Mahmoud Kouta and Greta Thunberg. I think we can all resonate on some level with united human suffering and united human consciousness. And we see, for example, that more Indigenous people are coming into Congress and they can shed light on the effects of colonialism.
On navigating discussions about justice:
B: What is the difference between someone being deceitful or deluded when they say things that are anti-humanitarian?
C: Everything is subjective. If we can agree on the metrics, then we can determine their worldviews by the actions around them. How do we make politicians better at representing their base?
D: Does anyone have experiences with someone who was deluded or deceitful? We could gauge the differences by picking apart experience.
E: Someone I met on the bus was saying that what Israel was doing is justified to exterminate Hamas.
D: Someone I knew - who I initially thought was deluded - was saying that Hamas is evil and Israel needs to exterminate it, and that if Hamas gains victory, then there would be a rise of extremist Islamism worldwide. This person was harmed a lot by extremist Islamist groups, so I understood in that sense why there was perhaps immediate wariness to Hamas, and why I thought they were deluded - because this is about genocide not extremist Islamist groups - not deceitful. But when I brought up international law violations by Israel in Gaza, he realized his views were wrong but refused to acknowledge that. I think that if his viewpoint was truly from a fear of persecution, then he wouldn’t be disregarding international law. That inconsistency was there. So I think he wasn’t deluded, he truly wanted to further his views even when faced with facts to the contrary. I think the line between being deluded and deceitful is when you give someone a fact, is their response going to be consistent?
B: I have a far-right client who believes that the war is justified because “Israel should be able to build a third temple” for religious reasons. I don’t know where I should start trying to debunk that narrative since it came from a religious viewpoint, and I’m not sure how to point out the inconsistencies.
D: Hmm. So we could discuss how to even begin a discussion in the first place.
E: We’d have to put whoever we’re talking with in the shoes of the oppressed and make it seem as much as an extreme as it is - because it is extreme. We have to make it feel as extreme as it possibly can because then, we can make them see it’s wrong - that these things shouldn’t happen to human beings. That’s what I tried with the person on the bus.
D: How did that go?
E: I think I eventually got him to say that “killing the civilians is wrong” but he was still “but Hamas, but Hamas”. But it was an improvement because he was fully a Zionist. I tried my best, I tried fully in the short time I had.
B: In that short time, that’s monumental because you made them anti-genocide.
E: I told him that I told him all the facts and that if he didn’t believe them, well, that sucks. I already told him all the facts so it’s his choice.
D: It’s true that when we make it hyper-relevant to individual suffering, they can’t politicize the violence and try to ignore it.
B: And if we talk to them and they still choose to listen to the propaganda in the media, then it’s their prerogative.
D: I think that people who are still deluded can become undeluded but it will take a lot for them to understand and to leave those narratives behind. I was talking to a friend recently about how there is a Western need for there to be so-called “balanced journalism” where we show “both sides”. But balanced journalism cannot exist without awareness of how power is distributed globally, and in a global situation where power is unequally distributed, showing “both sides” would only ensure that the imbalance of power is maintained. My friend gave a really good example about a discussion where people were saying that Israel and Palestine should have equal voices in balanced journalism, but they refused to say that Nazi Germany should have had an equal voice when reporting on the Holocaust. I thought it was a smart analogy to draw.
“Q: Do you believe that humanity can change?
Mujica: It could change. But the market is very strong. It has generated a subliminal culture that dominates our instinct. It’s subjective. It’s unconscious. It has made us voracious buyers. We live to buy. We work to buy. And we live to pay. Credit is a religion. So we’re kind of screwed up.
Q: It seems you don’t have much hope.
Mujica: Biologically, I do have hope, because I believe in man. But when I think about it, I’m pessimistic.
Q: Yet your speeches often have a positive message.
Mujica: Because life is beautiful. With all its ups and downs, I love life. And I’m losing it because it’s my time to leave. What meaning can we give to life? Man, compared to other animals, has the ability to find a purpose.
Or not. If you don’t find it, the market will have you paying bills the rest of your life.
If you find it, you will have something to live for. Those who investigate, those who play music, those who love sports, anything. Something that fills your life.”
D: We’re talking about an article about the President of Uruguay, Pepe Mujica, who was a bank robber and became president. He says “life is beautiful” and says that this is the reason his speeches are always optimistic, but he also says he is pessimistic. This reminds me of when we discussed Angela Davis and the fight between optimism of the mind and pessimism of the intellect. I like how clear it is here that purpose and narrative are closely related.
B: He uses soft power… and he understands how the market controls us. These are things that remind us of our focus and our purpose.
D: A lot of people structure and describe their lives in a way where “success” is contingent on careers, and therefore wealth, and nothing else. That shouldn’t be the case.
C: It carries risk to see success differently. Some people aren’t inclined to take risks.
B: Some people don’t have the opportunity or the choice to take risks. So how do we take action and bring changes with the government, which gives a structure that forces success to be about wealth? We need to make the elite uncomfortable but we also need to educate. How do we break the glass ceiling of the people who don’t want to listen to the things that are going on?
D: It takes ideology. We can’t fight against colonialism, capitalism, and other structures - which are heavily ingrained ideologies - without proposing and building a new, thorough ideology.
