Hasan Piker, the biggest progressive political streamer in America, was detained by Customs and Border Protection for hours of questioning upon returning to the U.S. from a trip to France this weekend. Piker posted about the incident on X and later talked about it on stream.
He was detained in Chiago and questioned for two hours about protected journalistic activities like who he’s interviewed and his political beliefs. He was asked whether or not he’d interviewed Hamas, Houthis, or Hezbollah members. He was questioned about his opinions on Trump and Israel and asked about his history of bans on Twitch. His phone and laptop were not confiscated.
They worked under the US, and reaped the benefits of our imperialist actions. obviously no one deserves to be murdered, but we are all culpable for the violence our nation commits, because we’re the ones keeping it running. The US deserved retaliation for what it partook in during the cold war, and that retaliation was never going to only include guilty parties.
EDIT: let me put it in another perspective: if you went to a foreign nation which operated on slavery, started working there, enjoyed the goods and services provided to you by the enslaved, and socialized with the enslavers, why would you ever expect sympathy from the enslaved? You chose who to help, who to do business with, and you chose the enslavers. It really doesn’t matter if you talked about slavery being fucked up behind closed doors, you enjoyed the value ripped from the enslaved. You’re now just as culpable as the enslavers.
Edit 2: made some edits communicating some further nuance regarding the subject. 9/11 was a tragedy, but it is largely overshadowed by the sheer scale of death our conflict with the Middle-East has had.
Would you go off yourself to stop the machine? Would you go to jail to fight for the cause? Would you sacrifice your family if it meant it would nudge anti capitalism movement?
Maybe read “Those who walk away from Omelas” and realize there’s many more productive ways to work against an oppressive nation, ranging from damaging its function to not participating in the systems which you don’t approve of.
There’s also the concept of ‘activation’, which is the slow process of learning to oppose authority in increments. It takes time to unlearn the docility the system imposes on us. Most Americans don’t even feel comfortable showing up to protests, let alone violently opposing the state.
If I die from middle eastern retaliation, I’m not gonna act surprised. If our nation was invaded, I’m not exactly gonna be lining up to volunteer defending it. We live in a country that does a vast amount of damage to the world, and I’m sick of pretending like us US citizens aren’t all small parts of the problem, because we’re letting this happen .
Jesus fuck, the political extremists have escaped the tankie containment instances
I’m an anarchist on the same instance as you are, I agree with the idea that US’s geopolitical games had to have a blowback at some point.
Should the 3000+ died? Probably not. Would someone at some point have died due to the blowback at some point? Most likely. Can’t say when or where, or how many.
But people were (understandably) seething with hatred for what America did to their nations and cultures. Removing elected leaders for autocratic dictators, assassinating people to help aid in anti-communist efforts, and so on. America was not innocent in the region pre-9/11.
The people in the towers probably had nothing to do even tangentially related to the reasons for 9/11 to be done in the eyes of the Al Queda, beyond “they are in the buildings tied to American capitalism, valid target in our eyes.”
I’m not a tankie, so I wouldn’t be on a tankie instance. Other radical views exist outside Maoism and Marxist-Leninism.
I’m not saying those 3000 people deserved to die. It is sad that they died. The US as a whole had it coming, and it would have been better if only the government or combatants were targeted. But to act like the US citizens who died on 9/11 were completely innocent bystanders is also unrealistic. It’s sad that settler families were slaughtered by native Americans, but I’m not going to act like it was completely evil that they were targeted, especially after we were slaughtering tribes en masse with our military.
Ye the Palestinians should just die already and let the last of their land be stolen by Jizzrael and the Ussa
Wow. Just… wow. That’s an extremely callous attitude.
So is our foreign policy. We live in a fucked up world. US citizens don’t deserve more respect than Middle-Eastern peoples, and far more Middle-Easterners have died unjustly prior to and after 9/11 than Americans did in 9/11. You either pretend like middle-eastern lives are without worth, become overwhelmed from the sheer amount of death, or you grow callous.