A court in the central Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod has jailed a woman for wearing rainbow earrings, the human rights group Egida reported late Wednesday, marking the second case of its kind after Russia banned the so-called “LGBT movement” as an “extremist” organization in November. According to Egida, law enforcement agents tasked with combating “extremism” detained the woman after a group of “aggressive people” approached her and her friend at a local cafe and filmed them on camera.
Many left-wingers (most especially Trots, I find) think the question is: “Should we support a multipolar world? In fact, is the coming world going to be multipolar or just Russian/Chinese imperialism replacing American imperialism? Should we support Russia in Ukraine and/or China against Taiwan?”
But these are all pointless questions. What does it matter if you support Russia/China or oppose them? It’s akin to spending your time debating “Is the hurricane coming inland good or bad?” instead of saying “Fuck, okay, there’s a hurricane coming inland. What should our individual responses be? Should we start prepping? Get involved in local politics to better withstand it?” and even “How did this hurricane come about? How will existing infrastructure be affected? It’s been looking pretty rickety even before the winds started up…”
I try to imagine that I’m looking back on the events of today from 100 years in the future. Doing so makes all questions of justification much less interesting than the question of “Where does this lead, and how is it fought?” It also explicitly imagines that there is a future, which is something that many people (quite reasonably) struggle with as climate change and massive wars continue to engulf us, which helps give perspective; just because things are a certain way now, doesn’t mean that they’ll be this way in 5, 10, 20, 50 years from now. It’s almost impossible to have predicted the world of 2024 from the position of somebody in 1924 or even 1974, in the multitude of ways that it has changed.