Voting is Not Harm Reduction An Indigenous Perspective February 2020 – www.indigenousaction.org Zine format printable PDF download:  Voting is Not Harm Reduction Zine-FINAL-PRINT (9.8MB) When proclamations are made that “voting is harm reduction,” it’s never clear how less harm is actually calculated. Do we compare how many millions of undocumented Indigenous Peoples have been deported? […]

BEFORE YOU DOWNVOTE LIKE SHEEPLE, READ THE ARTICLE FIRST AND THEN COMMENT WHY YOU DISAGREE, THEN, AND ONLY THEN, OUGHT YOU DOWNVOTE

We don’t dismiss the reality that, on the scale of U.S. settler colonial violence, even the slightest degree of harm can mean life or death for those most vulnerable. What we assert here is that the entire notion of “voting as harm reduction” obscures and perpetuates settler-colonial violence, there is nothing “less harmful” about it, and there are more effective ways to intervene in its violences.

  • keepthepace@slrpnk.net
    81·
    9 months ago

    When proclamations are made that “voting is harm reduction,” it’s never clear how less harm is actually calculated. Do we compare how many millions of undocumented Indigenous Peoples have been deported? Do we add up what political party conducted more drone strikes? Or who had the highest military budget? Do we factor in pipelines, mines, dams, sacred sites desecration? Do we balance incarceration rates? Do we compare sexual violence statistics? Is it in the massive budgets of politicians who spend hundreds of millions of dollars competing for votes?

    Yes, you do that and you get some fucking political culture about the fact the president is not an emperor king and that the control of the congress matters more. You also learn that some policy take years to show some effect and that politicians are specialist about deflecting blame on predecessors while claiming their success.

    The immigration/deportation/incarceration policy of the US is a fucking disgrace and it wont be solved overnight, but thinking that the party who calls for the end of the for-profit prison is as bad as the one who pardoned the creation of a racial concentration camp is just dumb. Counting drone strikes but dismissing the fact that without the disastrous GWB presidency there would have been neither the Iraq war nor the Afghanistan war, not the “war on terrorism” idiocy and possibly not even 9/11, that’s also voluntarily blinding yourself.

    HARM REDUCTION DOES NOT MEAN YOU VOTE TO SUPPORT, IT LITERALLY MEANS YOU VOTE TO OPPOSE!