When European, at first Christian and then secular colonial powers run rampant over your culture and people for 100+ years, and demonize your local majority religion as barbaric for almost as long, practicing that religion becomes an act of anti-colonial resistance in and of itself. A way of rejecting outsiders’ attempts to define “correct” beliefs and morality on their own terms.

Then there’s also the element of practicality. At least in Palestine and Lebanon, a lot of the secular leftist anti-colonial movements have been hollowed out, smothered and/or discredited over the past several decades, leaving more religious groups like Hamas and Hezb Allah as really the only resistance-capable game in town.

Also also, there’s a social element to it. Class differences can sometimes feel abstract, and religion, like race or narionality, offers a way to cut through that abstraction. A clear way of differentiating colonized in-group from colonizer out-group.

I’m back because liberal twitterati have been annoying me lately and I need to kvetch about it

Boss said I’m fired if I pop off on twitter again

Critical support to Tennessean used car salesmen with brains so fried by Qanon they’re stumbling backwards into opposing Bill Gates geo-engineering bullshit

Suddenly flashing back to that one dialogue where a human woman is desperately trying to get her mixed human/asari daughter out of a warzone and the galactic beuracrat she’s speaking to initially won’t do anything until the woman gives an emotional Sorkin speech that changes the beuracrat’s mind.

Very interesting. Are there any works you’d recommend that talk more about this? Besides the one @Wertheimer recommended, that is.

Didn’t Hellenistic era Greeks have their own internal ethnic chauvanism going on though? Like Ionians didn’t like Dorians who didn’t like Magnetes or whatever?

The problems of 2014, of 1992, of 1979, of 1968, of 1963, of 1955…

A good handful of mostly Black, leftist organizers have “mysteriously” died since Ferguson way back in 2014. Same as it ever was.