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>>>Self-criticisms
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Self-criticism - Sanam Abbasi
Thread started by Sanam.01
Anyone who knows me knows that I'm not a diary person, I have always found the concept to be one of those things you cease to find interesting after your twelfth birthday, but some in the cell appear to think I have been a naughty one lately, and so they asked me to engage in some healthy self-criticism which, following some friendly pressure, will encompass my entire life.
Right, where do I begin?
May as well start from the principle.
I was born twenty-five years ago on New London, my father was a lawyer and my mother a school teacher. One would think "Alright, that's a relatively privileged girl", but I beg to differ. My father was chronically short on clients for whatever reason and my mother, well, let's just say she wasn't teaching in a private school. I would call them mediocrities but that would be a disservice to them considering how much they struggled to keep the shack in one piece - not an actual one, don't worry, everyone. But I must say it was a rather small apartment - so let's just say that they weren't very lucky in life, and Notting Hill was a part of the megalopolis filled with many other people who, like us, would qualify as lower middle class.
My performance at school was, well, a good one, from the beginning. Not many 9s, but lots of 7s and 8s for sure. I loved humanistic subjects in particular. My parents soon noticed and, unwilling to entertain even distantly the notion that their missy would end up even lower than them in some back office job, they sent me to college after I finished the classical gymnasium.
A public college, of course, and a rather squalid one if compared to those of Cambridge, but still.
And what happens between one exam and the next when you're a mildly-social person in college?
Why, you get caught in the accursed network of politics, of course, and that is how I found the local branch of the Green Front. And you know how that goes, you join it for the guys at first, and then it becomes something real, something serious.
I devoured the political theory between one exam and the next, participated in debates and demos - the local Young Labor branch was always there with and for us. Good comrades, though this isn't the place to talk about our differences - hell I think I broke the noses of a few fascists in some of these demos. To put it simply, I was sucked into it, the Front was my life, and when I graduated from college in xenoanthropology, well, I really didn't know where to go.
I mean I had a useful piece of paper but at that point I was so caught in the idea that we shouldn't make another Leeds or London out of Gaia, that there was a lesson to learn out of what we were doing, that my career didn't matter anymore. It was at that point that me and some friends from college were approached by some recruiters from Islay who had kept a close eye on us. They offered us a guaranteed "source of income", but they warned us, this was a life of struggle that we were about to enter. I was one of the few to make my way there.
From there, the artificial gravity of that rock and the raids I was sent into against the Gauls - BMM, OSC and Planetform being minor issues for the moment, being evicted from Edinburgh by the frog-eaters who we were resisting in our own personal manner - became the least of my issues, especially after having paid my parents a one way trip to Sprague, away from the frontlines.
My problem, my real problem, were the people of Islay. Are the people of Islay. Some of them, at least.
You see, when the neighborhood you grew up in is in fact little more than a bunch of cans of sardines and you never saw the sky and the sun until your early 20s, any criticism of our dysfunctional system coming from wealthy Cantabridgian and Londoner kids comes across as detached and hollow, not to mention that classist prejudice can be present even in a hollowed out rock floating in space, and I felt it all the way to my neck.
This is where I have been a naughty little one.
Islay's composition is a colorful one. There are many lower middle class and working class people I understand but God... the people from Cambridge and the green areas of New London...
As someone who lived in a tin of sardines and who never saw proper sunlight until her early 20s, I kept wondering why were these people here. I mean, sure, they were the ones who founded the movement in the first place, but considering where we came from, this felt far more our struggle than theirs. To put it simply, their activism looked like a form of tree-hugging virtue-signaling, I felt that I fit into this far more than they did, as if they somehow "polluted" our struggle, and most interactions with these brothers and sisters ended up with me attempting to passive-aggressively stave off a form of upper class contempt that, perhaps, only I felt.
That I obstinately stuck to my lower class Muslim orthodoxy didn't help, and as a result, after having branded many of the recreational activities around here "neopagan pseudo-Kusari bullcrap", I essentially isolated myself from all but the few who followed me from college, who would swear that I wasn't so annoying until a year ago.
In other words, I was the arrogant brat I thought I was fighting, and if I want people to stop telling me to "go back" to Young SDF I must really do something about this, before I run out of people who can bear me.
Comments: AlmightyNathan +23 Good exploration of your background but scarce analysis of your relations with the people of Islay and of your own beliefs.
Healing is hard when you don't point out to the parts of you that hurt. You'll need more of this.
During my permanence on Islay, I have very seldom engaged in armed struggle against the movement's traditional enemies and I think I can say the same of the people who joined the movement in the same period as I did. It couldn't have been otherwise, by the time I had graduated our country had entered the fourth year of war against an enemy that came out of nowhere with the open intent of subjugating our country and taking over our resources. Eight centuries of planning, eight centuries of depleting its own space's resources, just to take over ours. Not the smartest plan, but we were nevertheless on the receiving end of this utter idiocy, and by the time I left college, the Taus had been occupied since the beginning of the war, Edinburgh had been occupied for two years, and smokey Leeds for one, displacing billions in the process and placing many more under brutal martial rule. The Bretonian government had declared what amounted to a localized truce with us - at least in Edinburgh, Leeds and the Taus - and we couldn't help but agree with it. How could we reject it, after the Gauls pledged to do to Gaia what we had prevented BMM and OSC from doing for two centuries?
Thus the movement entered a new historical phase, and that I only lived through this phase is perhaps telling.
Because my actions have mainly been focused on the Gallic war machine and the companies that feed it, my hatred has likewise been focused on an external enemy, perhaps "sparing" from it our own national capitalists, which for centuries have been the focus of our attacks.
I do not think that there is anything wrong in hatred, it is sanctifying, uplifting, but I wonder, am I misplacing it?
Is my hatred a nationalist deviation of the ideology of a fundamentally internationalist movement - as our contacts, friends and even branches throughout the Houses demonstrate. The LWB in Rheinland and the Atacama Cohort in the outskirts of Liberty know of our willingness to reach out to those in need - or is it merely a product of my environment, of being in a certain place at a certain time?
If the nature of my hatred is the former, then I must expunge this poison from my mind, lest I wake up on the day of the final victory realizing that, perhaps, my time was better spent as a Privateer or in the cockpit of a BAF fighter. If the nature of my hatred is the latter, then I must remind myself that, while our current struggle is in part national due to peculiar circumstances, our mission encompasses all of humanity.
I can only hate what is required of me as much as it is required of me, and if I am required to hate Bretonian capital for having driven to collapse two worlds that we needed far more than they needed us - and settling two more in recent times with the explicit purpose of doing to them the same. Three if Harris is recaptured following the recent events in Tau-31 - as much as I am to hate a foreign enemy thrice as strong and thus thrice as likely to self-destructively wreak havok upon Creation, no more and no less, then so be it. I can't have priorities.
And, of course, I cannot be consumed by what amounts to be a tool.
AlmightyNathan +12 We're making progress so far, and you're raising good points about yourself, perhaps you must also operate away from the frontlines. Want me to extend your zone of operations all the way to Omega-3? I'll tell the comrades on the Greifswald that I sent you. Either way, keep them coming.