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.
Rainbows are ultimately a Western symbol of queerness. There wasn’t an international queer conference where queer people from all over the world voted on rainbows as an international symbol of queerness. The rainbow flag originated in San Francisco during the late 70s where it then spread to the rest of the US and later the rest of the Western world. It only penetrated the non-Western world through Western-back NGOs.
This is the problem with pinkwashing. Non-Western queer people are essentially set up to fail by Western-back NGOs, making them entirely dependent on those NGOs. You can see this in the way some Chinese enbies use TA pronouns instead of using or inventing a Chinese character as their pronoun. If you’re a queerphobic asshole who thinks queerness is just Western d-word, then a bunch of enbies going around using the Western Latin alphabet instead of Chinese characters to describe themselves would pretty much confirms queerness as Western d-word. This is not the fault of the Chinese enbies, but the Western-backed NGOs who purposefully push the idea of using TA as a pronoun knowing that the more reactionary elements of Chinese society would weaponize this to push queerphobia, further pushing those enbies into the arms of the NGOs. The NGOs want the enbies to be estranged from mainstream Chinese society and are taking advantage of queerphobia to essentially groom those enbies to become potential Western agents of color revolution.
Queer people have existed throughout history and throughout every single human society, which means people don’t have to use a foreign symbol with pinkwashing baggage but just need to uncover the queer history of their particular society and use those symbols instead.
Or… just use the symbols? They’re not reactionary. I refuse to say random western sociopaths can just appropriate a symbol of my own liberation and make it bad forever
It’s more politically expedient to use symbols that are homegrown rather than symbols from a foreign place that’s hostile to your home country. Symbols mean different things to different people. From the perspective of the US and the West in general, the rainbow flag is a symbol of queer liberation, but from the perspective of people not from the West, the rainbow flag is just some pinkwashing bullshit. You can’t just ignore the non-Western reading of the symbol especially when we’re talking about what the rainbow means in non-Western countries. It makes a lot more political sense to just find different symbols that actually come from the local culture. By embracing the Western symbol, you’re already subtly insinuating that queerness is some Western invention, which is a queerphobic talking point.
There’s nothing inherently queer about rainbows. Gay people don’t piss out rainbows, and trans people don’t shit out rainbows. Rainbows are just symbols, which means they ought to be judged based on political expediency on whether to adopt them and where and who to display them to like any other symbol.
Ok, but like… I’m not
People can use whatever symbols they want, the argument isn’t over whether or not they come from the West, but if they’re inherently some sort of imperialism by their mere existence that implies the need for violence
And people will interpret those symbols whatever they want as well. Political symbols serve a political purpose, and if they are detrimental to whatever political project they are trying to accomplish, then they ought to be discarded.
But if it doesn’t make sense why I’m arguing so hard, it’s because the phrase “western values” sort of implies this weird connotation that, beyond simply being a symbol people associate with direct US influence, it is associated with some sort of evil, insidious gay worldview. This might seem like splitting hairs but it tread so close to Nazbol territory to defend that specific terminology that it freaks me out. If it was just “western symbols” or “probability of being a western spy” it would make perfect sense, but “western values” conjures images of hordes of scheming Untermench soft-men carving away the fabric of strong insert country here society.
As if the issue is the things these organizations claim to support and not the fact they are blatant lies. Gay liberation being a “western value” is about as true as democracy, as in, not at all (we just pretend it is so we can have Cassus Belli on random countries). If we try to compensate for every possible concept the US tries to appropriate then we’re going to end up having insane positions like “war crimes are actually good because the US said they weren’t” (probably with the context of the US lying about them happening in the first place)
Like, imagine if we responded to claims of the “Uyghur genocide” by claiming that being against genocide is a Western value being pushed on unwilling countries, instead of just pointing out the very obvious fakery of the whole thing. People would rightfully call us sociopaths and monsters.
That makes sense
I think Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains probably have some bad news for you on that front.
If one of the people the swastika was appropriated from used it, it would be far less suspicious than most contemporary modern uses
It’s used in decoration frequently, it’s extremely easy to tell the different contexts