Yossi Schwartz ISL (RCIT section in Israel/Occupied Palestine), 04.07.2024
The annual tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) tournament has been canceled as part of the largest and oldest gaming convention in the US after it was heavily criticized by the supporters of the genocide of the Palestinians for excluding scores from the ceremony and preventing the Zionists from being nominated for awards.
About two weeks ago, the Creators Awards Ceremony in the field of tabletop role-playing games (CRIT) changed a section of its regulations and made it clear that “people who identify as Zionists, who promote Zionist materials or the supporters of Zionism” will not be able to be nominated for one of the awards handed out at the ceremony.
The CRIT award process is similar to a democratic election. It begins with members of the tabletop RPG community proposing candidates who are then screened and nominated for selection in primaries. Those who pass these two stages compete against each other.
The tournament where the winners of the elections were supposed to be announced was to be held as part of the “Gen Con” conference (one of the largest and oldest tabletop role-playing and board game conferences in North America that takes place every year in Indianapolis and attracts tens of thousands of participants from all over the world) that will take place this year between August 1 and 4, However, the organizers of the CRIT awards ceremony announced earlier this week that they would not participate in the conference because they were concerned about their safety after receiving sharp criticism for denying supporters of Israel the possibility of being nominated for the award, a decision defined as anti-Semitic by pro-Zionists
Not surprisingly, the racist Anti-Defamation League strongly attacked the organizers of the CRIT ceremony for their new policy. In a tweet published on the X network, the league stated that “disqualifying people just because they are Zionists – this means because they support the right of the Jewish people to self-determination and the right to exist of the State of Israel is an anti-Semitic policy.”
In the history of the US, the supporters of the Confederation condemned the North and those who opposed slavery as anti-whites:
“It began with Abraham Lincoln’s election as president of the United States. What concerned Southerners most about Lincoln’s election was his opposition to the expansion of slavery into the territories; Southern politicians were clear about that. If new states could not be slave states, went the argument. It was only a matter of time before the South’s clout in Congress would fade, abolitionists would be ascendant, and the South’s “peculiar institution” – the right to own human beings as property – would be in peril.
Even those Southerners who did not own slaves opposed the freedom of slaves. Why would they risk their livelihoods by leaving the United States and pledging allegiance to a new nation grounded in the proposition that all men are not created equal, a nation established to preserve a type of property that they did not own?
In 1860 more than 4 million enslaved humans lived in the South, and they touched every aspect of the region’s social, political, and economic life. Slaves did not just work on plantations. In cities such as Charleston, they cleaned the streets and toiled as bricklayers, carpenters, blacksmiths, bakers, and laborers. They worked as dockhands and stevedores grew and sold produce, purchased goods, and carted them back to their masters’ homes, where they cooked the meals, cleaned, raised the children, and tended to the daily chores. Charleston looks more like a Negro country than a country settled by white people.
Fear of a slave rebellion was common. The establishment of a black republic in Haiti and the insurrections, threatened and real, of Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner stoked the fires. John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry sent shockwaves through the South. Throughout the decades leading up to 1860, slavery was a burning national issue, and political battles raged over the admission of new states as slave or free. The Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850 were struck, but the controversy could not be laid to rest.
The South felt increasingly isolated as the North increased its criticism of slavery. Abolitionist societies sprang up; Northern publications demanded the immediate end of slavery, politicians waxed shrill about the immorality of human bondage, and overseas, the British parliament terminated slavery in the British West Indies. A prominent historian accurately noted that “by the late 1850s, most white Southerners viewed themselves as prisoners in their own country, condemned by what they saw as a hysterical abolition movement.”
As Southerners became increasingly isolated, they reacted by defending slavery. The institution, they said, was not evil but a positive good, a practical and moral necessity. Controlling the slave population was a matter of concern for all Whites, whether they owned slaves or not. Curfews governed the movement of slaves at night, and vigilante committees patrolled the roads, dispensing summary justice to wayward slaves and whites suspected of harboring abolitionist views. Laws were passed against the dissemination of abolitionist literature.” [1]
When you see or read the complaints of the Zionists who claim that to oppose the genocide of the Palestinians is anti-Semitism as Israel has the right to its special attitude toward the Palestinians, you cannot be blind to the similarity of the Zionists and the Southern whites before the civil war. To those who would like to see the confederation again.
Down with Zionism!
For Palestine, red and free from the river to the sea!
Endnotes:
[1] https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/why-non-slaveholding-southerners-fought