I Choose Violence.

Lessons I learned from the public school playground.

I remember the very first physical fight I got into. It happened in middle school. For reference, I grew up in the inner-city public school system. There was a lot of roughhousing. A girl in my class had started bullying me, and I knew very quickly that if I didn’t stop her, it wouldn’t just stop; other people would start seeing me as an easy target, too.

I remember how badly I didn’t want to fight. I just wanted to be left alone. But I also knew that would never happen unless I did something. So one day, I had enough. When the bell rang, and we all went out to the playground, I walked up to her, grabbed her by the hair, and started fucking her up.

Our parents were called in, and we were both suspended. After that day, no one bullied me in school again. For a long time, I looked back at that experience and felt a deep sense of trauma. I would think: why was I put in that position at such a young age? Why did I have to go to such a ghetto-ass school?

But over time, I realized something else: that experience taught me how to defend myself, not just physically, but verbally too. When I got older and started working, I noticed how men would make uncomfortable comments toward my coworkers and me. I would watch them giggle out of fear or discomfort. But not me. I would tell them to go fuck themselves. They never tried that shit with me again.

I was always ready for a fight. It took me years to learn that not everything deserves my energy. Not every battle is worth it. But sometimes it is.

I’m sharing this story because the lessons you learn about dealing with bullies don’t stay on the playground. They follow you into the real world. They shape how you see power, conflict, and justice. They even shape how you see geopolitics.

Lately, I’ve seen a lot of my comrades posting the phrase “two things can be true at once” when talking about the war in Iran. What they usually mean is that both sides are bad, and therefore, they can’t support either side because both are terrible. But most of the people making these arguments live in the West and have been deeply indoctrinated for decades. Iran and the United States are not equally bad.

Iran never declared itself the leader of the world. It never claimed the right to control the planet. The United States did. Iran isn’t imposing its ideologies on the world. The United States invades nations to spread its ideologies, such as “democracy.” Iran is not bombing the United States into oblivion and killing its citizens. The United States is bombing Iran and killing its people. Iran is not sanctioning the United States and starving its population. The United States is sanctioning Iran, which is harming its people. Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons. The United States does have nuclear weapons and has actually used them. Iran is nowhere near as powerful as America. There is a clear power imbalance.

So why do so many people keep repeating this “both sides” narrative? It’s because people expected the resistance to look like the Avengers. They weren’t expecting Iran to be the country confronting Western imperialism and the Zionist entity. And by the way, they’re fucking them up.

So many liberals, and even so-called leftists, expected the resistance to look more like Luke Skywalker. More progressive. More honorable. More morally righteous. More like them. But that’s not reality. For decades, people in the West have been raised on Hollywood stories where the resistance is always pure and heroic. The savior is always morally perfect. The rebels are always noble.

Real resistance doesn’t work like that. Resistance doesn’t have to be morally perfect. It doesn’t have to match Western progressive ideals. It only needs one thing: a justified case against the occupier, the foreign invader, the actual villain. And the groups resisting empire, whether in Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, or elsewhere, have the clearest case possible: they are defending their homes from foreign domination.

Another thing that fascinates me is how people in the West feel entitled to have opinions on the internal affairs of countries in West Asia. Meanwhile, people in those countries are not sitting around debating gun control or abortion laws in America. They’re not discussing whether the United States should be invaded to free Americans from the Epstein regime that runs our country. Those conversations mostly happen in the West.

Why?

Because Westerners have been indoctrinated to see themselves and their countries as morally righteous. Even when they believe they are criticizing their own governments, that assumption of moral authority still lingers. No nation is perfect. But imperfection does not erase a nation’s right to defend itself from a bully.

And the stakes are high. If these nations do not fight back, the United States and Israel will keep coming back again and again, pushing further each time. The objective is to establish control and dominance over the entire region. You cannot let up on a bully. Sometimes you have to grab that bitch by the hair and end it right there.

What truly baffles me is watching comrades who have wept with me for three years while witnessing genocide suddenly become unable to support the resistance because it isn’t perfect enough. Because it’s “just as oppressive.” We live in a country ruled by the Epstein regime, a country that has inflicted immense suffering across the entire world.

Criticize the resistance when we are free. But to publicly condemn the resistance while the empire is actively committing violence against them is nauseating. Our little informative videos haven’t stopped a genocide. Our posts haven’t ended the wars. Our protests haven’t put a single member of the ruling class behind bars.

My siblings in misery, many of you are waiting for the Avengers. That is a fantasy. This is the resistance. This is what it actually looks like. This is what we have. And if you have a better strategy for ending a genocide and freeing the region from U.S. imperialism and a Zionist takeover, I’m open to hearing it. Comment below.

When I got suspended after that playground fight, the principal didn’t care that I had been bullied. According to the rules of the school, I should have reported the situation to a teacher or a guidance counselor. So my bully and I were treated as equally guilty. But I wasn’t.

I had a justified case. And the fight ended the bullying because I took matters into my own hands. The people who refuse to support resistance today, the ones repeating phrases like “two things can be true,” are like that school administration. They hide behind rules and neutrality. But those rules are made up.

And neutrality in situations like this doesn’t stop violence. It sustains it. Those neutral takes ultimately reinforce Western imperialism and the Zionist narrative that they must invade and “save” the region. Whether people realize it or not, they become mouthpieces for it.