When I went to one of the first worldwide AIDS Conferences in Amsterdam, I remember a march we had. It was so polite and welcomed by the city and its population that it achieved nothing.
Empires (of various sorts) can always accommodate dissent. Het culture could allow queer meccas to emerge since such places never seriously threatened the power or ubiquity of het dominion. Now queers just merge with hets.
> The question is, how do we create an anti-imperial politics,
which will turn the inevitable loss of Empire into an opening for
new forms of democracy and struggle.
1) You take care to help protect those people who will be most adversely affected by the crumbling of Empire and hope they remember who had been on their side after the dust of Empire's falling has settled.
2) You hasten along as best as possible the decline of Empire (though how much can be done on a practical level is modest at best. It will never be fast enough for the majority of attention-disordered human beings). You take advantage of lapses in Empire's security/rejuvenation apparatus to infect it with the virus of anti-imperialism in order to hasten its demise.
3) You lay the groundwork for the post-Empire society you want to see emerge from the collapse. Certainly, no one on this list will live to see its arrival. At best, list members' grandchildren will be around at its birth.
Brian