People are still behaving as if politeness might stop an empire that is actively killing people. As if the right tone, the right march permit, the right appeal to civility will suddenly make power develop a conscience. It won’t. Empire does not care how calmly you beg. It only cares whether its machinery is interrupted.

History is very clear on this. Peaceful protest has never been what stopped genocide, colonialism, slavery, apartheid, or war. Those systems ended when they became unmanageable. When compliance collapsed. When business as usual broke.

Respectability politics exist to keep resistance legible, containable, ignorable. They are cages built to make dissent harmless. And while people argue about optics, people are being starved, bombed, disappeared.

Empire will keep doing whatever it wants as long as we keep playing by its rules.

So no, the task is not to be nicer.

Not to be quieter.

Not to be more palatable.

The task is to become ungovernable.

To refuse cooperation with systems that murder.

To disrupt what depends on our obedience.

To stop asking permission from structures built to destroy us.

Liberation has never come from behaving well inside the cage.