I did an interview this morning about the Occupy movement and whether it can or should remain nonviolent.
Nonviolence and Occupy
Ted Rall
http://rall.comTed Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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Looks like your 4 dollar gas prediction is gonna come true.
I listened, beginning with Mr. Rall and Mr. Nagler’s debate, and neither understands India.
The British Army would machine-gun non-violent protests, killing thousands, and the protesters would flee. The RAF would bomb protesters with poison gas. The Raj kept Gandhi alive because it figured that would be cheaper than dealing with the massive protests if he died, and empires must be profitable if they are to continue.
In 1917, Britain was heavily indebted to the US, so the US joined their war against the Central Powers to protect its loans, and President Wilson expected, in return, the dissolution of the British mercantile empire that prevented American manufacturers from selling to the British colonies. The British considered the US contribution to WWI negligible, the US Senate did not want to get involved, and Wilson didn’t get his request. But he had planted the seed (for which Beck condemns him, for reasons that escape me).
In ’41, Britain was much more desperate than in ’17, and the US contribution to their salvation was admitted, however reluctantly. And the Great Depression had made it clear to the US that US manufacturing desperately needed the Raj markets opened as an outlet for its manufactured goods during domestic downturns. So, after WWII, the US insisted that Britain give up its empire.
Without the nuclear-armed US’s insistence on the end of the Raj, and without the utter debilitation of Britain by WWII, Britain would still have its Raj.
The Indian resistance was mostly non-violent and mostly ineffective, but I would hardly call WWII, which was ultimately responsible for the end of the Raj, non-violent.
Which raises the question: is there any way any of the poor, powerless Occupy protestors can possibly do anything to redistribute the wealth and power from the rich and powerful? Without violence? With violence?
In ’30, the rich were terrified. They’d seen what Lenin had done, and what Stalin was doing, and they could see that happening in the US. So they agreed to let wealth and power be re-distributed, and incomes became much more equal.
But Communism is dead, and the rich see absolutely no threat with which they cannot deal.
The US elite are prepared to use massive force against anyone perceived as a serious threat, and the US elite have the most massive force that has ever existed at their disposal.
So my own guess is that wealth and power WILL be redistributed: to them what hath, more will be given, taken from them what hath not.
And I don’t see any way–neither violent nor non-violent–to get to peace and justice from where we are now.
There is no such thing as non violent revolutions, only non violent reform.
I’ve recently noticed a trend (which means it has been going on for about a decade, and I’m only now catching up). It goes like this: Person A writes something complaining about a particular attitude or treatment. For instance, how doctors don’t return phone calls, how clerks can’t make change, etc.
And the response from the group consists of a small but measurable segment of the audience mentioning anger management. “You need to get your anger under control.” I could see someone doing that if you were freaking out, whaling on a car with a tire iron, screaming at the top of your lungs, but now, it seems that any emotional reaction of any kind will trigger this “Wow, you really need to get your anger under control” meme. We seem to be self-conditioning toward a mindset in which any sense of outrage is auto-sorted into the “unacceptable” column.
And I’m seeing the end result of this with the whole non-violence issue. Leaving out the nuances of what, exactly, is defined correctly as violence, the people who are most aware that they are being screwed by the system (and if you’re marching, you are, at least minimally, aware of that, compared to the couch potatoes who are telling themselves, “I’ve got mine, nothing can possibly go wrong for me!”) also seem to be unable to comprehend that they have been socially conditioned to continuously tell themselves as well as others to “calm down.”
But the actual issue — whether it’s how doctors don’t return phone calls or how an entire generation is going to be living on the streets while Wall Street continues to suck the marrow out of what’s left of America’s bones — is ignored. Has all this been going on for a while and I’ve simply not noticed? Or is it only recently that people started having this sort of dampened emotional affect? It’s like people are starting to forget to know how to have a complete set of emotional responses.
I listened to that show, and it hurt.
The first segment featured a debate between Boots Riley and Cynthia Boaz. Riley was, for whatever reason, tongue tied for the entire show. He paused, stuttered and struggled to find the words at every turn. This puts a person at a significant disadvantage in a debate, and if Dr Boaz had brought an argument she could have been very persuasive.
She didn’t bring an argument. She declared that violence is ineffective because it is, and that we should adhere to nonviolence because we should. That was the extent of it; no reasoning, no evidence, just the reiteration of an established ideology. The guy who spoke as if he’d gotten up early after smoking pot all night and then got stage fright managed to be more coherent in a handful of sentence fragments than she did in an apparently well rehearsed speech.
The second segment had Steve Seltzer and Ted Rall, but there was no back and forth this time, so it was more like a second and third segment: a long one with Seltzer and a short one with Rall.
Seltzer continued with Boaz’s lack of substantial arguments, but did manage to raise the stakes by sounding very much like he was delivering a sermon. Not an activist sermon, either. He just wanted everyone to calm down, even suggesting we take a year off from protesting. He spoke a lot about the power of love, without getting down to examples or tactics.
He also defined unacceptable violence as including emotional violence. Seriously? We’re supposed to triumph over our enemies without even hurting their feelings? But then, he doesn’t believe in enemies. In the painfully brief back and forth with Rall just before the sign off, he reacted to Rall’s customary definition of revolution as the replacement of one ruling elite with another by saying he doesn’t want any ruling elite, which is a nice sentiment, but wholly without precedent in any group larger than a few hundred.
As far as I can tell, Steve Seltzer is uninterested in the struggles of mere mortals trying to rid themselves of an abusive ruling class and will only concern himself with efforts to transcend primate psychology altogether.
Ted Rall got a sad little undersized segment of the show. He did go last, but didn’t really have time to address what had come before. This is really a shame, since he was the only person who was both coherent and speaking in real world terms.
One final note on the nature of non violent struggle. The essence of non violent protest is passive aggression. The protesters deliberately provoke a disproportionate response so that the authorities can play the villain in full public view. It is easy to see how Boaz and Seltzer would be comfortable with this tactic, because listening to them speak a language smarmy platitudes in the soft, unaffected voice of hypnotherapists, I really wanted to reach through the modem and down the wire to punch them in their smug faces.
Ugh.