Lorenzo Raymond has graciously given me permission to post the following essay. I hope it will inspire thoughtful commentary here. —Ted
“Be true to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant and broken the monotony of a decorous age. It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, ‘Always do what you are afraid to do.’”
– Emerson, “Heroism”
Watching the heart wrenching scenes of resistance, repression, and mass rebellion in both Turkey and Brazil this month is a bittersweet, and in some ways shameful, experience. For an American, it can only bring to mind the Occupy moment of two years ago – the moment that was torn away from us, and that we failed to muster any similar courage to defend.
In Turkey, a comfortable and industrialized country like our own, the protesters’ winning efforts have ranged from sit-ins, to street fighting, to blissfully daring tactics like commandeering mechanical diggers to overpower police vehicles.1 This is the epitome of a diversity of tactics that goes beyond dogmatic nonviolence.
Diversity of tactics was a founding principle of Occupy Wall Street, which was one of the things that set the movement apart from the established political party/NGO left. 2 To be sure, the principle was controversial around the camp, but that was because many occupiers were confused about the history of the anti-authoritarian wave that was sweeping the globe in 2011. A host of pundits had told them that the overthrow of the Tunisian and Egyptian dictatorships were accomplished without substantial civilian violence: “…Hosni Mubarak took such great pains to use armed thugs to try to provoke the Egyptian demonstrators into using violence…” wrote Erica Chenoweth in a typical New York Times op-ed. “Mr. Mubarak failed.” (Adbuster’s originally promoted OWS as America’s “Tahrir moment”)
Mubarak’s real failure, of course, was underestimating how ferocious the masses could be. On January 25, the first day of the revolution, the Guardian reported “thousands [in] running battles with armed police…” Street fighting was kicked off by gangs of soccer fans, known as “Ultras” (similar groups play a crucial role in the Turkish rebellion today). 3 It soon spread throughout much of the population: “There were a great number of women that were on the front line hurling stones at the police and pro-Mubarak thugs,” Egyptian feminist Sama El Tarzi told Al Jazeera. 4
Little by little, more and more occupiers became aware of this history of resistance, and they also noticed that it was the most militant encampments that were advancing the movement. Occupy Oakland embraced diversity of tactics the most ardently, and simultaneously it re-introduced the weapon of the general strike (familiar in other countries, but anathema to the timid American left) for the first time in decades.
As the concept gained ground across the country, due both to education and activists’ own experiences with the limits of nonviolence (some encampments like Occupy Albany were cozy with the police, but the cops still ended up pepper-spraying them out of their park like all the rest), pacifying left media figures vilified the militants and re-instituted a culture of doctrinaire nonviolence – although one now haunted by a bad conscience. Some of these left celebrities were well-intentioned people whose passion for change had been perverted by cowardice and privilege; others were authoritarian socialists – or in the case of Derrick Jensen, authoritarian environmentalists – who would rather see working people run circles in helplessness than break free without the leadership of a bureaucratic vanguard.
The most notorious of these neo-pacifists, of course, is Chris Hedges, with his “Cancer in Occupy” libels. David Graeber, in his new book The Democracy Project, makes short work of Hedges so I won’t even bother with him. 5 Instead I’d like to examine a few arguments from established left figures who retain greater vestiges of credibility, and whose influence is therefore more insidious.
The tendency I’m dubbing “neo-pacifist” here is marked by token statements that force is appropriate…at some place and time far, far from the here and now (similar to a liberal’s attitude towards socialism, really). One of the more lengthy neo-pacifist arguments last year came from Michael Albert, co-founder of Znet and Z Magazine. “Sometimes self defense is essential,” Albert wrote, “Sometimes even aggression is desirable. But for the most part, and certainly in the large, violence is the turf of the status quo, not of change, and certainly not of a new world.” Albert then claimed some unspecified critical mass of people would have to be achieved before a movement deviated from strict Gandhism – ignoring the fact that Occupy had already drawn hundreds of thousands into the streets (as we will see below, the civil rights movement was no larger when it made use of violence). Needless to say, tactics endlessly deferred are tactics endlessly denied; and the strange migration of self-defense from “essential” to “certainly not of a new world” in Albert’s statement reveals his position as self-negating sophistry.
A larger problem with neo-pacifist arguments is that they distort history in ways that are genuinely Orwellian. For instance, Albert presented the World Trade Organization shutdown of 1999 as an example of nonviolent victory undermined (almost!) by rabble militancy: “The anti-corporate globalization uprising that took place in Seattle, Washington, in the U.S. – which is just one among a great many similar cases – had, before any trashing occurred, already hamstrung the WTO.” 6
But the reality is the black bloc-ers got up just as early as the blockaders did on the day the WTO was crippled. At 8:45am, “About 20 protesters dressed in black throw eight metal newspaper boxes into 5th Avenue, but are chased away by other protesters,” – so reads the University of Washington’s WTO History Project Timeline for November 30, 1999 7 (The Seattle City Council’s timeline puts “Crowd breaking Niketown windows” even earlier, at 8:04am). By late morning, protesters had not only shattered windows at Bank of America and a dozen other commercial locations, they had thrown “cans, bottles, and barricades at the police.” Then and only then did the WTO cancel its opening ceremony at noon, and the Secret Service sequester Secretary of State Albright in her hotel.
The left media largely relies on David Solnit of the Direct Action Network for their understanding of Seattle. Solnit too is fond of denigrating the smashy kids, 8 but in unguarded moments he’s admitted that DAN had no confidence that nonviolence alone – even nonviolence involving thousands of people – would shut down the meeting:
“I think we were all surprised when we completely disrupted them and shut them down to the point where they couldn’t even have their opening ceremonies, and when that happened all day, most of us thought that we would disrupt them in the morning and the police would start regaining control in the late morning…” [“David Solnit interviewed by Jeremy Simer, March 23, 2000” WTO History Project, University of Washington] 9
The reason why the police couldn’t regain control until the morning of the next day – and the reason a state of emergency was declared which made the WTO protests a prime-time story – was precisely because of the chaotic rebellion that Solnit and Albert are so eager to demonize.
A secondary complaint of both men is that the rioting distracted from the real issues. There are at least two peer-reviewed studies – Deluca and Peeples 2002, 10 and Owens and Palmer 2003 11 – that say the complete opposite. The former concluded that, “In Seattle…symbolic violence and uncivil disobedience in concert produced compelling images that functioned as the dramatic leads for substantive discussions of the issues provoking the protests…On NBC, for example, dramatic images of violence yielded to a female protester declaring, ‘We’re just normal people who are tired of the exploitation of the multi-national corporations throughout the world.’” And Albert’s contention that the spectacular coverage “replaced substance about globalization with an endless litany of noise” is really bizarre; Z Magazine expended thousands of words at the time documenting the lack of substantial mainstream commentary about globalization until the riot.
While Seattle benefitted from a de facto diversity of tactics, Occupy in its earliest days benefitted from having them de jure. The founding guidelines of the Direct Action Working Group of Occupy Wall Street stated “We respect a diversity of tactics, but consider how our actions may affect the entire group.” As Nathan Schneider noted in The Nation, this flexibility led directly to spontaneous confrontations that brought OWS global attention. “The two incidents of police excess that catapulted the movement into the mainstream—the pepper-spraying of young women and the mass arrest on the Brooklyn Bridge—both happened after protesters moved from the sidewalk to the road during marches, improvising…The NYPD, caught unprepared, overreacted in front of cameras, and public sympathy flooded to the protesters”
There was a lot of improvising – and a fair amount of aggression – in those heady September days before Big Labor and the left celebs started piggybacking in the wake of the headlines. In the minutes leading up to the great pepper-spray massacre, I recall seeing 19-year old Brandon Watts scuffling with the cops. Brandon was later famously bloodied by the police the week of the Zuccotti Park eviction. He was charged with assault – throwing batteries at them to be exact. 12 Watts was generally agreed to be a loose cannon by occupiers, but then again, he’s also generally agreed to be the first kid to “face the cops down” and assert his right to put up a tent. “After that, tents started popping up everywhere,” one occupier told the New York Daily News. “That kid was a fighter.” 13 Some considered him crazy, some considered him a hero, but either way, we needed people like that. If there were a few more fighters, the movement might be, well, moving – instead it’s in traction. Projects like Occupy Sandy are admirable, but they look an awful lot like America before the rupture of 2011. Eight years ago, the Common Ground Collective of New Orleans fostered an impressive amount mutual aid as well – but it wasn’t the beginning of an insurrection, just the beginning of a non-profit corporation (albeit one better than average). And let’s not mince words: insurrection is what this rotten country desperately, desperately needs.
If one studies the history of American social movements with open eyes, it becomes clear that it’s always been this way. In 1962, the civil rights movement was at a low-ebb; Martin Luther King’s star in particular was fading, 14 so the Southern Christian Leadership Conference decided to go into Birmingham in 1963 looking for confrontation as well as nonviolent witness. King’s chief of staff, Wyatt Tee Walker developed a strategy that relied on the rowdiness of black “onlookers” to their demonstrations – that is, angry people who hadn’t been trained in, nor agreed to, nonviolence. 15 Even as the iconic pictures of crowds bombarded with fire hoses were being taken, Life magazine photographer Charles Moore was injured by a brick thrown by a protester, intended for a fireman.16 “A duel of rocks and fire hoses escalated” through the second week of May until Birmingham’s elite agreed to negotiations with King. 17 The Ku Klux Klan then bombed the movement’s local headquarters, and in retaliation 2,500 blacks rioted and burned a nine-block area of the city. 18 White House tapes show this to be the direct impetus for Kennedy’s belated backing of civil rights legislation. 19 “President Kennedy feared that black Southerners might become ‘uncontrollable’ if reforms were not negotiated,” writes award-winning historian Timothy Tyson. “It was one of the enduring ironies of the civil rights movement that the threat of violence was so critical to the success of nonviolence.” 20
“Predominantly nonviolent” is a phrase that appears over and over again in the movement case studies put forward by pacifist theorist Gene Sharp (including his whitewashed history of the Black Freedom Movement). 21 It’s clear on inspection, however, that “predominantly nonviolent” is just another way of saying “partly violent” – a part that’s usually indispensable. From Birmingham, to Seattle, to Turkey, to Brazil, any autonomous movement that hopes to seize and hold public space – and seize and hold the public imagination – must manifest a diversity of tactics.
Sources: 1. Jacob Resneck, “Demonstrations rock Istanbul” Occupy.com, June 3, 2013 – http://www.occupy.com/article/demonstrations-rock-istanbul
2. Nathan Schneider, The Nation, April 20, 2012 — http://www.thenation.com/article/166820/paint-other-cheek#ixzz2VUrdG1ex 3. Sherif Tarek, Ahram Online, April 13, 2011 – http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/9591/Egypt/Politics-/Egypts-ultras-go-from-football-to-politics.aspx
4. Fatma Naib, “Women of the Revolution” Al Jazeera, Feb 19, 2011 – http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/02/2011217134411934738.html
5. David Graeber, “Ask me anything chat” Reddit.com, Jan 28, 2013 http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/17fi6l/i_am_david_graeber_an_anthropologist_activist/
6. Michael Albert, “Violence Begets Defeat or Too Much Pacifism?” Znet, Feb 10, 2012 — http://www.zcommunications.org/violence-begets-defeat-or-too-much-pacifism-by-michael-albert
7. “Day 2- November 30, 1999” WTO History Project, University of Washington – http://depts.washington.edu/wtohist/day2.htm
8. David Solnit, “Seattle WTO Shutdown to Occupy” The Indypendent, December 5, 2011 –http://www.indypendent.org/2011/12/05/seattle-wto-shutdown-%E2%80%9999-occupy-organizing-win-12-years-later
9. “David Solnit interviewed by Jeremy Simer, March 23, 2000” WTO History Project, University of Washington – http://depts.washington.edu/wtohist/interviews/Solnit.pdf 10. Kevin Michael Deluca and Jennifer Peeples, “From Public Sphere to Public Screen” Critical Studies in Media Communication Volume 19, Number 2, June 2002, pp. 125-151 -http://comphacker.org/comp/engl335fosen/files/2012/08/pubspheretopubscreen-seattle-csmc.pdf
11. Lynn Owens and L. Kendall Palmer, “Making the News: Anarchists Counter-Public Relations on the World Wide Web” Critical Studies in Media Communication Vol. 20, No. 4, December 2003 pp. 335 – 361 — http://www.csun.edu/~vcspc00g/454/anarchy%26webpr-csmc.pdf
12. Jillian Dunham, “A Protester’s Uneasy Presence at Occupy Wall Street” New York Times, City Room blog, December 2, 2011 — http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/a-protesters-uneasy-presence-at-occupy-wall-street/?_r=0
13. Joe Kemp, et al, “Protester Brandon Watts, who was first to pitch a tent at Zuccotti Park, is now the bloody face of ‘Day of Action’” New York Daily News, November 18, 2011 — http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/protester-brandon-watts-pitch-tent-zuccotti-park-bloody-face-day-action-article-1.979573
14. “The Limits of Nonviolence”, Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Era 1954-1985 website –http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize/story/06_albany.html
16. David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (Harper Collins, 2004), p239 — http://books.google.com/books?id=HecWJnClV3wC&q=239#v=snippet&q=large%20knife&f=false
17. Foster Hailey, “Dogs and Hoses Repulse Negroes at Birmingham” New York Times, May 4, 1963 http://partners.nytimes.com/library/national/race/050463race-ra.html 18. Branch, Parting the Waters, p760 — http://books.google.com/books?id=U8ExdUHjzkMC&printsec=frontcover&dq=parting+the+waters&hl=en&sa=X&ei=bMDDUeb1CoWw4AO13YD4Cg&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=snippet&q=rocks&f=false
19. Glenn T. Eskew, But for Birmingham: The Local and National Struggles in the Civil Rights Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 1997), p301 –http://books.google.com/books?id=FFfSnM5sLSwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=but+for+birmingham&hl=en&sa=X&ei=xsbDUbCGB6vb4APp9YCICA&ved=0CDgQuwUwAA#v=onepage&q=2500&f=false
20. Jonathan Rosenberg, ed., Kennedy, Johnson and the Quest for Justice: The Civil Rights Tapes (W. W. Norton & Company, 2003), p97-99 —http://books.google.com/books?id=ZbK8U_w9lN0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=Kennedy,+Johnson+and+the+Quest+for+Justice:+The+Civil+Rights+Tapes&hl=en&sa=X&ei=wcfDUaPQFM7j4AP3loHACw&ved=0CDcQuwUwAA#v=onepage&q=black%20muslims&f=false
21. Timothy B. Tyson, “Civil Rights Movement” in The Oxford Companion to African-American Literature, eds. William L. Andrews, et al (Oxford University Press, 1996), p149 — http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/randall/birmingham.htm 22. Glenn T. Eskew, “Filling the Jail in Birmingham” Nonviolent Sanctions Vol. 5, nos. 2 & 3, Fall 1993/Winter 1994 . Note that in this account of the Birmingham campaign, published in Gene Sharp’s newsletter, all mention of rioting is suppressed, even though it’s written by a historian who had considered the rioting significant in his other scholarship on the campaign. (compare with note 19) http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsb41d.html
42 Comments.
Okay, so go for it. Who is holding you back exactly? Are you waiting for Chris Hedges’ blessing?
It’s a call for collective action.
It’s also a call for an end to fetishizing nonviolence as the only acceptable tactic of resistance to the violence of the state.
The problem with the United States is that most if not all problems are believed to be solved by this phrase “get a job”. Yes, get a shitty minimum wage job flipping burgers, and problem solved. The problem with that is even those jobs are scarce.
But I put the failure of Occupy at the feet of the labor unions. They were virtually nonexistent. They should have mobilized the massses of unemployed people, blocked the entrance of Wall Street, and demanded well-paying jobs for them in the form of government WPA.
So, that was a lot of nothing. Long and pointless.
Let me RE-explain once again: When you have feet of clay, none of your tactics matter. For “Occupy” or any other movement, if you have no basis for your movement it makes no difference what your tactics are.
And get rid of “Stark Raving Mad” — she’s doing the site zero favors. Yet ANOTHER inane comment. The labor unions? WTF? Is there ANYTHING that gets people like “Stark Raving Mad” to at themselves? Apparently not.
Meant to write … Is there ANYTHING that gets people like “Stark Raving Mad” to LOOK at themselves?
But for the threat of violence, the Civil Rights Act would have never been passed, period.
John Dingell was on the Colbert Report a few weeks ago (6/3/13). He is a Rep. from Michigan and won’t leave office until he fucking dies, the archetypical old white males in power (he’s the longest-serving Congressman in U.S. history). He signed onto the Civil Rights Act, he said, because, with it, “we stopped the nation from being torn apart.”
Without the CRA, U.S. cities would have burned.
MLK made the movement presentable. Malcolm X made it effective.
Nonviolence does serve an important purpose. It convinces those beneath the aristocracy of your nobility. There are plenty of white people who just didn’t know what was going on when it came to minorities in the U.S. They turned on their television and saw dogs biting innocent women and firehoses being turned on marchers and churches being bombed and were suddenly enlightened. That’s useful.
But the aristocracy didn’t give a shit, and it was threat of violence, not a thirst for justice, that made advancement possible. Even then, Democrats governed badly, but, unlike their counterparts, at least bothered to govern.
Compare the narrative around the CRA to the Lincoln Memorial. If you go to D.C. and read that, you find something unique in U.S. history: moral culpability. Lincoln flat-out tells you that this country committed sins, heinous and wretched sins, and was driven to an orgy of murder as the price for those sins. THAT is a narrative of justice. There’s a bad guy in that story, and it’s you, motherfucker. It’s you. So do your time and never again do the crime.
Is that what one gets out of the CRA narrative? MLK was awesome: okay, true that. But Malcolm X has to be dragged into the conversation because a certain class of white people are made nervous about him. WTF? Assholes are still backing the confederacy — traitors — and Malcolm X is a touchy subject? What’s causing all of this?
Simple: the Civil Rights Movement doesn’t have bad guys. The Civil War has a bad guy: Racist White People. Fuck them. Fuck them with sharp objects. They suck. Everyone agrees with this, unless, they too, suck. It’s important to note, though, that these people were only really bad because they had tremendous amounts of state power. So it can be simplified to “the aristocracy was bad.”
But with the CRM, the CRA gets passed and everyone holds hands and it’s all okay. Why? Because that bad guy, like in the civil war, was the aristocracy, and that class doesn’t want to be called out.
Once you remove the bad guy, nonviolence suddenly becomes the only option available. So you want to punch someone? Great! Who do you punch? Certainly not the police — they’re just doing their jobs. Certainly not the F.B.I. — they’re trying to protect you.
(But if you beat up that hippie over there, they were probably asking for it. Protester movements are not created equal.)
In order to talk about violence, you first need a target. If everyone is well-intentioned, there is no target because there’s no fucking moral culpability. That’s why it’s so important to shout down the Dem-apologists who intone Daddy Reagan’s “mistakes are made” — they aren’t stupid, they’re evil. Stupidity deserves mockery, scorn, and loss of status. Evil deserves a punch in the face, followed up by curb-stomps until The Message Is Sent.
Even better, once people start talking about violence, they start talking about strategy. Sure, you’re hot-blooded and ready to rumble, but you don’t want to die, right? You don’t want your friends to die, yes? So you play smart. You get big — you evangelize. You tell the fucking drum circle to stay the fuck home because you need to increase your movement’s raw population. You start thinking about logistics. You aren’t afraid to sit inside banks and LITERALLY Occupy Wall Street — why would you be, you were ready to take down jackbooted thugs with your fists and a key-chain a second ago, so what’s a sit-in to you? You’re fucking hardcore: the petty stuff is a blessing. If you can end this mess without getting trampled by police horses, that’s a titanic win.
You grasp reality.
You aren’t trying to change the minds of millions of white people this time. They mostly agree with you and just don’t know it yet. You’re trying to force the aristocracy that they’re shitting where they eat and it doesn’t work anymore. Your movement is directed upward so nonviolence doesn’t make much sense. Note that your actual acts of violence may be less important than your capacity to do violence — see again the runup to the CRA.
Also, you get sneaky. Note that the cops, if just, really should be on your side. You no longer assume that they’re doing their jobs. You aggressively evangelize law enforcement. There are righteous people there being encouraged to do terrible stuff. You appeal to their consciences. You create schism. It’s a damn sight better than being tear gassed or trampled or beaten or sodomized in jail, right?
One could go on and on with tactical options, but again, the point is that the appreciation of your enemy — the aristocracy — and the appreciation of violence go hand-in-hand. The obsession with nonviolence is many things: a self-indulgent conceit of the baby boomers for some, a completely understandable (and in some cases totally morally defensible*) error for others, and a powerful propaganda tool for state apparatchiks. But it is most importantly a muzzle on strategic thinking that wipes physical reprisal from the table and all of its attendant strategic complexities. Bizarrely enough, though it is an intellectual creation made to protect the conscience, it, in our current circumstances, dulls both conscience and intellect.
*Particularly under some readings of Christianity and Buddhism — in those cases, nonviolence isn’t error, so one would have to tackle the virtue of those interpretations of scriptures. Secularists: you have no excuse. Break heads.
(Also note: OWS was co-opted, but before it was co-opted, it was a creature of strife as people argued about what the movement was. OWS’ concern with the self-actualization of its members (everybody gets a say (a.k.a., biggest clique wins), Civil Rights vets get shouted down, etc.) meant that the movement couldn’t represent the American people at large. This doesn’t mean that U.S. citz are uniformly spineless, it means many of them, not politically astute, took one look at OWS and said “they’re not me,” and they were right. It’s not spineless to avoid acting until your gang gets big — that’s how primates fucking fight, with numbers and overwhelming force. But in the U.S., every man is an island, and if you join a group that is not mainstream, well, welcome to a terrorist watch list motherfucker. What group would a politically imbecilic but morally virtuous person join? What group should that person create? And how would a politically ignorant person, in the latter case, go about creating it? Remember, Freedom of Assembly is fucking garbage, now.)
I love how everybody goes back to the 60’s as if the country hasn’t changed enough in the past 40+ years to render them entirely irrelevant.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: when you advocate for “revolution”, especially VIOLENT “revolution”: You. are. playing. DIRECTLY. in. to. the. hands. of. the far. right. in. this. country. See, they figured that even with the aid of their (knowing and unknowing) allies on the left, they’d never be able to dumb down the populace to the point where they could just end democracy and change America to a fascist theocracy without protests.
But if they could dupe people on the left into trying violence, or “revolution”? Well then, they could put into place structures that would allow them to instantly identify and squelch such a “revolution” before it even remotely threatened their goals; and under the pretense of “keping us safe from homegrown terrorists”, implement the transition to the fascist theocracy (that has ALWAYS been their endgame) with minimal blowback from the populace.
It would be a win-win for them, because as more and more people abandonded actual effective methods of combating the right wing (thus pushing both political parties right) for this “revolution” silliness, it would be easier and easier for them to engineer a total system collapse, which would serve the same purpose as the “revolution” they were trying to engineer- cover for their endgame.
See, the far right actually LEARNED from their mistakes- something today’s left seems sadly incapable of. They have been playing the long game for 40+ years, and thanks to the left, are scarily close to getting everything they’ve ever wanted.
It’s not too late yet. The right can still be laughed so far out of power that they’ll never be able to try anything like that last 40+ years ever again.
But that would require the left to have the patience, frustration tolerance, and unselfishness to play the same type of long game that is currently being played on them. And I am no longer sure that the left in this country can do that, or even wants to.
There’s a segment of the left that is welcoming, hell, cheering for the upcoming collapse. Which, frankly, is unconscionable given that collapse can still be staved off. But a lot of the left is laboring under this (right-wing impanted and cultivated) delusion that collapse or “revolution” will somehow make things better when nothing could be firther from the truth.
And when the right wins, and its 1000x times worse then the cheerleaders for the collapse on the left ever thought possible, well, then- to paraphrase Rorshach from Watchmen:
“and they will look up and shout- “We didn’t know!”. And I’ll look down and whisper “Of course you did. You were warned.””:
Whimsical,
“I love how everybody goes back to the 60′s as if the country hasn’t changed enough in the past 40+ years to render them entirely irrelevant.”
You know what? I think you hit that one exactly on the head. I’m calling it. The ’60s are dead. Time of death, 11:57 a.m., Jan. 20, 1981, or 11:15 p.m., Dec. 8, 1980, if you gravitate toward the metaphysical.
After reading Ghandi: A Political and Spiritual Life by Kathryn Tidrick, I better understand the concept of Ghandhian non-violence.
Ghandi did not encourage passive-avoidance but active-resistance; for one to engage in nonviolence it is not enough to be predisposed to timidity so that passive non-violence becomes only a moral colorization of timidity; one must become nonviolent by active resistance to one’s violent tendency inspired by a desire for a violent response to a moral outrage. One must develop the capacity for violence while resisting the use of that capacity.
There is no virtue in refraining from violence if you are of a timid nature, just as there is no virtue in going on a hunger strike when one does not have food to eat.
Virtuous non-violence in a Ghandian sense means developing the necessary strength to actually use violence along with the self-discipline to refrain from violence except, perhaps, as a defensive response to violence. Nonviolence is only virtuous when one is fully capable of being violent in opposition to a moral outrage, but use self-restraint to remain non-violent.
Ghandi shamed those who were too weak and timid to fight when the necessity for fighting arose.
Ghandi’s idea of personal resistance was to sleep naked with young women without yielding to the temptation to have sex with them; no virtue was possible without self-restraining discipline.
When Ghandhi thought his followers were well-disciplined enough to virtuously, non-violently, confront the British occupiers, he sent them out to confront them. When they failed to maintain non-violence while under attack, he sought penance for his error by fasting. The preparation by Ghandi to fight was the firecracker; the British lit its fuse by their attacks on non-violent confrontations.
Ghandi said, retrospectively, what was practiced during the fight with the British under the name of non-violence was not really non-violence: “God had purposely sealed my eyes, as he wanted to accomplish His great purpose through me. That purpose being accomplished, He restored to me my sight.”
Ghandi’s own violence was revealed to him when he looked back at his time spent in denial of his own violence.
As Robert Trivers observes: the best way to deceive others is to first deceive oneself. Ghandi’s ‘non-violent’ violence ended British rule in India.
Fuck the 60’s and fuck everyone who thinks the 60’s, as some sort of metaphysical bullshit concept, matters.
Was there a tremendous change in the human genome in the last 300 years? No? Then a comparison between human political behavior 300 years ago and now is valid.
Was there a tremendous change in the human genome in the last 200 years? No? Then a comparison between human political behavior 200 years ago and now is valid.
Was there a tremendous change in the human genome in the last 50 years? No? Then a comparison between human political behavior 50 years ago and now is valid.
This soft-headed notion of touchy-feely generational motif bullshit belongs solely in the babble of children and the spontaneous ejaculations of the high-functioning mentally disabled.
The idea that historical comparisons cannot be made Because Of Reasons is a self-indulgent conceit. If you cannot compare the present to one period of history, you cannot compare the present to any period of history, a notion so stupid the English language collapses in on itself just attempting to verbalize the former. In the particular case of the U.S., lots of baby boomers are obsessed with this notion to the point of diversion. We shall not indulge twits, correct?
Let’s hope we’ve gotten that out of the way now.
This is a tremendously inane statement. Rightwingers — there is no “far right” or moderate, there’s only “politically immoral and selfish” and not “politically immoral and selfish,” so just rightwingers — rightwingers will employ violence in any and all capacities in any and all times. Pretending that there’s a trigger is laughably dumb. The entire POINT of an authoritarian regime is that state violence is a go-to tool for any and all controversies. If they weren’t willing and eager to escalate state violence, they wouldn’t be rightwingers.
In addition, violent revolution is redundant.
All revolutions are violent.
All. Why?
What’s the penalty for treason? Up to and including death.
If we had a revolution and put people on trial for treason, would we execute former congressmen? Sure. Supreme Court Justices? No problem. Presidents? So obviously “yes” that it’s actually banal to even ask.
Last time I checked, executing someone was some violent shit.
As Rall likes to say, revolution requires a change in class status. If one of the weaker classes becomes the stronger, the law will be more stringently applied to the losing class. That means bodies drop. Period.
This is why any revolution, “peaceful” or otherwise, is completely anathema to an aristocracy. No aristocracy can survive it, socially or even physically.
But if they could dupe people on the left into trying violence, or “revolution”? Well then, they could put into place structures that would allow them to instantly identify and squelch such a “revolution” before it even remotely threatened their goals; and under the pretense of “keping us safe from homegrown terrorists”, implement the transition to the fascist theocracy (that has ALWAYS been their endgame) with minimal blowback from the populace.
And that’s why violent labor uprising in the U.S. led to a fascist takeover (and not weekends, worker’s comp and benefits) and blacks, instead of gaining civil rights legislation, found that the civil rights movement ushered in an authoritarian theocracy that was a thousand times worse than Jim Crow.
Whenever someone tells you to ignore history, they are diving naked into quarry full of bullshit and inviting you to join them.
****
A conversation with an Indian friend of mine once concluded as follows: “Ghandi didn’t get the British out of India, Hitler did. Hitler’s face should be on all the money.”
If ALL of the movement is non-violent, their position will be dismissed as extremist.
If MOST of the movement is non-violent, but a small part of it is stridently violent, the violent ones will be dismissed as extremists but the rest of the movement will get more attention to their concerns, in the hope that some concessions will quell the violence or at least keep more people from becoming violent.
If the ENTIRE movement is violent we will have civil war, and likely lose.
Sekhmet et al,
I had this thought on the way home today. Try it out. Let me know if it fits.
We all know what violent and nonviolent mean. Violence is a boot in the face, a trash can through a window. Nonviolence is refusing to disperse and then lining up to get into the paddy wagon, or going limp as the police carry you off.
But we’re leaving out the third class. I’ll call it Passive-Aggressive Resistance. It operates on the premise of using the system against itself. Here’s an example that everyone comprehends, in theory.
Right now, almost all cases are plea-bargained out. Ask a judge or a lawyer. “What would happen if EVERY defendant demanded a jury trial?” They’ll all laugh. “The whole system will break down. There is no possible way to give every defendant a jury trial. There aren’t enough lawyers, there aren’t enough judges. Even going around the clock, it could not be done. Cases would take years to come to court. Appeals would overturn most convictions because the witnesses would be talking about things five years old.”
Another example: At airport security, everyone tries to move quickly. We rush because we realize the people behind us are in a hurry, too. What if everyone simply started taking a really … really … …. …. …. long time? Grab your change out of the tupperware and drop it everywhere. Oh, dang. Let me find that. Where are my keys? I can’t find my glasses! Hang on, my shoes aren’t right. I’ve put them on the wrong feet. I’m going as fast as I can. What if everyone keeps forgetting to remove a metal item before going through the checkpoint? On the flights themselves, what if everyone simply took a really long time to get settled? What if older pinkos start having “heart problems” in flight? “Nonstop” could become extinct because someone’s always having “heart problems” that turn out to be indigestion.
Why is there so little of this third approach?
Okay, so with the exception of the quasi-left Obama apologist we are all in favor of violence as the way forward then (at least as part of the plan if not the whole one).
But what now? If you get a group together, roughly one in every six is a CIA plant. Any conversation you have is recorded (including this whole comment thread here and probably everyone on it already heavily watched.) So even if we have agreed on the necessity of violence, what exactly is the next step that can successfully put it into practice? Acting alone we would each be infective and laughable and only serve as deterring examples of mock-able failure to other individuals who might otherwise seek necessary violent means, but any group any of us could collect is also screwed because it will start from the beginning as infiltrated, watched, and generally owned.
Before action can move forward a solution to this conundrum must be resolved, and until it is resolved there is no point in action. So what is the solution?
I mean I guess we can go with Alex’s break the system with numbers proposal. Sure that is true, you get enough people being openly violent, and there just aren’t enough jails or police to deal with the problem. But that still leaves the question, how would one get that many people together all getting violent in concert in some productively destructive fashion?
Other solutions, or theories? Incidentally I am not trying to discourage such a plan by being cynical, I am simply legitimately curious because I am baffled when it comes to putting this theory into practice in any remotely effective manner. So … thoughts?
In my understanding of Ghandi, one must develop the capacity for violence while resisting the use of that capacity. This is a version of a common concept going back to the Roman Empire, and embraced by every military organization since: those who would have peace must prepare for war. The problem with this concept is that every predator enlists it in the support of his military ambitions.
If we are not wise in the predator’s uses of rhetoric we will be repeatedly brought into a state of murderous moral outrage serving only the predator’s purposes. I’m in favor of humor that discredits the privileged, overreaching authority, without the characterization of violence as intrinsically good or bad; its value being contingent on the situation, not metaphysically predestined.
Violence against the slave was once legal; later violence against his owner became legal. Crime is a very fluid category. A slave was a criminal for fleeing his owner because he was stealing his master’s property: that being himself. Later the slave owner became a criminal. The category of crime has been inverted many times and it will continue to be inverted in the future, and lawful violence will be redirected repeatedly.
Someone,
“Before action can move forward a solution to this conundrum must be resolved, and until it is resolved there is no point in action. So what is the solution?”
I’m going to go a little Kwai Chang Caine here. The solution is to resist by not resisting.
The current political system is, very much, run by the current economic system. The current economic system is, very much, run by the current political system. Neither can be removed. But both can be weakened.
I do not vote for candidates who do not support the things I support or oppose the things I oppose. I didn’t vote for Obama in the most recent election because I could not square his behaviors with the sorts of things I believe in, and I do not accept assurances that the government is doing things aboveboard and fairly but can’t let anyone see those aboveboard and fair things. “I was only following orders” and “lesser of two evils” are really lousy arguments, and I don’t use them to excuse my voting choices.
So now I “waste” my vote on the Green Party. I mention this to friends whenever we discuss politics. Some of them are as disenchanted as I am with Bush’s third term. So now the Green Party gets a few more votes than it used to. Maybe next election, it will get a few more.
Economically, I avoid participating in the buy, buy, buy mentality. I avoid all the Internet trends I can. I have ad blocker attachments for my web browser. I make it a point to never buy something just because I’ve seen an ad for it online. I do not click on ads. I have no credit card debt. I pay cash whenever I can. I do not have a bank account with any of the major banks.
I simply avoid, whenever I can, giving “them” more profit. I may not cut their profit enough to be a liability, but I’m not trying to wipe out Citibank. I just think it shouldn’t be pulling in billions in profit. Let it be happy with millions in profits instead. And the same for all the other corporations. I don’t hate corporations. I hate the greed they manifest.
I think it’s particularly idiotic for one who continually “goes back to” 1968 to explain all that has followed can then proclaim: “I love how everybody goes back to the 60′s as if the country hasn’t changed enough in the past 40+ years to render them entirely irrelevant.”
“Violence never solved anything.”
“Who told you that?”
“The armed gentleman who was telling me to move along.”
@Ex
There is nobody here who goes by the name “Stark Raving Mad”. I went to the WordPress Dashboard, and couldn’t find him listed anywhere. But if Mr. Mad ever contacts me, I’ll pass along our concerns to him. Thanks
@Whimsical
” There’s a segment of the left that is welcoming, hell,cheering for the upcoming collapse. There’s a segment of the left that is welcoming, hell,cheering for the upcoming collapse. Which, frankly, is unconscionable given that collapse can still be staved off.”
Yes, I agree with you that collapse can be staved off, and that no, we shouldn’t cheer the idea of collapse. But collapse WILL happen if we don’t take measures to prevent that, like a massive jobs program and a dollar bill based on something other than military might.
I don’t agree with you on the “right-wing” scenario, though. What will happen is that we will be speaking Mandarin Chinese, and our lives will be dictated by Beijing, because they will be the head Superpower after the US goes under. Because, you see, they are preparing to survive Collapse, and we are not.
Well, they may be precipitating Collapse. . .
***
alex,
The first point of resistance will be taxes. Eventually, some revolutionary group — and it won’t be a tea party-type — will decide that the fed doesn’t deserve their money. That’s not interesting. What’s interesting is that they will convince millions of other people of the same thing. (Which is why the tea party need not apply; we’re describing something that can apply to all citizens not wallowing in political selfishness.) That’s the maximum level of what you’re describing.
Nonviolence spoken of today is a different critter than nonviolence of previous years; today it is used as a lie. Faux-liberals urging nonviolence aren’t even that much in favor of civil disobedience; what they want is social order, even when that social order is illegal or evil. Remember, these people existed in the Sixties, too — MLK wrote his Birmingham Jail letter to them. Then, they didn’t claim nonviolence, they claimed that blacks — specifically blacks — should do absolutely fucking nothing. Seriously. Black people. Should. Just. Stop.
. . . And hope that the nice white people fix everything. That was their actual position.
That’s their position now; the difference is is that they co-opted the term “non-violence” in order to do it. While true nonviolence is a problematic concept, what mainstream commentators advocate is actually a sophisticated version of inaction, millions of times more passive then even actual, honest-to-goodness nonviolence. Thus, there really isn’t a nonviolence-versus-violence debate in the mainstream; it’s a do-nothing or do-something discussion, where “something” is corralled into near-oblivion.
FBI, but yeah.
The first thing you need is a target. People act in accordance with their tribe. A person’s tribe is informed by their personal narrative. Narratives involving social change need a bad guy.
As I’ve mentioned, we live in a world free of bad guys in authority. The beltway is always good. The aristocracy is always good. Poor people are bad. Foreign people are bad.
The first thing that’s needed to create a tribe is the elimination of the notion that our aristocracy wants to help. If we, as a country, judge people based on their actions, then are made aware of their actions, both parties would lose their bases.
Why is this all so important?
If you try to rally anyone to an anti-establishment clause now, there’s a narrative in their head that says that Obama (or Bush, or Clinton, or some motherfucker) really does mean well — he just makes mistakes. You can’t rally people against mistakes; you rally them against evil. No evil, no rally.
So faux-liberal trolls are actually a huge, titanic concern. They eliminate morality from the discussion. You’re talking about rape and murder, they’re talking about “actionable intelligence” and “national security.” If an authoritarian confuses the issue, the common man concludes that both sides have a point and the status quo reigns. Once you can say “that motherfucker caused this motherfucking problem,” you have a bad guy. Then you can say “we are all together against this problem.” Then you have a tribe. Then you can fight. Violently and nonviolently both.
Without this, both violence AND nonviolence are off the table.
Without this, you get — well, de Tocqueville said it best:
Keep in mind — this dude was writing 200 years before television.
I keep wondering if part of the reason that we aren’t seeing cities burning yet is because the illusion of plentiful abundance is being maintained. Right off of Union Square in New York is a “homeless” person who has his cardboard sign asking for help. He also has a cell phone. I’ve seen him reading the screen of it at various times as I walk by.
I’ve lost track of the number of people on the subway who have smartphones but look like they make $9 an hour. Remember all those poor bastards who bought property in the Poconos and couldn’t afford it? It happened all over the country when even less-savvy investors started flipping houses until one-bedroom, one-bath shanties were pricing for $350,000.
All around us, we keep seeing shell games that allow us to kid ourselves that we can still come out ahead. “If I have a job,” goes the thinking, “I should be okay.” But the reality is that a lot of people with jobs have no retirement savings. And not because they were spendthrifts. Their kids needed shoes. Their parents needed hip replacements. And all the while, wages stagnated.
Reminds me of Reaganomics: lower taxes, increase spending, and balance the budget! All at once! What? Sure, if you use math it’s impossible, but, ooooh, look, something shiny!
Jesus you all have an apocalyptic world view! Whimsical is right that violence will feed into the Republican Party’s world view, but I think he’s totally wrong about why. The reason it feeds into the Republican vision is that the Republican party has essentially adopted an anti government world view. The Democratic Party is pro government. There is no left and right. Class war, left-right politics, that shit was dying in like 1930 and was buried with the de-industrialization of the 1970s. By 1989 it was gone. Forget left and right. Today the only relevant political question is: “Is government helpful or harmful.” Republicans say harmful. Democrats say helpful. If you try to overthrow the US government you ally yourselves with the “USA is harmful” crowd. So you are helping the Republicans. Want to see the American government do more to help unfortunately citizens? You first have to support the American and tell people that our government, this government, CAN help people. You have to convince them that governments can be effective. Most of all, you have to convince them that their tax dollars are not being “stolen” from them. Talk of revolution does not do this.
You guys talk as if nobody has a good job and the breadlines are forming around the corners. It just isn’t true. It isn’t close to being true. tens of millions of Americans have perfectly fine jobs, nice houses, cars, families, happy children. These are people that understand the system. They know how to work within this system, and they will not think twice to use the system to protect what they have. You don’t need a majority to do that, and I think the majority of adults are actually part of the system. A revolution, particularly one based on 19th century industrial revolutionary thinking, doesn’t stand a chance in hell.
Susan Stark (aka Stark Raving Mad to readers here) continues to cause damage to Ted Rall and his site. In addition to lost donations (mine), there’s the credibility hit as well. Apparently a Snowden Truther image is ok by Ted, for tedrall.com.
Lost money.
Lost credibility.
It DOES matter who gets Guest Post privileges.
I disagree with Susan Stark. I think Edward Snowden is a magnificent human being. Not for one second do I suspect that he is anything other than what he seems to be.
That said, Susan is a long-standing, valuable contributor to my blog and has stimulated a lot of interesting discussion. I don’t care if people agree with her or disagree with her, including me. What I care about is that she stimulate discussion by being intelligent and provocative. You will no doubt reply that speculation about Snowden’s loyalties are stupid, but I think it’s reasonable to ask.
@Andy
It’s hard to convince people that “governent is good” when it keeps Guantanamo open, drones US citizens, and wages Wars of Choice across the globe that they can’t pay for. And all under a Democrat, no less.
To what Andy said:
From: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
“Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders.”
–Friedrich Nietzsche
Which is why no one, but you, brought one up.
If you’re going to argue with yourself, you could save yourself a few calories and refrain from posting your internal struggle.
The U.S. already suffers from Great Depression rates of hunger and joblessness; just because you’re fine doesn’t mean everyone else is. And pretending that there wasn’t violent calls to action many times over the last eighty years simply adds historical ignorance to an ethically dubious position.
@Susan, I agree all those things need to stop, but the government does so much more than fight unnecessary wars and spy on us. Our government builds fantastic roads, maintain a reasonable good if unfairly expensive education system, help keep endangered animals alive, funds medical research, and even finds manages to find time inspire people by sending robots to explore mars for no reason other than it’s “cool”, and this is just a thin sliver of the good things the government does.
My point isn’t that everything is perfect. Far from it. All I’m saying is that if we convince people that government actually is good and effective at doing what we tell it to do, than we will have a MUCH easier time getting universal healthcare, free college, and we might even be able to convince people to raise the amount of money in food stamps.
When we fall into the Republican script promoting the view that our government is intrinsically evil, it plays right into their hands. It’s only a small logical leap for people to conclude that all governments are by definition evil and there’s no point in even attempting to form a new government because whatever the government is, it will be evil. All this government is evil talk does is breed apathy. We need to tell the story that the American government is the greatest government in the world and if it wants to help its citizens it can, and can do so effectively without wasting tax dollars. Than we just need to convince people that it’s a good idea to help our neighbors. I think that will be pretty easy because most people are generous.
@Glenn, man, I tried reading Nietsche once. Bored the crap out of me. I prefer the philosophy of someone more modern– Capt. Jean-Luc Picard.
@Sekhmet, I disagree. I think the idea of violent revolution that many here are proposing is fundamentally a 19th century concept. Yes, these revolutions continue today but only in under developed countries that are today where we were back than. The economy isn’t great in the developed world, but the wealth is distributed wide enough and the labor is spread thin enough to prevent future revolutions here. For the foreseeable future, change will be at the ballot box in the developed world. That said, I think we are only beginning to see the impact of the free information age. Things may change if the elite manage to outsource the medical and legal professions.
To what Andy wrote:
Your choice of a fictitious philosopher reveals the workings of a mind that will only find substance in a fictitious world view.
The real world is too boring for most of your–sadly, all too common–type to actually engage in it as it really exists.
Anyway, off to never-never land with you.
Damn straight, Glenn. I rolled my eyes at the Star Trek reference. Fictional characters are used for inspiration when one is ignorant of real thinkers.
It’s far past the time to continue the attempt to convince the people that government works for us. This one doesn’t and in fact, it was not designed to. BOTH parties use it for its true purpose of working for the super elite. Over the past few decades the government has done even less for us. Now its eating away at our rights too. Dem pols don’t really think government is good. Andy, your worldview is too simplistic. We don’t have any power anymore. No pol is actually going to make government accountable and helpful now.
Andy,
You give no reasons why violent revolution is antiquated. People today are so cowardly and pampered. It must be comforting to believe there is never a time when we must risk all and actually FIGHT. They will give us nothing without threat. As Mr. Snowden said, THEY WANT IT ALL. Government IS a necessary evil. It was a liberal who said that. His name was Thomas Paine. Government limits freedom, makes mistakes, and is easily abused no matter how good the people or how intelligent of a system or how many great services it may provide! Republicans aren’t nuts for thinking government is evil. They’re nuts because they think the government is too liberal!
@Andy
I understand what you are saying, but I can’t rightly say that the government is good when these violations are happening. I can defend certain programs like food stamps and social security, but not government as a whole.
Ted,
Two quick questions.
1. Did you change your most recent comment? Because I could have SWORN on a Reagan-height pile of bibles that you had posted a comment extremely negative about Snowden (and it really surprised me, too, so I would really appreciate the checkback on whether I’m losing my marbles finally).
2. In all the critique of bad editorial cartoons, I’m wondering: Have you ever tried to do a really bad cartoon? Seriously. I think it would be GREAT for you to do just one, really bad, total stinkeroo of a cartoon. My suspicion is that once you pass a certain point in a craft, you become incapable of doing it really badly. (You don’t even have to publish it. Perhaps if you’re trapped in an elevator, you could do it to pass the time …)
Sekhmet,
Your previous comment about MLK brings something to mind.
One of King’s lesser-known comments runs something like this: “In the end, you forget the shouting of your enemies long before you forget the silence of your friends.”
What a terrifying thought: to be judged one day not by what we did, but what we did not do.
@Ted
Well, my last post on Snowden was provocative, but it lead people to believe that I wanted Snowden to submit to torture. I did not say such a thing, but in this sad day-and-age, it’s quite reasonable to think something like would happen to Snowden if extradited. Under that circumstance, yeah, ya gotta run.
“In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
Yup; a brilliant quote.
I should also like to point out that andy, below, claims that violent revolution is basically impossible because of some completely unexplained bullshit in his own head involving what century it is — but the last century had violent revolutions. Not just a few posts ago I warned about people who simultaneously cite history and then, in the same, witless breath, claim that history cannot be cited. You may ask, “what the fuck characterizes a 19th-century revolution?” — in the same way you may ask “what the fuck characterizes TEH SIXTIES?” — but you’ll get no answer, only handwavery and pseudo-academic ejaculations that would be more at home in a David Brooks piece than in any coherent example of the English language.
And Glenn is right: though Patrick Stewart is certainly an accomplished gentleman, I submit that he may encourage us to seek philosophical instruction, not from his most well-know alter ego, but from actual fucking people —
— Like Thomas Motherfucking Paine, easily the greatest (if not the most practical) statesman this country has ever produced. Jack’s point is extremely important because of another strawman andy used: that the posters here are arguing “against government.” Now that’s some bullshit of a particularly rancid odor because “against government” is actually a typically rightwing position, specifically of a libertarian flavor. I like government. It can be spiffy. That said I find this government to be despicable and want it transformed into a better one. . . which is what the Framers of the Constitution intended to happen. Hell, Jefferson expected this to occur regularly via bloodshed.
Could an American poster be so dense as to forget that this country was founded via a rebellion (which was marketed as — and by many intended to be — a revolution) and that its founding was, like with many liberal countries, intended to create a state of continuous revolution (hence the regular selection of officials via the vote and the right of the states to keep militias).
Or was he having so much fun with his strawman that he couldn’t see past his own reflection? I’m thinking the latter.
P.S. — One of the bizarre consequence of authoritarian overreach is that all resistance against it is justified. This is why autocrats of yesteryear always hesitated before, for example, rigging a trial or committing an overt crime. If I believe the system works, I will submit to the system even if you’re perverting it. But if the system manifestly and obviously does not follow anything resembling the rule of law, why should I bother? Torture was a HUGE fuckup for the Bushbama administrations. It was self-indulgent — like rape (which is a form of torture) is. It gains nothing politically (besides letting your political allies get their rocks off); it’s impressive to those already on your side. It’s a victory lap.
If you steal, say, $7 trillion dollars from the taxpayers, they may not notice. But torture is personally vile and anyone in custody is under personal threat. By defending it, Obama has put fear in the hearts of Americans — a rather dramatic act of terrorism. If he had attacked it, sure, he would have lost some allies, but he would have restored faith in The System(tm), which is more valuable. Instead, now every dissident is automatically sympathetic.
OK. Sorry. I feel like my comments strayed into troll territory earlier. After rereading Ted’s article you guys are right, the author is thinks violence has a place in a protest movement. He isn’t actually arguing for a violent revolution. On different Rall threads violent revolution is promoted but not this one.
I concede that the threat of violence might be useful in a protest, but I really don’t think the the nonviolent philosophy doomed OWS. OWS was doomed because they didn’t have any recognizable spokespeople. There were no leaders. You need leaders if you want to lead people to change.
I do stand by my statements about the relevant of dead philosophers. Tomas Paine. Seriously? I was born 1980. Tomas Paine lived almost 200 years before me. Find someone from my generation to quote to me. Sorry but TV, rock, and movie stars are the philosophers of my generation. That and perhaps Steve Jobs but I don’t particularly like the cult surrounding him.
IMO the relevant movement to look at is the gay rights movement. They accomplished a huge amount in the last 10 years without any violence. They did it by smart lobbying, education, and by using TV and movies to make their case, and it worked.
Other than France, are there any violent protests in developed countries that actually changed the political system? Even in France, the last time was way back in the late 1960s.
Andy,
I was born in 1988. How does being dead make someone’s thoughts irrelevant? You do realize Thomas Paine helped found our nation, right? He was betrayed by George Washington and died broken and impoverished. He deserved and deserves better than a casual dismissal of his ideas because he happens to be dead. He is relevant because we are talking about the Republic he helped create!
You’re making my generation look bad. How can you cite history and then imply it doesn’t matter by dismissing historical people? You do realize that NO ONE here was alive when Thomas Paine was? You need some serious academic study. Some entertainers have clever things to say in clever ways but are no substitute for real thinkers. So speak for yourself if they are your philosophers. They aren’t mine. Every age had entertainers and smart people still listened to scholars and thinkers.
There has been no meaningful changes in decades. Violence is needed in much of Europe as well as here. ‘Violent’ revolution is an oxymoron. ALL revolution is violent.
Yeah, OWS needed leaders. It also needed backbone and specific objectives and purpose AND better tactics, aggressive if not outright violent.
Gay marriage is a conservative cause. Marriage is a traditional societal unit. It is backward. Why are gays trying to be like straights? Why should anyone be excited that they not also get to suffer in marriage just like the rest of us? Oh, and they get to be openly gay while killing brown people. YAY. You said, “It worked.” They still can’t get married in what, 38 states? This whole cause is a big distraction from the REAL civil rights we are all losing every year to federal government overreach. This has been allowed only because it has nothing to do with ANYTHING. Wars, foreclosures, regulation, employment…if gay rights threatened the elites, it wouldn’t have come even this far.
Sekhmet,
Thanks. And yes, violent revolution is the start and continuing part of the American experiment. Thomas Jefferson said, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Ultimately, the only thing that stops tyrants are we and our guns.
@Jack: “How does being dead make someone’s thoughts irrelevant?” Irrelevant is too strong a word. The Founding Fathers words are obviously useful if you’re trying to understand the development of the USA. I think the Federalist Papers should be required reading for all high school students. But I think dead philosophers are not very useful for understanding how to solve today’s problems. Those dead guys lived in a completely different world with a complete different set of problems. In 1776 there were about 2.5 million people living in the US. Most of them were farmers. Corporations hadn’t been invented yet. It was a totally different world. Their philosophers were solving totally different problems.
I was being a little facetious with my pop star comment but honestly the Founding Fathers were politicians. They the deepest thinkers of their day. There has been a lot of advancement in political philosophy since the founding fathers. IMO the most modern and relevant stuff to todays problems is coming out of the field of cognitive linguistics. Professors in that field are pulling together philosophy, neuroscience, and linguistics to try to understand how people think. Their work has enormous implications for politics, but it doesn’t lend itself to pithy political slogans like “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
I think part of my attitude toward old dead guys is due to my education. In engineering school you NEVER waste time reading the actual words of Newton or Einstein or Navier or Stokes. We study textbooks written in the last 3 or 4 years. They credit Newton where credit was due a lot of what he said is outdated and some of it is just plain wrong.
As for marriage being conservative– we will simply have to disagree. I see marriage as the ultimate in commitment to and from the larger community. For me, this is the essence of liberalism.
Anyway, I think we basically agree on why OWS went nowhere. However, I think you discount the ability of nonviolent action to push public policy. (I would include sit in and trespassing in the category of non violent action). But I don’t think you will get anywhere threatening people with bloody action, and if history is your guide, I think history is on my side.
Good news, everyone! I’ve learned to close my tags!
____
andy:
Rock stars are not philosophers. Saying that they are philosophers is. . . stupid. There’s no other word for it. Jean-Luc Picard doesn’t exist; his words are written by mostly second-rate science fiction writers (though top-rate dramatic writers, which is why Trek’s space opera setting is technologically and socially nonsensical but presents compelling and wonderful episodes) whose background likely includes an English degree. It is not hyperbole to say that looking to entertainment figures for philosophy is no better than looking to plumbers and pharmacists for philosophy. And since there is no movement in any of these random professions to produce philosophy, the notion that one relies on them for philosophy is incoherent and nonsensical. You communicate nothing by saying it because no one can know what message you’re getting from rock performers since what message you’re getting is purely the result of your own personal interpretation, which means, quite literally, your philosophy is stuff I’ve made up and pinned on songsmiths I like.
That is bullshit.
If I say I read mainstream philosophers, that doesn’t tell us much, but it tells us something. There is a greater-than-zero amount of data in the room. If I say I study philosophy under musicians, this will cause everyone to guess different musicians you can mean and they will come to different conclusions as to what was meant, which creates ambiguity — meaning that there is actually negative fucking data in the room. We were better off before we played stupid guessing games.
Complete bullshit. Really. You want a completely different world? Venus. It rains ammonia. That’s different. The framers were in a world with slavery, racism, political corruption, and vapid political propaganda. That applies to today 100%, and it applied to the world a thousand years before them 100%. You have no basis to say that historical comparisons cannot be made. Period. Your generalization isn’t based on a single fact whatsoever. So long as any human being can point to any similarity between then and now, your claim is bullshit.
And that’s good, because if your claim were not bullshit, no person could make any claim involving the past at all. You can’t compare something now to something in the Seventies — they didn’t have cell phones. This is deliberate soft-headedness in order to dismiss arguments that one cannot answer, and because ALL claims eventually make reference to past events, it is completely and utterly incoherent. How can you compare anything now to the year 2000? We had a different president and 9/11 hadn’t happened yet? This shit never ends.
This is so myopic that you actually sound like a troll-parody of engineers. No profession reads the original texts of any scientist for practical purposes. Do you think biologists have the damn time to read the Origin of Species in class? Can you possibly comprehend how overspecialized every branch of science has become due to the sheer amount of data involved? You do understand that your belief that engineering is somehow, mystically “more practical” than other scientific disciplines, being founded on myth and not fact, thereby makes your pursuit less practical than those disciplines?
. . . except for that one tag. Dammit, Firefox, I hadn’t hit submit yet. Why did you have to freeze and misread the click just then?
The version of the post below I would have submitted is totally correct, just so you know.