Hypocrisy and The No-Political-Violence Catechism
I condemn political violence.
I condemn political VIOLENCE.
I condemn POLITICAL VIOLENCE.
I CONDEMN POLITICAL VIOLENCE.
Guess who doesn’t?
Extreme right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk was assassinated in the middle of giving a speech at a conservative university in Utah. Horrific stuff.
Democratic politicians are declaring publicly and unequivocally that they condemn political violence. I suppose it’s better than declaring the opposite.
Already MAGA is declaring bloodlust, and Trump is foreshadowing an acceleration of dark times.
The only things I think worth saying right now are two points of clarification:
I’ve closely read a lot of the literature that claims nonviolence is more effective than violence and it’s mostly bullshit. But if the means of a good strategy must ultimately resemble its ends, then violence as a tool will tend to favor reactionary politics, not progressive or peaceful politics.
My existence is built around opposition to violence (except on the mats). And because the state is the greatest peddler of political violence in our world, bridling it or seizing control of it is an obsession.
I don’t just hate violence when individuals do it but think it’s fine when states do it. Physical harm to human beings is poison for the soul! Outsourcing violence to the state does not insulate you from the boomerang consequences of it.
I see a tremendous hypocrisy, then, in condemning the political violence of an individual but ignoring or even supporting the political violence of the state—be it military occupations, drone strikes, bombings, terrorism, assassinations, or the structural violence of denying people what they need to live.
I accept that some situations can present you with no alternative to fighting. But it’s often the case that if you find yourself having no choice but the way of the gun, it means you fucked up at some earlier point. And just because self-defense is legitimate doesn’t mean you’ll like what happens after victory, assuming you can even succeed dealing with your enemy in the same manner that you perceive them dealing with you.
Politics is about power. And the greatest unspoken cleavage in modern politics is not left versus right but rather the question of violence. There are those who believe you’re supposed to use power to enforce your preferred social order through violence. Hierarchies between fundamentally equal beings, after all, is unnatural and requires violence to uphold them. But there are those of us who believe that order doesn’t always have to be predicated on violence. We ought to be making a future that does not require perpetual violence as its condition of existence.