Who Benefits From Political Violence?
Part of a course I teach on strategic studies covers “strategy from below.” The subject of strategic studies has a very strong bias toward states and nations. Accordingly, most of the literature focuses on the strategies of military force that states pursue.
I find this a bizarrely narrow scope, so I have students also spend some time on the strategic thought of peace movements, liberation struggles, anarchists, guerrillas, and rebels. One of the things I struggle with in the course—and in life—is how it seems that while violence in self-defense is justified or even necessary, violence as a tool of strategy works best for reactionary or exclusionary political aims.
I’ve given voice to this on my podcasts many times, but I’ve been immersed in violence most of my life and I’m a violence skeptic. If de-humanization, racial hierarchy, or power-hoarding on some level is part of your aim, then violent means complement your violent ends. But if your politics are fundamentally humanist, egalitarian, or peaceful, it’s verges on a contradiction to employ violent means. I find something very strategic in the pacifist’s insight that the means of policy must resemble its ends.
And this is not just a philosophical hunch but an empirical observation. I’ve had a hard time finding case studies where projects of human liberation realized their aims through terrorism or war. Ethnonationalist projects, sure. But egalitarian movements? Not so much.
Even in apparently successful cases like Cuba and Algeria where national independence was achieved, the regime of violence their revolutionaries used to throw off the imperial yoke poisoned the political soul of those who subsequently took power. Frantz Fanon is most frequently invoked as the scholar who justifies political violence against oppressors and reads anti-colonial murder as a “cleansing force,” but the same text that uses those words spends far more time lamenting the soul-destroying trauma that both French and Algerian violence did to those who wielded it. The French did not leave Algerians much choice, but that’s not much of a vindication; Algerian society has been plagued by recurring conflict and tyranny-as-governance for most of its post-independence lifespan.
Enter the Tupamaros, an Uruguayan revolutionary group that developed their own innovations around urban guerrilla warfare in the 1960s and 1970s. They took center stage in our convo on The Bang-Bang Podcast when we recently watched State of Siege, a 1972 Costa-Gavras film that is deservedly in the Criterion Collection. I had never heard of State of Siege, and had only vaguely heard of the Tupamaros because they took their name from Tupac Amaru II, the namesake of the rapper Tupac Shakur.
The movie was incredible, inspired by the real history of the Tupamaros kidnapping a USAID worker who was building up the terror-policing capacity of a fascist regime. As we discuss in the teaser below (with guests Alex Aviña and Stuart Schrader!), the Tupamaros were eventually defeated in a narrow sense by a fascist regime willing to resort to any means necessary:
But the Tupamaros succeeded in not only reshaping Uruguay’s political imagination; the Tupamaros themselves birthed two democratic presidents who had once been part of their movement. Millions voted for these former revolutionaries who adapted their strategies for liberation based on what the terrain of struggle required; in one era, it was urban warfare, in another it was policy and electoralism.
The Tupamaros’ historical legacy, the dialectic of progress that they catalyzed through their violence, tells a positive story that complicates my general view that peaceful ends require peaceful means.
There’s more I could say about State of Siege and political violence, but we cover a lot of it in this episode!
Have you seen Costa-Gavras' 'Z'? It's his masterpiece. Doesn't quite fit the Bang-Bang profile but well worth your time.
"War and revolution are so complex and take so many forms that those who want to promote them rarely achieve what they set out to do, and those who want to prevent them are rarely able to do so effectively or without self-destruction. The social trauma they cause stems from the abrupt violence they involve, which can be destructive to lives and institutions, and often to both. The difference between war and revolution is most visible in their antidotes. The antidote to war in the contemporary era is peace, while the antidote to revolution is counter-revolution. The antidotes reveal the character of the social forces involved in both war and revolution. Those who want peace are the social classes that suffer most from war. Those who die in wars are soldiers and innocent citizens, not the politicians who decide them or the generals who command them. Both the soldiers who choose war or are forced to fight it and the innocent citizens most vulnerable to the risk of death belong to the historically less privileged social classes, members of the working classes, such as peasants and factory workers. On the contrary, those who want war are the social classes that run the least risk from the destruction it can cause and stand to gain the most from what follows destruction. Those who promote counterrevolution are the powerful minority social classes that benefit most from the status quo that revolution seeks to destroy. On the contrary, those who promote revolution are the exploited, oppressed, and discriminated social groups and classes who, despite being in the majority, find no other means than revolution to end the injustice of which they are victims.
Both war and revolution are extreme forms of class struggle, constituting an open struggle between life and death. But while war involves the death of the majority to defend the life of the minority, revolution involves the death of the minority to defend the life of the majority. The social and political forces that promote war are the same ones that promote counterrevolution. On the contrary, the social and political forces that promote revolution also promote peace, even if this may imply war against minorities” https://savageminds.substack.com/p/war-revolution-and-the-future-of?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=65949&post_id=170304978&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=22fwk&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email