I agree that much of what passes for normalcy is violence, built into our culture and endemic at multiple "hidden" levels. Fast food is an example, violence against the Amazon Rainforest and the cultures of the people who live there, ending in violence against the body of the person eating the "food," resulting in health problems creating prey for the diet industry and pharma companies. There is little we do in industrial society that isn't interconnected this way.
The essential problem with resistance in any form is it comes far too late. That is not to say I don't favor resistance, it's in every word I write.
Like the formative years of childhood, early indoctrination into society is key. The household that reads to their children is healthier than the one that plunks them in front of a TV. Our society at large is the second one. Overcoming the brainwashing and ignorance is for the most part an impossible task.
My last article focused on the inevitable and likely soon collapse of the basin states of the near dead Colorado River. The social and economic chaos of that alone is enough to break the US. Anger and disorganized resistance are likely as well as climate migration and deaths from crashed agriculture, supply chains, wet-bulb temperature and more. At that point it's too late for an organized, effective response.
Ultimately what we have here is a species that became too successful in manipulating its environment, 8 billion plus of us that live and die by fossil fuels. The oil men, bankers and oligarchs are all manifestations of the survival instinct made lethal at global scale by technology.
All that said, I do appreciate this knowledgeable article. Even as our odds of survival diminish every day, calling out the insanity gets me out of bed. Good, thoughtful work, Max.
Thank you Geoffrey. I disagree that it's too late for resistance, although it's certainly too late for many things. Even to the last breaths, we will still have moral choices to make.
I don't disagree about choices and fighting with whatever tools and resources we individually and collectively possess. I'm writing a follow-up piece to the Colorado River situation on Texas water, the Rio Grande and New Mexico. I feel a moral choice to at the very least warn, and certainly appreciate your perspective and commitment.
It seems really bad. I'm so worried about the river and all those who depend on it. The Southwest is heading towards a Gulf situation of total dependence on A/C and desalinization for basic survival.
It is bad, and most people don't seem to realize it. The situation is quickly approaching dead pool at both Lake Powell and Lake Mead. My article from a week ago.
I find the idea that if we use their tactics against them that we we will become them laughable.
As an example, a woman who fights of an attacker and saves herself will not become a violent predator because of her actions, she will, perhaps, save other women from the same attacker. Thanks for this article.
It all comes down to motivation. The state uses violence to hold power. If we use violence to try to take power for ourselves, we are living in the parable of George Orwells Animal Farm. Power corrupts. If we use violence as a selfless act to save others, including the perpetrators, who are too ignorant to understand the harm they are causing to self and others, then we are in the parable of the Buddha…
In the global north we're cowed and blinkered. We are frightened by shadows, probably because we have had it so good (relatively speaking) for so long. Like you, I find the violence/non violence discussion is not forefront in the activism of colleagues in the global south. Thiers is a focus on tactics. Always. Whereas in the north 'the movement' twists itself in knots walking between the prescribed lines. Challenging with words, and passive 'protests', and little more.
Absolutely, Margi. The discourse is so profoundly different when people's lives are on the line. As I'm sure you know as a former climate negotiator, the small island nations have called the drive for restricting atmospheric carbon levels to 350ppm "a death sentence." Their death sentence is what many relatively privileged activists in the global north see as a positive goal. Millions of people are fleeing their homes and losing their lives to ecological collapse. That's why I support a broad range of tactics, thoughtfully employed. This is an emergency, and we need to act like it.
Excellent! Thank you. I'm currently doing a doctoral degree in depth psychology (PsyD), and there is a lot of research on how important "green space" is for developing people. If it breeches the subject of activism at all, much of the academic writing is milquetoast at best echoing this "nonviolence" trope baked in your standard liberal thinking. They talk about "climate change" as this looming catastrophe that has no locus point and cannot be confronted, only survived. It's almost as if academia wants to reiterate fear in order to maintain total paralysis. Whenever I read your work amidst this, I am refreshed and feel a great sense of relief. I am actually able to draw on your writing for an upcoming presentation I'm giving, which I really appreciate.
The biggest problem with the non-violent philosophy advocated in the mainstream is that it is performative and designed to make the participants feel good rather than to effect change. If your resistance amount to a march and then you go home, it will not achieve change. When protestors can be counted on to "stay off the grass" you know they can safely be accommodated. Gandhi talked about non-violent resistance, which has a meaningful difference. One actively resists an injustice and forces the perpetrators to escalate and thus be exposed. If a protest does not carry with it an implicit or explicit meaningful consequence then I doubt it will achieve anything.
How do we define "meaningful consequence?" Can "speaking truth to power" and increasing public awareness about our actual predicament be considered a meaningful consequence? If we take these "No Kings" protest marches and rallies as an example, I think that we can find a broad spectrum of consequential results--some "meaningful" or significant and others not so much. I think that the voices speaking out against systemic injustice (towards all species) and for radical systemic and cultural change are much more meaningful than those that just point at the obviously corrupt and psychopathic individuals. But, what can we expect from a protest organized by a basically non-oppositional political party that wants us to believe that a change in personnel through voting is all the "change" we need?
I see the value in symbolic action, but movements can't be limited to that sort of approach. Most protest movements in the US have been pigeonholed into this type of action in lieu of a comprehensive approach involving many different tactics used in concert.
What is needed are tactics that challenge the authority and legitimacy of governments, compelling them to act in accordance with the will of the people. The mass mobilization of the Bolivian people offers an instructive example of how this can be achieved. A book that explores this deeply is The Sovereign Street: Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48587552-the-sovereign-street
Thanks for sharing Christian, I'll have to take a look at that. Bolivia certainly has a far more vibrant tradition of people's movements and functional democracy than the United States does.
You're taking on one of the core strategic issues here. I appreciate you quoting Arundhati Roy, who like Gene Sharp saw it as a matter of strategy. (Sharp had originally been a pacifist and abandoned that to promote nonviolence as a strategy instead, saying that the importance difference is between action and inaction. ) but my point is not there. Incidentally, I believe the other commentator is mistaken about the timing of MLK 's use of guns, and the Deacons for Defense, but that's not my point either.
I'm writing to ask your thoughts on Bayo Akolomafe, whose analysis is deeply radical and whose strategy I'm still trying to understand. I'm currently working my way through a lecture series,, and I see that he has many, many talks on YouTube. He's hard to follow, but I think that's the point.
I'd love to hear your thoughts, and if you haven't read him yet I encourage you to check him out.
Thanks for commenting, Shodo. I'm not too familiar with Akolomafe's work. I believe I've read a few things he has written, but it was a long time ago now. Any suggestions on the most accessible or relatable starting points?
One of the major hurdles is that people will generally not bother to invlove themselves unless personally affected. That inaction is complicity is philosophy 101, which is way above the average citizen’s comprehension. It is the job of reporters, artists etc to expose people to visceral and moving stories that engage on an emotional level.
It is everyone moral duty to push in the right direction. I know the mission must seem impossible, but you are doing great work. Thank you.
In my personal opinion, violence can be justified if the following criteria are met:
1) There is clear evidence of catastrophic damage that is irreversible on human timescales
2) All other methods to prevent such damage have failed
By the way, Are you familiar with the work of Tom Murphy, the retired physicist? He recently moved to the Pacific Northwest and shares a lot of your ideas.
Just a tiny contribution to the reflection your text has elicited from the back of my mind:
Gandhi’s little known abhorrence & disdain for cowardice.
Gandhi’s essential admonition was to act with courage as a non negotiable imperative when faced with injustice. Courage to resist the injustice. In any and all such cases: Courage as a remedy to both injustice and cowardice!
Courage as a mandatory course of action, for which he suggested two separate and different, respectively high vs. low roads of action.
Both however have the same common footing: to escalate the confrontational moment until a resolution of the injustice is brought about! The purpose and aim being: Fairness! Equity! Justice! Parity! Reciprocity! Whatever the adequate qualifier for “nullified or reversed injustice” is.
His normative preference, now historical/legendary, was for the nonviolent path, which he goes on to explain the psychological & tactical advantages of in confrontational dynamics. His preference of the high road, if my memory is correct, is known as Satyagraha. The west knows it as Martin Luther King’s approach.
His understanding of the low road was that of violent responses via resistance, retaliation or retribution.
Here’s the point: His own tactical & strategic preference notwithstanding, his main point was to urge victims of injustice to ACT! Rather than to give in to cowardice. And this is what is often missed in conversations about applied nonviolent strategy:
Either way, when faced with injustice, courage obliges you to act! Which path you chose, low or high, is yours bearing in mind that the consequences of the choice will be yours and yours alone to bear! But under no circumstance should you chose the cowards’ retreat or pliant defeat.
Somewhere, somehow; Gandhi’s courage over cowardice injunction belongs in this conversation. Y’all figure that one out.
What is needed are tactics that challenge the authority and legitimacy of governments, compelling them to act in accordance with the will of the people. The mass mobilizations of the Bolivian people offers an instructive example of how this can be achieved. Read 'The Sovereign Street: Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia' by Carwil Bjork-James to learn about them.
Thanks again, Max, this time for taking us into a very necessary realm of thought and action where few people are willing to tread. Could this be, in part, because of that other common aversion toward the topics of death and self-sacrifice (to the point of severe pain or death)? Many other reasons that this aversion/avoidance exists, I'm sure.
In one of your comments you gave an estimate that the violence/non-violence ethics and strategy debates have been hot topics for the last "~75 years." Well, since I am turning that age this year and have been wrestling with those issues for about 62 of those years, I might have a few things worth sharing here. I became committed to non-violence when I was about 13. When I turned 18 I decided not to comply with registration for the draft. A year and a half later I registered as a conscientious objector and spent about two years doing alternative civilian service with homeless or transient people in "crash pads." My commitment to non-violent resistance was first put to a serious test sometime after I became a father in 1974. My desire to protect my children from harm raised a lot of "what if" scenario questions and thoughts. That led to settling for something I called, "non-violent, protective physical restraint," in which we could attempt to physically restrain a violent attacker without doing the person unnecessary physical harm--just enough physical restraint to stop the attack. But how far toward real, serious violence could such a strategy go? I still don't have an answer for that.
Other thoughts on those topics that have come and gone and come back again since those days, that maybe some of us can discuss sometime, include:
-Is violence unavoidable just because we have to breathe (inhaling and thereby consuming millions of micro-organisms) and because we have to eat? It is, if we remove our anthropocentric blinders and acknowledge the equal right to life of all of our relations (all species, plants included).
-If I can swat a fly or a mosquito with some kind of justification about avoiding harm, why can't I justifiably swat a psychopathic dictator who does billions of degrees greater harm than those little, innocent relatives? I suppose that is much more easy to understand and accept ethically than tactically, as a path to successful resistance. But, why?
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a long-time pacifist who seriously and violently resisted a national force in WW2 Germany that very much resembled what we are up against today in the U.S. Was Bonhoeffer ethically correct and tactically wrong? Would the answer be any different if he and his comrades had succeeded in their attempts to assassinate Hitler?
Sorry if I went on too long here. I guess there is still the possibility for more and further later. Peace.
Thanks very much for sharing these thoughts, George. I grapple with many of the same questions. As you know, I was raised in the peace movement myself, so that's my default position. Yet as you can see from this piece, I've come to question it more and more.
Great presentation of a difficult topic, Max. It makes for some deep contemplations and reflections. What immediately comes up for me is the meaning of the word 'violence', which is "behavior involving physical force to cause harm". Since harm is the desired outcome of the violence, the dueling perspectives involved are often over the degree of harm being inflicted upon humans and the more than human members of the planet.
The default position is reflected in the Precautionary Principle of "do no harm". For me this works well for those of us conscious that simply by our living on the Earth in a Western culture we do harm daily. Sometimes great harm. We can discuss the best ways to reduce and even reverse that harm, but to have a discussion there is an assumption of sympathy and compassion between those in dialogue.
A major issue arises when those in our societies who wield vast amounts of power have no empathy to register the impact of the harm they impose on the world. These people are now in primary seats of power and are being fully exposed as the Epstein Class. The level of their depravity is difficult if not impossible for most of us to fathom. Since these sociopaths are unreasonable by definition, how does one implement acts of nonviolence to stop the genocide of an entire cultures?
Thank you, John. Yes. I agree. That's the problem. I think those in power have vastly improved their techniques for managing / defusing / responding to non-violent social movements since their heyday, now ~75 years ago. That's not at all to say those methods are bunk or useless — absolutely not. But our movements can't be static. We need to evolve.
Thanks very much for sharing, Rachel. This is a brilliant piece. The section under this heading (A “nonviolent” response to nonviolence) is particularly interesting. Appreciate it.
You are very welcome! I'm glad at least one more pair of eyes saw it. I think the title might scare some folks away a bit when they're probably those most in need of reading it.
Yeah. I feel like this sort of discussion should be front and center in social movements, even ones committed to non-violence. But there is such a taboo around this.
I agree that much of what passes for normalcy is violence, built into our culture and endemic at multiple "hidden" levels. Fast food is an example, violence against the Amazon Rainforest and the cultures of the people who live there, ending in violence against the body of the person eating the "food," resulting in health problems creating prey for the diet industry and pharma companies. There is little we do in industrial society that isn't interconnected this way.
The essential problem with resistance in any form is it comes far too late. That is not to say I don't favor resistance, it's in every word I write.
Like the formative years of childhood, early indoctrination into society is key. The household that reads to their children is healthier than the one that plunks them in front of a TV. Our society at large is the second one. Overcoming the brainwashing and ignorance is for the most part an impossible task.
My last article focused on the inevitable and likely soon collapse of the basin states of the near dead Colorado River. The social and economic chaos of that alone is enough to break the US. Anger and disorganized resistance are likely as well as climate migration and deaths from crashed agriculture, supply chains, wet-bulb temperature and more. At that point it's too late for an organized, effective response.
Ultimately what we have here is a species that became too successful in manipulating its environment, 8 billion plus of us that live and die by fossil fuels. The oil men, bankers and oligarchs are all manifestations of the survival instinct made lethal at global scale by technology.
All that said, I do appreciate this knowledgeable article. Even as our odds of survival diminish every day, calling out the insanity gets me out of bed. Good, thoughtful work, Max.
Thank you Geoffrey. I disagree that it's too late for resistance, although it's certainly too late for many things. Even to the last breaths, we will still have moral choices to make.
I don't disagree about choices and fighting with whatever tools and resources we individually and collectively possess. I'm writing a follow-up piece to the Colorado River situation on Texas water, the Rio Grande and New Mexico. I feel a moral choice to at the very least warn, and certainly appreciate your perspective and commitment.
It seems really bad. I'm so worried about the river and all those who depend on it. The Southwest is heading towards a Gulf situation of total dependence on A/C and desalinization for basic survival.
It is bad, and most people don't seem to realize it. The situation is quickly approaching dead pool at both Lake Powell and Lake Mead. My article from a week ago.
https://geoffreydeihl.substack.com/p/leaving-las-vegas
I find the idea that if we use their tactics against them that we we will become them laughable.
As an example, a woman who fights of an attacker and saves herself will not become a violent predator because of her actions, she will, perhaps, save other women from the same attacker. Thanks for this article.
This Buddhist parable, in which the Buddha kills a man to stop a mass murder, is an interesting commentary on this: https://www.twobuddhas.org/post/compassion-beyond-violence-the-bodhisattva-captain-and-the-wisdom-of-self-protection
It all comes down to motivation. The state uses violence to hold power. If we use violence to try to take power for ourselves, we are living in the parable of George Orwells Animal Farm. Power corrupts. If we use violence as a selfless act to save others, including the perpetrators, who are too ignorant to understand the harm they are causing to self and others, then we are in the parable of the Buddha…
Well said.
Buddhists are hardly non violent
Emperor Ashoka killed many in his conquests in the Indian subcontinent after he became Buddhist
The srilankan buddhists are pretty violent
In the global north we're cowed and blinkered. We are frightened by shadows, probably because we have had it so good (relatively speaking) for so long. Like you, I find the violence/non violence discussion is not forefront in the activism of colleagues in the global south. Thiers is a focus on tactics. Always. Whereas in the north 'the movement' twists itself in knots walking between the prescribed lines. Challenging with words, and passive 'protests', and little more.
Absolutely, Margi. The discourse is so profoundly different when people's lives are on the line. As I'm sure you know as a former climate negotiator, the small island nations have called the drive for restricting atmospheric carbon levels to 350ppm "a death sentence." Their death sentence is what many relatively privileged activists in the global north see as a positive goal. Millions of people are fleeing their homes and losing their lives to ecological collapse. That's why I support a broad range of tactics, thoughtfully employed. This is an emergency, and we need to act like it.
Excellent! Thank you. I'm currently doing a doctoral degree in depth psychology (PsyD), and there is a lot of research on how important "green space" is for developing people. If it breeches the subject of activism at all, much of the academic writing is milquetoast at best echoing this "nonviolence" trope baked in your standard liberal thinking. They talk about "climate change" as this looming catastrophe that has no locus point and cannot be confronted, only survived. It's almost as if academia wants to reiterate fear in order to maintain total paralysis. Whenever I read your work amidst this, I am refreshed and feel a great sense of relief. I am actually able to draw on your writing for an upcoming presentation I'm giving, which I really appreciate.
I'm very glad to hear that, Erica. There is a lot of value in saying out loud what so many of us know to be true, but are afraid to say.
The biggest problem with the non-violent philosophy advocated in the mainstream is that it is performative and designed to make the participants feel good rather than to effect change. If your resistance amount to a march and then you go home, it will not achieve change. When protestors can be counted on to "stay off the grass" you know they can safely be accommodated. Gandhi talked about non-violent resistance, which has a meaningful difference. One actively resists an injustice and forces the perpetrators to escalate and thus be exposed. If a protest does not carry with it an implicit or explicit meaningful consequence then I doubt it will achieve anything.
How do we define "meaningful consequence?" Can "speaking truth to power" and increasing public awareness about our actual predicament be considered a meaningful consequence? If we take these "No Kings" protest marches and rallies as an example, I think that we can find a broad spectrum of consequential results--some "meaningful" or significant and others not so much. I think that the voices speaking out against systemic injustice (towards all species) and for radical systemic and cultural change are much more meaningful than those that just point at the obviously corrupt and psychopathic individuals. But, what can we expect from a protest organized by a basically non-oppositional political party that wants us to believe that a change in personnel through voting is all the "change" we need?
I see the value in symbolic action, but movements can't be limited to that sort of approach. Most protest movements in the US have been pigeonholed into this type of action in lieu of a comprehensive approach involving many different tactics used in concert.
What is needed are tactics that challenge the authority and legitimacy of governments, compelling them to act in accordance with the will of the people. The mass mobilization of the Bolivian people offers an instructive example of how this can be achieved. A book that explores this deeply is The Sovereign Street: Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48587552-the-sovereign-street
Thanks for sharing Christian, I'll have to take a look at that. Bolivia certainly has a far more vibrant tradition of people's movements and functional democracy than the United States does.
I was looking forward to reading such a provocative appeal. I stand with you, as I know Herb G. would have! My best to you and Will.
Thank you, Kathy. Provocation was my intention here. This topic isn't easy to discuss, as I said in the piece. It's taboo. But it's essential.
You're taking on one of the core strategic issues here. I appreciate you quoting Arundhati Roy, who like Gene Sharp saw it as a matter of strategy. (Sharp had originally been a pacifist and abandoned that to promote nonviolence as a strategy instead, saying that the importance difference is between action and inaction. ) but my point is not there. Incidentally, I believe the other commentator is mistaken about the timing of MLK 's use of guns, and the Deacons for Defense, but that's not my point either.
I'm writing to ask your thoughts on Bayo Akolomafe, whose analysis is deeply radical and whose strategy I'm still trying to understand. I'm currently working my way through a lecture series,, and I see that he has many, many talks on YouTube. He's hard to follow, but I think that's the point.
I'd love to hear your thoughts, and if you haven't read him yet I encourage you to check him out.
Thanks for commenting, Shodo. I'm not too familiar with Akolomafe's work. I believe I've read a few things he has written, but it was a long time ago now. Any suggestions on the most accessible or relatable starting points?
I’ll forward you a set of 6 classes he just did - have listened to 3 now, and I think they’re accessible individually.
Thank you.
One of the major hurdles is that people will generally not bother to invlove themselves unless personally affected. That inaction is complicity is philosophy 101, which is way above the average citizen’s comprehension. It is the job of reporters, artists etc to expose people to visceral and moving stories that engage on an emotional level.
It is everyone moral duty to push in the right direction. I know the mission must seem impossible, but you are doing great work. Thank you.
PS. I believe your friend is Roger Hallam
Thank you, Jan. That quote isn't from Hallam, but we've spoken and I think he would probably agree.
In my personal opinion, violence can be justified if the following criteria are met:
1) There is clear evidence of catastrophic damage that is irreversible on human timescales
2) All other methods to prevent such damage have failed
By the way, Are you familiar with the work of Tom Murphy, the retired physicist? He recently moved to the Pacific Northwest and shares a lot of your ideas.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/
Thanks for the comment. I've read some of Tom's work over the years, yes. Very interesting stuff.
On Violence - Nonviolence
Courage & Cowardice.
Extremely interesting essay. Very instructive.
Just a tiny contribution to the reflection your text has elicited from the back of my mind:
Gandhi’s little known abhorrence & disdain for cowardice.
Gandhi’s essential admonition was to act with courage as a non negotiable imperative when faced with injustice. Courage to resist the injustice. In any and all such cases: Courage as a remedy to both injustice and cowardice!
Courage as a mandatory course of action, for which he suggested two separate and different, respectively high vs. low roads of action.
Both however have the same common footing: to escalate the confrontational moment until a resolution of the injustice is brought about! The purpose and aim being: Fairness! Equity! Justice! Parity! Reciprocity! Whatever the adequate qualifier for “nullified or reversed injustice” is.
His normative preference, now historical/legendary, was for the nonviolent path, which he goes on to explain the psychological & tactical advantages of in confrontational dynamics. His preference of the high road, if my memory is correct, is known as Satyagraha. The west knows it as Martin Luther King’s approach.
His understanding of the low road was that of violent responses via resistance, retaliation or retribution.
Here’s the point: His own tactical & strategic preference notwithstanding, his main point was to urge victims of injustice to ACT! Rather than to give in to cowardice. And this is what is often missed in conversations about applied nonviolent strategy:
Either way, when faced with injustice, courage obliges you to act! Which path you chose, low or high, is yours bearing in mind that the consequences of the choice will be yours and yours alone to bear! But under no circumstance should you chose the cowards’ retreat or pliant defeat.
Somewhere, somehow; Gandhi’s courage over cowardice injunction belongs in this conversation. Y’all figure that one out.
Thanks for sharing this, MP. It's important.
What is needed are tactics that challenge the authority and legitimacy of governments, compelling them to act in accordance with the will of the people. The mass mobilizations of the Bolivian people offers an instructive example of how this can be achieved. Read 'The Sovereign Street: Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia' by Carwil Bjork-James to learn about them.
I'll have to check that one out. Thank you, Christian.
Thanks again, Max, this time for taking us into a very necessary realm of thought and action where few people are willing to tread. Could this be, in part, because of that other common aversion toward the topics of death and self-sacrifice (to the point of severe pain or death)? Many other reasons that this aversion/avoidance exists, I'm sure.
In one of your comments you gave an estimate that the violence/non-violence ethics and strategy debates have been hot topics for the last "~75 years." Well, since I am turning that age this year and have been wrestling with those issues for about 62 of those years, I might have a few things worth sharing here. I became committed to non-violence when I was about 13. When I turned 18 I decided not to comply with registration for the draft. A year and a half later I registered as a conscientious objector and spent about two years doing alternative civilian service with homeless or transient people in "crash pads." My commitment to non-violent resistance was first put to a serious test sometime after I became a father in 1974. My desire to protect my children from harm raised a lot of "what if" scenario questions and thoughts. That led to settling for something I called, "non-violent, protective physical restraint," in which we could attempt to physically restrain a violent attacker without doing the person unnecessary physical harm--just enough physical restraint to stop the attack. But how far toward real, serious violence could such a strategy go? I still don't have an answer for that.
Other thoughts on those topics that have come and gone and come back again since those days, that maybe some of us can discuss sometime, include:
-Is violence unavoidable just because we have to breathe (inhaling and thereby consuming millions of micro-organisms) and because we have to eat? It is, if we remove our anthropocentric blinders and acknowledge the equal right to life of all of our relations (all species, plants included).
-If I can swat a fly or a mosquito with some kind of justification about avoiding harm, why can't I justifiably swat a psychopathic dictator who does billions of degrees greater harm than those little, innocent relatives? I suppose that is much more easy to understand and accept ethically than tactically, as a path to successful resistance. But, why?
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a long-time pacifist who seriously and violently resisted a national force in WW2 Germany that very much resembled what we are up against today in the U.S. Was Bonhoeffer ethically correct and tactically wrong? Would the answer be any different if he and his comrades had succeeded in their attempts to assassinate Hitler?
Sorry if I went on too long here. I guess there is still the possibility for more and further later. Peace.
Thanks very much for sharing these thoughts, George. I grapple with many of the same questions. As you know, I was raised in the peace movement myself, so that's my default position. Yet as you can see from this piece, I've come to question it more and more.
Great presentation of a difficult topic, Max. It makes for some deep contemplations and reflections. What immediately comes up for me is the meaning of the word 'violence', which is "behavior involving physical force to cause harm". Since harm is the desired outcome of the violence, the dueling perspectives involved are often over the degree of harm being inflicted upon humans and the more than human members of the planet.
The default position is reflected in the Precautionary Principle of "do no harm". For me this works well for those of us conscious that simply by our living on the Earth in a Western culture we do harm daily. Sometimes great harm. We can discuss the best ways to reduce and even reverse that harm, but to have a discussion there is an assumption of sympathy and compassion between those in dialogue.
A major issue arises when those in our societies who wield vast amounts of power have no empathy to register the impact of the harm they impose on the world. These people are now in primary seats of power and are being fully exposed as the Epstein Class. The level of their depravity is difficult if not impossible for most of us to fathom. Since these sociopaths are unreasonable by definition, how does one implement acts of nonviolence to stop the genocide of an entire cultures?
Thank you, John. Yes. I agree. That's the problem. I think those in power have vastly improved their techniques for managing / defusing / responding to non-violent social movements since their heyday, now ~75 years ago. That's not at all to say those methods are bunk or useless — absolutely not. But our movements can't be static. We need to evolve.
globally, millions of deaths are attributed to air pollution, yet there's been no pandemic lockdown about that...hmm...
Yes. Death on a far greater scale than COVID wrought.
This came out in January but it really pairs well with what you've just written.
https://www.grassrootsthinking.com/nonviolence-is-violence-too-somebodys-gotta-die/
Thanks very much for sharing, Rachel. This is a brilliant piece. The section under this heading (A “nonviolent” response to nonviolence) is particularly interesting. Appreciate it.
You are very welcome! I'm glad at least one more pair of eyes saw it. I think the title might scare some folks away a bit when they're probably those most in need of reading it.
Yeah. I feel like this sort of discussion should be front and center in social movements, even ones committed to non-violence. But there is such a taboo around this.