Still more violence ...

A couple more observations on violent protest, on top of this post and this post.

By not condemning violence if it is employed in the interest of causes that I support, don't I leave myself open for the chaos that will result if other people, whose causes I reject, also resort to violence?

To a degree. But context is everything. If somebody runs at you and tackles you, your reaction will be quite different if the person was trying to push you out of the way of an oncoming car than if that person was just trying to assault you. In the same way, violence used to advance good causes is different from violence used for bad causes.

Ah! But who decides??? That would be the same people who make these judgment calls among different ideas and causes today. Just as we can differentiate between somebody assaulting us from somebody trying to save us, we differentiate between anger and violence over increasing poverty, obscene levels of corruption, and policies of imperialism and racism, and violence employed to keep people down, suppress democracy, and service imperialism and racism.

Obviously, nut-bars on the right believe that their causes are right and just. So what? I condemn their ideas today, I condemn their violence today (in the case of unjustified evictions, racist policing policies or the wholesale slaughter of their wars) and I will condemn their stupidity and violence when they decide to attack decent people in their incoherent rage tomorrow.

The point is to get beyond this scare-word "violence" and realize that "violence" always depends upon context. As I said in my first post in this series, we employ violence when we make a meal in the kitchen. You can employ violence to push somebody out of harm's way. You can smash windows as a fire-fighter, an anti-poverty activist, or as a racist bully. It's all in the intent. We need to get beyond this irrational visceral response to the word and the deed and see what the violence is being used for.

"But that's messy and dangerous!"

Agreed. It is messy and dangerous. There will be disputes, and some people will take things too far. You might be surprised to read this, but I believe that employing certain types of violence (for whatever reason) does distort one's soul. But that's life. Growing older deforms and weakens our bodies but we have no choice. Building a better world might necessitate difficult decisions, but there you have it.

Imagine a world where a corrupt, sadistic ruling elite lords it over 98% of humanity and besides keeping people in grinding, humiliating poverty, they often, for sport, grab individuals at random and publicly torture them. Imagine that the 98% humanity that is subjected to this abuse has been brainwashed to believe that they must never raise a hand against this ruling elite and as a result, members of this elite can walk among their victims alone and unafraid. Imagine further, that this abused population rises up in anger and revulsion at anyone who snaps and vandalizes symbols of the ruling elite (statues, buildings, posters). After shaming these individuals (who remain, mind you, just as incapable of attacking their masters physically as everyone else) and abandoning them to their fate, they go about their business. But some of them recognize the injustices of their society (indeed, it is from these few that the violent malcontents often emerge, which only serves to "discredit" the pro-justice activists in the eyes of the rest of the population) and they often write letters explaining why things are unjust and what needs to be done to correct them. Or, in the case of the particularly egregious torture of an individual, they're sometimes able to collect many signatures on a petition protesting this torture and present it to their masters.

This provides some of the best sport to the masters however. Being amoral psychopaths, they are entirely indifferent to complaints about the suffering they cause. Actually, they enjoy hearing how upset people get in the face of their torture and misery. They take sport in making threatening hints to people foolish enough to sign these petitions (which is why the majority of people have sense to stay away from these dangerous things) and they cackle amongst themselves reading these bleating protests.

I would submit to you that we're not all that far from such a state of affairs right now. Our leaders are amoral psychopaths who are beyond shame and beyond the control of the law. Yet, in a lengthy debate on the subject of violent protest (in fact, it was in Vancouver, protesting the rise in homelessness at the beginning of this Olympics madness) one person was so bent out of shape at the idea of violence that he or she equated my refusal to condemn the breaking of a lamp and the scattering of some paper with advocating for the assassination of the premier of British Columbia!

Finally, before I forget, I'd like to quickly address something that I'll talk about at length later: the notion that violence doesn't work. The thing is, sometimes it does. Also, non-violence sometimes doesn't work either.