(i lied)
The risk of your movement going violent is that it deters sympathists, and it makes the targets of your violence sympathetic.
If you don’t care because you already have strong enough public support then load the cannons. Send out your suicide bombers.
But then your movement will be regarded as one that uses force. Some people will see it as justified. Some won’t. But it also weakens the effect when the police are seen busting the heads of your protestors; some will think state force against your protestors is just that wouldn’t if your group was non-violent.
This is why Martin Luther King chose a strict code of nonviolence, footage of police dogs attacking the protestors made sympathists of bystanders and activists of sympathists.
Malcom X on the other hand believed white supremacist sentiment in the US was more pervasive than King felt, and the only choice was to defend their rights by force, because the white power factions would not recognize any less.
And this is true: they do not. It’s less of a problem when outright bigotry is not acceptable within the Overton window, but it’s definitely a problem when the supremacists have a strong following in the community; though usually they only attack when they outnumber you. Hence FBI under J. Edgar Hoover killed King (likely) and also the leaders of the Black Panthers.
Oh, I think it’s icky too.
In fact since WWII we’ve been aware that only a small percentage of us can get past our killing bad instincts to shoot at other infantry in combat. We humans are really against killing each other.
But we’re totally fine when the choices we make kill people offstage, or someone is willing to do the killing for us. Based on a 2015 tally, law enforcement kill four people a day – most of those not resisting and not armed – and the number has gone up with each year. And those are the ones that NGOs track via news, obits and coroner reports. Then we have precinct coroners who will fudge so that a police bullet was not a cause of death, erasing one. We estimate up to 75% of the incidents are not detected or reported, similar to unreported sexual assault cases.
And then there’s elite deviance. It used to be called white collar crime but when Brian Thompson was doing it, it wasn’t actually criminal, but perfectly legal according to the state. (He may have committed some crimes, but the ED included far more than that.)
Elite Deviance, when our ownership class engages in revenue-enhancing shenanigans such as private equity finance, kills more people, causes more destruction and costs more than all the petty crimes combined by multiple orders of magnitude.
That is to say, if we actually prosecuted our industrialists and capitalists, and (hypothetically) completely ignored every mugger, every serial killer, every shoplifter, and heck every corrupt police officer, we would still be saving lives by far. We might also reduce crimes of desperation, given precarity or scarcity informs most petty crime anyway.
But the society we live in does not grant personhood to everyone, and in fact most of us are beneath the interests of the owners and their corporate machines. And then there’s the more obvious unpersoning, such as women with complex pregnancies, trans kids, non-whites and immigrants, or families of immigrants.
So it’s not so much about whether killing is icky, but the narrow scope of specific cases in which killing is icky, because our society already tolerates an awful lot of it when we don’t have to watch a specific incident unfold.
“Depending on how you define mruder, there are hundreds of murders happening every day. What’s one more? gunshot” --you
Unironically, though. When you’re killing “The Terrorists” or “The Drug Dealers” or “The Evil Foreigners” or whatever, murder is incredibly cool and good.
Slap a “Generic Bad Guy” label on a human and you’re free to go full Rambo, because killing Bad Guys is awesome. We love it. Especially when the Bad Guy doesn’t look like us.
The folks screaming the loudest about a guy in a North Face fleece getting got are the same ones who couldn’t be picked out of a lineup with Brian Thompson’s pre-ventilated flesh suit. The folks clapping the loudest over bombs dropped on the perfidious cartels or the insidious Hezbolmas or the vile Asian Menace Of the East also have interchangeable LinkedIn profiles with the ex-CEO of UHC.
It’s Identity Politics all the way down.
Which is precisely why vigilante justice is so dangerous. Do I need to be worried because I said something that some asshat with a gun who was having a really bad day misinterpreted as transphobic, or in case I happen to look like somebody who raped somebody else’s sister?
🤓:
You raise a point that is not only valid but really rather pertinent in the US in 2024, that yes, it’s super easy to paint groups as generic enemy, at which point it’s acceptable to do anything to them.
Demonizing Arabs and Muslims became conspicuous in the aughts after the 9/11 attacks. The US was soon in Afghanistan (still with memories of where empires go to die since USSR was there a decade earlier) and the US was back in Iraq due to Weapons of Mass Destruction (e.g. nukes) that never materialized. Hate crimes surged against both Arab and Muslim communities (with the assumption that all of one category was in the other)
Then Abu Ghraib scandal became public in 2003. We Americans soon found out it wasn’t isolated, rather there’s a whole CIA extrajudicial detention and torture ( enhanced interrogation ) program. Apparently it was okay to torture terrorists. Also we learned we couldn’t rely on local news agencies, since they were too beholden to the White House Press Office. Only foreign news agencies were willing to talk about extraordinary rendition and waterboarding.
(Eventually we’d be able to look up on Wikipedia that torture was obsolete when it came to interrogation of the enemy, as this guy, a WWII Luftwaffe interrogator, showed that being nice works far better. We were torturing Arab Muslims because some rich people wanted to know brown people were suffering for 9/11 even if it wasn’t anyone actually involved, but I digress)
Pretty soon, any media person or activist that challenged the policies of the George W. Bush administration (including torture and the use of PMCs to massacre villages) was called a terrorist, and dismissed by the rapidly growing conservative media establishment.
In the 2020s, as the United States is being taken over by a literal dangerous cult (the white Christian nationalist movement centering around Donald J. Trump) talk of demons, of possession and exorcisms and ways to justify calling other people demons or associated with Satan is rising.
And the cool thing about Satan, if you’re a Christian fanatic, is you can do anything you want to Him because he’s the enemy by fiat.
So literally demonizing folk (accusing them of being demons, being possessed by demons or in league with demons) is the first step before deciding they need shooting or lynching or packed into detention centers.
/🤓 (Sorry about the rant. I’ve been specifically studying this stuff since Waco)
You bring up an interesting point, but there’s a bit more to it that has been downplayed in most history books
They were two sides of the same coin
MLK did not protest for support or to display their convictions - it was done to fight the legal system. They staged events to get arrested and charged for crimes relating to segregation and rights denied to them - then the lawyers came into play. They challenged the constitutionality of the laws, over and over. They overwhelmed the courts so much it hampered their ability to function. They lost plenty, but every small win persisted and chipped the laws down little by little
The black Panthers were an implied threat - “were watching, and we’re armed too. We’ll play by the rules if you do”. They primarily upheld the rule of law, by limiting extra-legal punitive crackdowns on Black communities. There was some less reactive violence, but that wasn’t their purpose
Civil disobedience wasn’t peaceful for optics, it was a third path strategy to turn the system against itself. Returning the violence would defeat the primary purpose, because it would weaken the legal challenge
All that being said, the two organizations were separate wings of the same movement. They both played important roles, one faught for fair laws, the other for fair application of the law. Their methods were incompatible though, so they needed strong separation
Oh I think many of the jokes are about him. Of course they’re about him. He got rich by killing people, he did it intentionally, all of his family and friends knew exactly what he was doing, and almost nobody respects him for it.
It’s kind of comical if you think how pathetically small the reward for information was. $10,000 and then now it’s up to $60,000. That’s how little his family wanted to track down his killer? That’s how little the government cares about who killed him? Jesus.
And UHC has already removed his profile from the website and is talking about a replacement. Part of me was like “I bet one of his colleagues arranged this so that they could take his job.” The jokes are all rooted in a shared (rightful) hatred towards the US healthcare system.
His wife seemed perfectly happy with the fact he was making millions. His family doesn’t get a pass on this. They all know what they’re doing.
Your wishes don’t come true from shooting stars, they come true from shooting tsars
Honestly, I think it’s OK to hold a bit of both beliefs and have that dissonance generate a sort of shame-tinged discomfort.
Violence should, by any rational and reasonable measure, be avoided. But that doesn’t mean that violence isn’t necessary at very specific points. To be more specific, the threat of violence can be a powerful equaliser when faced with aggressive, unrelenting abuse wrapped in denial.
We still shouldn’t glorify it, though. Snitches get stitches in this not related to current events context, because a show of force is sometimes* necessary to establish the veracity of said threat. But we shouldn’t forget that murder is murder, even when the murdered was a murderer.
When you say something like, violence should be avoided, I have no idea what you mean. Avoided by who? Avoided when? Certainly law enforcement has done a lot of horrible things, but if you think they ought to exist, then you are explicitly endorsing the use of violence.
Avoided by any living thing when it would be directed at or would affect any other living thing. I don’t care if you punch your fridge, for instance. I do care if said busted fridge would negatively affect someone else (i.e. someone else having to waste money buying a new one) or you punch something with a pulse. That punch better have a damned good reason, like being aimed at a Nazi. Or a cop. Or a Nazi cop. Oh, who am I kidding, that’s pleonastic.
Edit: to further clarify, while I do not agree with the police as an institution, I do think a system of accountability needs to exist, just like in any other game.
But we should also recognise when violence
a. Is bad
b. Is completely legal
And that this is, in fact, a bad thing. And we should question why such violence is legal.
… Even if you come out at the other end deciding that yes, this is how it should be. The only “wrong” thing is not thinking about it.
Get out of here with your “nuance” and “reasonable, balanced” takes. We clown in this mf
Violence should be avoided, which is why our healthcare system needs to be replaced by a single payer universal system like the rest of the developed world. The current system is violence. social murder is violence.
Israel
All state violence is political violence.
