Liberalismo part two; A fairly critical response to "How Nonviolence Protects the State."
How Nonviolence Protects the State, by Peter Gelderloos.

First, I have to say that this book makes one very good and overwhelming point; we have to do something, and soon. It can't happen soon enough.

But.



I got this book because someone recommended it as "challenging." If you are as completely freaked out by the title as I was, you can certainly see why I found it so. Oh no! Oh my god! Are we doing something horribly wrong by not derailing trains and blowing up stuff more often?!?!?!?

This is how the book positions itself. It is a Very Important Book by a Very Serious Man. The quotes on the back all agree; if you don't agree with this book you have a responsibility to read it.

By the way, that is genius marketing and I may adopt it for my own books. I traded two copies of I am the President of Ice Cream for this at Monkeywrench Books in Austin, which creates an equivalency that tickles me pink. Everybody who likes ice cream is morally obligated to buy my book now. Because if you DON'T how can you say you know everything about the DARK SIDE of ice cream?

So this critique here is a product of my brain, which is willing to go through the craziest contortions to arrive at the answer "violence is wrong," plugging the factors into the equation posed by the mind of Peter Gelderloos, which will use every opportunity to advocate militarism. Not openly, of course. He's not that crazy. But he wants to "challenge" you. That means making a lot of wild generalizations at the beginning and gradually settling down by the end. He doesn't want to persuade you so much as convince you that you're horribly, horribly wrong.

Here's some the chapter headings, for example. Helpfully printed all in caps.

CHAPTER TWO: NONVIOLENCE IS RACIST
CHAPTER FOUR: NONVIOLENCE IS PATRIARCHAL
CHAPTER SIX: NONVIOLENCE IS DELUDED

This is trolling on the epic scale. But the man does have something to say.

Good points are made. I don't want to give the impression that this book is incoherent. Rather, I'd say that it's aiming at something that I absolutely don't want, and it has moments of incoherency on the way there.

Basically, Gelderloos posits that violence works, so we need more of it. Gelderloos views the injustices in the world so dire that instant action is necessary (hard to disagree with that part) and that the left should consider, strike that should get the fuck on militarizing because nonviolence had its chance and it failed.

Typing that out makes me realize how thoroughly I disagree. I hope that's a fair take on what he's saying. I did read the whole book, you know.

But this is not a review. A review assumes that there is some possibility that the audience will read the work reviewed.

I'm under no such illusion. For one thing, this book is darn hard to find. So I'm not too worried about enticing you here. This is more of a critique. I'll just give you most of what he says, as close as I can cut to the bone of the idea, and try to minimize my own ideas. So if anyone ever asks you if you read this book. you can say, I read the Cliff's Notes. And chances are nobody will ever ask you. But if you're not sitting in front of a munitions train right now, if you're not actively doing something, you should actively be considering, why not? Because it looks more likely every day that you're going to have to deal with the consequences of someone else's actions. Someday you're going to run into an Iraqi fella at a cocktail party someday, and he's gonna say, "Where were you when they were slaughtering my family?"

Awkward!

Better start thinking of excuses now. You don't want him to throw his shoes at you.*

So, in that spirit, here's some things Gelderloos says.

Starting from the first page;

"Because of the hegemony advocates of nonviolence exert, criticisms of nonviolence are excluded from the major periodicals, alternative media, and other forums accessed by anti-authoritarians."

Say what?

But I think I see what he's getting at. Nobody wants to hear about violence, that's for sure. And things aren't getting done fast enough.

AND. A lot of people use "nonviolence" as an excuse for not doing anything.

This seems to be his big point around here. Gelderloos doesn't like bullshit activists who accomplish nothing and say they're pacifists. He only likes pacifists who get things done, and he seems to think that they're rare. Who can blame him? He's right.

Please remember, though, that the solutions he proposes may not be those with which you are comfortable.

"This book will show that nonviolence, in its current manifestations, is based on falsified histories of struggle."

No, sadly, this book will not. This book would have been a much better book if it had. But the history falls awfully flat around here. I'll get to that.

"The word radical I use literally, to mean a critique, action, or person that goes to the roots of a particular problem rather than focusing on the superficial solutions placed on the table by the powers and prejudices of the day."

I like that quote a lot, because it means I'm infinitely more radical than this guy will ever be. It's not to hard to do, because as you will see, Gelderloos wants to replace the violent patriarchy with a violent anarchy that will, somehow, never lose control of its internal violence. Whereas I, in my inimitably goofy way, am addressing issues of power and violence directly. So yeah, when it comes to social violence, Prez is more radical than this book. Isn't that neat? It makes me smile.

Anyway, good as the quote may be, in this context he refers to "our" unwillingness to try violent tactics, and the woeful indirection to which liberalism falls prey. Though I do believe this man would hate that I call him liberal. Tough. You don't get to apply your own labels in this world.

Chapter One: NONVIOLENCE IS INEFFECTIVE.

First sentence: "I could spend plenty of time talking about the failures of nonviolence. Instead, it may be more useful to talk about the successes of nonviolence."

Oh, I bet that the successes are going to sound great here, too. Man, this is not the way to write a book if you want to convince people. People who don't already agree with you, that is. This was the first time I thought about throwing the book at the wall.

"I'm trying to read this book this guy wrote about how nonviolence is stupid," I told Amy, "but I keep wanting to throw it at the wall."

"Well," says Amy, "isn't that exactly what he wants you to do?"

Amy's smart.

Yeah, let's talk about the failures of nonviolence. The world is a fucking mess, for example. Pacifism has failed to solve the problem of life being shit sometimes. We come from a multibillion-year history of animals that eat other animals to survive, and a century of half-hearted effort have not changed that overmuch. Oh, let's not get defensive. Gelderloos and I agree -- the only way real change gets done is with an organized peaceful leadership representing and restraining a vast, potentially violent mob. Gelderloos is all, like, "Where's my mob? Where's my fucking mob? I need a mob!" Poor guy. He misses his mob.

See Liberalismo Part One for my explanation of where the mob went. It's an old paradigm. It's no longer useful. Gelderloos wants change right this instant and he's not interested, though. He seems to feel that technology can be overcome with heart and commitment. I don't agree.

At this point I'd like to point out that John Henry, the steel-driving man, could barely beat a beta-test steam engine and that was a hundred and fifty years ago. And, at the end, he died. The machine came in to work the next day like nothing happened.

Modern technology can be comprehended, subverted, and controlled. It cannot be fought directly. Those who forget this are bound to splat against the windshield of history. This is the age of the Trickster, not the Warrior.

But, on to the chapter at hand. A history of the successes of nonviolence and how he thinks they are not successes at all.

It begins well, telling me a lot of things that I didn't know about Gandhi and the Indian independence movement. Then it moves to the civil rights movement, where he started in with some stuff that didn't seem quite like what I'd learned, but maybe he had better sources (my knowledge of the civil rights struggle is not the best; I've read a couple real books like Moody's "Coming of Age in Mississippi" but mostly gleaned info from histories of jazz music and Chester Himes novels. In fairness, I have read an awful lot of the last two.). Then he moves to the Vietnam War, where his points...lack depth and introspection, to say the least. Then he moves to the Iraq war, where he's just plain wrong. So the more I know about a subject the more often I find holes in his argument big enough to drive trucks through. And that makes me wonder if there are other problems with the early stuff that I'm just not aware enough to notice yet. This is why it's important to get your history right, kids. One mistake throws everything in doubt, and it isn't too hard to do the research anyway.

I will not reprint all his historical anecdotes here. At some point I have to draw the line, or retype the whole book. Do your own research, draw your own conclusions. Your guess is as good as either of ours. But, please, indulge me as I point out a couple little things.

"Perhaps the largest of the limited, if not hollow, victories of the civil rights movement came when black people demonstrated they would not remain peaceful forever. Faced with the two alternatives, the white power structure chose to negotiate with the pacifists, and we have seen the result."

Above this in the book I scrawled, in all caps, THAT'S THE FREAKING POINT. In fairness, Gelderloos wrote this book in 2005, at the absolute nadir of the Bush presidency. He didn't know a black dude was gonna be President soon. But I think that, along with about a zillion other things, shows that the victories were not exactly hollow. They weren't dramatic, and they weren't enough. But you know what else they weren't? They weren't transitory. They weren't temporary. They were real. So, thank you pacifism, you got the job done. Peaceful change is permanent change. Rights gained peacefully are rarely lost.

(((A caveat: this surveillance society we seem to be sleepwalking into is the result of new technology allowing us to do bad things faster than we can figure out how to not do them. Every other self-spying society eventually collapses because of the manpower needed to keep it running -- I think Kundera does an excellent job of showing this in his book "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." I don't think that will happen today because cameras are so cheap as to be practically unstoppable, and face- and body language-recognition software are nearly here. That's worrisome. But I think privacy is a dead issue anyway, so my opinions are somewhat extreme. Basically, I think we're less than five years from machine-assisted telepathy, when all secrets will be laid bare anyway, so you're better off just not having anything to hide anyway. But that's totally a side issue.

Another side issue, while we're speaking of Kundera; I recently met a woman who had a quote from Unbearable Lightness, "Grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love.", tattooed on her lower belly. I thought that was brilliant.

Shows to go how two people can pull totally different lessons from the same book, too. I think about that book all the time, but I'll admit that until she brought it to my attention I didn't think about that line as much. I mostly remember the parts with the dog and the spies and the stuff about the bowler hat and Magritte, and the general sensation of trying to be happy and occasionally reaching it. And the wonderful, terrible ending.

Okay, now I'm reading Kundera quotes.

"Vertigo is not the fear of falling; it is the fear that you will be unable to overcome the urge to hurl yourself into the void."
"When the heart speaks, the mind finds it disrespectful to argue."

Huh. "Life like weeds" is a Kundera quote. Way to go, Isaac Brock.)))

Okay, enough Kundera, back to Gelderloos v. Sebesta.

GELDERLOOS on VIETNAM: "The US government was not forced to pull out by peaceful protests; it was defeated politically and militarily."

Oh really. Leaving aside the fact that the Pentagon Papers disagree with you (correct me if I'm wrong, but the papers clearly stated that the number of troops needed to pacify American cities was becoming unsupportable and cited that as a major factor in withdrawl), what would you call the protests except for political? Do you think that wasn't part of the equation?

He goes on:

"As evidence of this, Churchill cites the victory of Republican Richard Nixon, and the lack of even an anti-war nominee within the Democratic Party, in 1968, near the height of the anti-war movement."

This sentence not only demonstrates an extremely shallow understanding of the election of 1968, but is clearly wrong. Rather than take you through the history of 1968 and making this post even more TMI, I'll write a sentence for you on the same subject that is true.

"The peace movement provoked such strong reactions that it prolonged the Vietnam war until the peace movement was strong enough to end it. Although this is not what I'd call a total victory, I challenge you to name other imperialist wars that peaceful protest ended. Your list will not be a long one."

Violent resistance to the Vietnam War, in America at least, was ludicrous. When you look at the death totals in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, it looks damn silly over there too. I don't know how you could argue that the Viet Cong won the Vietnam war. Yeah, they won so good that thirty years later they're making shoes for America anyway. Awesome. Great job. I think we can safely say that the Vietnam War was just an awful fucking thing and that nobody won, unless you count Kissinger.

Gelderloos does point out that the American peace movement retired when the American troops left, and not when our American-backed dictatorship fell, and that the peace movement failed to bring peace on any reasonable timetable. I got nothin' to say to that. He's right. It wasn't good enough. Nothing ever is.

He mentions that fragging lieutenants scared the Army worse than peaceful protestors and conscientious objectors. Sure. I take this to mean that if peaceful demands are not met individuals will take it upon themselves to become violent in random and unpredictable ways, and that this is not controllable and not a good thing at all. Certainly the lieutenants, who didn't want to be there either, would have preferred to not be fragged. Nobody likes to get blown up for representing the wrong thing.

Gelderloos takes this to mean that we should frag more lieutenants because it obviously gets the job done.

Sometimes, as I read this book, I despair of reconciliation. This guy has no problem hurting people that he disagrees with. He doesn't see why I would.

Gelderloos's point is that people are hurting, now. Something needs to be done, now. Hurting the people that hurt other people is acceptable.

I think that's madly short-sighted and a little bit plain old wrong. You have to stop when you can't tell the difference between yourself and the people you oppose.

Then he disses the Iraqi war protests and says we did nothing. I got to admit I feel him there. We didn't do much. We did hold Bush down to only two wars, when he obviously wanted to take center square and invade Iran. That's...a....sort of....victory-ish....um....sort of....ah.... And we do have a very real shot at very real change right now, so let's wait a couple more months before we say that the People are totally powerless. As for the Iraqis and Afghanis and everybody else who it is too late to save, I got nothin'. I got no idea. Only that I am positive that blowing up military targets in America would not help you. You don't stop a war by starting a new one, do you?

Do you?

Now we get to the prize chapter, easily the worst in the book. The second chapter. As a "challenging" book this thing is written backwards, with all the weirdest and least-supported stuff at the beginning and the calm reason at the end. You can tell he was angry when he started and chilled out by the finish. But this chapter is just plain difficult to read...

CHAPTER TWO: NONVIOLENCE IS RACIST

"Nonviolence is an inherently privileged position in the modern context."

He's absolutely right.

"Pacifism assumes that white people who grew up in the suburbs with all their basic needs met can counsel oppressed people, many of whom are people of color, to suffer patiently under an inconceivably greater violence, until such time as the Great White Father is swayed by the movement's demands or the pacifists achieve that legendary 'critical mass.'"

Yeah, that's true, sort of. I don't know if pacifism assumes that, because I don't assume that. I'm in favor of everybody doing everything they possibly can in the hopes that something works, and I don't know what the hell to say to the people on the ground except get out, run, get away, let the situation defuse and you can return home. Murderous horror rarely seems to last longer than fifteen years. You cannot fight a bulldozer by standing in front of it. Run.

As we've discussed here before, this does not seem like good advice to a lot of people. Possibly most people. But it's the best I got. Don't be there when the bombs are dropping, that's my advice. You're probably more use to the movement alive than dead. And since the movement is about helping you, then you're definitely supposed to not die, or get raped or enslaved or stuck in a sweatshop or any of the other horrible things. Things that white suburban kids like me don't understand, and can't understand, and can only know that we can't understand but are expected to do something about anyway. Because, apparently, not knowing who made my shoes makes me responsible for something happening very far away to people I've never met.

Sorry to be flip about this Very Important Issue but honestly, what do you expect? How responsible am I, anyway? Let us identify something that is NOT the fault of suburbia and then we can proceed from there. Is Tibet my fault? I'm honestly not sure. And why should the particular dinky neighborhood in which I was born affect my responsibility for the entire dang planet so totally? This is a problem liberals are not equipped to handle. They worry about everything, the entire spectrum.

Think about it -- there must be something that is literally not our fault, none of our business, has nothing to do with American suburbia whatsoever. What?

If there isn't, doesn't that mean that the American suburbs are just another part of the same huge gestalt, and that we are their fault? I would say yes, and that at that point fault becomes meaningless, and the nature of the question changes. Since everything is now the fault of everyone in every society, it just doesn't matter.

This sort of bugs me, about this book and a lot of liberal stuff I read. Everything is our fault, everything is our business. At that point I become sure that pacifism is our only saving grace, since we're determined to meddle every bit as bad as the neocons. At least we won't kill you. That's our big selling point over the neoconservative suburban monsters. We will fuck your life but we will definitely not kill you. Might make you wish you were dead sometimes. Won't kill you.


I'd like to see some boundaries to global responsibility. You should be able to, need to be able to, say some things are just not your business. Please don't overuse this power. Use it sparingly. We all know that we need to care more, not less. But let's make this in some way liveable at the same time.


Okay, after that interesting beginning, the chapter goes insane. I...um...I can't even...um. Okay, his point is that the civil rights victories of the 60s were hollow and meaningless and that MLK was a sell-out who was co-opted by the white power structure to discredit and delay the movement. He is upset that people only remember the parts of MLK's speeches that they agree with. He quotes Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Mumia Abu-Jamal makes sense. Then Gelderloos starts again:

"White pacifists (and even bourgeois black pacifists) are afraid of the white supremacist capitalist system. They preach nonviolence to the people at the bottom of the racial and economic hierarchy precisely because nonviolence is ineffective, and any revolution launched 'by those people,' provided it remains nonviolent, will be unable to fully unseat white people and rich people from their privileged positions."

WHAT. Okay, what?

I was infuriated. I turned to the back of the book because I wanted to see what manner of man Peter Gelderloos may be, to say stuff like this. And there was a picture of him there.

Would anybody be amazed to hear that he's a skinny suburban white kid?



It was then that I realized that it was very deeply annoying for me, as a suburban white guy, to be lectured on racism by a suburban white guy. Possibly as annoying as it is for any other person, of any ethnic group or gender. I mean, seriously.



And, Peter, declaring that black people who disagree with you are self-evidently "bourgeois" is just a little bit contemptible.

The second half of the statement makes a lot more sense than the first.

"Even strains of nonviolence that seek to abolish the state aim to do so by transforming it (and converting the people in power); thus, nonviolence requires that activists attempt to influence the power structure, which requires that they approach it, which means that privileged people, who have better access to power, will retain control of any movement as the gatekeepers and intermediaries who allow the masses to 'speak truth to power.'"

Well, good point, sort of. Yeah, I do prefer the peaceful and reasonable methods of engaging the beast. And I'm not as into punishing the privileged as this guy is. Not as much for the obvious reasons as for the practical reason that an eye for an eye makes the world go blind, and I'm trying to move beyond violent methods of conflict resolution entirely. I don't want to punish anybody. I want them to get better so they won't do stupid shit any more, and with a large portion of the population I think that's very realistic.

He points out that most of the theorists of nonviolence are white. Besides Gandhi and MLK, I guess. Well, he says they are just convenient examples and that everybody else is white. Not having read a lot of pacifist theory (I sorta make it up as I go along, though I do take the vow of nonviolence even against machines I took as part of Earth First very seriously), he might be right, I don't know. Who the fuck cares about books on pacifist theory? Well, I guess somebody does.

Wait a minute...I'm basically writing a book on pacifist theory right here. And I'm white.

Crap.



On page 34 he violates Godwin's Law, thus losing the argument.

"One gets the impression that if more Gypsies, Jews, gays, and others had violently resisted the Holocaust, pacifists would find it convenient to blame that little phenomenon on the absence of an exclusively pacifist opposition as well."

Yep, sorry, that's garbage and you lose. And less than a quarter of the way through the book. For the record -- trying to use WWII to explain politics is like trying to use Ted Bundy to explain dating, and using ANYONE as a straw man for a holocaust argument is cruel nonsense through and through.

I swear the book gets better after this chapter. This was the height of the looniness.



"Hip-hop artists bonded to the major record labels largely abandon the glorification of anti-state violence and replace it with an increase in the more fashionable violence against women."

Good point. But then he blames pacifists for that!



"And the benign relationship of privileged people to global systems of violence should raise serious questions as to the sincerity of privileged people, in this case white people, who espouse nonviolence. To quote Darren Parker again, 'The appearance, at least, of a nonviolent spirit is much easier to attain when one is not the direct recipient of the injustice and may in fact simply represent psychological distance. After all, it's much easier to "Love the enemy" when they are not actually your enemy.'"

Very, very good point. It should raise serious questions, and it does. Which is why I read books like this. And find that books like this do not have the answers I'm looking for. This book provides no easy test to see if I am truly sincere or not, and believe me I'd like to know just as much as you. I figure the real test will be if I go back down to Tijuana a few more times and find something useful to do. I think that's infinitely more useful than any brick through any window. Gelderloos disagrees.

But this is a true point. I advocate pacifism because unrestrained social violence does not exist in my mileu. If it did, I might change my mind real fast. That's what happens when you test ideas. Some of them fail.

But I got Jesus on my side, and Doctor Martin Luther King Junior (though I understand he had feet of clay) and Gahndi (him too), and maybe I can learn some lessons from their testing. Maybe, Mister Gelderloos, the absence of violence is not necessarily an absence of commitment. Maybe there's something wrong with violence itself.


CHAPTER THREE: NONVIOLENCE IS STATIST

"Put quite plainly, nonviolence ensures a state monopoly on violence."

Yeah, ya got me there. As opposed to now, when it's just a game of roulette with a fixed wheel and a crooked dealer and tanks, did I mention tanks? Yeah, until violence is abolished, I'd rather the state have a monopoly on it than see an equal distribution. I'm from a part of the world where the government works, sort of, and there are peaceful methods of righting most wrongs. So I'm biased. I'd rather export our peaceful and occasionally blissful way of life than import the crazy violence that infects the world and that we either cause or at least don't stop in a meaningful way. Yeah, I'd rather it happens nowhere than have it happen here too.

Can't argue this chapter, guess he's right. Nonviolence does not lead to a violent overthrow of the government, and anything that allows the state to persist must, by his logic, be statist. Lots of examples to support that in this chapter.



CHAPTER FOUR: NONVIOLENCE IS PATRIARCHAL

He seems to be under the impression that pacifists do not recognize another's right to self-defense. That's not true. I do recognize that, because it's flippin' OBVIOUS. I may choose to abrogate my own right to self-defense on a case-by-case basis, and I may try to make that case as often as I possibly can, but to tell someone not to defend themselves against a direct attack is a little unreasonable. That's one of the reasons I found the Sean Bell case so shocking. Because the cops weren't in uniform and didn't identify themselves. The lesson of the Sean Bell case; the NYPD say s that if some guy you don't know is shooting a gun at you, you should stop the car and ask them if they are police. If they say no, then you can drive away or return fire. But, heaven help you, not until then.

If someone is shooting a gun at you and you have a gun, I'm not going to say it's a "right" but it's certainly unreasonable to expect you to not shoot back. That's human nature. Legislating against human nature is a mug's game. The law is about us trying to be smarter than ourselves, and avoiding these situations, not trying to second-guess what happens when the situation is already FUBAR.



Here comes the most brilliant part of the book. I missed how great this was at first. I was reading this chapter and I said to Amy, look, he even has a little list of people he thinks its okay to be violent towards. For example, "killing a cop who rapes homeless transgender people and prostitutes."

"Does that really happen?" Amy said, obviously skeptical.

"I guess so. It might. Everything happens."

"That's awfully specific," Amy said. "How often do you think that happens?"



I dunno. I guess he was trying to find a situation where he could be judge, jury, and executioner. Here's another one: "burning down the office of a magazine that consciously markets a beauty standard that leads to anorexia and bulimia."

"You know," Amy said, "when I was pedicabbing I was down on Sixth Street all the time at night, and I would watch these women, you know, normal, healthy women, and they would squeeze their feet into these tiny little shoes and they couldn't walk. The guys would have to get things for them, and hold doors for them, because they couldn't, since there was something wrong with their feet. So they were basically, you know, crippling themselves. So that men would find them attractive. How crazy is that? Why do women hurt themselves so that men can feel strong?"

"Well," I said, "that's a very good question. I'd never thought about it like that. But," I continued, "you know, he's talking about burning down an actual building. With actual people in it."

"Oh," said Amy. She clearly missed that part.

If you know Amy you may find this as shocking as I did. Amy, long story short, is not one to countenance the burning down of buildings, for any reason. Amy is not one to countenance the squishing of spiders. As lovely and peaceful a person as exists on this earth, yeh she was willing to consign the women's fashion industry to hell and she thought there was plenty good reason.

I was fascinated by this reaction and mentioned the situation to several other women. I have not asked one single woman yet who does not want to burn down the offices of Cosmo.

This level of resentment was news to me. Women do not usually want to burn buildings down, in my experience. Amy doesn't, at least. Whatever it is that these women's magazines are doing, it must be pretty bad.

Nevertheless, I still don't think we should burn them down. They'll just build a new one and you'll poison the groundwater. Though apparently you will impress women.

Oh god, please don't burn down a magazine and say that I told you it would impress women. That would be mortifying.





Back to the chapter at hand: is nonviolence patriarchal? He says yes, I say I have a hard time seeing how it could be more patriarchal than plain old violence. He gives a lot of examples that don't make much sense, says the Black Panthers were basically a matriarchy (which might be true, I don't know), then he drops this bomb:

"But pacifism thrives on avoiding self-criticism."

OH. REALLY. Hey, Peter, did you ever read the back cover of your own book? Because of the four quotes on it, two are from people who say "If you don't agree with this book you have a goddamn moral responsibility to read it." Liberalism, of which pacifism seems to be a subset (doesn't have to be, but I've never heard of a pacifist neocon), lives on self-criticism. It's our greatest strength and our greatest weakness. Go over to Rush Limbaugh and see how well your "if you don't agree with me you have to buy my book" schtick works. Do you have more liberal or conservative readers, I wonder? Why do you think I'm reading this book? I'm not looking for pointers on protecting the state. I'm using self-criticism to attempt to refine my goal, reacting against the extremely abrasive surface of your thoughts to hone the edge of what I want to accomplish. That's the way it works. And that was a bullshit thing to say.

You just can't stand the people who don't agree with you and you're angry that the world isn't changing now. It's always a little strange when antiauthoritarians find their way out of the authority complex and can't resist creating a new one so they have something to fight. Thus, the nonviolent "hegemony" that Gelderloos perceives, which those of us on the "inside of the conspiracy" know to be no collaboration at all, but a mishmash of ideals and mistakes. That is the way it works. There's no conspiracy out there.



Then he talks about how the nonviolent hegemony prevents women activists from being as violent as they want to be. Maybe we are. Maybe I am. Maybe I'm culturally reinforcing the women around me to not burn down the offices of Abercrombie and Fitch. If that is true, I'm sorry for the implied patriarchalism of my refusal to destroy a building because I disagree with the ideals of one of the tenants. I don't want to make generalizations about women here, or ever again, so I'll let it go. If nonviolence really is patriarchal, then I don't know what the fuck to do about it. Go beat up a patriarch? What?


CHAPTER FIVE: NONVIOLENCE IS TACTICALLY AND STRATEGICALLY INFERIOR

In which he compares social reform to a chess game. Now, I can't imagine a more patriarchal game than chess. You're talking about a game where literally the only important piece is the king. But yet he wishes to "checkmate" the state.

I can't tell you too much about this chapter, since his point is that "If you want to violently overthrow the government you're going about it all wrong!" Yeah, I know.

"Clearly, the total pool of tactics available to nonviolent activists is inferior, as they can use only about half the options open to revolutionary activists."

Wow, that's like saying someone's child-rearing techniques are inferior because they won't strike their child. And the comparison is more apt than you may think. Pacifists often operate from an assumed position of moral superiority. Whether or not that's crap can be decided on a case-by-case basis, but it's fair to say that the nonviolent often feel that they have the leg up on the violent, and that their stake to the moral high ground is, in fact, their only advantage. They often feel like a wise parent explaining things to an angry child. So I would say, and this applies to the child-rearing thing too, that the violent have the inferior pool of tactics, because most of their tactics just plain won't work. An activist without the moral high ground is a sorry thing indeed. Immoral activism doesn't happen very often.** People usually expect to be well paid for their immorality.

"Pacifism can't even keep itself from being co-opted and watered down -- how do pacifists expect to expand and recruit?"

Does anyone else see how militaristic this guy is? Yeah, Peter, good point. How are we going to conquer the world?

This guy wants to overthrow the government and replace it with Right-Thinking Folk like him. Laudable, but completely untrustworthy.

Here's the problem, man. Any movement owns its mistakes. You are in some small way responsible for those who read your book and take it to heart, and some of them are going to do it all wrong. What are you gonna say to someone who reads your book and says, I'm going to enforce morality and end opression and state-sponsored murder, I'm going to bomb an abortion clinic? You definitely seem to think it's okay, except that it's patriarchal, that's your only real objection there. But blowing up that which you find immoral, that's cool. They do see it as a life-or-death moral issue, after all.

A system must be aware of the natural misuses of the system. Communism is prone to corruption, that's why we don't use communism much any more. Capitalism is prone to a different kind of corruption, so capitalism is taking a bow. Your system of unrestrained attack on anything you find disagreeable or inconvenient might work for a while, because we know you and you're a good guy, you can get away with it. But the people who follow you, maybe they're not as smart. Consider:

When you write a book, you have to admit to yourself that you're probably at least a bit smart, and that people a bit dumber*** than you might read your book. So you are always a bit responsible if people do what you tell them to do, even if it was in a way you never imagined. Not legally liable, of course. But consider:

I'm going to go to the Christian pharmacists who refuse to sell birth control for this example. I hope that's a sufficiently neutral example, not because it's not important, but because it's ridiculous. This is the best pro-lifers have got? Birth control is legal, you can stock it, but they won't sell it? Re-dorkulous. This should not be a big issue -- the market will take care of this one. Refusing to sell something that people want has never been a good path to riches, and making your customers hate you doesn't work well either. In a year or two this should have gone completely away.

BUT, let's say somebody feels so strongly about this that they think it's worth doing something about. What should they do? They read "How Nonviolence Protects the State," and say, "Why it's perfectly simple. We'll just burn the pharmacy down."

That'll show 'em. Only problem is that's incredibly stupid. What did you just do to the groundwater? How does causing an ecological catastrophe show anyone they're wrong?

This is more or less true for most violent things. It's usually a step backward. I'll support that more in the next post. It's the "War and Peace problem," so called because it's so wonderfully summed up by that book and takes about as long as that book to explain.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the violent sometimes do not think things through.

But let's not mess with my examples, let's mess with his.

The rest of the chapter hammers home the extremely good point that nonviolence is bullshit if nothing gets done, and if you look around at the world it's easy to get the idea that nothing's being done. I can't argue with that. You can't really argue with that.

Then he starts in on some culture-war stuff that's just plain laughable, says that I should "hijack corporate media outlets and deliver an anti-corporate broadcast."

Sure, buddy. Tell you what. I don't tell you your job, you don't tell me mine. I'll just mention this little thing: what you want there is pure fantasy, not possible and barely even desirable. You'll have a lot more luck subverting and modifying the information stream than you ever will hijacking a transmission tower. Nobody listens to their radio except when they're in the car anyway, and I guarantee you the driving folk are not your most receptive audience. Fantasy.

"How exactly are we supposed to build alternative institutions if we are powerless to protect them from repression? How will we find land on which to build alternative structures when everything in this society has an owner? And how can we forget that capitalism is not timeless, that once everything was an "alternative," and that the current paradigm developed and expanded precisely out of its ability to conquer and consume those alternatives?"

Good questions all.

Here's another cogent point, and what I think caused him to write this book in the first place. Imagine this as Goofus and Gallant.



Reporter: What do you have to say about the windows that were smashed in today's protest?

Goofus: Our organization has a well-publicized nonviolence pledge. We condemn the actions of extremists who are ruining this protest for the well-meanning people who care about saving the forests/stopping the war/halting these evictions.

Oh, no, Goofus! Don't carry their water for them! Stay on point!

Gallant: It pales in comparison to the violence of deforestation/the war/these evictions. [Insert potent facts about the issue].

Yay Gallant!

I agree with him 100% on this very salient point, though obviously not with his reasons, because he goes on to say this: "It is best not to talk with members of the corporate media as though they were human beings because they rarely comport themselves in such a manner."

Would it surprise you to hear that this public relations genius is in a jail cell in Barcelona right now? Not that you can't be effective in protest from a jail cell in Barcelona, no, no, not at all. I mean the whole attitude that those with which you disagree are not behaving like human beings. That's the beginnings of psychosis, isn't it? Clue for the confused: they are human beings. Treat them like human beings. You can stay on target and get your point across without reducing the inconvenient to automatons. Remember you're supposed to be helping them too (although if they're white and privileged they're gonna have to wait their turn).

Here's another favorite point; he talks about how millions of people die every year for lack of clean drinking water. Then he blames the government and big business. And it is often their fault. But you know, malaria and guinea worm are about to vanish from this earth. The ancient curse will be lifted. You know who made it happen? Bill Gates. Believe me, I don't like capitalism much. But it worked this time. Capitalism cured malaria. Protest did not, violent or non-. We may have focused attention, but you did not pummel malaria into submission with your fists. Rich white liberal suburban guilt did it, not you.

So let's cut the nonsense of beating everyone we don't understand into submission. The fundamental argument of this book is that truth and rightness are perfectly obvious and that if we fight the government (because the government is automatically and entirely evil) good things will happen way faster than if we don't fight. If you don't have a superpower that allows you to see into every man's heart and to the end of every situation, then this is bullshit. Even if you navigate this web of responsibility your followers will not.

"Pacifists claim that they are more effective because they are more likely to survive repression." Well, sort of. We are slightly more likely. When things go completely haywire we're much, much less. But we're much better at keeping things from going haywire, and isn't that the point? Why on earth does anyone want to provoke the American military to crisis? Do you think good things will happen? Yes, let us starve the giant robot bear and then throw rocks at it. Decent tactics, lousy strategy.

"On the whole, the Iraqis have chosen armed struggle."

What? Is this true? I don't actually know. Anybody who's been over there, please tell me -- are the "majority" of Iraqis in favor of armed struggle? I'd like to know.


CHAPTER SIX: NONVIOLENCE IS DELUDED

In this he tries to show that violent revolutions do not lead inevitably to violent juntas. Maybe not inevitably, Peter, but certainly often enough so's you'd notice. It's easy -- in a violent revolution, the most violent prosper. Can't imagine another way for that one to work out.

But what do I know? I'm deluded.

"Sitting down and locking arms is not fighting, it is a recalcitrant capitulation."

BULLSHIT. Obviously he don't know much about treesitting. I'll get to that in my next (and final) post on this subject.

Then he says being nice to a cop is a violent act.

Then the book ends.



My biggest criticism is that the margins of this book were too small, and I didn't have much room to write "NO WRONG WRONG NO." I tried to use good handwriting but it was impossible.

My second-biggest criticism would be that he does not think things through.

This balances against the fact that it is a tremendously interesting and "challenging" book. I don't think he understands much of the history he's throwing around, but he was 23 when he wrote this book. I don't believe in age-based discrimination much, but my understanding of history when I was 23 was damn shallow compared to what it is now, and I think that's one major advantage us old folk have (and those older than us ever more so). History is where age shines, because it's based on seeing the same thing over and over and over again until you have a good sense of what human nature is and how things tend to be. I don't want it to seem like I'm dismissing him based on age. What I'm doing is pointing out his history is full of factoids and limited understanding, and I don't think it's a coincidence that he was young when he wrote this. Every time he touched on a subject I know (treesitting and the Vietnam war especially) he was quite wrong. This leads me to suspect the other parts are wrong too.

But the spirit is absolutely there. He is right; there are problems, and too many of us use "nonviolence" as a synonym for "inaction." Bullshit activists get on everybody's nerves. But it's part of the game, Peter. Everybody's a hypocrite. That's because none of us can be as good as we wish we were. We all talk bigger than we can do. Don't hate, do your own thing and hope.

After reading this book I am more sure than ever: violence is not the answer, and I shall treat those who preach with the deepest suspicion. It is no exaggeration to say that they are dangerous, and they want a different world than I do. I want a new world, they want the old world turned upside down.






I am done with this book, and if you want it you can have it. Send me your address and I will mail it to you. Only one condition; You must sincerely believe that you are going to read this book. It can be false hope or habitual self-delusion, I am not in a position to judge you. All I ask is that you honestly believe, at least for a minute, that you are actually going to read this book if I mail it to you.

If you're going to write in the margins, I didn't leave much space. You'll want a red or blue ink pen, or maybe a pencil.

A much better and more insightful critique of this book is available at http://www.contextflexed.com/revgelderloos.html -- it's plain-old brilliant sometimes, even though it's academic and a little obtuse. It's also incredibly long, as is this post. Say what you will about Gelderloos, he inspired a lot of thought. Every once in a while somebody needs to come along and ask the dumb questions, just so that everyone else can be very precise in the way they say "NO!!!!~!~!!~!~!"






*yes, I'm well aware that it's not funny.

**or at least I should say that activists very rarely feel they're immoral, but I'm aware some people find some of the cultural issues that I don't care about, and want legalized so that everybody can enjoy the benefits of not caring, to be extremely immoral. There's a possibility that somebody may read this someday who finds abortion immoral. I think they're silly. But I think they should stay nonviolent.

***to be precise, people who are less-learned and inclined to be credulous in your particular area, a group which includes people across a broad spectrum of intelligence. But "dumber" gets the point across.



Okay, I just spent a long, long time writing this, I think it's done, sun's coming up. I'll write the third and final part sometime soon. Hopefully it won't be near this long. Thanks for reading!