Every anarchist on the internet has surely already laughed themselves dizzy at the youtube video of right-wing, bananaphone, Mormon, libertarian, F*x News talking head Glenn Beck vituperating against The Coming Insurrection in a book review [does it count as a book review if the reviewer goes on to admit they haven’t actually read the book in question?]. You can’t write comedy that good. However, I will dwell on neither the book nor the infamous video. What inspired this piece was Beck’s repetition of a popularly held and widely accepted notion, namely that ‘violence’ will ‘delegitimize your cause.’ Picture: State and corporate violence(Clockwise) Mass graves of Indigenous Americans at the Battle of Wounded Knee; Environmental destruction caused by tar sands surface mining in Alberta, Canada; The atomic bomb.
I use ‘violence’ in scare quotes because such a wide range of tactics are considered violent by the dominant culture, whether it’s breaking windows, setting fires, blocking intersections, or even dragging newspaper boxes into the street, irrespective of the fact that none of these things involve hurting people. More unnervingly, many ‘radicals,’ whether overtly or unconsciously, buy into this framework. How many times have you read accounts of street actions where the writers repeatedly refer to ‘peaceful protesters,’ ‘non-violent demonstrators,’ or hope to inspire outrage against incidences of police repression against ‘non-violent activists’? The presupposition here is that it would be totally OK for the police to smash the faces and ribs of people smashing windows. That, as soon as someone oversteps the bounds of law, in place to protect property and preserve privilege, they are making an ‘illegitimate protest’ and their concerns aren’t to be taken seriously and we aren’t to be concerned when they get a judicial smackdown. In case anyone is confused, I am not arguing that people fighting for social change should only use ‘violent’ tactics, but simply that we should not condemn any tactic that is effective. If a petition to the school board will get student activists reinstated after suspension or expulsion, fantastic. If occupying your factory will get you your severance pay and benefits, wonderful. In France, workers have learned that kidnapping their bosses and threatening to blow up their factories will end managerial inaction and get their demands met.
In the Niger Delta, finding that pleas to oil companies to respect human life and dignity go unanswered, the Movement to Emancipate the Niger Delta takes takes direct action and stages kidnappings and blows up oil pipelines. In Somalia, people were sick of multinational corporations dumping toxic waste on their shores, so an unofficial coast guard was set up to counter this-- you may have heard them called ‘pirates.’
Of the examples above, most of which would probably be considered ‘violent,’ the ‘violence’ of the resisters pales in comparison to what they were resisting. Though systemic, coordinated attacks on the health, life and dignity of humans and ecosystems for profit is the ultimate violence, these are seen as acceptable when they come with state or corporate sponsorship. Nevertheless, to allow these attacks to continue unchallenged is to be complicit in them. Those in positions of social and economic power do not generally feel compelled to modify their violent activity against the oppressed classes and there is a reason that the state elevates as shining examples figures like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Despite his anti-capitalism and questioning of dogmatic non-violence in his later years, as well as his identification of the U.S. as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” King has effectively been de-radicalized and sanitized to please the dominant culture, which is a white culture, and his legacy has been redefined to keep the privileged comfortable in their belief that the oppressed won’t actually do anything to threaten privilege.
Because there is such real systemic violence present in the daily lives of poor people, women, people of color, queer and gender non-conforming people, children, differently abled people, immigrants, and people at intersections of the above categories, it is incredibly insulting and problematic to tell us that we ought not defend ourselves so that we may maintain some sort of ‘moral high ground.’ Some of us face life and death on a daily basis just for existing as we do. How can it be the ‘moral high ground’ to keep from fighting back, individually or collectively, against the structures that keep us subjugated within violent systems of domination?
Glenn Beck and most of the country think that ‘the extreme left on this planet are actively calling for violence,’ which will ‘delegitimize [the] cause.’ A quick glance at wars, prisons, workplaces, extraction sites, and dumping zones, to name a few, would render the cause of the state and capitalism the most illegitimate imaginable.
Glenn Beck is a Mormon nutjob - discuss!!
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