eva reblogged one of my posts recently about how “nonviolence” and “pa

eva reblogged one of my posts recently about how “nonviolence” and “pacifism” is sort of a made-up idea wrt how it’s applied to the hero characters in narratives about how to effectively oppose oppression, and it’s been fascinating watching it get bounced around with various comments appended.  the people who are furious at me for saying the suffragettes punched cops, broke windows and built bombs, and that the poop should be scared, as in, frightened for its physical safety.  that this is how shit gets done.  the civil rights movement, women’s suffrage, and gandhi all had armies backing them up, people who were willing and able to engage in (mostly, but not entirely) defensive violence, a fact which is “curiously” overlooked in modern american public school texts.  so you get these mostly very young, mostly very white people, having graduated high school just stuffed to the gills with the twinkly idea of “no resistance but nonviolent resistance” and how “effective” it is, and how all political action must somehow be boneless or else not morally pure, just horrified at the completely historical idea that the ruling class really has no incentive to bend to public will unless they’re staring down the barrel of a literal or metaphorical gun.what’s extra weird is that they somehow manage to maintain this concept even after running through the approved curriculum on the American Revolution from the hated British Oppressors (won by candle vigils, signature-gathering, and office sit-ins, no doubt), and the American Civil War, where the popular public school rhetoric (at least in the liberal northern enclaves where i got my public schooling) goes something like, “we punched a bunch of Dixie freaks until they stopped being racist”.  Again, not a lot of pacifism involved.  But somehow these conflicts are considered “different”.  You’re allowed to learn certain versions of historical events, but not to apply them to modernity or your own life.  Confronted with the question of whether the Boston Tea Party (an event every american schoolchild is familiar with) was automatically invalid as a political action because it involved that most forbidden of transgressions: the Destruction of Government/Private Property, no 10th grader will say yes.  which is odd, because they’ll be shocked if someone tells them the Suffragettes had a hand-to-hand combat unit specifically to punch cops who tried to attack marchers and protestors who, you will learn in those articles, had no problem breaking windows.and then a gang of queers, non-whites, and other at-risk people are in the notes too, making the weary but necessary counter-arguments, most of which are rooted in the reality of being physically and politically exploited by the police, and everyone else.  just looking into the race/class/sexuality/gender/life experience cohorts of each side probably tells you most of what you need to know about the veracity of each position. -- source link

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