THE COP IN YOUR LIFE

I don't know any cops. I see them on the street but usually they don't see me, because I don't fit the profile of the people they target for harassment, kidnappings, and murder.

Maybe you know some cops? A few weeks ago I was discussing the New Jim Crow with two friends, women who also want to see a fast end to the institutional racism in the US that preys on people of color to fill its prisons, ghettos, and morgues. I made the totally uncontroversial statement that all cops are bastards, only to remember, as I spoke, that one of my friends is the daughter of a cop.

I did not take back my statement, or apologize, but I did listen as she described her cop father: a man, she said, whose inclinations were anti-racist, toward genuine public safety, toward justice, who complained (at home) about dirty deeds on the force.

A few days later, cops in Anaheim, California executed Manuel Diaz in the street. Diaz, a 25-year-old community member accused of no crime, was shot from behind, as he ran with two other men in the opposite direction of the armed men trained to kill who were chasing him. Diaz was unarmed. After hand-cuffing him, police shot him in the back of the head at close range.

Members of that same police force responded to the families, who assembled in the neighborhood to demand justice, just like a bunch of cowardly bastards, firing bean bags from shotguns, firing rubber bullets, and letting loose an attack dog. The small, unarmed crowd included infants.

These cops then offered cash in hand to people in the crowd for their cellphones, presumably to dispose of the evidence of their disgusting crimes, which anyway found its way to network news and the Internet. Within 24 hours, these same cops murdered another community member, Joel Acevedo.

"Known gang members" is the way the police force, and the compliant media, justified these murders. "Police involved shooting" is the way the press describes them, and the numerous other acts of lethal, extra-judicial aggression this particular police force has committed in 2012.

Here's a reminder: so far, this year, a person of color is murdered by the state or its vigilante proxies every 36 hours in the US. I don't have the exact numbers for when American cops initiate beatings, sexual harassment, sexual assault, public humiliations, violations of privacy, threats, thefts, kidnappings and so forth. You can look up the numbers on incarcerations for non-violent offenses, for the way folks are kidnapped from their communities and stripped - with classless, colorblind laws that target people of color and the poor - of their rights to work, receive public assistance, vote.

And since I began this piece, I read of Chavis Carter, a young man who was stopped by cops in Jonesboro, Arkansas, searched multiple times, handcuffed, and thrown in the back of a police car. At some point after this, a bullet entered his right temple and killed him, and the pigs say it was a suicide. These cops are bastards.

What does it take for a cop to not be a bastard? To denounce, loudly and clearly, this kind of behavior. To refuse to participate in it. To refuse to protect the State from the people it is entrusted to serve. To refuse to protect corporations from people protesting their misdeeds. To refuse to protect private power, period. To recognize the functional difference between municipal police and the military.

Want to be a hero to the community? Escort vulnerable folks, without a gun. Be helpful, without a badge. Be responsible, without a uniform. But if you wear a uniform, if you wear a badge, if you carry a gun, know that the State no longer sees you as an individual, but as a weapon yourself. That's how it uses you, that's how it dispatches and discharges you. Know that many of the rest of us see you that way too, and with good reason.

If you wear a uniform and a badge, if you carry a gun, go ahead and demand accountability from the force, see how far that gets you. Remember that you are supposed to serve the community, not the force. Remember that the mass incarcerations and killings by police are done in your name and that, wearing that uniform, we see you as duplicate expressions of the same idea. Are you a weapon against us? What are you a weapon for?

If the cop in your life is still a cop, it means that he (or she) has not threatened the good ol' boys club with demands for accountability, but really it means that he (or she) hasn't risked job and benefits in a society that criminalizes joblessness and health problems. It means that they collude (actively, or by their silence) with other members of the force to alter or hide evidence of police crimes. It means they go out on the street, trained to kill, with weapons loaded, knowing damned well that we live in a society that targets people of color, youth, and poor folks, and have the temerity to expect respect, even praise.

I am about done writing when I read another story about murderous cop bastards, this one out of New York City, where the mayor brags "I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world." Two days ago a swarm of these forces loyal to arch-plutocrat Bloomberg confronted Darrius Kennedy in Times Square. I am going to go out on a limb and say that a reasonable response to being confronted by multiple armed killers is to protect yourself. Kennedy pulled a knife and started to back away. I suppose Kennedy had mental health issues, and if this society cared to address them, it wouldn't shoot him dead in broad daylight.

Ten shots, I think I read, to slow down this one agitated man, from a police force well practiced at containing thousands of Occupy Wall Street activists at a time for the past year. Brave? No. Accountable? No. Just? Not at all.

Again, what were these cops a weapon against? Who were they a weapon for? Here is an account from social justice activist Kelly Rose Pflug-Back, who writes that

"Some political prisoners are arrested for staging public demonstrations that address poverty, and some are arrested for living in poverty. Some actively protest social inequality, while others turn to drugs or alcohol because they can no longer bear the brunt of this inequality."

Will we live in fear of the State's municipal police forces or will we demand accountability and exact justice from them? Are all cops bastards? Let the bravest ones lay their weapons down, step forward, and prove otherwise.

(WRIGHT RIFF)

Because it bears repeating,

and regarding the anniversaries of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, civilian population centers in a country ready to surrender,

and regarding the billowing plumes of black smoke spilling out from the Chevron refinery in Richmond, California and into the lungs of the largely poor, black, and immigrant population there,

and regarding the US president who still takes cash from the nuclear industry, and thinks that hydrofracking should be exempt from clean air and water standards, and that BP and Shell and ExxonMobil and the rest should drill for oil, right there, offshore, in the fucking sea,

and regarding the drone aircraft that killed another ten men (and who knows how many women?) in Yemen earlier this week, ten men whose crime was their age, their gender, and the audacity to live where they live, making them "militants" (against whom? for what reason? in what war?),

and regarding the laying of the Keystone XL Pipeline across North America, from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico, cutting like a dull, rusty knife through aquifers and mountains, wetlands and woodlands, prairies and farms, cutting through lands where genocide has taken place, cutting to line the pockets of a few men, the moral and biological descendents of those who committed the genocide,

and regarding the sending of spacecraft (military, scientific, commercial) through the atmosphere and into outerspace, the only atmosphere we have, our protection on this planet, the atmosphere that NASA must share with every species, and most of us never asked NASA to put us all at risk so that a camera could snoop around Mars anyway,

and regarding the white men who won't examine their fear and hatred, who lash out with violence against any "othered" individual or group, men like that white supremacist piece of garbage who brought his hatred to a Sikh temple in Wisconsin last weekend, putting to predictable work his years of training and indoctrination by the US military,

and regarding the asshole president who speaks of "soul-searching" after such a predictable bloodbath, while maintaining a kill list, the right to kill anyone, anywhere, for any reason, while defending war, defending apartheid, promoting the idea that remote-controlled aircraft armed with missiles and bombs, and covering the globe make anyone safer, and turning his back, like a fucking coward, on climate science, on American racism, on class warfare,

and regarding the murder of Marvin Wilson by the state of Texas a few days ago, a man who was so easy to kill, with an injection of poison into his bloodstream, and so difficult for people to defend, with his black skin, and his mental disability, which the racist, backward state compared in its murderous legal reasoning, its own intellectual deficiency, to a fictional character in the Steinbeck story Of Mice and Men,

and regarding the fact that at no time in history have so many people been imprisoned as there are, now, in the United States, and they are so disproportionally drawn from poor, black, and latino communities, and this is neither brave, nor free, nor secure, but unmitigated evil,

and regarding the hateful mass of people, who call themselves Christians, but whose charity amounts to eating the cooked flesh of industrially tortured chickens rather than countenancing the notion that their very neighbors might love who and how they wish to love, without fear,

and regarding the channeling of stolen wealth toward corporate stooge politicians amidst a backdrop of school closings, teacher layoffs, home foreclosures, and the absence of mental health resources to those pushed to the edge of despair by this shithouse culture,

but mostly because the degree to which the following sounds wrong to you reveals the degree to which you need to hear it again, to turn it around in your thoughts, to realize not everyone has it as good and easy as you,

god damn America.

The American Way

"Go back to your country, you terrorist."

That's the message left in a note next to the body of Shaima Alawadi, a 32-year-old mother of five who was beaten with a tire iron in her California home on March 21.

She can't go back to her native Iraq, now, though, after nearly two decades in the US. She's dead. A few days after the attack, she died, in a hospital.

Evil as it was, Shaima's murder was not senseless. It was a predictable, logical expression of the culture. American politicians elbow each other to justify precisely this kind of treatment of Iraqi women, from Operation Desert Storm in 1990, to the bombing raids and brutal economic sanctions of the ensuing decade, through 'Operation Iraqi Liberation', to Obama's faux withdrawal from Iraq late last year.

I want to make this point as clearly as possible, but it is difficult, because it is at once so obvious and so upsetting.

American politicians, military personnel, and business people tied to "defense", "security", and "energy", have been literally and figuratively gunning down Iraqi mothers since at least 1990. They do this with the total approval of US media, from the New York Times to FOX, from CNN to NPR. They do this with the complicity of Americans who reinforce such actions with votes, patronage, a willingness to be perpetually misinformed, a refusal to unpack their privilege.

This murder is the embodiment of the culture: the brutal beating of a woman, an outsider, a mother; an infantile note with an inane message; the victimizer running from the scene of his crime; the news media turning from it (and, in the same moment, attempting to smear Trayvon Martin, the victim of another targeted assasination on the other side of the country).

This is the American way. This is what America does. It beats Shaima Alawadi with a tire iron. It guns down Trayvon Martin for the color of his skin. It trespasses, off duty, into the neighborhood of Rekia Boyd and fires a bullet into her skull. With badges on, it chases 18-year-old Ramarley Graham into his own home and murders him. It plugs holes into children, women, and men in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, sets them on fire, and then spirits away a single man, as if he alone were responsible, as if it was an isolated act, as if the US didn't bring the killer, many killers, and more than a decade of devastation to Kandahar Province.*

This is the American way. It threatens to drop nuclear bombs on Iran while cautioning the starving of North Korea to obey whatever diktat the US sees fit to impose. It manufactures and sells the weapons to crush liberation uprisings from Egypt to Palestine, from China to Tibet, from LA to NYC.

Each US president reiterates what the last said, that there will be no apologies, to great applause. Each stands in front of a flag and feigns remorse when the stories of individual victims of predictable violence become known, when these stories shock enough people that a response is demanded, when there's an angle that the news media can parley into better ratings with the insightful banter of authoritative white men in suits. With the most insincere sincerity they declare their determination to "get to the bottom of this", which invariably means forcing the issue out of the collective consciousness as fast as possible.

Talk to anyone who wears the American way as a badge of honor and wait -- wait in vain, wait forever -- for them to talk about patriarchy, about white privilege, about the myriad ways to be "othered" in the US: for being a woman, for being a person of color, for being born somewhere else, for living in the wrong neighborhood, for wearing hijab, for dressing differently, for speaking differently, for loving differently, for working differently, for praying differently, for being indigenous, for defending oneself.

America is 300 million white supremacist, xenophobic, homophobic, misogynist imperialist murdering rat bastards.

And you. You're not this. So prove it.

No one needs anyone's casual shock, how terrible this or that isolated incident is, change the channel. Their violence is coordinated, it is premeditated, and it is sustained. That's what our resistance to it must be. Thoughtful, creative in the extreme, persistent, diverse. If you are a person of conscience, if you have had enough of young mothers living under the threat of a beating -- from anyone, for any reason -- if you have had enough of teenage boys gunned down by cops, whole families incinerated by the Pentagon, smooth-talking asshole criminal politicians tap dancing for the camera, your friends and neighbors constantly marginalized for this or that otherness, women slut-shamed, you're in luck, even the climate of the planet agrees with you. You know where to find others who feel as deeply as you do the need to stop the beatings, the bombings, the shootings, the imprisonments. Find them, get to work, before the next manifestation of the American way takes a tire iron to another mother, before it puts a bullet in another beloved son.


* The victims of the (most recent) massacre in Kandahar have names: Mohamed Dawood, Khudaydad, Payendo, Robeena, Shatarina, Nazia, Masooma, Farida, Palwasha, Nabia, Estmatullah, Faizullah, Essa Mohamed, Akhtar Mohamed, who were murdered, and Haji Mohamed Naim, Mohamed Sediq, Parween, Rafiullah, Zardana and Zulheja, who were wounded.

Vocabulary Is Not The Problem

Last week I wrote a few paragraphs on the subject of free speech. The subtext would have been clear to any American paying attention: the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 went into effect on March 1. Predator Obama signed it into law, like a fucking coward, on New Year's Eve, hiding behind the fact that some Americans were celebrating the calendar's birthday, some were trying to avoid getting attacked with chemical weapons by municipal security forces in body armor, and some were just trying to get some sleep before another work day.

By now you know that the NDAA gives authoritarian serial killers like Obama and whatever scum-sucking fascist theocrat follows him the legal cover to kidnap and torture anyone on the planet, at any time, for any reason (or lack thereof).

But the timing of what I wrote coincided with something else that corporate and social media has latched on to here in the United States of Bombing People: right wing influence peddler and living embodiment of a pile of shit Rush Limbaugh had some derogatory words for Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University law student and advocate for women's reproductive rights who spoke to the US Congress on the need for women to have access to birth control as part of their health insurance coverage.

Nothing new, there are innumerable evil men like Limbaugh on American radio, preaching hatred for women, under the cover of "family" or "religious" or "conservative" values, every hour of every day. As nasty as it was, and as much as I would like to punch him in the face repeatedly for saying it, I believe that Limbaugh had the "right" to say what he said. Bowing to the public pressure applied to his corporate paymasters over a span of two whole days, he did sort of almost apologize for this one particular incidence of his rhetorical violence against women.

It's a difficult thing for me to articulate, this right of someone I hate to say things I hate, because I don't want any mother or sister or daughter to ever be called a "slut". Women (in the United States as elsewhere in industrial civilization) continue to be the subjects of violent rhetoric, laws, and social behavior that are all unacceptable. How do we end this violence? Is it enough to decide what can and cannot be said?

I think not. Any person of conscience is sickened and outraged by the misogynistic speech of assholes like Rush Limbaugh. But then, people of conscience are sickened and outraged by a patriarchal culture that accepts and normalizes violence and hatred directed at women in every aspect of our society.

Rush Limbaugh is a symptom. In our culture there will always be scumbag misogynists like him because it is our very culture which is misogynistic. Dig: liberals want Limbaugh taken off the air for his disgusting use of words, but have few or no words themselves when it comes to the men giving orders at this moment to literally murder women. It is no secret that women bare the heaviest burden of war, and the United States is at constant war, as the NDAA clearly reflects. Wars need armies. How often and how aggressively does the US military prosecute its male soldiers for raping its women soldiers? But here's another example, the war on Afghanistan, which is particularly brutal.

Why?

Afghan women face three enemies: the misogynist Taliban, the misogynist Afghan warlords (made over to look like a legitimate government), and the misogynist Western warlords who are engaged in an imperial war of aggression (the supreme crime under international law, if you get with that sort of thing). The US and its NATO partners routinely bomb civilian targets. Women, men, and children who go to recover the remains of their loved ones after indiscriminate bombing raids (which in themselves are an outrage) are the deliberate targets of secondary bombing raids. In order to terrorize the population, bombing raids are conducted by President Exelon's "Reaper" and "Predator" robot planes on weddings, funerals, homes, schools. Such attacks have increased manifold since the Nobel Prize-winning father of two took over for George W. Bush, another sociopathic baby-killing father. (Read A Woman Among Warlords, the indispensable memoir of the young Afghan opposition leader and women's rights advocate Malalai Joya, to learn about the desperate and worsening situation for women in her country.)

Let's walk and chew gum at the same time. Sure, I can get with any campaign to remove scumbags like Rush Limbaugh from the airwaves. Let's call out, shame and boycott every last one of the advertisers of his radio program, let's out the corporate network (Clear Channel), and the network's owner (Bain Capital), and the fascist theocrat scumbag politician associated with it (Mitt Romney). (Let's boot the system of commercial airwaves while we're at it.) But I can't get with all that unless we also get real. Spectacular violence is being done to women by the Obama government with an alarming willingness by his cheerleaders (well what the fuck are they, anyway? fans? followers?) to forget it or forgive it. It's unacceptable and unforgivable.

Everything I have written here, up to this point, is consistent with my writing over the years. To make a case against a morally repugnant, nationally significant figure I have used an example from the far side of the globe. But I might as well look over the fence to see how my neighbor is treated by her husband. I might notice, jesus it was just today, how the two "good natured" male hosts of a seemingly benign NPR chat show guffawed with a male caller over how hysterical their wives can be. I might check my own patriarchal privileges and advantages.

Some people talk about pragmatism, some people talk about a "lesser" political evil. They need to know that if they want to be taken seriously in their opposition to violence against women, it cannot be selective. In the current cultural climate of the United States, if all we do is censor speech, regardless of how righteous we think it might be in the isolated moment, watch how fast such power will be used against those who continually find themselves at the receiving end of the culture's violence and oppression.

The Imperial Theater of Barack Obama

I did not intend to write on the incident in Tucson, Arizona last week, where a deranged and impressionable young man named Jared Loughner stands accused of killing six people and wounding thirteen others with the bullets of his semi-automatic Glock 19. But the dissembling words of US President Barack Obama yesterday were cutting in a deeply personal way.

A common refrain in my work is the violence our culture perpetrates on children. This is not only because I experienced it so close and so devastatingly. In 1988 one of my younger sisters, Sybil, was killed when a car smashed into her as she was crossing a street after school. She was nine years old and every bit the bright light that Christina Taylor Green, a victim of the Tucson attack, seems to have been, every bit the bright light that all kids, everywhere in the world, tend to be: energetic, creative, talented, funny, sensitive, full of love, curious, charitable.

Years ago, as I went through a process of abstracting my personal tragedies and grief--attempting to dismantle the formulation that one death is a tragedy and a million are a statistic--I found resonance in the words of Howard Zinn: All wars are wars against children. The work of Derrick Jensen was also influential to me in this context, particularly his notion that most aspects of industrial civilization--how it abuses its environment, miseducates the young, objectifies women, loathes the "other", twists language--are "strangely like war". I see strange wars perpetrated against children throughout the culture and it makes my stomach turn.

Last night, by chance, I happened upon the transcript of Obama's eulogy for the six people killed in Tucson. (The environmental organization 350.org, which I follow on facebook, linked to it, adding that the speech "beautifully shows the humanity we're all working so hard to save.") I avoid watching or listening to political speeches, especially if I haven't read them first; I am as susceptible as anyone to the manipulations of a good performance. So I read the speech and was nauseated. Here is a piece of utterly unscrupulous imperial theater, even without the tenor and cadences that have made Obama so frustratingly beloved by so many.

For the arch-defender of war that Obama is to say the things he said--to applause and adoration--about how the incident should be reflected on and how the victims should be honored, seems beyond perverse to me. Audacity indeed. Even as the Nobel Peace Prize-winner spoke, armed drone aircraft under his command continued their mission of circling and dropping bombs indiscriminately over far-away Afghanistan and Pakistan.

And what did he say? "None of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack. None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped these shots from being fired, or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man's mind. Yes, we have to examine all the facts behind this tragedy. We cannot and will not be passive in the face of such violence. We should be willing to challenge old assumptions in order to lessen the prospects of such violence in the future."

But one would be a fool to expect Obama, who spoke these words on the occasion of a memorial service for six innocent people, to examine all the facts behind the tragedy or to challenge old assumptions. Not even for a day did Obama halt the atrocities at his command in honor of the victims in Tucson. He did order a moment of silence on the Monday following the shooting, but I suspect little girls in southern Afghanistan could hear the continuing roar of American warplanes overhead.

What else did he say? He said God Bless America. Peppering his speech with bits from both the Old and New Testaments, Obama (or his speechwriters) sought to express spirituality (and perhaps a specifically Christian angle) while forgetting that, at least in Dante Alighieri's vision of Hell, there are special places for fraudulent and violent politicians.

God bless America, Obama. And god bless its little girls, and little girls everywhere. Little girls suffering from the continuing American Predator drone attacks. Little girls suffering from the continuing war on Afghanistan. Little girls suffering from the continuing US occupation of Iraq. Little girls suffering from American material and political support of Israeli occupation in Palestine. Little girls suffering from American dismissal of climate change. Little girls suffering from American economic policy. Little girls suffering from corporate healthcare. Little girls suffering from corporate welfare. Little girls suffering from American institutional racism. Little girls suffering from the horrid notion of American exceptionalism: what a mean, uncharitable conviction creeping through its mainstream political culture, imbuing its people with the cognitive dissonance necessary to applaud a war criminal for gentle words offered back in eulogy! But only to little American girls.

And so on and so forth. To say nothing of little boys, and women and men. Pseudo-liberals who idolize Obama like to remind his left critics that he is not a superman. We are mocked for holding him up to his own rhetoric. I understand, as George Monbiot put it, that hypocrisy is the gap between aspirations and actions. But where are the actions that signal aspirations? They have military operational titles. They are apparent in signatures to laws and decrees that bolster empire. And to hell with little girls.

Call back the jets and the tanks and the soldiers, Obama. Call them back, every last one. Close the military bases littered across the planet. Defuse and decommission each and every nuclear bomb, submarine, and power station. Signal aspirations, impossible though they may be to realize in a capitalist democracy, to end wars against children, even if it means ending your career. End your wars.

It must be difficult to organize a funeral or memorial service, especially for tragic deaths. I would not want to have that job. But if I did, and the memorial service was for victims of violence, I would rule out inviting someone with a proven record of violence against men, women, and children. It was not mere hypocrisy on display. I may be a hypocrite, sitting here typing away at this computer and despising the hurts of industrial civilization. But I believe Obama's performance goes beyond hypocrisy, beyond cognitive dissonance and into the realm of deliberate political and emotional manipulation. If it's not pure theater then it's pure insanity, and if it's not that it's puppetry. As with his predecessors and successors and the perpetrator in Tucson, we can "examine all the facts" that lead not only to lone tragedies, but to systemic tragedies. One little girl killed is a tragedy. So are two. And so are a million.

What else did Obama say? "I want to live up to her expectations. (Applause.) I want our democracy to be as good as Christina imagined it. I want America to be as good as she imagined it. (Applause.) All of us--we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations. (Applause.)"

Then stop committing the atrocities.

Oh, Do Tell.

The United States Senate has just voted to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", the 17-year old controversial law that prevented openly gay people from serving the causes of empire and injustice in the United States Armed Forces.

I imagine indigenous people around the world at this moment, gathering at the gates to a thousand American military bases and torture chambers, cheering in relief that now, along with other Americans long denied their civil rights, homosexuals will legally be among the invading, occupying, destabilizing, violating, murdering forces of empire.

The military strength of the civilized has always relied on the disenfranchised to do its killing and become its cannon fodder. It doesn't surprise me that racist America is happy to have Blacks and Hispanics and Asians and Native Americans in its armed forces. It doesn't surprise me that patriarchal America is happy to have women in its armed forces. It doesn't surprise me that pseudo-Christian America is happy to have Muslims and Jews and Hindus and atheists in its armed forces. It doesn't surprise me that plutocratic America is happy to have the economically depressed in its armed forces.

But I have found it strange that a government willing to deny civil rights to gay people--that must therefore hate gay people as much as it does non-whites, non-males, non-Christians and the non-wealthy--did not want all the objects of its hatred to serve as its cannon fodder. One would think the government would want to out those to whom it accords lesser value and send them directly to the front lines.

But they didn't. Until now.

To be more accurate, it wasn't that homosexuals could not kill and be killed for the American empire. Rather, they were to do so without revealing their sexual orientation. That was the great compromise that noted friend-to-the-disenfranchised Bill Clinton made in 1993. With the law repealed, gay people in the US Armed Forces can take pride in who they are: trained killers.

Another clarification: it's not that now gays and lesbians will merely be pushed to the front lines. Sure they'll be allowed to murder and die for empire. But also, along with non-whites, non-males, non-Christians and the non-wealthy, non-heterosexuals will be welcome to perform support roles as nurses, doctors, clerks, engineers, and communications [sic] and language experts. They will be able to write press releases and fabricate stories. They will be able to operate drone aircraft from comfortable control rooms thousands of miles away from their targets. They will be able to spy on people. They will be able to negotiate the transportation and use of land mines and chemical and nuclear weapons. There are so many ways for devalued and marginalized Americans to join the racist, plutocratic, patriarchal, pseudo-Christian empire in devaluing and marginalizing people all over our beloved planet.

So congratulations to gays and lesbians in the United States, who are now poised to legally and proudly join the racially, economically, and religiously marginalized in openly participating in the American worldwide imperial bloodbath. You've come a long way, babies!

Violence and Gandhi's Blunders

I do not, as I once did, maintain an ideological commitment to non-violence. I do believe that (non-violent) civil disobedience can be a useful tactic in opposing illegitimate authority, rejecting empire, preserving one's rights and dignity, and so forth. But it is only one tactic. There are others, and success depends on how a multitude of tactics are employed by a multitude of actors.

In his book Endgame and in his talks Derrick Jensen goes to great lengths to point out the fundamental flaws of maintaining an unwavering "commitment" to non-violence in the current climate of State and Corporate Aggression. He describes how "non-violent" protesters at the WTO thing in Seattle in 1999 actually fought, physically, with other protesters who were willing to up the stakes and destroy corporate "property". Jensen even mentions how these "peaceful" types---who presumably had agreed in advance with the authorities on where and how many could march, how many would get arrested and so forth---how they actually assisted the police in hauling in those who sensed that engaging state/corporate violence with love and kindness wasn't going to get anyone anywhere.

At a certain point, refusing violence as a tactic ceases to be about one's own spiritual health; it becomes, instead, an unwillingness to protect others under fire. Someone once said that no ideology is so good that it is worth committing cruel acts for. Fair point. I think a refusal to prevent cruel acts is in itself cruel. And if you need to get physical, to step away from the armchair and the computer, in order to prevent acts of cruelty, then by all means do it.

Sure: one man's cruelty is another man's profit, moral authority is a tricky issue, and perhaps at least some of what I am suggesting here might sound like it validates the worst crimes of, say, the Bush Administration. But don't misunderestimate me.

For years my own rejection of violence was centered on the idea that I did not want to become that which I despise, that which is destructive, that which my values stand in opposition to. So much did I believe in universal justice and "the rule of law" that I even said that, given the chance, I would not assasinate someone like Hitler. Not even a universally accepted archetype of pure evil like Hitler could get me to take on his tactics, I thought.

Well, I don't anymore. The people controlling and destroying the world want nothing more than for their opponents to always and ideologically stop short of preventing the destruction by any means necessary. I want to be clear that I am not advocating violence. But---and I credit Jensen for arguing this point powerfully enough to get me to reconsider extremely deeply held views---I think an honest look at useful versus useless tactics might get us thinking differently about violence.

It's 1936 or so, and there we are, with the IEDs, standing just outside Adolf Hitler's house. But we don't ignite them, because to do so might just encourage more state repression. You know what Jensen says he would say to a guy like Hitler if he had the chance to meet him? "Bang. You're dead." I love it.

I'm not pro-gun. I don't think we all ought to arm ourselves to fight the State by dressing up in black and using walkie-talkies and throwing molotov cocktails at business fatcats when they step out of their limousines. I'm against violence. I don't allow it to manifest in my daily personal interactions. Still, I think we're not being honest if we don't even discuss provoking the same degree of state repression and violence for ourselves that (for example) the US government and military---along with their proxies, hired guns, and political and corporate allies---dispense to others in our name every second of every day throughout the world.

I wonder if a sustained campaign of property destruction and violence (or the threat of it) against planet-raping elites would be more or less effective than the sustained campaign of "consciousness raising" and occassional rally attendance many of us have presumably taken part in.

It's not just some rights and freedoms we risk losing by not fighting back by any means necessary, but the planet itself as a giver of whatever it takes for this generation and the next to survive on a practical level.

From Endgame: "Those in power are responsible for their choices, and I am responsible for mine. But I need to emphasize that I’m not responsible for the way my choices have been framed."

And this: "Defensive rights always trump offensive rights. My right to freedom always trumps your right to exploit me, and if you do try to exploit me, I have the right to stop you, even at some expense to you." ...to which I would add: not only the right, but the responsibility, even at some expense to me.

Jensen says over and over again, and he's right, that the violence will not stop because we ask nicely. It won't stop if we organize 15 million people to march peacefully against war on the same day throughout the world (remember that one? I was there). It won't happen because we write a lot of intelligent stuff and "get it out there".

I'm not giving planet-raping elites any more credit than their willingness to do harm merits. No one needs moral or philosophical (much less political) authority to push back. When you're literally gasping for air you don't seek out authority for access to something breathable. You don't ask permission for water (or human breastmilk) to not be poisonous, or for children to not be slaughtered for profit, or to prevent everything in the non-human world to rapidly---rapidly---disappear (read: get ground up).

We serve no good purpose by openly informing violent state/corporate criminals that their offences will never be met with counterforce. It just doesn't make any sense. The gas-guzzling, hyper-consumerist jerk-offs of America and the rest of the world would do well to take note when open season is declared not just on their political representatives, but on their ecocidal civil works, shit-house media propoganda dispensers, and corporate flagships as well. That might get them to poke their heads up from American Idol for a sec.

What I'm noticing is that my allies are really fewer and further between than I would like to admit. Upping the stakes and making sacrifices definitely means taking an honest look at tactics, physical tactics. There's no reason to be nice and I think people who for whatever reason won't get physical need to be supporting like crazy those who will. In this sense I support the insurgency against US and allied forces in Iraq. I wish no harm to those American troops. I think they should just leave. Now. But if they won't, well, I support efforts to force them out. Unfortunately.

Unwillingness to make sacrifices to do the killing is one thing, but the state violence will continue unless more people make sacrifices to prevent it. Cindy Sheehan's recent conclusion seems to be that such sacrifices are basically unthinkable for a population that doesn't really give a damn.

The following list may be well-known to some. I have just discovered it myself. Shortly before his assasination Gandhi gave this list of "Seven Blunders" that lead to passive violence to his grandson Arun, who added the eighth.

1. Wealth Without Work
2. Pleasure Without Conscience
3. Knowledge Without Character
4. Commerce Without Morality
5. Science Without Humanity
6. Worship Without Sacrifice
7. Politics Without Principles
8. Rights Without Responsibilities

And I have one of my own:

9. Turning the other cheek twice.

Please add your own in the comments section.