It will be interesting to see how long corporate media commentators will blithely smear the anti-racist protests as violent: now after three years of the President of United States inciting his followers against The Media as being the Enemy Of The People, cops in various cities are now arresting journalists, clubbing them, and firing (so far) nonlethal projectiles at reporters from respectable outlets like CNN. Being on the receiving end of some of the police violence with which African-Americans face daily may perhaps lead to a more nuanced treatment of protests which include some kind of violence by some protesters. We can always hope.
It very much worth keeping a critical perspective on establishment narratives of what constitutes "violence" in demonstrations, protests, and dissent. The police are empowered to exercise legitimate violence as agents and enforcers of the rule of law. In polite legal and academic language, we talk about government as having a "monopoly on violence" as one of the distinctions between "failed states" and those who have not yet failed.
This latest inflection point in public outrages over cops committing murder with impunity because they can hide behind the claim of "legitimate" state violence is another reminder of how the dominant American political narrative obscures the fact that that far too many people wearing police uniforms are lawless and murderous, especially in their treatment of minorities.
One part of the discussion that the left made part of the conversation in "The Sixties" is that there is an important distinction between violence against people and violence against property. That distinction is, of course, part of the law. The legal penalty for breaking a store window is considerably less severe that for holding a man down on the ground with a knee on his neck and choking him to death. When the law is actually functioning, that is.
Obviously, tossing a Molotov cocktail or firing a shotgun into a private residence - the sort of attack that Klan types have made against civil rights leaders many times, are acts aimed at killing or injuring live human beings and is very different from smashing a store window out of rage or even a desire to steal stuff. On a legal level, those kinds of distinctions really are not in question.
And no one actually argues that there shouldn't be laws protecting physical property. But when politicians, reporters, or commentators use the concept of "violence" indifferently as though there is no distinction between scrawling graffiti on a building, burning down an empty store, and a gang of four goons wantonly murdering somebody just because they feel like it, then that is a real problem.
"Violence" against public statues honoring military leaders of the Confederacy are really at the bottom of my list of political concerns at this moment.
The media are so driven by the "if it bleeds, it leads" mentality that they are way too eager to cover fires and broken windows to the serious neglect of coverage of actual peaceful protests. And forget seeing any serious efforts by most corporate media to understand any kind of complex dynamics in a nationwide protest like this.
But in the real world, there are complicated dynamics. There is real and justified outrage over cops wantonly murdering black people. It's a chronic problem. The murder of George Floyd by four Minneapolis gangsters in police uniform was the spark that set off this particular round of demonstrations. There are protesters who do get angry and break stuff. There are rightwing provocateurs who deliberately promote violence by encouraging protesters to break or burn things, or who disguise themselves as protesters to provoke violence against people or property damage. Some of them are certainly police infiltrators or paid by the police, though it will likely be years before that can be publicly documented. And there are real activists that actually advocate such actions because they think they are plain justified.
Given all those factors, fascist-minded politicians like Donald "Bunker Boy" Trump and Sen. Tom Cotton deliberately try to incite their own armed followers, cops, and now even the military to escalate violence against protesters. And most metropolitan police forces in the US are already pretty deficient when it comes to de-escalating tense situations. Far-right and white supremacist organizations already have far too much influence among too many police and sheriffs' departments anyway.
Political violence is discussed in the corporate press in almost metaphysical terms, in which even criminal police violence and murder still share an aura of Legitimate Violence. While even the most desperate acts of violent resistance are condemned as simply criminal. Once again, the legacy of "The Sixties" still defines the symbolism of this discussion, particularly in the figures of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. All too often with little or no understanding of what either of them actually did and stood for.
It's important to recognize the rhetorical device involved when people invoke King's own kind of political militancy as an excuse to dismiss the significance of the kind of genuine outrage we're seeing from anti-racist protesters. King's strategy of Gandhian nonviolence was a strategy of nonviolent protest, nonviolent resistance, nonviolent activism against injustice. Conservatives these days who pretend to respect King's legacy would prefer us to think that what he advocated was nonviolent resignation, nonviolent apathy, nonviolent submission.
I've been on a bit of a Galbraith kick lately. So I'm going to quote here from John Kenneth Galbraith's The Anatomy of Power (1983) about MLK. Galbraith served as US Ambassador to India 1961-63. And he acquainted himself with the political history of that country. In that book, he is looking at the sociology of power. And here he is talking about the need in general for groups of people to exert a symmetrical kind of power to gain benefits denied to them. But what happens when the power relations are seriously non-symmetric? He writes:
More recently, the most notable cases of asymmetry in the exercise of countervailing power were those of Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi in contending with British authority in India, and of his disciple Martin Luther King, Jr. , in opposing racial discrimination in the United States. The power of the British in India derived from the carefully cultivated personal images of the Viceroy and the King Emperor or Queen Empress, the similarly cultivated revenue (that is, property) resources of the Raj [British colonial rule], and the superb organization of the Indian civil and military administration. The compensatory reward for those who were in power or who accepted the social conditioning that urged the benignity of British rule was not unimportant. But the instrument of prime importance was the threat or reality of condign [retributive] enforcement from the military and the police.
Against the foregoing elements of British rule Gandhi offered his powerful personality and a substantial organization, and from both of these came social conditioning on the right of the Indians to rule themselves. But he did not proceed, as would have been expected, to build an armed force in opposition to that of the British - to bring condign power to bear on condign power. Instead he resorted to nonviolence - passive resistance to the exercise of British rule, including at various times resistance to the collection of taxes or the functioning of the courts, refusal to obey police orders, and other specific acts of civil disobedience. [my emphasis]In a footnote, he provides an important clarification of what he calls there "passive resistance": "More precisely Satyagraha, which [Gandhi] distinguished from mere passive resistance and defined as 'force which is born of truth and love or nonviolence'."
This departure from the accepted design was a source of infinite wonder, so deeply is symmetry assumed. Nonetheless, the Raj would have dealt in a matter of hours with any army Gandhi might have assembled, while in dealing with this asymmetrical resistance, it was recurrently at a loss and, in the end, defeated. There was a general parallel in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s efforts in the American South. Had the participants in the famous Selma march fought the local police, they would have been easily overcome. In choosing, asymmetrically, to refuse all invitations to answering violence, they too used a far less obvious but more formidable tactic. "Nonviolent resistance paralyzed and confused the power structures against which it was directed." [my emphasis]It's important to note that in the cases of Gandhi and King, both were applying the Satyagraha resistance strategy against democratic powers: the British Parliament in India's case, the US national government and state governments in King's case. Although in numerous states including Alabama and Mississippi, voter suppression against African-Americans was so extensive that it would be more accurate to calls those partially democratic governments, or Whites-Only democracies. That meant that governments whose administrators and police chiefs may have been indifferent to or supportive of violence against protesters were subject to the reactions of voters not only in their cities but statewide and nationwide. In India's case, even British citizens who took a benign view of colonialism weren't all willing to countenance bloody mass repression of Indian independence activists.
This post is a reminder of why 15- and 30-second news spots are not likely to give remotely adequate attention to the causes of violence. It requires more than a couple of sentences to remotely do justice to the topic in even the briefest way. In the Indian case, the independence process wasn't entirely nonviolent. As Galbraith himself relates in The Age of Uncertainty (1977), "In northern India the end of British rule brought what was, perhaps, the most intimate cruelty of modern times. Moslems slaughtered Sikhs; Sikhs slaughtered Moslems. This they did with clubs and knives, by hand."
One big factor that shaped the discussion of "violence vs. nonviolence" in The Sixties worldwide was the anticolonial movement in the world after the Second World War. That's when India first became independent. Like the American colonies in the 18th century, the independence of British, French, and Dutch colonies in the 20th century was often won by struggles that included armed resistance.
No comments:
Post a Comment