Tag Archives: violence

American Cowardice

I hate this introduction, because I don’t believe my experience matters, but I also understand from a rhetorical standpoint why I should, so I’ll write it out to condemn it before proceeding.

What I advocate for is not you to taking risks that I would not take for myself. I am an anonymous person online, you can’t confirm that, and the bitter twist of fate is that if I’m ever identified as the author, it would both verify what I say while also undermining why I am choosing to remain anonymous.

I’ve been in a shootout, I’ve had rubber bullets shot at me and witnessed it remove a man’s eye, I’ve been doorknocked by the FBI, I’ve been detained at the border with handguns drawn on me, and a myriad of other things. Not once have I been deterred as a result of these experiences, surely I’ve had trauma related to them, but deterred?

Absolutely not.

Again, my experiences are only here to justify to you, I could not share them, or have them, but I need to justify myself to you to be heard, even though my critique, even if it was made by someone with zero of my experiences, would remain as valid.

The problem here is that others (my then-comrades) have been scared, not by being victims of state repression as I have, but by being in community with me as I have gone through state repression. They fell victim to the point of repression: isolation.

Counterinsurgency, at its core, is about isolating the most militant among us, and while I was not deterred by the FBI, I was not deterred by the violence, I was not deterred by being detained, many comrades and would-be comrades were.

They were not victimized, they were not doorknocked, but they were scared, even if they were not involved in my immediate organizing, and they stepped away. I was the victim and they weren’t, but proximity to my own trauma was enough for them.

There was no tactical or strategic reason for this. None whatsoever and the years that passed only cemented on much of their politics were an aesthetics rather than a pursuit of liberation. They were and are not, I am certain, doing anything worthy of state repression and needed to isolate to carry out acts of resistance. Shit, I was not doing anything worthy of the state repression I had received, and yet, it happened.

I say this with love in my heart, but their response was that of cowardice. Their response is not alone or unique, it is the hegemonic feeling that governs almost the entirety of American radicals, save for a handful scattered coast to coast. They deny this though and they find a thousand different reasons to justify it, reasons that seemingly only exist in the western world or at least within the English-speaking west with due respect to militants in western countries that aren’t Anglophones.

But, my context is specific to the so-called US, and therefore, the cowards I am directing this at are the ones we can summarize as Americans.

It’s clear radicals are in as worse position than they were in 2016-2020 and I think the most militant among them, if I am being generous, have not disappeared or given up, but clearly saw the continuous liberal counterinsurgency and rather than tolerate their bullshit marches or protests, simply chose not to engage and remain within their respective scenes.

The only problem here is even the smallest militant influences on these people have ceased to exist and we don’t even get the bare minimum occupation of ICE facilities. I don’t blame militants for vacating these spaces more than I blame the left for always bending over backwards to peace police and basically making any willful militant who’d compromise with them to some degree live in an eternal political hell.

Revolutionary anti-fascist militants (not run-of-the-mill anti-fascists who should drop the label) that actively engaged with legalitarians were, whether they’d admit it or not, unfortunately engaging in self-harm the whole organizing time. I digress.

Back to the topic at hand. So-called radicals well-into this second Trump administration have made it completely clear across social media that this is the worst possible case scenario and they’re willing to even do less about it. If the anti-ICE militancy of the first administration was maintained into the current year, there at least would’ve been some interference.

Yet where are the Occupy ICEs, where are the Willem van Spronsens? The facility Willem attacked is the same-still-existing prison corporate entity, GEO Group, that has been collaborating with Texas for Operation Lone Star for committing the horrors we see now, except also back under Biden.

There is no legal solution here. I’ve known this for as long as I understood anarchism, I knew this before I was an anarchist trying to get an “innocent” person out of prison under Obama. They keep asking is this legal and they keep not getting the fucking hint. It never mattered and the fascists are just really exemplary of how it never mattered. The only solution to Bukele is Luigi and the only solution to CECOT is for us to destroy it by any means necessary.

I get if you aren’t willing to go that far,
but guess what the halfway point is here?
What the compromise is here for you?

It’s running interference against ICE. It’s interrupting the flights, it’s de-arresting, it’s hiding people, it’s slashing tires, the list goes on. If you think there has to be another way, I’ve got something for you.

Your struggle is not a lack of creativity to find an alternative means of resistance, your struggle is being a coward when the useful means of resistance are presented before you. There is no safe way to fight back. Again, I am not asking yourself to get arrested or to be cannon fodder, but I also am asking you to not avoid risks.

Do the risky work and risk the arrest.

Don’t avoid arrest by avoiding doing the work.

Well, that is the problem though isn’t it? Cowardice is the hegemonic feeling guiding most of you. You’ll engage in the theatrics of arrest, which I will always advise against, not because its particularly traumatic, but because an arrest is politically hollow. You did a protest, then stayed overnight in a jail cell, then got released with maybe a ticket, all in the name for a cause.

Congratulations, you think this means something, but for many normies, this is an excessive weekend in a college town in the early 2000s. Jokes aside, it is also just the reality of being unhoused and poor. I had a friend spend a weekend in jail for being drunk on a bicycle trying to get home then get a DUI for it.

Should I laud this as an act of political resistance if we’re going to use the act of arrest as a measure for political importance? It is just the reality of being someone society wants to disappear for whatever particular reason they feel on any given day. It isn’t a measurement of effective action for the most part. Considering the background of most of you though, no wonder you cannot distinguish it because it may unfortunately perhaps be the most exciting thing in your life and exciting must mean effective, right?

The arrest means nothing, it is a response to a perceived nuisance, not a threat in most contexts. It’s when the felonies drop, when the raids go non-stop, when a manhunt is issued for you, when friends disappear like during the George Floyd Rebellion, that is when we have some semblance of measure, but that starts getting to scary, right?

I’m not a fan of measurements though, only in-so-far to tell you what is a bad measurement, but I don’t think offering “good” measurements is useful either.

I am here to tell you that the vast majority American radicals will find every reason, real or imagined, to not do the damned thing.

“There’s not enough people”
“The police will just kill us”
“We’ll all get disappeared”
“The military will shut us down”
“They’ll just drone strike you”
The list goes on.

Despite the fact the Green Scare victimized only a handful of people, it has been an effective talking point by so-called anarchists into doing absolutely fuck-all nothing. It was incredibly effective act of repression of the state, not by the number of anarchists it fucked over, but the number of anarchists who used it as a counterinsurgent talking point against militancy.

It’s telling, right?

The American Radical situation is not that concentration camp doom of a Palestinian in Gaza, yet even their children will pick up a rock to sling it at a tank. I say this as I recall seeing a younger Black boy get badjacketed by slightly older peers for banging on a window during a protest in a big city.

The eagerness to quell the slightest impulse of militancy is thorough.

I think of the two Latinas out in LA who lauded that their anti-Trump protest earlier this year was “effective at preventing a riot”.

The white queer who just assimilates in the midwest and figures they can ride it out until the next election (as if there is one).

Eager bootlickers emerge of every color, sexuality, and gender who will do everything to say, “I’m the good one, not me, don’t hurt me, hurt them.”

The police will kill you, but they’ll do it even if you aren’t doing a thing worth doing. We can’t let the fear of death halt the struggle for life. There are people who protest knowing they’ll die and I think that’s far more worthwhile than sign-holding hoping you’ll live. I also think some of us dying is an unavoidable part of the process of becoming free. I’m terrified of death, I want to live, I’d live for a few hundred years if I could, I love life, but I am more terrified to live life as a coward.

Another difference here is I think a police murder doesn’t mean the police are an unstoppable, omnipresent force, I don’t mistake their violence for strength, I recognize our lack of retaliation as our weakness instead. The US military has been defeated countless times in the last 70+ years, I am not interested in assigning a mythology to the United States that can justify my cowardice.

But most of you do. It is easy to be a coward that way. You don’t have to do much other than shrug and go, “there’s no way we’ll win”. Not that I’m interested in whatever winning looks like to you, but creating this falsehood that the US is not defeatable is just you finding a roundabout way to go, “My fear of what happens to me matters more than the on-going suffering and deaths at the hands of the Empire I do benefit from”.

No. The US can be stopped, it can be defeated, and we can do that, but we have to start from a position of honesty. You aren’t providing an actual strategic reason, you are providing a shield to your cowardice.

You don’t have to grab a gun and go shoot someone, but you do have to put your body in front of a truck at a minimum. You do have to grab the person the cop grabs and de-arrest them. You do have to be willing to stand your ground until they move you with violence, not move you with a threat of violence.

These are things we’ve done before in our radical history, it’s only new to you, its not new to here. Anarchists have not been lined up and executed like they have been in the past. “Well, I don’t want to give them a reason to do it now”, no no, they’ll find a reason to do it, and you can either be a coward who did nothing up until that point, or you could’ve done anything that directly contributed to liberating someone, even if that someone is just you.

There are no new means to be invented for resisting. There might be, actually, but needing a new means is not prerequisite for resisting, especially when there are still worthwhile tactics. There are new things to be invented to counter surveillance and certain technologies, sure, but there are a lot of means of resisting that are tried and true and we simply have to do them rather than pull every reason under the sun as to why we can’t.

Bolivia showed how to resist fascism in a way that didn’t require the oh-so-scary pick up your guns and shoot, rather it showed incredible examples of your preferred non-violent direction action, but because it was NVDA with actual risk, still it is too much for you and that’s what this comes down to.

It is about taking a risk and if you can’t take a risk, then just go submit all ready and stop taking up our oxygen. Your complaints of “this is illegal” are frankly exhausting and your questioning of what to do now equally so. I could give a fuck less about your theoretical self-victimization when the victims are all ready here and have long been. The blue prints are all ready out there, we must simply find a willingness to disrupt the entirety of our life, at risk of ourselves, but the reward is every bit worth it.

A Fear of Violence is also a Fear of Change

I reject nonviolence and the American left’s obsession with it.

I’m against a diversity of tactics, which is almost always used to weaponize against violence and militancy while claiming to be not against it.

The “diversity of tactics” recognizes the status quo in which there hasn’t been “violent” protests beyond riots in decades and the violence of those riots is almost exclusively to property or the perpetrators of state violence. The imagined strategy of violence is still exclusive to the historical imaginary and we see this in art, in current writings on violence, where violence has been relegated to the myths and truths of radical history.

As someone who does statistics for a living, unwillingly, this is an imprecise measure of what I’ll offer you, but I’m certain if we looked at the actual numbers, that reality would be far harsher. I am ignoring riots in this capacity only because if property violence is the epitome of violence from the left in this country, we’re fucked, but if we look at organized, formal or informal, violence against the state and in the name of liberation, whether this be in the form of actions of the Black Liberation Army (BLA), the Weather Underground, various assassinations, and random deeds of anarchists, if we were to total the events into a singular timeline, the days spent would not even add up to a year of actual violence.

Why am I making this comparison?

Because, we know from various liberal sources that since 2020, we can easily identify a single year where more than ten thousand demonstrations have happened and protests where we’ve had upwards of a few million in attendance (Hands Off, Women’s March, etc).

With all due respect to the militants in Portland holding down street action during the George Floyd Rebellion, just to reference a few, I think we can argue what is perceptibly seen as “violent” protest would account for less than a percent of all movement action within the modern American left. Even when it was flourishing in the historic American left, it was still an incredibly small percentage of the population. At its height, the BLA had less than 100 members most likely in the decade it was active, the Weather Underground even less, and there was absolutely overlap.

All insult to the DSA, their membership eclipses these organizations entirely, and I mean that in the most negative sense.

What use is it to compare the two, you might ask.

To emphasize that organizations committed to liberatory violence hold an outweighed existence both within political history and the imaginative.

The American left so readily condemns “violence” when 99% of so-called radicals have never committed it. Even if they don’t condemn it, they are as easily eager to “we should treat both strategies equally” which does not actually uplift “violent” protest or militant strategies, but is another variation of left “unity” which seeks to silence the discussion about actual, militant, meaningful resistance, and does not in fact center violence or militancy.

Make no mistake, the status quo of the American left is:

Non-violent “direct action” and electoralism as pillars of resistance, which were the two main strategies behind the anti-war movement in the early 2000s, which were the largest protests in American history, and yet did absolutely fucking nothing. Yet these never became nails in the coffin for NVDA, electoralism, or mass movement strategies. Anyone who suggests otherwise is being a scold whose unwilling to actually critique their politics or they’re deeply afraid, which should bring more internalized shame than it actually seems too. 

“Why do you keep quoting violence and mentioning militancy? “

Because of radicals who are actually liberals and their sensitivities.

Even in their own imaginary, the violence is not violence.

Violence is a moral term, one of negative implications (not to me), and to reluctantly cater to who may be reading this, I pivot to militancy. Self-defense as it has been performed within movement spaces is not an act of violence, but it is a threat of violence if violence were to occur. Rather than perpetually making this distinction, I would simply like to move to calling it militancy, which refers to a capability of committing violence, but not always an action of violence. Shooting a gun at someone and having a gun in case of shit going down are two different things, but both are militant. I loathe to even kind of use this comparison because I also don’t think militancy = guns, but again, it is within the left imaginary. Or bombs.

Back to the issue at hand, I’ve been in organizing spaces where we’d organize according to the St. Paul Principle’s as a means of respecting a diversity of tactics, but that actually meant nothing because by nature of who we’d organize with, in the name of unity, and not wanting to scare them off, we’d scale down what actions we were willing to commit.

I’m against bomb-throwing simply because its too indiscriminate and I think you should have the courage to use a weapon that demands accuracy, but do you think a democratic socialist would meaningfully share organizing space with a bomb-thrower or would-be assassin? Not even. These spaces are made of up so-called militants willing to degrade their militancy for the sake of a coalition that does nothing.

I’ve been in other organizing spaces where even joking about armed resistance was squashed with raised-voices by people who’d never experienced an FBI or police door-knock. I wasn’t making the joke, but as an observer it was incredibly telling what was allowed to be said by group consensus and what wasn’t out of fear, which is the main driver of counterinsurgency within the “movement” and not by direct agents of the state.

They’ve become so obsessed with the notion that anyone speaking of direct, violent action is secretly a cop, that they’ve effectively ensured no meaningful action will occur because any real resistance is now meant with contempt and charges of conspiracy. Leftwing conspiracy theorists are the frontlines of counterinsurgency and should be meant with violent contempt in every space they exist until they’re made irrelevant.

There has never been an overthrow of the state in which militancy was not the primary driver. There is no such thing as a peaceful overthrow and never has been.

There’s been erasure of militancy, there’s been overemphasis on nonviolence, and an overemphasis on the failure of “violent” actions or organizations because the risk is higher, but even the “failures” of violence can be more powerful than the greatest successes of nonviolence. The “failure” of John Brown’s raid most certainly was critical in escalating the US into a civil war (hm another act of violence) that ended slavery as we then knew it (although took other forms), could you imagine if it had succeeded as they’d planned?

When non-violence fails, it often looks awfully similar to what it looks like when it succeeds, and if that’s not true, then when has it ever succeeded without the looming threat of a violent uprising in the background?